Isn’t it reasonable for lawmakers and ordinary citizens to say that a piece of proposed legislation should not be enacted into law until it has been studied fully to find what its effects likely will be?
But Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has bizarrely reversed that. She says she wants to enact ObamaCare socialized medicine first — and then let everyone find out what it would do.
She was speaking recently in Washington when she made some remarks on ObamaCare. They started out fairly mild:
“You’ve heard about the controversies within the bill, the process about the bill, one or the other. But I don’t know if you have heard that it is legislation for the future, not just about health care for America, but about a healthier America, where preventive care is not something that you have to pay a deductible for or out of pocket. Prevention, prevention, prevention — it’s about diet, not diabetes. It’s going to be very, very exciting.”
OK, those comments aren’t very specific, but neither are they particularly controversial.
It is what Speaker Pelosi said next that turns common sense and sound public policy on its head:
“But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy,” she said — according to a transcript that she proudly posted on her own Web site!
That is as backward as it gets!
The American people and our lawmakers need to know with crystal clarity what is in this gigantic, trillion-dollar-plus legislation before — not after — it passes. In fact, it is precisely because grassroots Americans have become aware, bit by bit, of alarming provisions of various ObamaCare proposals that those bills have not become law already. That public scrutiny seems to trouble the speaker.
It will be too late to reverse course once ObamaCare is enacted and its disastrous consequences — for our economy and for our medical care — can no longer be denied. It is condescending and distressing that Speaker Pelosi would suggest hastening ObamaCare into law before the public knows “what is in it.”