President Obama has taken the United States one more giant step toward socialism by ramming through the Senate his financial regulation bill...

From Dick Morris: Repealing this regulatory travesty must be high on our 2011 agenda!

BREAKING: Democrats release 2300-page reconciliation bill

*Updated* - Included in the bill appears to be the “public option” that was removed from the Senate bill.

159 Ways the Senate Bill Is a Government Takeover of Health Care

159 Ways the Senate Bill Is a Government Takeover of Health Care

Man, THIS IS RICH

Obama tried to publicly distance himself from the deals, saying he wasn’t in the room when they were struck, even though some of his aides were.

Obama presses Reid to cut special deals from health bill

10 bad things that will become law if ObamaCare is not stopped now

From RiehlWorldView.com

If the Senate bill isn't stopped in the House over the next two weeks, there's every reason to believe these stipulations and more will become the law of the land:

1) Spends Way Too Much: $2.5 trillion over the first ten years that the plan is fully implemented

2) Raises Taxes During a Recession: Hikes taxes $493 billion with new levies on so-called “Cadillac” plans, a new Medicare payroll tax on higher-income earners, and taxes on health insurance and drug manufacturing companies, which are sure to be passed on consumers in the form of higher premiums

3) Individual Mandate: Requires individuals to carry health insurance or exacts a fine up to $750

4) Business Burdens: taxes employers with more than 50 full-time workers if they are not offered insurance. CBO estimates employers would opt to drop as many as 5 million workers from private insurance, and pay the fine instead of maintaining current coverage

5) Huge Medicaid Expansion: an estimated 40 percent expansion of the entitlement program would greatly increase costs for government and taxpayers. States would be forced to manage the increased load. However, the federal government would pick up a large share of the new cost

6) Insurance Companies can still Limit Benefits: Although one of the prime reasons for this entire effort was to force insurance companies to live up to their commitments, the Senate bill would only ban lifetime-benefit caps. Insurance companies can still invoke yearly limits that will have essentially the same effect

7) Bad for Seniors: Cuts $120 billion from Medicare Advantage, which CBO says will result in fewer seniors with access to vision, dental and flu shots. Ultimately, up to 2.6 million seniors could lose their Medicare Advantage coverage

8) More Bureaucracy: Creates comparative effectiveness panels, a Medicare Advisory Board and a Health Care Commissioner, all of whom would be responsible for oversight of the greatly-expanded government role in health care and invoking rationing in attempts to contain cost

9) Doesn’t Tackle Tort Reform: Despite the president’s commitment to lower medical liability costs, the bill only contains a “Sense of Senate” provision, with no real reforms that could save up to $54 billion over ten years

10) Auto-Enrollment: Businesses with more than 200 workers will be required to automatically enroll employees in health coverage

Pence: Next 2 Weeks Will Determine Future Of Health Care In America

SCARY: "If the House passes the Senate bill, Obama will sign the bill if reconciliation fails."

From one of the most savvy political bloggers around whom I dearly hope is wrong this time: Prediction: Obama Will Sign Senate Bill If Reconciliation Fails

The Senate health care bill could end up hitting middle-class workers hard, through a new tax on insurance plans that could ultimately cut through to their wages

This is the first part of a five-part series on health care reform. Watch "Special Report With Bret Baier" every day this week at 6 p.m. ET for the latest installment in the Health Care Countdown series.

There is a middle-class tax time bomb ticking in the Senate’s version of President Obama’s effort to reform health care...

A Less Than Honest Policy

Health care bill: "...monstrous mountain of toxic pustules sprouting from greasy boils metastasizing from malign carbuncles that passed the Senate on Christmas Eve..."

Nobody says it better than Mark Steyn, Canadian writer, political commentator and cultural critic:

Government can’t just annex “one-sixth of the U.S. economy” (i.e., the equivalent of annexing the entire British or French economy, or annexing the entire Indian economy twice over) and then just say: “Okay, what’s next? On to cap-and-trade . . . ” Nations that governmentalize health care soon find themselves talking about little else.

Obamacare is the fast-track to a permanent left-of-center political culture...

The 800 pound gorilla in the health care bill

"Don't the American people deserve to know the "true" cost of ObamaCare?"

Throughout the debate on President Obama's relentless push to reform Americas Health Care both the House and the Senate have taken great care to keep the price tag close to the arbitrary $900 Billion cost target proposed by the President.

While both the House and Senate versions claim to have met the Presidents objective, everyone with the exception of Mary Landrieu and Ben Nelson are ignoring the proverbial 800 pound gorilla in the bill.

