Like the Wizard of Oz, Amazing George promises all, yet delivers a rabbit out of his hat. As we watched his State of the Union speech unfold hypnotized in front of our boob tubes, George told us all that it wasn’t right what we have now, that we needed to be empowered, and that we need to be informed consumers of health care. So he said he was going to simplify the health care billing system we all have horror stories about? Well NO. Instead he was going to tie our health care to the the Infernal Revenue System! What genius is that!
Most of America is so befuddled with this tax scheme called (by Dubya) a medical system reform, that few have actually commented on Bush’s proposals. This is a sign of not even taking the whole preposterous thing in the least bit seriously. Heck, who can figure out a health system actually being tied to a nation’s tax codes? Sick? Well now you’re also being tortured. Why not now make the deadline for choosing your health care plan AND paying your taxes, April 1, April Fool’s Day, Amazing George?
Lest we forget, this is Dubya’s 2nd foray into ‘health care reform’. The other rabbit out of the hat trick was to announce the HIPAA ‘medical privacy’ law in 2003. That one generated oodles of paper, oodles of ‘education’, oodles of administrators running in circles ‘implementing’ absolutely nothing, oodles of no enforcement of whateveritwas anyway, and oodles of non relevance to anything including guarding or protecting any sense of privacy we might ever have regarding our health, and the records of it that insurers and employers float about everywhere today, just as they did before the great privacy ‘reform’ took place.
Poof! Smoke and bluff. One step forward, and two steps back. Bush in charge of privacy, no less! Now, the doctor is protecting our health care, too? Too sickening for words.
When I was reading the framework of his SOTU address and got the point that health care benefits should be counted as taxable income I almost went ballistic.
OK that’s not entirely true, I cussed so loud my landlady had to yell at me.
After a 15 K deductible, all your health benefits, presumably including the Workman’s compensation paid health care if your pendejo ooops I mean boss actually has the coverage and the courts actually allow you to collect the benefits, would be taxable. So if you get a hundred grand worth of hospital work, say, like being in Intensive Care for a couple of weeks, you are suddenly in the same tax bracket as the average CEO.
Would Workman’s Comp be required to pay the extra tax burden?
Enquiring minds want to know.
I would do my standard wager of a donut but by now I am owed so many donuts I would die of a carbohydrate overdose if I ever collected.
Bush just announced his federal budget proposal which includes major cutbacks in Medicare and Medicaid, and 2/3 of a billion extra for the Pentagon.
So much for ‘reform’ of American health care. Bush in charge of reform of medical delivery is a national copy of our local nutwing evangelical ‘reform’ of education that happened with District 11. Bad can only become yet worse when the ‘reformers’ are in fact reactionaries, that are actually wanting to dismantle a public/governmental system of some sort, or another, rather than improve or make it better.