By Justin Lofton, Staff Writer, Ada Evening News
United States representative Tom Cole from Oklahoma’s 4th District said the current version of the House of Representatives healthcare bill doesn’t have his vote.

“It’s 10 pages short of 2,000 pages long and there’s a second companion bill, which is mercifully short — only 13 pages,” Cole said. He said the companion bill is separated from the primary bill to hide the cost of the bill.

Cole said he’s fairly certain a manager’s amendment will be put out next week for the bill.“When they did this on cap-and-trade, the manager’s amendment was 300 pages long,” Cole said. “That bill will probably include whatever last minute deals they’re making with individual members to try and round up the votes for this thing. I can guarantee that it’ll be expensive, it’ll be complex and they’ll try to run it through fast.”

Cole said Republican members of the House of Representatives were not given access to the bill until Thursday, Oct. 29 and he said the bill does include a public option.

“Instead of doing a mandated medicare sort of feature, the government would negotiate the price, if you will, with individual healthcare providers. The government is in an awfully strong position in that negotiation process, to basically impose things,” Cole said.
Cole said the bill will cost more than one trillion dollars.

“They claim the price tag is under $900,000,000 over a 10-year period. If you add the Doc-Fix to it, though, it’s at least 1.1 to 1.2 trillion dollars,” Cole said. “It’s paid for, broadly, by cutting medicare for seniors — especially medicare advantage programs — and applying that money toward this, and by raising a whole raft of taxes.”
Cole said the bill will eliminate an individual’s ability to purchase health coverage.

“There’s one (stipulation) that says you’re not eligible for any of the reimbursement that’s under the program if your state limits liability — if you have tort reform, in other words,” Cole said.
“Finally, we’re going to increase the eligibility for medicare and the states are just going to have to pick that up.”
Cole said the house version of the bill does not include a state “opt-out” option that had been previously discussed.
“We call it the Pelosi healthcare bill,” Cole said. “She certainly didn’t listen to anybody in August. There are no changes in this bill that are the sort of things I heard in my town hall meetings in August. There’s no tort reform in this bill — which wouldn’t have cost anything — there’s no ability for small companies to combine together and purchase insurance across state lines, there’s no national market in insurance, there’s no tax deduction for individuals who want to buy their own coverage so they can use pre-tax dollars. We just ignored all that and all we did was make this more bureaucratic.”

Cole said he doesn’t think Pelosi has the votes required to pass the bill in the House at this point but the bill could end up in the House as early as Nov. 5. He said 85 percent of US citizens are currently estimated to have coverage and this bill claims to raise that to 96 percent.

“It is very onerous. If you’re a small-business owner, just get ready because you’re going to get hit for sure,” Cole said. “If you don’t have healthcare provisions, we’re going to tax you quite heavily and effectively force you to enroll your employees in it whether you want to do that or not and whether they want to do that or not.”

Cole said there would be a link to the text of the bill at www.cole.house.gov.