Government Health Care Cookie Monster

Me want cookies! Me eat cookies? Me eat anything and everything.

Spoken by the Cookie Monster, character created by Jim Henson (1937-1990), founder of Puppets, Inc, and developer on Sesame Street of Miss Piggie, Kermit the Frog, Fossie the Bear, and the Cookie Monster.

Sometimes it is useful to think like a child of lovable creatures  or of a  monster  that eats other peoples’ cookies day and night, incessantly without pausing.

Here is the government health reform cookie monster at work.

The cookie monster is always eating.  Its appetite is insatiable.    It eats in broad daylight. It eats at night. It eats behind closed doors. It eats out in the open.  It eats your breakfast.  It eats your lunch.  It eats your dinner.  It eats 24 hours a day.  It is always raiding your cookie jar. It eats things you are not even aware of.  It even eats your money.

·         Starting in 2013, if you earned  more than $200,000 as an individual or $250,000 as a couple, it ate 1.45% to 2.35% of Medicare Part A.

·         That same year, it will start eating 3.8% of your “unearned income” – investment proceeds from partn4rships, royalties, and rents.

·         Between now and 2018,  if you are an insurance plan bogeyman, it will eat $47.5 billion.  After that it will eat $14.3 billion a year.  

·         Along the way, it will  empty your cookie jar as you pay more for premiums and those unaffordable deductibles. 

·         Through 2019,   it will eat $16.7 billion out of drug company proceeds, and $2.8 billion a year thereafter, taking more out of your cookie jar to pay for drugs.

·         It will eat $2 billion a year out of the profits of sales of medical devices- pacemakers, prosthetic limbs, and insulin pumps- more out of your cookie har if you need those things.

·         On July 1, 2010, it began eating 10% on the profits of tanning salons.

 

·         In 2020,  it will tax and eat 40% of the costs of Cadillac health plans.

 

·         From 2010 to 2020,  it will eat $575 billion out of Medicare itself by eating away to Medicare Advantage plans and payments to doctors and hospitals.

·         It will even eat its own entitlement, though it has never eaten an entitlement before.  Federal entitlement as previously unknown.  Yet from 2010 to 2020, it says it plans to eat $575 billion out of Medicare by chewing away at Medicare Advantage plans and payments to doctors and hospitals.

·         From 2014 to 2024,  it will eat $1.5 trillion to  $2.5 trillion directly out of the federal budget.  The exact number does not matter.  A trillion here, a trillion there.  Pretty soon it will be talking about real money.

What a cookie monster is health reform! 

 It is like a big baby- an alimentary canal with a huge and growing appetite at one end and no end at sight at the other. 

It keeps saying ,”Me want cookies!”  

The trouble is: its cookies are your cookies.