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Well looks like all bets are off concerning our health care.

Everyone will now have to have mandatory health insurance, proven by a medical card issued by the government. You will have your own individual barcode on this card. It's the "mark of the beast". As prophesized 2 millennia ago. Be afraid. Be VERY afraid!

Really.....we are now forced to 'buy' a product by our govt.!!! And of course the new govt. hires - thousands of IRS agents - will hunt down the uninsured. Scary $hit.....and this mandate will kill small businesses, inflate unemployment & affect hiring (negatively)in larger companies! Speaking of govt jobs here's some more interesting stuff: Using federal figures from 2008, reporter Dennis Cauchon found:

* U.S. government workers earned an average salary of $67,691 for occupations that exist in both government and the private sector, which was $7,600 a year more than workers in the private sector doing the same jobs. Health and pension benefits for U.S. government workers average $40,795 per year, but $9,882 per worker in the private sector.

* Nurses employed by Veterans Affairs hospitals earn an average of $74,460 a year, which is $10,689 more than private-sector nurses.

And Chris Edwards, Cato Institute, has compared the pay and benefits of local and state government employees with private-sector workers.

He found the average hourly compensation, wages and benefits of state and local government employees in 2009 was $39.66 per hour, 45 percent higher than the $27.42 per hour package of private-sector workers

Where 80 percent to 90 percent of state and local government employees get paid sick leave, health insurance and life insurance, and 90 percent receive pensions, that is true of only 59 percent to 71 percent of workers in the private sector.

These disparities suggest that government work is becoming a sweet deal for those who can get it, which may explain why government has begun to crush the private sector that has to carry the government on its back.

Consider. Between 2000 and 2010, U.S. manufacturing, backbone of the nation, lost 5.7 million jobs, one-third of all the manufacturing jobs America had. But government employment rose that same decade by 1.9 million jobs to 22 million, with three-fourths of the new workers being added to local government payrolls.

States like California, whose public employees are among the best paid in the nation, are the states closest to chapter 11. Their last, best hope to close their deficits is a U.S. taxpayer rescue a la Fannie, Freddy, GM and AIG. But do the states merit a taxpayer bailout if their crises come out of their own continuing profligate ways??? Writes Edwards:

"Public sector workers … can typically retire at age 55 after 30 years of service, as in California's CalPERS system. In CalPERS, workers receive an annual pension equal to 60 percent of final salary after 30 years. Public safety workers in CalPERS can retire at age 50 after 30 years of work with benefits equal to 90 percent of their final salary.

"In California, there are 6,144 retired public employees in the CalPERS plan and 3,090 retired teachers in the state teachers' plan receiving annual pension benefits of more than $100,000."

And folks wonder why California is bankrupt. Should middle-class Americans be forced to subsidize $100,000-a-year pensions for middle-aged California retirees?

Yet, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, in that $787 billion stimulus bill, shoveled billions of federal tax dollars into California to pay salaries, pensions and health benefits of Californians who have been paid more than private-sector workers all of their lives. Where is the fairness here?

Not another federal dime should go out to any state government whose employees receive more in pay and pensions than the average worker in that state or the other 49.

As for the U.S. government, Republicans should call for a one-year freeze on federal salaries and a two-year freeze on congressional salaries. If sacrifices are to be made, the people who had a fat decade at taxpayers' expense should make them sacrifice, not a ravaged private sector that has contributed almost all of the conscripts to today's 15-million-man army of the unemployed.

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Great read from Anne Coulter:

On the "Today" show this Tuesday, President Obama claimed the massive government takeover of health care the Democrats passed without a single Republican vote was a "middle of the road" bill that incorporated many Republican ideas.

One Republican idea allegedly incorporated into the Democrats' health care monstrosity is "medical malpractice reform." Needless to say, the Democrats' idea of malpractice reform is less than nothing. Until trial lawyers are screaming bloody murder, there has been no medical malpractice reform.

The Democrats' "malpractice" section merely encourages the states to set up commissions to "study" tort reform, in the sense that frustrated mothers "encourage" their kids not to slouch. By "study," the Democrats mean "ignore."


So we get more taxpayer-funded government workers under the Democrats' "medical malpractice reform," but not one tittle of actual reform.

Democrats manifestly do not care about helping Americans get quality health care. If they did, they could not continue to support trial lawyers like John Edwards making $50 million by bringing junk lawsuits against doctors who are saving people's lives. (At least Edwards has not done anything else to publicly disgrace himself since then.)

At a minimum, any health care bill that purports to improve Americans' health, rather than trial lawyers' bank accounts, must include a loser-pays rule and a restriction on damages to actual losses -- as opposed to punitive damages, which mostly serve to enrich the John Edwardses of the world, and their mistresses.

The Democrats also lyingly claim their health care reform includes the Republican ideas of competition across state lines.

I know they're lying because -- well, first because I read the bill -- but also because Democrats are genetically incapable of understanding the free market. You might say it's a pre-existing condition with them.

True, you can buy insurance across state lines under the new health insurance law -- but only after the Democrats have created a national commission telling all insurance companies what they are required to cover.

That's not as bad as the current patchwork of state mandates -- it's worse!

At least before the passage of ObamaCare you could move to states such as Idaho or Kentucky, where all insurance plans aren't required to cover fertility treatment, restless leg syndrome and social anxiety disorder.

Under federal mandates, there will be no escape.

That's right, a single, one-size-fits-all, jammed-down-your-throat national plan is what the Democrats mean when they say their plan includes "competition across state lines."

How much do you want to bet that the national commission in Washington will mandate coverage for every form of shopping addiction treatment, body image therapy and sex-change operations with mandatory mental health counseling, but not injuries from hunting accidents or smoking-related illnesses?

The Democrats compare their new health care bill to entitlements like Medicare and Medicaid. But those are welfare, not health care. They may go to deserving welfare recipients, but they are a government-enforced gift from the young to the old (Medicare), and from the middle class to the poor (Medicaid).

There's no reason why most Americans shouldn't be able to buy our own medical insurance the same way we buy our own cell phones, hair care and cars.

And just incidentally, Medicare and Medicaid are projected to go bankrupt slightly before the United States of America is projected to go bankrupt. So turning all of health care into a larger Medicare program may need a little more thinking through.

These programs will have to be reconfigured at some point, but how society takes care of the old and the poor should be put in a separate box from how the non-elderly and non-poor should obtain health care.

Democrats want to turn the entire citizenry into welfare recipients.

A few weeks ago, The New York Times ran an editorial noting the amazing fact that, by the middle of this year, there will be an estimated 6.8 billion people on Earth -- and 5 billion will have cell phones! (Even more astounding, at least one of them is seated directly behind me every time I go to the movies.)

How did that happen without a Democrat president and Congress using bribes, parliamentary tricks and arcane non-voting maneuvers to pass a massive, hugely expensive National Cell Phone Reform Act?

How did that happen without Barney Frank and Henry Waxman personally designing the 3-foot-long, 26-pound, ugly green $4,000 cell phone we all have to use?

How did that happen without Obama signing the National Cell Phone Reform bill, as a poor 10-year-old black kid who couldn't afford to text-message his friends looked on?

The reason nearly everyone in the universe has a cell phone is that President Reagan did to telephones the exact opposite of what the Democrats have just done with health care.

Before Reagan came into office, we had one phone company, ridiculously expensive rates and one phone model. Reagan split up AT&T, deregulated phone service and gave America a competitive market in phones. The rest is history.

If you can grasp how inexpensive cell phones in a rainbow of colors and wonders like the iPhone could never have been created under a National Cell Phone Reform Act, you can understand what a disaster ObamaCare is going to be for health care in America.