Balzac89
Undercover Mod
decided to seek out an online copy of the bill to get an idea of how accu­rate Mr. Kithils claims might be, as his claims sounded like a load of hog­wash to me. A quick google search turned up a copy of the bill over at OpenCongress.org which Ive used to make my com­par­i­son of the bill to Mr. Kithils claims.
See I can copy and paste too.
- EXACT SPECIFICS, to include page and para­graph in the bill on why this Health Bill is BAD.
- Page/paragraph num­bers are use­less for com­par­i­son with­out hav­ing an iden­ti­cal print copy. If Mr. Kithil had legit­i­mate com­plaints with spe­cific parts of the bill, why didnt he ref­er­ence them all by their Sections/Sub-section head­ings or per­haps even by includ­ing quotes from the bill so other peo­ple could see exactly what part of the bill he was talk­ing about?
- I also find it inter­est­ing that Mr Kithil appar­ently wrote such an amaz­ing arti­cle against H.B. 3200 that peo­ple are feel the need to for­ward it to every­body they know, and yet they dont for­ward the entire arti­cle that he wrote.
- I attempted to do some dig­ging into whether any such arti­cle was writ­ten by a David Kithil of Mar­ble Falls, TX but have not been able to find any­thing except ref­er­ences to this email chain-letter.
- it is esti­mated that a fed­eral bureau­cracy of more than 150,000 new employ­ees will be required to admin­is­ter HB3200
- If the Far Right was inter­ested in back­ing this bill; this com­ment would instead be about how the bill will help out our strug­gling econ­omy by cre­at­ing jobs. But since they dont like the bill, its about waste. Also, where is Mr. Kithil get­ting this esti­mate from? By fail­ing to quote a source, it makes one won­der if he didnt just pull a high out of thin air to try and make peo­ple panic over the bill.
- Page 50/section 152: The bill will pro­vide insur­ance to all non-U.S. res­i­dents, even if they are here illegally.
- Sec­tion 152 is titled PROHIBITING DISCRIMINATION IN HEALTH CARE and noth­ing in it guar­an­tees cov­er­age to ille­gal aliens. Addi­tion­ally, a later por­tion of the bill, SEC. 246. NO FEDERAL PAYMENT FOR UNDOCUMENTED ALIENS, specif­i­cally for­bids the bill from pay­ing for health-care for ille­gal aliens.
- Page 58 and 59: The gov­ern­ment will have real-time access to an individuals bank account and will have the author­ity to make elec­tronic fund trans­fers from those accounts.
- As best as I can tell, Mr. Kithil is refer­ring to SEC. 164. ADMINISTRATIVE SIMPLIFICATION. SEC. 1173A. STANDARDIZE ELECTRONIC ADMINISTRATIVE TRANSACTIONS. (4) © which reads enable elec­tronic funds trans­fers, in order to allow auto­mated rec­on­cil­i­a­tion with the related health care pay­ment and remit­tance advice; And if we apply a bit of thought to what that says, its really no dif­fer­ent from using your debit card to buy milk at the gro­cery store. Thanks for point­ing out the obvi­ous there, Mr. Kithil.
- Page 65/section 164: The plan will be sub­si­dized (by the gov­ern­ment) for all union mem­bers, union retirees and for com­mu­nity orga­ni­za­tions (such as the Asso­ci­a­tion of Com­mu­nity Orga­ni­za­tions for Reform Now ACORN).
- I will note that sec­tion 164 is SEC. 164. ADMINISTRATIVE SIMPLIFICATION and every­thing I see under it appears to be talk­ing about how the plan is to be run. But there is noth­ing I can find in the bill which seems to sup­port Mr. Kithils claim that the plan will be sub­si­dized for union mem­bers, union retirees and for com­mu­nity orga­ni­za­tions. If Mr. Kithil or another oppo­nent of this bill can find me the rel­e­vant por­tion of the bill which makes up the basis of this claim, Ill be happy to revisit it.
- Page 203/line 1415: The tax imposed under this sec­tion will not be treated as a tax. (How could any­body in their right mind come up with that?)
- PART VIIIHEALTH CARE RELATED TAXES, Sub­part ATax on Indi­vid­u­als With­out Accept­able Health Care Cov­er­age, SEC. 59B. TAX ON INDIVIDUALS WITHOUT ACCEPTABLE HEALTH CARE COVERAGE., (e) Other Def­i­n­i­tions and Spe­cial Rules-, (6) NOT TREATED AS TAX IMPOSED BY THIS CHAPTER FOR CERTAIN PURPOSES The tax imposed under this sec­tion shall not be treated as tax imposed by this chap­ter for pur­poses of deter­min­ing the amount of any credit under this chap­ter or for pur­poses of sec­tion 55. So basi­cally for tax pur­poses, this par­tic­u­lar tax can­not be used in cal­cu­lat­ing tax cred­its. Big whoop, our tax sys­tem is nearly as con­fus­ing and bro­ken as our health-care sys­tem. Is it really any sur­prise that some­thing like this is in the bill?
