Under the Sunroom Desk paperweight during the past two weeks are a few health care reform commentaries, including New meme: Reading legislation is counterproductive, which decries the fact that most of our representatives will probably not personally read and understand every sentence of health care reform legislation. It also explains the process by which specialists, lobbyists and Congressional staffers control the language and substance of bills.
These are our representatives; we should require them to read the entire health care bill (when the significant details are worked out) and to explain its every implication to their constituents before they vote for it.
This fact-checking commentary on Obama’s health care reform appeal found the assertions in his speech less than accurate. Congressman Joe Wilson received a lot of media attention for his callout (too many links to pick from here; I didn’t start collecting). He was technically correct because the bill as written contained no enforcement mechanism for excluding illegal immigrants (after the fallout from Wilson’s callout, Senators reconvened to make sure it would!).
An aspect of the proposed legislation that concerns this editor is the enforcement mechanism for the rest of us! In Health Care Reform equals more power to IRS? Macedoniaonline warns that health care reform, as currently envisioned by Democratic leaders, would be built on the foundation of an expanded and more intrusive IRS. The Washington Examiner concludes that
So far, there has been little substantive public debate about the integral role of the IRS in nearly every aspect of the various national health care proposals. But people who are closely involved with the process are deeply concerned about what they view as a massive, and in some senses unprecedented, expansion of the Internal Revenue Service.
The federal government instituted an inconvenient and intrusive process for screening every commercial airline passenger after September 11, 2001. How many terrorists have been caught this way? How many people determined to defraud the federal health care reimbursement system will be caught by a bureaucratic screening system entailing massive loss of privacy foisted on law-abiding taxpayers?
Representatives should explain these provisions in detail to their constituents, in mailings, on their websites, and in town hall briefings on the final legislation.
I’ll repeat what I posted before: all members of Congress should be required to abide by the health care coverage and reporting terms they impose on the rest of us.