Opinion: Bill Is Too Flawed and Too Unpopular

(March 19) -- In the next few days, the House of Representatives will likely "vote" on the long-debated health care reform package pushed by President Barack Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. The only problem is that by attempting to rig the system so that a vote isn't really a vote at all, House Democrats are likely to harm themselves, their party and everyday Americans in one fell swoop. All the while, they will be undermining our country's strong democratic process and flagrantly disregarding the will of the American people.

Just when we thought that the process could not get any uglier, Pelosi and the House Democratic leadership may try to pass their bill with a "self-executing" rule that would "deem" the Senate bill passed, combined with an unrelated takeover of the student loan industry and a reconciliation bill to make changes to the Senate bill.

Using a self-executing rule to pass a bill of this magnitude, affecting one-sixth of the American economy, is unprecedented. Pelosi and her colleagues want to do this so Democratic members will not have to actually vote for the deeply unpopular Senate bill that passed last Christmas and all its special deals, including the Cornhusker Kickback and the Louisiana Purchase, half a trillion dollars in new taxes, 159 new government bureaucracies, and more that will still exist in the final bill.

They know that the bill is too flawed and too unpopular (even among Democrats) to pass without this legislative sleight of hand. To put it simply, the process brings two votes, but one loser: the American people.

Americans deserve better.

Despite the continued declarations of bipartisanship before and after the White House's health care summit last month, the Senate bill is not bipartisan. Republicans unanimously voted against it. What the legislation does contain, however, is nearly half a trillion dollars in Medicare cuts, a dramatic expansion of government, $500 billion in tax hikes, corrupt backroom deals used to buy votes, and taxpayer funded abortion coverage. A more detailed analysis of the Senate bill's provisions and how it affects different Americans can be found at the Center for Health Transformation.

The American public outright rejected ObamaCare. They reject the thousands of pages of complex legislation and special deals that will ultimately raise premiums for American families and do little to fix what is broken in our health care system. Obama, Pelosi and Reid need to stop, start over and embrace commonsense reforms that can obtain bipartisan support. They need individual pieces of legislation that take smaller bites at the apple rather than swallowing it whole, while choking the American public with their idea of reform.

These bills should include measures that would allow doctors and patients to control costs rather than government bureaucrats. One example is to move away from a fee-for-service payment model to one that rewards quality results.

Other commonsense, bipartisan ideas include making insurance portable from job to job and across state lines, rooting out the fraud, waste and abuse in the system that could save hundreds of billions of dollars a year, and reforming our health justice system to end the use of defensive medicine while lowering the number of medical malpractice suits.

I was heartened to learn that over the past few days thousands of Americans called their congressional representatives in Washington to voice their opposition to this dangerous bill. So far Speaker Pelosi and others continue to disregard the will of the American people as they use parliamentary end-arounds to push through this deeply unpopular bill. They do so at their own peril. Any attempt to explain how they either did or did not vote for the bill will fall on deaf ears as they are swept out of office in November.

Americans may forgive, but they certainly will not forget.