An Unhealthy Health Care Bill.

While proponents are touting all the things the new health care bill will do, provide additional coverage for millions of Americans, the negative consequences will be far reaching.

Again, the bill is based on the flawed belief that government can effectively solve our health care problems. The reality is the our significant problems with rising costs is due to government intervention and distortion of the market by providing health care to millions of people and shielding them from some of the costs.

With government debt mounting and this bill only adding to it, we are only marching more quickly to greater problems down the road.

This article by Michael Tanner highlights some of the pain we will be facing in the future. The real problems in our health care system will only be exacerbated not solved by this bill.

In the end, this vote is not about the corruption of the legislative process — although this has been tawdry and sleazy almost every step of the way.

The Democrats have bought votes with pork and special deals. They’ve twisted and ignored congressional rules. They’ve threatened and intimidated critics. And they’ve ended up with a new procedure that will allow them to pass the bill without actually having to vote on it.

Nor is this vote about the massive new spending and debt.

True, even by the president’s circumscribed accounting, this bill will increase government spending by roughly $1 trillion over the next 10 years. But that estimate obscures the real cost behind a smokescreen of accounting gimmicks.

Some costs, like the so-called “doc fix” (avoiding a scheduled 23% reduction in Medicare reimbursements) are pushed into other legislation. And since the bill doesn’t really take effect until 2014, much of the cost is pushed outside the 10-year budget window. Estimates of the bill’s real cost over 10 years of actual operation run as high as $3.5 trillion.

Moreover, because this massive cost is paid for in part through budgetary tricks and promised future Medicare cuts that are unlikely to happen, health-care reform will actually add to our already crushing national debt.

It’s not about the higher taxes and higher premiums that will sock millions of American workers and businesses, either.

Yes, the bill contains more than $600 billion in new taxes. And contrary to President Obama’s promise, many of those taxes will fall on the middle-class. Other taxes, such as a new tax on investment income, will be job killers — this at a time when nearly 15 million Americans are unemployed.

On top of that, insurance premiums would continue to rise, nearly doubling in the next few years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The bill would do nothing to diminish that increase. In fact, for millions of Americans who get their insurance through the individual market, rather than from an employer, this bill will raise premiums by 10% to 13% more than if we do nothing. Young and healthy people can expect their premiums to go up even higher.

And this vote is not even about how this bill will diminish the quality of health care in this country.

Of course, it will result in greater government interference with how doctors practice medicine. It will undercut our research and development efforts. And it threatens to squeeze reimbursements in a way that could put hospitals out of business and cause physicians to leave the profession. In the long run, we could see the type of rationing or long waits that are prevalent in other government-run health care systems.

All these things are bad. But they are not the worst things about this bill.

At its core, this vote is about freedom and the type of country we want to live in.

Health care is one-sixth of the US economy. It involves some of the most important, personal and private decisions in our lives. This bill would give the government unprecedented control over both the economy and those decisions.

Insurance coverage would be mandated for both employers and individuals. Government would determine what benefits insurance would have to include and force Americans to purchase health insurance that satisfies government mandates. This might require Americans who are satisfied with their insurance to switch to a plan that includes the benefits the government requires, even if that is more expensive or includes benefits they don’t want or are morally opposed to.

Insurance companies themselves would become little more than public utilities, protected from real competition, but with every aspect of their operation regulated and controlled by the government.

And once in the doctor’s office, government would micromanage medical decisions, deciding what treatments are most effective, or, frighteningly, most cost-effective.

All this, while accomplishing one of the most massive redistributions of wealth in US history. Millions more Americans will be added to the “dole,” making them more dependent on government. America will have taken a huge step down the road to becoming a European-style social-welfare state.

That is what is at stake here. If this bill passes, America may be less healthy, and it will likely be less prosperous. And, almost certainly, it will be less free.

What's Obama's ultimate agenda? Radical social change via government.

There's been a lot of speculation on the type of president Barack Obama will be. Will he be the cautious centralist or a radical social reformer?

