A Democratic Congressman who voted for ObamaCare was on Greta van Susteren’s show  last night. In response to a question from Ms. Van Susteren, he indicated that, yes, he had more or less read the 2000-plus health care bill and that, yes, he knew it as well as one can know something this massive. When Van Susteren said this wasn’t enough, the perusing dude volunteered to let her quiz him. She wisely declined the offer, having made the point. (I can’t seem to locate a video.)


But I’d love to ask him a question: Did the speed reading solon discover in his trip through the bill that it was going to cause construction to stop on 45 physician-owned hospitals? Rick Moran at the American Thinker, one of my favorite blogs, comments:  



What a superlative idea! Let’s throw thousands of construction workers out of work and make it harder to access quality medical care at the same time.


Although I’m sure many representatives who voted for ObamaCare can wiggle out of taking responsibility for this by saying they must have missed it, the destruction of physician-owned hospitals appears not to be an accident. There is a provision in the bill that bans physician-owned hospitals from starting up. Moran sees this as a gift to the American Hospital Association (AHA), which supported ObamaCare and “prefers to have its member hospitals operate without competition from hospitals owned by doctors.”


He is not alone in this belief:



Dr. Michael Russell, president of Physician Hospitals of America, which has filed suit to try to stop this selective building-ban from going into effect, says, “There are so many regulations [in Obamacare] and they are so onerous and intrusive that we believe that the section [Section 6001] was deliberately designed so no physician owned hospital could successfully comply.”


This is a piece of legislation that should be repealed if for no other reason than that nobody, but nobody, not even the guy who voted for it on the basis of knowing “more or less” what’s in it, really has any idea of what the ramifications will be. Let’s scrap this piece of rubbish-and then start a real reform of health care that will improve care and bring down costs.


We can do this in a bill (or preferably incrementally, with more bills than one) that can be read and more fully understood by those who vote on them.