An article in the Wall Street Journal discussing jail time if you don’t buy health insurance.

The notion of imprisonment has its origins in the bill’s requirement that most Americans must get health insurance, with the help of government subsidies if necessary, or pay a special income tax of up to 2.5%. If someone refuses to get insurance and refuses to pay the tax, that person would be guilty of tax evasion. Criminal penalties for willful tax evasion, which are pursued in rare cases, include a fine of as much as $250,000 and up to five years in prison for the most egregious cases, Republicans point out.

Rep. Peter Roskam (R., Ill.) said on the House floor that this means the health overhaul comes with handcuffs. “Now, I am not talking about figurative handcuffs,” he added. “If you don’t comply with the individual mandate, what happens to you? You can be subject to five years in prison and you can be subject to a quarter of a million dollars in fines.”

Supporters of the health overhaul say this is a distortion and prosecutors don’t pursue criminal penalties for tax evasion except in drastic cases. “It’s like saying you could be jailed for jaywalking,” said Rep. Robert Andrews (D., N.J.).

via Coverage Mandate Under Fire – WSJ.com.

So there you have it. Don’t worry about jail time. You can rely on the Government to only use it in “drastic cases”. Who decides what’s drastic? Also, just because you don’t get sent to jail doesn’t mean you are free? The IRS would inflict high penalties on you, and ultimately could confiscate your property and your bank account. Oh but don’t worry. You still live in a “free” country.

This morning, Ralph R. Reiland has a funny and yet disturbing description of how the UK government controls citizens via health care cost control.

In other universal health care news, the December 2009 issue of Reason magazine reports that government inspectors working for the Stoke City Council in England “warned residents to remove welcome mats and potted plants from their porches.”

With government running health care, it becomes the state’s business if someone trips over a porch plant or welcome mat, or if some numbskull runs into a hanging basket.

And what about sled riding, something more likely than a potted palm to raise hospital costs?

In a nation that can’t stomach the risk of a welcome mat, how long will people be permitted to ice skate or race cars? Will kids still be allowed to build snowmen, given the danger of frostbite and subsequent medical interventions?

So what will be the allowable winter sport in England, given the need to cut the level of red ink in health budgets? Stay inside and bake gingerbread people? Still risky. To make 30 little gingerpeople, just 2.5 inches tall, Betty Crocker says to use a full cup of packed brown sugar, 1.5 cups of dark molasses, 7 cups of flour, and 1/3 cup of shortening, plus cinnamon, allspice, cloves and ginger.

There’s also frosting — 4 more cups of sugar, powdered, plus vanilla and some raisins and chocolate chips for the faces and buttons.

That comes to 270 calories per gingerperson. Eat the whole batch (they’re small) and that’s 8,100 calories, enough to become the business of the obesity cops and the central committee’s watchers of budget busters in the health sector.

On top of fat, there’s also the gingerperson’s fuel squandering and its link to climate calamities and drowning polar bears, with ginger, cloves and cinnamon, respectively, coming from half a warming world away in India, Madagascar and Sri Lanka.

via Appendectomy? Make it a double – Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

Here’s an article from the Wall Street Journal this morning about the rationing commission.

Like most of Europe, the various health bills stipulate that Congress will arbitrarily decide how much to spend on health care for seniors every year—and then invest an unelected board with extraordinary powers to dictate what is covered and how it will be paid for. White House budget director Peter Orszag calls this Medicare commission “critical to our fiscal future” and “one of the most potent reforms.”

On that last score, he’s right. Prominent health economist Alain Enthoven has likened a global budget to “bombing from 35,000 feet, where you don’t see the faces of the people you kill.”

As envisioned by the Senate Finance Committee, the commission—all 15 members appointed by the President—would have to meet certain budget targets each year. Starting in 2015, Medicare could not grow more rapidly on a per capita basis than by a measure of inflation. After 2019, it could only grow at the same rate as GDP, plus one percentage point.