Read the whole thing

Immigration and abortion: how Americans will get screwed and foot the bill

The differences Senate and House leaders will have to work out between their two versions of reform have focused primarily on abortion and how the bill is paid for. But, as TNR's Suzy Khimm points out, immigration could also be a sticking point.

Read more

From Awful to Worse: Harry Reid's medical malpractice

The Obama administration and congressional Democrats long ago gave up any pretense of working to rationally reform American health care. The exercise now underway in the Senate is a mad dash to get to 60 votes, and nothing more. That's why some Democratic senators who had no idea exactly what is in the "breakthrough deal" announced by majority leader Harry Reid last week immediately hailed it as a milestone. They're for anything that creates a sense of "momentum" and "inevitability."

But the substance does matter. If Congress passes something in the end, ordinary Americans know they will have to live with it. And from those voters' points of view the latest effort to strike a compromise among Senate Democrats would, based on press reports of what it involves, take the horrendous bill offered by Reid earlier this month and make it even worse.

In most ways, the new proposal is as terrible as Reid's original bill. It would spend hundreds of billions on a new entitlement even as our debt is mounting, inflict massive tax increases on a troubled economy, impose costly mandates on employers at a time of high unemployment, squeeze money out of Medicare without fixing the program, insert the government in countless new ways between doctors and patients, and cause millions of middle-class families to lose the employer-based insurance they have today and pay even higher premiums.

But in one crucial respect, the new proposal is far worse than the last one.

Read more

Three provisions constitute the vicious heart of the Democrats' health-care overhaul

So let's get straight what the real essentials of the bill are-and how disastrous they are...

When you understand what this bill does, you can see why the Democrats would be happy to compromise and drop the public option-for now. This bill so comprehensively wrecks private health insurance that pretty soon a "public option" will seem like the only alternative, and they will already have put into place one of the new taxes needed to pay for it. If the left's goal is to impose socialized medicine in America, this bill does it in the most callous and destructive way possible. It smashes private health care-then leaves us stranded in the rubble, at which point we will be expected to come crawling back to the same people who caused the disaster and ask them to save us.

That is the final and perhaps most compelling reason to kill this bill: the sheer arrogance of the whole enterprise. It is the arrogance of stampeding an unwilling public toward a monstrous 2,000-page piece of legislation while admitting that it still has huge problems, but promising that it will all somehow be fixed later on. It's the arrogance of selling us a bill that expands government spending by hundreds of billions of dollars while telling us that it will reduce the deficit. It is the sheer unmitigated gall of appointing a bureaucrat to run a government-controlled insurance market that takes away all of our health choices-and then calling this bureaucrat the Health Choices Commissioner.

That's the kind of government arrogance that has to be smacked down hard, and that alone is reason to demand that your senator reject this vicious bill in its entirety.

Important health care resources

Jeanette Nordstrom from the National Center for Policy Analysis has provided the following resources:

NATIONAL CENTER FOR POLICY ANALYSIS provides Health Care Solutions and Five Steps to a Better Health Care System

JOHN GOODMAN'S Health Policy Blog
(He is the father of Health Savings Accounts)

THE HEARTLAND INSTITUTE'S Health Care Solutions

Transparency: Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee passes Health Care Amendment written in invisible ink!

President Obama has promised a "new era of transparency" in Washington, so perhaps he should talk to the Senate about getting with his program. On July 15, six weeks ago, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee passed an amended $1 trillion health-care bill, with acting Chairman Chris Dodd calling it a "historic achievement." Too bad the committee won't reveal this history even to other Senators, much less to the public.

Three weeks ago Republicans on the committee wrote Mr. Dodd "to reiterate our request for a full copy of the bill as amended, in the four-week mark-up." Mr. Dodd has refused to comply. The Senate bill that is available on the committee Web site is 790 pages long. While that is some 300 pages shorter than the House health bill, that's in part because it doesn't include nearly 200 amendments that passed when the committee redrafted the bill. Amended sections of the bill might as well be written in invisible ink.

Health-Care Secrets

Bill would give president emergency control of Internet

Internet companies and civil liberties groups were alarmed this spring when a U.S. Senate bill proposed handing the White House the power to disconnect private-sector computers from the Internet.

They're not much happier about a revised version that aides to Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, have spent months drafting behind closed doors. CNET News has obtained a copy of the 55-page draft of S.773 (excerpt), which still appears to permit the president to seize temporary control of private-sector networks during a so-called cybersecurity emergency.

The new version would allow the president to "declare a cybersecurity emergency" relating to "non-governmental" computer networks and do what's necessary to respond to the threat. Other sections of the proposal include a federal certification program for "cybersecurity professionals," and a requirement that certain computer systems and networks in the private sector be managed by people who have been awarded that license.

Read more