Where's the Health-Care Bill?

By Joseph Farah

Documents don't seem very important to this administration or this Congress.

It seems Congress is about to approve a health-care "reform" bill without actually reading it or – even more unusually – without actually writing it.

The idea, apparently, is to railroad through Congress a piece of non-existent legislation.

After all, who can object to a bill that hasn't yet been written? When someone objects to provisions of the legislation, you can always say, "That's not in the bill." And, of course, you would be right. Nothing's in the bill. The bill doesn't exist. It will be written after approval.

It's ingenious, when you think about it strictly from a power politics perspective. However, it is so unimaginably unethical, illegal, immoral and anti-American, it literally staggers the imagination.

But that's what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid plan to do.

Already, the non-written version of this bill comes with a Congressional Budget Office price tag of $829 billion. I suspect it will cost much more – like your freedom. But it's nice to know they can actually estimate costs without seeing actual legislation. Maybe they are factoring in savings on the cost of paper on which the bill would normally be printed.

One thing we do know about this non-bill: It projects savings on health care by penalizing doctors who order too many tests.

How much is too many? Well, I guess Dr. Barney Frank will make those decisions. Certainly he has a better perspective on this than your own doctor.

But, again, it's all speculation. The devil is always in the details, as they say. And it's the details that are being kept secret – even from members of Congress.

We only know what we're being told. And we're supposed to believe assurances from politicians who have never run a popsicle stand that there will be tremendous savings as a result of the invisible details. They also tell us we shouldn't be alarmed by the costs because those will be offset by revenues from new taxes on high-premium insurance plans. In other words, government is raising the cost of insurance plans for the consumer – skimming off the top, if you will.

Isn't that comforting?

But, again, I'm only speculating, because there is no bill. Not yet. First things first. First we pass the bill, then we write it.

Never mind all those promises Barack Obama made during the campaign to ensure that legislation was not only written before approval by Congress, but written and published on the Internet for a week to allow the American people an opportunity to review it.

That was then. This is now.

Never allow a good campaign sound bite stand in the way of a totalitarian coup. (Did Rahm Emanuel say something like that?)

Anyway, this aversion to actual documents by government reminds me of Obama's animosity toward disclosing his own personal papers to the American people. Here he is, the guy who was going to run the most open and transparent administration in history, still stonewalling on the release of his original, long-form birth certificate, health records, student records, travel records and so on.

Do you see a pattern here?

Keeping Americans in the dark is what the "new politics" is all about.

You don't know what's good for you; government knows best.

Heck, you can't even be trusted to take care of your own health care. Government has to do it for you.

In fact, you can't even be trusted to decide how government should take care of your health care. That's how pathetic you are.

So don't ask the obvious question, "Where's the health-care bill?"

If you do, you will be accused of being a conspiracy nut. You will be accused of being a right-wing extremist. You will be accused of being an anti-government zealot.

For heaven's sake, this is for your own good. Now lie down and take your medicine!

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