Health Care Bill Is About Control, Not Health Care

By Doug Patton

October 21, 2009

The entire Declaration of Independence, including all 56 signatures, is contained on a single hand-written sheet of paper.

The full and complete original Constitution of the United States of America is printed on six pages. The first four pages contain the basic text of the founding document. Page five is the letter of transmittal to the British government. And the sixth and final page contains all ten of the initial amendments, known as the Bill of Rights.

Karl Marx laid out The Communist Manifesto in a mere 23 pages.

The English translation of Dostoevski's Crime and Punishment is 718 pages, while Tolstoy's War and Peace weighs in at 1,225 pages. And try as she might, even Ayn Rand could manage only 1,069 pages in her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged.

My personal, large-print New King James copy of the Bible contains 1,426 pages of text, a 64-page concordance and six pages of maps.

What do these momentous documents have in common with each other? They all contain fewer pages than the bloated Senate health care bill, S. 1796, which totals a ridiculous 1,502 pages.

In other words, the Founding Fathers of the United States of America, the father of modern Communism, three of history's most prolific Russian writers and even God Almighty Himself didn't need as many words to get their entire message across as the self-important blowhards in Congress trying to express themselves on one single issue: health care.

But let's be honest. What's going on in Washington right now is not really about health care; it is about control. The Senate leaders, in conjunction with the White House, are doing the same thing they did with the stimulus bill, the omnibus bill, the budget bill and the cap and trade bill. Thousands of pages of rules, regulations, restrictions and, most of all, astronomical spending. They believe that if they so overwhelm the American people with mind-numbing legalese, we will simply take their word for it that this poison pill isn't going to hurt us.

On top of the already burdensome language of this monstrosity, they have made it a moving target. It started with House Resolution 3200. Now it has morphed into the Senate version. But they are not even close to being finished with it. In fact, the current, so-called Baucus bill, with its "moderate" approach to health care reform, is merely the framework for the shell game Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is playing with our health care system. Even if S. 1796 were acceptable in a free society -- which it isn't -- it in no way reflects how the final bill will read.

President Barack Obama and the domineering Democrat leadership in Congress never talk about freedom. They whine about "fairness" and "security," but the word "liberty" is not in their vocabulary. The Founders would have considered the current "reform" going on in Congress as nothing short of criminal. They would rebel against this tyranny as surely as they revolted against the despotism of King George.

One thing on which we can depend: this process will not improve the bill. If this piece of statism passes, the federal government will eventually tell us what we can or cannot eat or drink, how much exercise we must do to stay fit, what we can and cannot smoke (pot yes, tobacco no), whether or not we can have guns in our homes (they're dangerous, you know, and therefore affect our health care costs) and how many children we can have.

And they will do it all in the name of "health care reform."