O.K., let’s file this one under …
THE CONSPIRACY TO HIDE BILLIONS IN PLAIN SIGHT
Regular followers of this blog know that my day job is at New York 1, the twenty-four hour news channel.
Since the network is a subsidiary of Time Warner, my own health insurance problems are minimal, and I have no personal leanings one way or another concerning the health care reform act that has so dominated the news over the past year or so.
Regular readers and watchers also know that I tend to try to steer clear of dedicating posts to the sort of instant conspiracy theories that spring overnight from current events.
Often these have very little stickiness. In other words, they disappear with end of the short attention span of the news cycle, evaporating under the weight of their own silliness. I get such little enjoyment arguing with Jeff, or writing about, say, a tsunami caused by mind control experiments.
There’s obviously going to be a “but” in here between the dots…
Since the advent of the national discussion on health care reform, and the recent passage of the health care bill, there has been no shortage of conspiracy theories concerning what will be sweeping change.
These theories range from the most outlandish, for instance, that there will be death panels to vote your grandparents off the island, to the ones that are sadly true, for instance, that the management teams of the big pharmaceutical companies might not always tell us the truth. For those of you that keep score on who prevails in the arguments that give this blog it’s wealth of material, I always, sadly, put those types of theories roundly in Jeff’s column.
Speaking of wealth, Jeff has argued, of late, that the massive expense of the health care plan has sinister motives behind it, and that the dots connect from the law that would majorly overhaul the current system, create a socialist state, or worse, take the country down a clear path to bankruptcy, paving the way for a New World Order.
Jeff has found a very vocal ally in a member of the House of Representatives, Michele Bachman from Minnesota.
Michele Bachmann
Congresswoman Bachman is the one who delivered one of the rebuttals to this year’s State of the Union Address. This blog takes no stand on her individual politics, but it will investigate her claim.
The Congresswoman insists that she is privy to a sinister plot by the Executive Branch to hide one hundred and five billion dollars worth of funding in the health care reform bill, which lies in wait to fund the very implementation of the health care plan.
It probably would not be that difficult to hide a few clandestine words in a bill of this size, something along the lines of: the following exorbitant sum of money is earmarked to put this plan into action, and hope that the people reading it are so tired at that point that their eyes glaze over the number of zeros. This would even make greater sense if the bill came out at midnight, and the vote was at seven in the morning. Not a human being alive would be ashamed to go glassy eyed while trying to get through the document in a single read.
The Health Care Bill
The expenditure of any amount of money of that size needs to be thought through carefully, and there is no doubt that a sum that large should be used in ways that should benefit the population at large, not contribute to the spiraling debt that could potentially send their government into bankruptcy.
But as wasteful as some government spending might be, and as angry as taxes make some of us every April, that’s simply not evidence of a conspiracy.
For a conspiracy to exist, there must be a secret agreement between two or more people to perform an unlawful act.
First, the word secretly, is enough to make this conspiracy theory fail. In the past year the bill has been dissected, and argued over, perhaps more than any other piece of legislation in history. It’s been fully available not only to members of Congress, but every member of the population. No words were blacked out in the public versions. No top secret stamp was every on the cover page.
For those who could not dedicate the days necessary to read the full version, there was also an internal Congressional Report, that’s also available to the public. This report was issued four months before the vote, and it clearly summaries all of the appropriations that are in the bill.
Second, a conspiracy must somehow be unlawful, or immoral, or otherwise loaded with sinister motives. How can this be an unlawful act, since these are the very people who make the laws, and it concerns a new law, one that was voted in with our system of checks and balances in place?
I realize that it is no secret that there is a very sizeable and extremely vocal faction of the population thinks that health care reform will create a state of socialism, and ultimately bankrupt the country.
Given this fact, it’s surprises me that none of the elected representatives, or public watchdogs, who live in fear of loss of their rights and freedoms would have taken the time to read this bill more carefully, or at least the digests that were prepared for them like high school Cliffs Notes versions.
The Readers Digest Version
Like Charles Dickens, the writers of the health care plan seemed to have been paid by the word. I guess given the price of the bill, our representatives do need to look for new and creative ways to raise revenue. Clearly they are trying to make a stab at job creation with all the printing that needed to be done.
I applaud those who actually read and consider the laws upon which they vote. It’s ever more impressive when they can come from a well-informed place. It makes me have so much more faith in our representatives.
But it’s always so much easier to criticize without doing adequate research. That requires hard work.
As always, Cliffs Notes-length responses are welcomed, or even ones thousands of pages long.