In column, entitled "Obama's Plan to Transform America", Charles Krauthammer probably gets it right as much as anybody.

Krauthammer notes that

Barack Obama has garnered praise from center to right -- and has highly irritated the left -- with the centrism of his major appointments. Because Obama's own beliefs remain largely opaque, his appointments have led to the conclusion that he intends to govern from the center.

Obama the centrist? I'm not so sure.

Take the foreign policy team: Hillary Clinton, James Jones, and Bush holdover Robert Gates. As centrist as you can get. But the choice was far less ideological than practical. Obama has no intention of being a foreign policy president. Unlike, say, Nixon or Reagan, he does not have aspirations abroad. He simply wants quiet on his eastern and western fronts so that he can proceed with what he really cares about -- his domestic agenda.

Similarly his senior economic team, the brilliant trio of Tim Geithner, Larry Summers and Paul Volcker: centrist, experienced and mainstream. But their principal task is to stabilize the financial system, a highly pragmatic task in which Obama has no particular ideological stake.

Why the centralist teams on foreign policy and economic policy? Because those areas he doesn't have great expertise and lacks passionate interest and are areas he needs stability if he's to accomplish what he wants domestically.

According to Krauthammer.

A functioning financial system is a necessary condition for a successful Obama presidency. As in foreign policy, Obama wants experts and veterans to manage and pacify universes in which he has little experience and less personal commitment. Their job is to keep credit flowing and the world at bay so that Obama can address his real ambition: to effect a domestic transformation as grand and ambitious as Franklin Roosevelt's.

As Obama revealingly said just last week, "this painful crisis also provides us with an opportunity to transform our economy to improve the lives of ordinary people." Transformation is his mission. Crisis provides the opportunity. The election provides him the power.

And he plans to use the economic crisis and public fears as a justification for his actions:

The deepening recession creates the opportunity for federal intervention and government experimentation on a scale unseen since the New Deal. A Republican administration has already done the ideological groundwork with its unprecedented intervention, culminating in the forced partial nationalization of nine of the largest banks, the kind of stuff that happens in Peronist Argentina with a gun on the table.

Obama was quite serious when he said he was going to change the world. And now he has a national crisis, a personal mandate, a pliant Congress, a desperate public -- and, at his disposal, the greatest pot of money in galactic history. (I include here the extrasolar planets.)

It begins with a near $1 trillion stimulus package. This is where Obama will show himself ideologically. It is his one great opportunity to plant the seeds for everything he cares about: a new green economy, universal health care, a labor resurgence, government as benevolent private-sector "partner." It is the community organizer's ultimate dream.

Rather than not having any money to do things, Obama plans on ramping up spending for public works and other programs.

Ironically, when the economy tanked in mid-September, it was assumed that both presidential candidates could simply forget about their domestic agendas because with $700 billion drained by financial system rescues, not a penny would be left to spend on anything else.

On the contrary. With the country clamoring for action and with all psychological barriers to government intervention obliterated (by the conservative party, no less), the stage is set for a young, ambitious, supremely confident president -- who sees himself as a world-historical figure before even having been sworn in -- to begin a restructuring of the American economy and the forging of a new relationship between government and people.

Don't be fooled by Bob Gates staying on. Obama didn't get elected to manage Afghanistan. He intends to transform America. And he has the money, the mandate and the moxie to go for it.

Krauthammer's analysis makes a lot of sense given what we know about Obama's background, ideological views, recent comments, and actions.

If he does dramatically expand government debt that will likely only deepen the debt and economic crisis facing our nation. What's different about 2000s crisis versus the Great Depression is today we are already much more deeply in debt and expanding bailouts and government spending will only worsen. If the federal government throws restraint to the wind, the debt level will become enormous. Somebody will eventually have to pay for it and no doubt it will be the American people in the form of much higher taxes and inflation, which is really a tax and especially hammers the poor and those on fixed incomes.

Obama's end game maybe closing the gap between the rich and the poor and socializing medicine, but that will result in making everybody poorer. Of course isn't that what socialism is all about?