……

Worse, it makes little room for medical innovations. The commission is mandated to go after “sources of excess cost growth,” meaning treatments that are too expensive or whose coverage will boost spending. If researchers find a pricey treatment for Alzheimer’s in 2020, that might be banned because it would add new costs and bust the global budget. Or it might decide that “Maybe you’re better off not having the surgery, but taking the painkiller,” as President Obama put it in June.

In other words, the Medicare commission would come to function much like the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, which rations care in England. Or a similar Washington state board created in 2003 to control costs. Its handiwork isn’t pretty.

The Washington commission, called the Health Technology Assessment, is manned by 11 bureaucrats, including a chiropractor and a “naturopath” who focuses on alternative, er, remedies like herbs and massage therapy. They consider the clinical effectiveness but above all the cost of medical procedures and technologies. If they decide something isn’t worth the money, then Olympia won’t cover it for some 750,000 Medicaid patients, public employees and prisoners.

So far, the commission has banned knee arthroscopy for osteoarthritis, discography for chronic back pain, and implantable infusion pumps for pain not related to cancer. This year, it is targeting such frivolous luxuries as knee replacements, spinal cord stimulation, a specialized autism therapy and MRIs of the abdomen, pelvis or breasts for cancer. It will also rule on routine ultrasounds for pregnancy, which have a “high” efficacy but also a “high” cost.

Currently, the commission is pushing through the most restrictive payment policy in the nation for drug-eluting cardiac stents—simply because bare metal stents are cheaper, even as they result in worse outcomes. If a patient is wheeled into the operating room with chest pains in an emergency, doctors will first have to determine if he’s covered by a state plan, then the diameter of his blood vessels and his diabetic condition to decide on the appropriate stent. If they don’t, Washington will not reimburse them for “inappropriate care.”

via The Health Care Rationing Commission – WSJ.com.

Here is more of the government deciding that if not everyone can have the expensive medical procedures, then no one will.  If this is the way you encourage growth and innovation, I must have missed it in my Econ 101 class. I said this in a previous blog, and I’ll say it again. Jealousy of the rich, who have more health care options, does not help the middle class or the poor. It’s the rich who pay for the innovations at first, and once companies begin recouping their R&D cost and run out of rich people (there aren’t that many of them), then prices begin to decline bringing the new technology to the masses.

While the government would argue that these limits are only on government plans, we all know that eventually we are going to fall under a national health care plan with government health care for all. Government never stops once a program is implemented. It only gets bigger. Government programs have to grow and get more people dependent on them. They are similar in this respect to private companies, except private companies have to grow by you voluntarily deciding to use them. Government just changes it’s rules and forces you to abide by them.

Here’s a great post with examples of how the free market is already solving health care issues. Now if we can just get the government out of health care completely, we’d be set.

So while Congress now debates how to control rising healthcare costs and expand access to medical care through government intervention and a public option, the private marketplace has already started many healthcare reforms on its own—providing affordable access at more than 1,000 retail clinics in pharmacies, truck stops, and workplaces around the country; lowering drug costs with prescriptions for $4 or less anywhere in the country; introducing innovative prepaid medical and concierge plans that restore the direct patient-doctor relationship; and covering eight million employees with HSAs.

When it comes to lowering costs and improving quality and service, government enterprises have a miserable track record, and competitive markets have a proven, excellent record. If we want to make healthcare affordable and accessible, we should encourage greater competition and more market-based solutions like the examples above; and less government intervention, not more. Unfortunately, the politicians in Washington have it backwards.

Check ou the full article at Congress to Healthcare Market: Drop Dead — The American, A Magazine of Ideas.

As part of the health care reform bill, house Democrats put a new surtax into the bill of 5.4%. This is going to increase the effective capital gains rate by 69%. Capital gains is the tax term used by our government to explain investment income. For example, if you buy a stock at $5 and sell it at $10, you have a capital gain of $5. Now, capital gains also counts real estate investments, and Democrats were talking about repealing the owner occuppied housing exeption in the last election. So potentially, this could effect every American if Democrats get their way in the long run. As we know, anytime government wants more money they just seek out profitable sectors of our economy and decide to tax it. If most American’s have their saving sitting in their houses, surely you will see government eventually targeting that for more revenue.

