What surprises lurk in the thousand plus unread pages of the health-care bill?
Diana Furchtgott-Roth has just found another one: “a little-noticed provision that for the first time could give the government access to the checking or credit-card information of every American.”
“Under section 163, which is entitled ‘Administrative Simplification,’ the bill sets new ‘standards’ for electronic transactions between individuals and their health-care providers. According to section 163, the standards will ‘enable the real-time (or near real-time) determination of an individual’s financial responsibility at the point of service . . .’ In addition, they will ‘enable electronic funds transfers, in order to allow automated reconciliation with related health care payment and remittance advice.’”
This is truly frightening.
We need:
1.) A healthcare bill that is brief and clear enough to be read by most Americans.
2.) A Congress that is not so rich that too-large staffs write humongous bills that can’t even be read by legislators.
It is my hope that the healthcare reform mess will reveal so many flaws with the way business is done on Washington that healthcare won’t be alone in being reformed. How about Congress? Anybody satisfied with our elected representatives?