What does the 111th United States Congress have in common with the saucy, pregnant, Minnesota teen Juno of indie movie fame? Well, if Congress passes the Affordable Health Care for America Act, both will have committed a "doodle that can't be un-did." That's right ladies and gentlemen, you have officially entered the twilight zone; the American public is the unassuming Polly Bleaker and Congress is your Juno. In the film, Juno and Bleaker live out an awkward love affair characterized by a naive attraction springing from historical familiarity. The trouble begins when Juno and Bleaker commit an irresponsible and rash act which culminates in Juno becoming pregnant. While this situation may at first appear irreconcilable, Juno actually possesses a variety of different options to rectify her situation. Unfortunately, if the health care reform bill passes, the American electorate will find themselves bearing the consequences of a massive mistake, while possessing even fewer options for rectification than those possessed by a juvenile enduring an unwanted pregnancy.
While those statements may appear extreme at first, the reality of the health care reform legislation proves just as dire. Once Congress' spending baby is conceived, there is little chance of termination. As Prof. David Colander of Middlebury College notes in the seventh edition of his textbook "Economics," "Politically, it's much easier for the government to increase spending and decrease taxes than to decrease spending and increase taxes." The bureaucratic and fiscal complexity embodied in the Affordable Health Care for America Act boarders on the absurd, with over 1,000 pages of text. The length of the bill, however, pales in comparison to its price tag. According to the Congressional Budget Office, extending health care coverage to roughly 50 million uninsured Americans would cost the taxpayers over $1.6 trillion in the next 10 years.
The expense estimate is considered conservative by many members of Congress who oppose the bill, such as Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire. Gregg estimates the bill will easily cost taxpayers in excess of $2 trillion. That unpleasant scenario becomes even more likely when the track record of the bill's father, Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut, is taken into account.
Dodd's past performance in the Senate has been perpetually tainted with allegations of financial corruption. He acted as a primary agent in halting the reform of questionable subprime lending practices of the quasi-private mortgage brokerage firms Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Dodd was also implicated in a possibly corrupt sweetheart deal with Country Wide Financial in 2008. According to the Huffington Post, after gaining the chair of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs in 2007, Dodd received campaign contributions valued in the thousands of dollars from current Bank of America Consumer Policy Executive Andrew Plepler. Plepler served as a former vice president of community initiatives at the Fannie Mae Foundation. The subprime lending facilitated by the quasi-private organizations Freddie Mae and Fannie Mac is considered a large contributing factor to the current financial crisis. Both Fannie Mae and Bank of America have received federal aid from congressional bailout legislation.
The morally questionable exchanges of money and influence among elected officials and the financial institutions responsible for the current financial crisis should cause every taxpayer to question competency of the officials proposing health care reform legislation. In modern society, the state reserves the right to remove a child from the custody of an incompetent parent. Yet Americans continue to allow Congress the power to control numerous faltering social welfare programs and are currently preparing to permit Congress to birth another. When the future economic solvency of health programs such a Medicaid and Medicare are taken into consideration, there becomes no question that health care reform legislation needs to be stopped. According to a Medicare Trustees report, as early as 2017, Medicare will be rendered financially insolvent. That will burden the tax system with an additional $38 trillion dollars in unfunded social welfare liabilities.
If Congress cannot even keep its current social health care initiates out of debt, the American public should never consider allowing Congress another opportunity to run the American economy into the ground. As holders of increasingly large amounts of American debt, only the People's Republic of China will derive any long-term benefit from the implementation of this health care reform legislation. Passage of the act will force the U.S. federal government to issue billions of dollars in new bonds and pay increasingly higher interest rates to cover the cost of the health care initiative. Once the program is approved, there is virtually no feasible political option for the American government to free itself from the additional mandatory expenditure. That is why the American public needs to act now to stop the conception of this foolhardy legislation. We must fight to stop the union of the House and Senate versions of the bill. As the movie Juno so lamentably demonstrates, in America, it is easier to kill a child than to abort a bill.
Ginny Robinson's column appears Wednesdays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at g.robinson@cavalierdaily.com.
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