H.R. 676

When the patron saint of U.S. health care, Harry Truman, addressed Congress on November 19, 1945, to encourage passage of his proposed national health care program, a program very much like the national health insurance found in every advanced industrial nation in the world today with the sole exception of the United States, to the top of his remarks President Truman said:

"Millions of our citizens do not now have a full measure of opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health. Millions do not now have protection or security against the economic effects of sickness. The time has arrived for action to help them attain that opportunity and that protection."

Note Truman's use of the word "citizen." Now fast forward to today's proposal for a U.S. universal, single-payer plan, H.R. 676. In it's first substantive section — Title I Eligibility and Benefits, Sec. 101 Eligibility and Registration (a) — the Bill says:

"In general.—All individuals residing in the United States (including any territory of the United States) are covered under the USNHI Program entitling them to a universal, best quality standard of care. Each such individual shall receive a card with a unique number in the mail. An individual's social security number shall not be used for purposes of registration under this section."

It's always good to read the fine print. Let's think about this for a moment. "All individuals residing in the United States" are covered. It could be a question of poor drafting, but coming from John Conyers' office the odds are against that. Or one would suppose that somebody among the Bill's ninety-odd co-sponsors would have suggested a fix. "All individuals" is a mushy category. We might assume that means "all lawfully resident individuals" but the Bill doesn't use those words. At a minimum, if hypothetically H.R. 676 were to become law, the text would provide rich grounds for legal action no matter how the administration interpreted it.

Looking deeper into the text of H.R. 676 (Google is a miracle we should be thankful for each and every day), and doing a word search for "citizen" we find only one example, having to do with something called "citizen patient advocates," completely unrelated to eligibility requirements. The word "citizen," by the way, appears five times in Truman's speech: he didn't want anybody to get the wrong idea. So H.R. 676 appears to extend national health care to non-citizens, in other words, to illegal immigrants.

If it weren't bad enough that the Bill would surreptitiously cover 11-12 million illegal immigrants, it would amount to a huge flashing sign on our southern border that says "C'mon up for free American health care." Honestly, that can't be such a good idea.

What really bothers me, indeed offends me, about this Bill is the way that politically correct, so-called liberal democrats in Congress have taken a very important issue, health care reform, and turned it into some kind of back door illegal immigrant amnesty. This is not a serious effort to reach out to moderate Republicans or independent Democrats and, frankly, the Bill as written has no hope, ever, of passage. It's just for show.

Serious advocates of radical health care reform, reform aimed at creating single-payer national health insurance, complain, quite properly, that insurers and other vested interests have created phony lobby groups to confuse the public, thereby staving off, or attempting to stave off, real reform. Well, H.R. 676 amounts to essentially the same thing on the other side of the fence. I can't speculate as to the motives but I assume they're tainted. If I were in Congress, as much as I want to see a universal single-payer system, and as much as I want to put the insurers out of business and take a lot of spare change out of the drug companies' hides, I would not vote for this bill. Nor, I think, would it be fair to criticize Nancy Pelosi for studiously ignoring it.

In a time when repeated surveys show large majorities of Americans in favor of radical health care reform, it is more than passingly curious that H.R. 676 has not been made a common rallying point. Until one reads the fine print and realizes that its authors don't want the public to take too close a look.