Health care reform punishes handicapped, tanning, personal responsibility

Like most pieces of major legislation, the health care reform bill is long and complicated. In their attempts to fund a dramatic expansion of health insurance coverage and costs, Democrats pulled out all the stops and reached for every possible revenue source short of across-the-board tax increases.

Some of the revenue provisions in the bill may surprise you. According to Bloomberg, the reform bill imposes some bizarre punishments. For starters, the bill places a $2500 cap on pre-tax contributions to health care flexible spending accounts or FSAs. In other words, don’t be too responsible in trying to set aside funds for your own health care needs when you should be burdening the insurance system with those costs like a good socialist.

Here’s another: If you visit a tanning salon under the New Obama Order, you’ll pay a 10% excise tax on top of the price. Presumably this is justified by findings that tanning beds increase the risks of cancer, thereby burdening the health care system unnecessarily. But I think it would be hard to prove that the impact is so great as to justify such a tax.

Perhaps most incomprehensively, if you purchase a medical assistive device such as a wheelchair, you’ll be slapped with a new 2.9% excise tax. That may not be enough to bankrupt anybody, but what pray tell is the rationale for soaking disabled people? What crime against the Welfare State have they committed? It’s not as if they can simply choose to forego their wheelchairs rather than pay the excise tax.

Maybe the Democrats counted on a belief that tanning salon patrons, disabled people and responsible working stiffs don’t vote in great numbers. Let’s hope that, in the words of President Ronald Reagan, “They counted wrong.”

Health reform a Pyrrhic victory for Democrats?

Tunku Varadarajan has got it mostly right over at The Daily Beast. As House Democrats celebrate their victory in passing health care reform, they have handed Republicans a very powerful weapon for this fall’s midterm elections. The GOP is now advocating a repeal of the new law, which would require veto-proof Republican majorities in both the House and Senate – probably impossible, but it makes a great pitch to fundraise and campaign on. Polls have consistently shown that the majority of Americans oppose this legislation, and worse – they know that their legislators know that and voted for it anyway. Although I would not go so far as to say as Varadarajan does that Obama’s re-election in 2012 is at stake (there’s a lot of terrain to cover between now and then), the 2010 election prospects for Democrats were grim to begin with and are only getting uglier in the wake of yesterday’s vote. 

Particularly vulnerable are the 8-10 conservative, anti-abortion Democrats who, led by Rep. Bart Stupak, eventually voted Yes after holding out for the meaningless sop of an executive order from the President promising that the government would not start funding abortions. These Democrats have managed to alienate both liberal and conservative voters, and if the GOP picks up their seats they are likely to stay Republican for the foreseeable future.

Democrats could be facing a situation in which they have purchased health care reform at the cost of giving up their control of Congress and their ability (as well as the President’s ability) to pursue other liberal goals such as climate change legislation.