‘Hillary Care’ would criminalize doctors, patients
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Editor,
If you’re under 30 you may not remember Hillary Clinton’s 1992 health care proposal. A horde of new voters has registered since then. Before you decide to vote for her, you should thoughtfully review some of its penalties. The email flap now occupying most of our attention has been an effective smokescreen to divert us from thinking about what sort of President she would be.
She wants to “strengthen” the Affordable Care Act. Here is what her “strengthening” may eventually include:
Tony Snow, White House press secretary in 2006 and 2007, said “The (‘Hillary Care’) plan prescribed some eye-popping maximum fines: $5,000 for refusing to join the government mandated health plan; $5,000 for failing to pay premiums on time; 15 years in prison for doctors who received ‘anything of value’ in exchange for helping patients short circuit bureaucracy; $10,000 a day for faulty physician paperwork; and $50,000 for unauthorized patient treatment.” Tony’s comments are a short list.
Her proposal would have made it a federal crime, punishable by imprisonment, for a doctor to treat a patient outside of the government-run “Alliances.” So, if you had a procedure done by your favorite surgeon in California, and then moved to Montana into a different Alliance, you and your doctor would both become criminals if you went back for a checkup.
If the government system would not accept you as a patient because it deemed your treatment medically unnecessary, or if others were ahead of you in line, and you went to a doctor asking for treatment, the doctor could have been imprisoned for treating you. Under her plan, an 80-year-old Navy veteran like me could be denied any kind of treatment and be fined if I tried to pay for it myself.
Also, do you think the Veteran’s Administration will improve under her rule?
The Affordable Care Act is now well-entrenched. President Hillary could easily attach penalties to it. She wasn’t just thinking of a misdemeanor slap on the wrist: these are penalties for felonies. The government is supposed to fight crime, not create it.
Think about it.
Dale P. Ferguson
Polson
