I had the privilege of talking to Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels this past Wednesday.
He was passing through Etna Green en route from an appearance in Elkhart to an appearance in North Manchester.
He stopped at the Etna Green Café for a cup of coffee and piece of peanut butter pie.
Our reporter asked him several questions about Indiana issues like education and property taxes. Then I asked him about health care.
It was kind of a rhetorical question because I already knew what he thought about the health care plan our government likely will foist upon us with a partisan vote this weekend.
I knew what he thought about it because he wrote a letter to every member of Indiana's Congressional Delegation last week, urging them to vote no.
Here's what the letter said:
A few months ago I expressed the view that the health care bills then pending before Congress were hopelessly misguided, unaffordable, and dangerously adverse to the interests of Hoosiers today and tomorrow. I have hoped that these schemes would be modified and improved given their clear defects and the public's quite sensible rejection of them. Instead, they have become, if anything, even worse.
Again I ask your leadership in preventing this disastrous national mistake. You will soon be presented with the most anti-jobs, anti-taxpayer, anti-Indiana measure you may ever see in your Congressional career, and I hope you will represent us well by voting against it.
The governor also provided an impact statement which showed the likely effect the bill would have on Indiana:
n Through a massive expansion of Medicaid, half a million (500,000) new Hoosiers would become eligible, costing Hoosier taxpayers billions more in state taxes. One in four Hoosiers would be on public assistance.
n Without a costly increase in the Medicaid provider reimbursement rates, there will not be enough health care professionals to care for this huge new influx of Medicaid patients.
n The Healthy Indiana Plan (HIP) would be eliminated as the new federal rules would force the 45,000 families who are currently covered into the Medicaid fee-for-service delivery model, losing the cost saving and quality advantages of consumer-driven health care.
n Many Hoosiers who currently have health insurance will pay higher premiums - the Congressional Budget Office estimates an average increase nationally of $2,100 for some families, and a study of the effects in Indiana showed premium increases ranging up to 78 percent. Premiums will continue to rise because the drivers of rising costs in the health care system are exacerbated rather than controlled by the legislation.
n A growing and job-creating life sciences sector in Indiana will be hit with huge new tax increases: at least $20 billion for the device manufacturers and $90 billion for pharmaceutical companies. These costs will be passed to consumers and will result in job losses in Indiana.
n A job-killing tax of $2,000 per employee will be levied on many companies which cannot afford or choose not to provide coverage to their employees, including Indiana.
n The costs for this massive entitlement expansion are vastly and misleadingly understated: An honest estimate would show an addition of more than a trillion dollars to the national debt.
Unfortunately, it appears as I write this on Friday that despite the efforts of our governor, all the Republicans in Congress, a fair number of Democrats in Congress and a solid majority of the American people, Congress will pass Obamacare this weekend,
The "disastrous national mistake" as Gov. Daniels termed it likely will be come the law of the land.
Seems to me this is a bad bill passed by a bad process.And of special interest to Times-Union readers should be the point the governor raises about the medical device tax.
Remember that little gem?
It was in the original bill but was removed after the bill came out of the Senate. It's back in - all $20 billion of it over 10 years. Kosciusko County comprises companies that manufacture roughly a third of all medical devices worldwide.
That means these companies face $7 billion in medical device taxes if this bill passes. What do you suppose will be the likely effect on these companies? What bill be the likely effect on this community?
How do you, as a company, absorb that kind of cost? Do you cut manufacturing jobs, administrative jobs, research and development, marketing? Do you get your overseas manufacturing processes up to speed and ship jobs over there? Do you do all of the above?
You know, I don't have a crystal ball. And I could be dead wrong about this health care mess. But my sense is that it's going to be bad for our country, especially bad for our county.