That surtax takes effect on January 1, 2011, or the day the Bush tax rates of 2001 and 2003 expire. Today’s capital gains tax rate of 15% would bounce back to 20% because of the Bush repeal and then to 25.4% with the surtax. That’s a 69% increase, overnight. The last time investors were hit with anything comparable was 1986, when the capital gains rate jumped to 28% from 20%, a 40% increase, as part of the Reagan tax reform that lowered income tax rates.

The 1986 experience was not a happy one. Tax revenues from capital gains surged before the increase took effect in 1987, as investors moved to cash in at the lower rate. Revenues then plummeted. Total realized capital gains didn’t again reach their 1985 level of $172 billion until 1996. By 1992, the federal government was barely getting more in revenue ($29 billion) at the 28% rate than it did in 1985 ($26.5 billion) at the 20% rate.

Rate reductions, as in 2003 when Republicans cut the rate to 15% from 20%, have typically had the opposite effect. Treasury receipts from capital gains climbed to an estimated $117.8 billion in 2006 from $49 billion in 2002.

via Health-Care Surtax Applies to Capital Gains – WSJ.com.

Ok, so how is this going to effect the stock market? It will definitely hinder the stock market growth. If you are buying and selling stocks, your return will be decreased, which means you are less likely to take the risk. If less people are willing to take the risk, there will be less capital to fund businesses. On top of that, businesses, especially small businessses, have capital gains as well. If their capital gains is taxed more, they are less likely to invest in expanding their business because the investments now become more risky. Businesses look at after tax profits. As the article says, capital gains revenue to the government actually went down after increases in the rate. That means there was less investing and less turner of investment. Capital was held up in the system instead of flowing through the system.

Government is  the land of idiocy. They think we live in a static world where they can say, hey look at all that money. Let’s take some, and for some reason people are going to just say “Oh ok George, here you go.” Reality is much different. People’s behavior changes, and the government does harm to all of us. This increase will hinder our economy, and worst yet, it will destroy more jobs.

The truth be told.

The typical argument for ObamaCare is that it will offer better medical care for everyone and cost less to do it, but occasionally a supporter lets the mask slip and reveals the real political motivation. So let’s give credit to John Cassidy, part of the left-wing stable at the New Yorker, who wrote last week on its Web site that “it’s important to be clear about what the reform amounts to.”

Mr. Cassidy is more honest than the politicians whose dishonesty he supports. “The U.S. government is making a costly and open-ended commitment,” he writes. “Let’s not pretend that it isn’t a big deal, or that it will be self-financing, or that it will work out exactly as planned. It won’t. What is really unfolding, I suspect, is the scenario that many conservatives feared. The Obama Administration . . . is creating a new entitlement program, which, once established, will be virtually impossible to rescind.”

Why are they doing it? Because, according to Mr. Cassidy, ObamaCare serves the twin goals of “making the United States a more equitable country” and furthering the Democrats’ “political calculus.” In other words, the purpose is to further redistribute income by putting health care further under government control, and in the process making the middle class more dependent on government. As the party of government, Democrats will benefit over the long run.

This explains why Nancy Pelosi is willing to risk the seats of so many Blue Dog Democrats by forcing such an unpopular bill through Congress on a narrow, partisan vote: You have to break a few eggs to make a permanent welfare state. As Mr. Cassidy concludes, “Putting on my amateur historian’s cap, I might even claim that some subterfuge is historically necessary to get great reforms enacted.”

No wonder many Americans are upset. They know they are being lied to about ObamaCare, and they know they are going to be stuck with the bill.

via John Cassidy on ObamaCare – WSJ.com.

