During Sunday’s interview with George Stephanopoulos, President Obama, while promoting his proposal for an individual mandate that would require every US citizen and legal alien to have health insurance, claimed that the average family is paying “$900, on average — our families — in higher premiums because of uncompensated care”.  

Health Care researchers, however, believe the President is vastly overstating the impact that the uninsured have on the cost of health insurance premiums.

You know, for a party that has spent the last three decades cowering in Centrist fear at even the echo of a whisper of the word ‘tax’, and is so afraid of offending right wing civil libertarians that they don’t say peep when teabaggers bring loaded guns (including assault rifles) to Congressional Town Halls and Presidential rallies, I find it incredible that Congressional Democrats are seriously considering a massive government program that would soon force every American citizen and legal resident (but not illegals, ironically) to pay a substantial amount of discretionary income most of them don’t have directly to a large private insurance corporation. What’s worse, if people don’t it fork over, the government fines them even more money.

In this economy?  Pay those guys??  Or you’ll fine us?  For getting sick?

Are they nuts?

(Okay, now that I’ve gotten that out of my system.)

Look, before we pass something that has the potential to be perhaps the most unpopular US law since the Alien & Sedition Acts, don’t you think we really should have an open and honest debate about whether a universal health insurance mandate is actually such a good policy idea in the first place?