So argues Richard Epstein, who makes the compelling argument that the legislation is a de facto take over of the health care industry, and as such will result in the elimination of private health care insurance companies. Since the constitution mandates that private parties must be compensated when state action takes their ‘property’ this legislation is unconstitutional since it fails to compensate insurance companies for destroying their business.

Regardless of the argument, the piece is a must read because he read through the bill and does an excellent job of translating the legalese into something that can be more easily read.

It should go without saying that healthcare bill is truly a craptastic piece of legislation. I would be curious to see which of my readers who voted for Barack Obama support this healthcare legislation.

Here is a list of parts of the legislation that immediately get implemented.

It goes without saying that the vast majority of these provision will be ruinous to healthcare.

TOP 14 PROVISIONS THAT TAKE EFFECT IMMEDIATELY

1. BEGINS TO CLOSE THE MEDICARE PART D DONUT HOLE — Reduces the donut hole by $500 and institutes a 50% discount on brand-name drugs, effective January 1, 2010.

2. IMMEDIATE HELP FOR THE UNINSURED UNTIL EXCHANGE IS AVAILABLE (INTERIM HIGH-RISK POOL) — Creates a temporary insurance program until the Exchange is available for individuals who have been uninsured for several months or have been denied a policy because of pre-existing conditions.

3. BANS LIFETIME LIMITS ON COVERAGE–Prohibits health insurance companies from placing lifetime caps on coverage.

4. ENDS RESCISSIONS–Prohibits insurers from nullifying or rescinding a patient’s policy when they file a claim for benefits, except in the case of fraud.

5. EXTENDS COVERAGE FOR YOUNG PEOPLE UP TO 27TH BIRTHDAY THROUGH PARENTS’ INSURANCE– Requires health plans to allow young people through age 26 to remain on their parents’ insurance policy, at the parents’ choice.

6. ELIMINATES COST-SHARING FOR PREVENTIVE SERVICES IN MEDICARE–Eliminates co-payments for preventive services and exempts preventive services from deductibles under the Medicare program.

7. IMPROVES HELP FOR LOW-INCOME MEDICARE BENEFICIARIES–Improves the low-income protection programs in Medicare to assure more individuals are able to access this vital help.

8. PROVIDES NEW CONSUMER PROTECTIONS IN MEDICARE ADVANTAGE– Prohibits Medicare Advantage plans from charging enrollees higher cost-sharing for services in their private plan than what is charged in traditional Medicare.

9. IMMEDIATE SUNSHINE ON PRICE GOUGING–Discourages excessive price increases by insurance companies through review and disclosure of insurance rate increases.

10. CONTINUITY FOR DISPLACED WORKERS–Allows Americans to keep their COBRA coverage until the Exchange is in place and they can access affordable coverage.

11. CREATES NEW, VOLUNTARY, PUBLIC LONG-TERM CARE INSURANCE PROGRAM–Creates a long-term care insurance program to be financed by voluntary payroll deductions to provide benefits to adults who become functionally disabled.

12. HELP FOR EARLY RETIREES–Creates a $10 billion fund to finance a temporary reinsurance program to help offset the costs of expensive health claims for employers that provide health benefits for retirees age 55-64.

13. COMMUNITY HEALTH CENTERS–Increases funding for Community Health Centers to allow for a doubling of the number of patients seen by the centers over the next 5 years.

14. INCREASING NUMBER OF PRIMARY CARE DOCTORS — Provides new investment in training programs to increase the number of primary care doctors, nurses, and public health professionals.

WSJ has an excellent post showing the difference between the senate and congress healthcare bill. If anyone thinks these bills are good should probably take a look at whats in them.

The individual mandate is particularly heinous. The parts about prohibiting insurance companies from rejecting people for preexisting condition is also fucked up. How can you honestly tell me you want to reduce healthcare care cost and then forbid insurance companies from taking on consumers who are clearly going to make the whole system cost more.

Don’t get me wrong, there are good moral reasons to prevent insurance companies from rejecting people for prior conditions. Unfortunately moral reasons are not cost saving reasons.

He has made libertarians more popular than I have seen in my entire life.

Just how angry is the public with the country’s two leading political parties? Angry enough that the conservative, libertarian-leaning Tea Party movement is more popular than either the Democratic or the Republican parties, according to the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.

The Republican Party maintains its net-negative favorable/unfavorable rating in the poll, with 28 percent viewing it positively and 43 percent seeing it in a negative light.

For the first time in more than two years, the Democratic Party also now holds a net-negative fav/unfav, at 35-45 percent.

By comparison, the NBC/WSJ poll shows the Tea Party movement with a net-positive 41-23 percent score.

Keep up the good work Obama. Maybe one of the political parties will be permanently replaced by a socially liberal economically fiscal libertarian leaning party. That would be awesome.

Over at the blog “Dude, with Keyboard”, their is a post that perfectly captures my position on global warming. While I highly suggest reading the full post, his conclusion serves as a nice summary.

Therefore all policy proposals beyond voluntary individual action and existing clean air guidelines should be placed permanently on hold until all the data has been reanalyzed and all research, all methodology, all computer code, and all coding standards are publicly available and put through a true democratic investigation if they are to be used to dictate public policy. Furthermore, the computer models must be set to some standards of predictive accuracy within a limited term time horizon (not less than 10 years) and must be able to accurately predict, within a reasonable margin of error, agreed upon global climate criteria as well the impact of large weather events. This must occur before any policy proposals are put into place. If this is too complex and too high a threshold to meet, then perhaps, we should stop pretending that AGW is a proven fact, that we have settled the question of man’s impact on the global climate and that we must limit economic prosperity to prevent a crisis whose scope we cannot accurately predict.

If you want your science to dictate policy your methods and data will be transparent and open to all. This is particularly true when your science is advocating for policies with massive economic consequences.

Reason has several good ideas for healthcare reform. If your legislation does not include any of these idea you are obviously not interested in reducing cost no matter what you may claim.

I think Glen Reynolds does a nice job of succinctly characterizing current healthcare reform:

Health care policy is suboptimal, but there is no “crisis.” Talk of a “crisis” is just a PR effort to get us to accept a different set of suboptimal policies that are more to the liking of certain interest groups.