The writing is already on the wall. Government is poised to take over health care. The next logical step in controlling the cost of this “public service” will be controlling your eating habits. While I believe that people should pay for their eating habits via increased insurance premiums, I do not believe the government should be telling people what to eat, trying to change the way people eat, or getting involved in people’s eating habits what-so-ever.

Instead of hoping that individuals can muster the self-discipline on their own to avoid processed foods, fast food and days without physical exercise, the idea is that governments must actively work to change environments and reduce the menu of harmful options available in everyday life.

As a result, hundreds of towns in Europe and elsewhere have adopted a version of this strategy, aimed particularly at preventing children from becoming overweight and obese. They hired dietitians to counsel children and their families in schools, organized walk-to-school days, hired sports educators and built new sporting facilities. The U.S. government, meanwhile, is increasing its funding for cities and towns to pursue so-called community-based obesity prevention, in an effort to gather data about which kinds of tactics work best.

“People are finally acknowledging that the obesity problem is so pervasive that it isn’t just because people are making bad choices,” says Laura Kettel Khan, an obesity expert at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which makes grants to states for community obesity-prevention programs.

via New Obesity-Fighting Programs Enlist Entire Towns – WSJ.com.

The free market has a way of dealing with obesity via health insurance premiums. It also would deal with it, if the government would stay out of the free market. The government encourages bad eating habits. It does this by promoting the idea that no one should pay increased insurance costs because of pre-existing conditions, obesity or any other higher risk factor. Once government controls health care, there will be no penalty what-so-ever for bad habits.

Also, the government subsidizes corn more than any other crop which is used in most fattening foods to the tune of almost $10 billion a year. Because corn is so cheap, things like high fructose corn sryup have been developed to make food cheaper. Corn is also used to feed most live stock, which makes live stock cheaper as well. This is why fast food is so cheap. If you remove the government subsidies, corn prices will go up. With corn prices, the cost of some of the worst foods will also increase, which would result in less consumption of those foods.

We are watching the same old sitcom. Government side effects cause or contribute to our societal ills, and the government inserts itself to be our saviors willing to take our freedoms in order to fix our problems. Unfortunately, the people are all too willing to take the government solution.

Government’s role in society is to create criminals out of ordinary people.

Shout out to Hotair for the video

Bob Murphy had a great post,  Free Advice: “The Money That Is Sold Abroad Is You!”, that reiterates my post on selling our kids into slavery. This video is a lot more dramatic though. I’m jealous.

As usual, our government finds it wise to punish good behavior. If you are a small growing business, you better not hire anyone once payroll reaches $499,999. Once you cross over that line, you are in the cross hairs of government regulators who decide how you must treat your employees. If you don’t do what they say, you will pay more taxes.

The House bill mandates that employers with payrolls above $500,000 must contribute — for each full-time employee — 72.5% of the premium cost for single coverage and 65% of the premium cost for family coverage. The penalty for failing to do so is a 2%-to-6% tax on employers with payrolls between $500,000 and $750,000 and an 8% tax for employers with payrolls above $750,000.

via Small Business Crunches Numbers – WSJ.com.

So how does this promote job growth? Business aren’t in the business of charity. If they must spend more on health care or even worse send money to Washington, they are not going to have that money to grow and to create jobs. Those employees will get less pay, because businesses figure out the overall cost of employees. If they budget X for a certain position, the person will get X minus health care, minus taxes, minus social security, minus unemployment insurance, minus workers comp, minus other benefits, and minus any other business cost associated with that employee.

If an employee takes care of themselves and their employer didn’t pay for their health insurance, they would have more money in their pocket. The employer would be able to pay more for the position without the extra costs.  Shopping for themselves, the employee would get better rates and maybe buy a low premium, high deductible insurance plan. This would increase their income substantially. Because businesses are forced into buying health insurance for all regardless to health conditions of each individual, their plans are more expensive and eats more money out of the healthy worker’s pocket. This lowers the standard of living for all workers, and is more punishment for doing the right things.