Obama continues to LIE to the American people for his perverse Marxist agenda...He doesn't give a damn about Americans!...

A Death Blow To Health 'Reform'

Posted 12/14/2009 07:09 PM ET

Socialized Medicine: The administration's own health department, in a devastating analysis, warns of rising costs, shrinking benefits and a long-term health care "death spiral." "Reform" has been pronounced dead.

When even the liberal Washington Post warns that congressional Democrats, in trying to save their increasingly unpopular health reform bill, are sneakily making it more like European-style socialized medicine, it means the death watch is on.

Letting 55-year-olds "buy in" to the fiscally doomed Medicare program "could be a bigger step toward a single-payer system than the milquetoast public option plans rejected by Senate moderates as too disruptive of the private market," the Post wrote last week.

The key reason: "sicker near-seniors ... might assume, with good reason, that the government will be more accommodating in approving treatments, and they might flock to Medicare. That would raise premium costs and, correspondingly, the pressure to dip into federal funds for extra help."

Medicare is already rocketing toward bankruptcy; that move would switch on the afterburners.

The president can talk about enactment before Christmas all he wants; the fact is that the more that information gets disseminated about this ever-shape-shifting nightmare of a plan, the more the American people fear it. The IBD/TIPP Poll pegs public support at 41%; Gallup gauges its popularity at just 35%.

Now comes the final, fatal blow: a report from the chief actuary of the Department of Health and Human Services' Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services that says health "reform" will mean the opposite of its advertised promises.

Reform was supposed to be about reducing ever-increasing costs. But HHS says that under the bill now being steamrolled through Congress, total health costs over the next decade (now estimated at $2.5 trillion) "would increase by about 0.7%" over what would take place if we made no changes at all.

And the plan to "save" nearly $500 billion in Medicare costs that Democratic leaders ask us all not to worry about? The result would be cuts in services as providers and physicians who take Medicare patients "could find it difficult to remain profitable and, absent legislative intervention, might end their participation in the program (possibly jeopardizing access to care for beneficiaries)."

How about that new long-term care entitlement plan in the Democrats' reform proposal, with its spiffy moniker, "CLASS Act"?

According to HHS, because "individuals with health problems or who anticipate a greater risk of functional limitation would be more likely to participate than those in better-than-average health," premiums would rise and rise, causing an "insurance death spiral" and making the program "unsustainable."