- Page 241 and 253: Doc­tors will all be paid the same regard­less of spe­cialty, and the gov­ern­ment will set all doc­tors fees.
- Again the lack of proper doc­u­men­ta­tion of Mr. Kithils argu­ment, but my best guess is hes refer­ring to some lan­guage in the bill that the Sec­re­tary must nego­ti­ate rates for health-care items/services such that the gov­ern­ment will not pay less than the rates already set in the Social Secu­rity Act and not more than the aver­age of other QHBP. Again, this is fear-mongering on the part of the Far Right and if they were sup­port­ing the bill; theyd point out this bit as being fis­cally respon­si­ble on their part.
- Page 272. sec­tion 1145: Can­cer hos­pi­tal will ration care accord­ing to the patients age.
- (1
AUTHORIZATION OF ADJUSTMENT FOR CANCER HOSPITALS- What this por­tion of the bill really does is give the Sec­re­tary the abil­ity to study the costs of pay­ments to can­cer hos­pi­tals and if it is deter­mined that these spe­cialty hos­pi­tals are charg­ing more for the same ser­vices as gen­eral hos­pi­tals, then the Sec­re­tary has the author­ity to adjust pay­ments to these can­cer hos­pi­tals to reflect those costs. Which sounds more like this bill would have the gov­ern­ment pick­ing up more of the expense for patients going to a can­cer hos­pi­tal, and that sounds good to me.
- (1
- Page 317 and 321: The gov­ern­ment will impose a pro­hi­bi­tion on hos­pi­tal expan­sion; how­ever, com­mu­ni­ties may peti­tion for an exception.
- Im shocked as for the first time since I started review­ing Mr. Kithils claims, this one appears to be entirely accu­rate. It appears he is mak­ing a ref­er­ence to © PROHIBITION ON EXPANSION OF FACILITY CAPACITY. But where he sees a prob­lem, I see a nec­es­sary step towards reform. When youre try­ing to restruc­ture some­thing as com­pli­cated as the US health-care sys­tem, youre much bet­ter off min­i­miz­ing the num­ber of vari­ables you have to deal with. Hence, the pro­hi­bi­tion on expand­ing health-care facilites. How­ever since hav­ing those facil­i­ties can mean life or death to patients; the cre­ators of this bill have included pro­vi­sions for health-care providers to ask for an exemp­tion. Why exactly Mr Kithil finds this to be a prob­lem is not made clear in the email, and I would be happy to dis­cuss his com­plaints on this point if he cares to make them.
- An alter­nate the­ory as to the rea­sonin behind this sec­tion of the bill, was pro­posed by James in a com­ment:
[*]the pro­hi­bi­tion on expan­sion of facil­i­ties is only on physi­cian owned hos­pi­tals. I think the idea being one thing that dri­ves up costs is some less eth­i­cal doc­tors refer­ring patients for unneeded tests and diag­nos­tics at facil­i­ties they owned to get more insurance money.
- Page 425, line 412: The gov­ern­ment man­dates advance-care plan­ning con­sul­ta­tions. Those on Social Secu­rity will be required to attend an end-of-life plan­ning sem­i­nar every five years.
- While there is lan­guage in this bill for advance-care plan­ning which includes men­tion of end-of-life plan­ning; the way its writ­ten, its clear the inten­tion is to make the patient aware of what pal­lia­tive, hos­pice and other care ser­vices the health-care provider offers which would nat­u­rally be of impor­tance for a per­son reach­ing the end of their life­time. Are those con­sul­ta­tions going to be filled with hap­pi­ness & joy? Prob­a­bly not. Is it a good idea to put infor­ma­tion in the hands of peo­ple who will need? Definitely.
- Its also good to point out that under SEC. 138. INFORMATION ON END-OF-LIFE PLANNING, (b) Noth­ing in this sec­tion shall be construed-
- to require an indi­vid­ual to com­plete an advanced direc­tive or a physicians order for life sus­tain­ing treat­ment or other end-of-life plan­ning document;
- to require an indi­vid­ual to con­sent to restric­tions on the amount, dura­tion, or scope of med­ical ben­e­fits oth­er­wise cov­ered under a qual­i­fied health ben­e­fits plan; or
- to encour­age the has­ten­ing of death or the pro­mo­tion of assisted suicide.
- Page 429, line 1325: The gov­ern­ment will spec­ify which doc­tors can write an end-of-life order.
- The phrase end-of-life order never appears in this bill and after search­ing through the bill, I can­not find any sim­i­lar phrase to indi­cate the gov­ern­ment can have doc­tors write such a thing.
- On the other hand, there is lan­guage through­out the bill specif­i­cally detail­ing how assisted sui­cide it com­pletely forbidden.
See I can copy and paste too.
