Last Thursday the United States House of Representatives voted and narrowly passed the new American Health Care Act. Now it will go to the Senate, where it will most likely be amended and sent to a conference committee and then back to the house for another vote.
The bill would eliminate the mandate that orders people to buy government-chosen health insurance whether they want it or not and replace Obamacare subsidies with refundable tax credits, mainly based on age, to purchase health insurance. The Obamacare-mandated insurance program caused most major insurance companies to stop offering health insurance plans through the “exchanges” created. Premiums continued to rise in spite of promoters saying there would not be big premium increases. Also high deductibles made the health plans tantamount to having no health insurance at all. About the only thing it did successfully was prevent you from paying the penalty when you filed your taxes every year. And everyone remembers “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan.”
Democrats predictably voted against the bill, and House Minority Leader Nancy Polosi said they need more information on the proposal. This from the representative who said of The Affordable Health Care Act (Obamacare) “We need to pass it in order to see what’s in it.” She also said Republicans are “terrified of the public learning the full consequences of their plan to push Americans with pre-existing conditions into the cold.” She called it a “moral monstrosity” for which the American People will hold them accountable.
Representative Darrell Issa said it does no one any good to pretend Obamacare is “going to fix itself” or someday magically get better. “Obamacare was a failure from the get-go; now is the time to make it right.” Senator Orin Hatch hopes the Senate will move quickly on this bill, calling it a “major step” toward putting American’s back in charge of making their health care decisions, not Washington.
The most important aspect of this bill is the elimination of funding for Planned Parenthood. Alliance Defending Freedom senior counsel Kevin Theirot said this is the third time the House has voted for a bill to defund Planned Parenthood. He said it has been thoroughly documented “this billion-dollar abortion giant has been implicated in massive fraud, waste, and abuse of Medicaid and other federal and state programs.” Congress should be concerned about the deceptive practices of Planned Parenthood to increase revenue, let alone the fact over 320,000 human lives are destroyed every year. Every day 887 innocent babies are denied the right of life.
As Representative Polosi mentioned, part of this bill is how it will or will not provide for people with “pre-existing conditions.” After the final draft of the bill is passed by congress and sent to the President’s desk for signing into law, we will know. Even though Obamacare tried to eliminate pre-existing conditions from being an issue in getting health insurance, the deductibles turned out to be so high, it didn’t really matter if one suffered from a pre-existing condition or not. In the past before Obamacare, insurance companies handled it by requiring waiting periods, increased premiums, giving reduced coverage, or no coverage at all related to those conditions.
There are a lot of people with such conditions. But how many of us who suffer every day from debilitating or near-debilitating pre-existing conditions are willing to take the responsibility for it upon ourselves if it means saving the life of even one newborn baby? Neither our tax dollars nor our insurance premiums should be used for Planned Parenthood. It is time to shut them down.
THE RIGHT RENDITION 