Inside the health care bills

Robert Moffit:

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If President Obama signs either bill into law, he'll be breaking a host of promises. Neither the House nor Senate would guarantee that you can keep your private health plan if you like it. Or that patients will retain their relationships with their doctors.

And that bit about cutting the typical family's health costs by $2,500 a year? A howler, if there ever was one. Deficit neutrality? Level playing field for plan competition? Fuhgeddaboudit.

Each bill would create a new government health plan to compete against private insurers. In the House version, this "competition" would take place via a "national health insurance exchange," a new entity run by a "Health Choices Commissioner." In the Senate, a "public plan" would compete against private health plans through federally supervised state entities called "gateways."

Either way, taxpayers would assume the risks. The private plans would be heavily regulated by the government, but otherwise "on their own" -- in a highly qualified matter of speaking.

In the House bill, the government plan would pay doctors and hospitals on the basis of Medicare rates -- rates that are so low that more and more doctors have stopped taking new Medicare patients.

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As the comedian says, "Stop your killing me." Unfortunately, what the Democrats are proposing is not joke and it can b deadly to your future health, unless you are fortunate enough to get at the front of the ration line.