At Least Birthers Do Homework
But the state still gets between 10 and 20 e-mails seeking verification of Obama’s birth each week, most of them from outside Hawaii, Kim said Tuesday. (Via Hawaii considering law to ignore Obama ‘birthers’ – Yahoo! News.)
I was tempted to laugh at this story about the Birthers still asking for Barack Obama’s birth information — the state of Hawaii is considering passing a law allowing them to ignore these requests — but then it occurred to me that at least those people are actually doing their homework.
On the other hand, I get pestered at least once a day by some lunatic who a) hasn’t noticed that I actually oppose the health care bill, and b) has fallen for the reams of robo-emails floating around the internet making extravagant claims about what’s in the Obama Health Bill. One of the most popular is something written by a Texas County Judge named David Kithil – I have no idea if he actually exists or not — who purports to have combed through HR 3200 and found evidence of all sorts of fiendishness.
Some of the highlights of the evils lurking in the Health Care bill, according to this possibly-real person:
| ** Page 50/section 152: The bill will provide insurance to all non-U.S. residents, even if they are here illegally. ** Page 58 and 59: The government will have real-time access to an individual’s bank account and will have the authority to make electronic fund transfers from those accounts. ** 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). ** Page 203/line 14-15: The tax imposed under this section will not be treated as a tax. (How could anybody in their right mind come up with that?) ** Page 241 and 253: Doctors will all be paid the same regardless of specialty, and the government will set all doctors’ fees. ** Page 272. section 1145: Cancer hospital will ration care according to the patient’s age. ** Page 317 and 321: The government will impose a prohibition on hospital expansion; however, communities may petition for an exception. ** Page 425, line 4-12: 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. (Death counceling.) ** Page 429, line 13-25: The government will specify which doctors can write an end-of-life order. |
Attention all you fine citizens who are writing to me about this stuff: instead of sending abusive emails to a person who actually opposes the bill, do us all a favor and read the fucking bill. Thanks to a miraculous invention called the internet, you can find it quite easily. Here, I’ll even give you the link. Check each one of those supposed clauses and you’ll find they’re all bullshit, if you can even find them at all.
The author of this Rovian screed was clever. He picked sections of the bill that used very general language and then simply pasted lies on top of them that sounded like they might fit, even when they did not. A good example is the first bit about section 152, which does indeed prohibit discrimination and provides health coverage “without regard to personal characteristics.” Section 152, however, says nothing about immigrants.
The section that does talk about immigrants is section 242, the “Affordability Credit Eligible Individual” section, which basically defines an “affordability credit eligible individual,” i.e. a subsidy-eligible individual, as a person who is “lawfully present in a state in the United States.”
Similarly, while there is a section giving providers the ability to check on a patient’s ability to pay, there is nothing in there allowing withdrawals or transfers to or from a person’s bank account. And the advance care deal, as we all, know, does not mandate advance care consultation every five years; what the bill says is that if you want advance care consultation, you can’t get it more often than once every five years, unless there’s an extraordinary reason (i.e. a significant new change in the person’s condition, an injury, etc.).
But you’d have to actually read the bill to learn that. Much easier, of course, to simply rely upon the analysis of some anonymous internet author who can’t spell “counseling.” Is this a great country, or what?
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Source: http://trueslant.com/matttaibbi/2010/03/17/at-least-birthers-do-homework/
The Health Care Bill (.pdf)
