What’s in that stimulus bill?

From Bloomberg.

Troubling health provisions have been sneaked into the bill:

One new bureaucracy, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective. The goal is to reduce costs and “guide” your doctor’s decisions (442, 446). These provisions in the stimulus bill are virtually identical to what Daschle prescribed in his 2008 book, “Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis.” According to Daschle, doctors have to give up autonomy and “learn to operate less like solo practitioners.”

And how many new crimes are invented by the hidden health care provisions?

Hospitals and doctors that are not “meaningful users” of the new system will face penalties. “Meaningful user” isn’t defined in the bill. That will be left to the HHS secretary, who will be empowered to impose “more stringent measures of meaningful use over time” (511, 518, 540-541)

What penalties will deter your doctor from going beyond the electronically delivered protocols when your condition is atypical or you need an experimental treatment? The vagueness is intentional.

A little further down in the article (my bold):

Hiding health legislation in a stimulus bill is intentional. Daschle supported the Clinton administration’s health-care overhaul in 1994, and attributed its failure to debate and delay. A year ago, Daschle wrote that the next president should act quickly before critics mount an opposition. “If that means attaching a health-care plan to the federal budget, so be it,” he said. “The issue is too important to be stalled by Senate protocol.”

Those are the concerns of Betsy McCaughey, former lieutenant governor of New York and adjunct senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. The health provisions, it would appear, were buried in this huge omnibus bill by design, to avert debate.

Here’s more commentary from Secondhand Smoke:

This is why people are so jaded and cynical about their own government. The economic stimulus bill that we are told is too important to really debate and must be passed NOW! NOW! NOW! contains sneak provisions opening the door to national health care.

and…

The fact that our betters in government want to sneak matters of this import into law without a debate tells us all we need to know about how the people would react to these provisions. And their attempt to use the economic crisis as cover, tells us all we need to know about their integrity and respect for the democratic process. This isn't an issue about whether these government controls should be passed or defeated. For now, the issue is that they should be debated. Otherwise, we are losing the right to call ourselves free.