Senator Thune Warns of Some of the Health Care Bill's Evils

Looking presidential in the Russell Senate Building Rotunda as he waited patiently for Imus, Senator John Thune was a breath of fresh air this morning.

“We’ve been knee-deep in people from the House of Representatives, who, as you know are just about a notch below lawyers,” Imus told Thune, a Republican from South Dakota who is thankfully not an attorney.
 
Thune, predictably, had few positive thoughts about the health care reform bill that passed on Sunday, cautioning Americans that the impacts of its policies won’t be felt for some time.

“I think people who assume their premiums are going to go down are going to be very surprised when their premiums continue to go up,” said Thune. “I think a lot of people are going to be surprised when they start getting tax increases with this bill too.”

Some of the bill’s more popular items—covering people with preexisting conditions and allowing children to stay on their parents’ health insurance until age 26— go into effect immediately, which Thune believes was done by design so Obama and his team could go out and sell it.

Either way, Thune is worried. “I think that our country right now, with these unfunded liabilities, and Social Security, and Medicare, is on a pathway to bankruptcy unless we change our ways,” he said.

While the sky will not start falling tomorrow, he thinks it will fall a little bit for the Democrats in November. “It expands coverage, it doesn’t reform health care in this country,” Thune said of the bill, which will he believes also grant the federal government “more and more control” over the lives of Americans.

“That’s going to be a big factor in the November elections,” he concluded.

He was not familiar with a stipulation in the bill exempts the President and some senior members of the Senate and their staffs from the changes in the bill, but said, “If they’re going to foist this on everybody else in this country, they ought to be covered by it.”

If it’s true, however, Imus observed, “That’s something even people on Wall Street wouldn’t pull!”

One particular aspect of the health care “fixer’ bill that passed yesterday has gone largely overlooked by most people: student loans, now handled by some 2,000 lenders or so around the country, will fall under the jurisdiction of the federal government.

“They’re taking about $9 billion of that money they get from the student loan program to pay for the new health care entitlement,” said Thune, outraged because not only will students be piling up their own debt, but they’ll be piled on by the country’s debt, too.

Though he’s not happy with Obama’s health care bill, Thune denounced the violent acts directed at some of his colleagues over the last few days for their support of the bill. Even the ones in the House, who are, despite Imus’s belief to the contrary, people too.

-Julie Kanfer