Most Americans who support the health care reform bills currently being rammed through Congress believe that this process will result in Americans receiving universal health care that is cheaper, more efficient and that gives all of us more choices.  But that is not the case at all.  Rather, Americans will soon have much fewer health choices which are much less efficient and for which they will end up paying much more for.  In fact, there are a ton of really nasty surprises for the American people in the health care reform bill.  The following are 10 of the nastiest of the surprises....

#1) All Americans will be forced to buy health insurance.  If you don't like the new system, that is too bad for you.  If you don't pay up, you will be heavily fined and you could ultimately end up in prison.  There will simply be no escape from participating in this health care system until you die. 

#2) Americans will have basically two places from which to get health coverage - either their workplaces or from "insurance exchanges" set up by the government.  If you are not employed, you will have one choice. 

#3) Americans will have much fewer health plan choices under the new system.  The new "insurance exchanges" that the government is setting up will offer four health plan templates that have been mandated by the government.  Each plan will contain health benefits that have been specifically dictated by government agencies.  You will be forced to pay for the benefits contained in these plans whether you need them or not.  So if you will never need substance abuse treatment or prescription drug coverage that is too bad - you will be forced to pay for them.

#4) Americans will be eligible for a federal subsidy to help them buy health insurance, but only if they earn less than 400 percent of the poverty level ($88,200 for a family of four).  However, an individual will only be eligible for a subsidy if their employer does not offer health coverage and if that individual purchases a "government-approved" plan from a "government-approved" insurance exchange.

#5) The Congressional Budget Office estimates that a family insurance plan for a typical family of four will cost approximately $15,000 per year when the health care bill comes into full effect in 2016.  How do you think most American families will react to that?

#6) The Congressional Budget Office also says that the coverage provisions in the Senate bill will cost the U.S. government $200 billion annually by 2019 and that these costs will grow by 8 percent per year.  Considering the fact that the U.S. government is already drowning in red ink, where in the world will all of that money come from?

#7) American workers will be hit with nasty new taxes under the new system, including a .9 percent Medicare payroll tax increase that the Senate bill would implement.

#8) There is also a 40 percent tax on "Cadillac" health plans in the Senate version of the bill.  That tax is not indexed to inflation, which means that eventually every health plan will be subject to the tax.

#9) Even if your current health plan is "grandfathered" in, your current health insurance company will be required to meet new federal mandates that will dramatically increase the cost for any health plan it offers you right now.  Guess who the health insurance companies will pass those costs on to?

#10) Senator Harry Reid has inserted some really wicked provisions in the Senate version of the health care bill that will make it virtually impossible to repeal the Obamacare bill once it is adopted.  So the reality is that once it is voted in, the American people will be stuck with it forever.

Remember the days when Americans could freely contract with private health insurers for whatever level of health coverage that they wanted for themselves and their families? Those days are over. In the health care bill being rammed through the U.S. Senate, Americans are given 4 health care plan templates from which they must choose and 2 places from which they can get that coverage (either their workplace or from a state-based "insurance exchange"). You see, this is the new socialist America - where health care choices are limited and where conformity is required.

4 Health Care Plan Templates

Many Americans who are supporting the health care reform bill are excited because they think that finally all Americans will get the health care coverage that they want.

But unless what all Americans "want" is contained in the four standardized U.S. government health plan templates that is most definitely not going to be the case.

You see, private health insurers will still be involved in offering health insurance under the new plan, but their health plans will be required to meet the standards set forth by the U.S. government templates. The New York Post puts it this way.....

Consumers must buy policies from their employers or through the exchanges — but, either way, their choice of coverage is limited to one of four basic insurance plans that the government sanctions.

Private insurers will still compete to offer policies but must model their coverage on one of these four templates. In short, the Senate bill explicitly standardizes health benefits and then establishes elaborate mechanisms (including subsidies and penalties) to pay for them.

According to an Associated Press breakdown of the Senate bill, the most basic of the health plan templates would pay about 60 percent of health care costs per year, while the most "advanced" of the health plan templates would pay about 90 percent.

The vast majority of Americans have not even noticed that their health care choices are about to be scaled way back, but the Wall Street Journal has.  In a scathing editorial, the lack of flexibility and choices in these "health plans" was pointed out....

Unnoticed by the press corps, the Congressional Budget Office argued recently that the Senate bill would so "substantially reduce flexibility in terms of the types, prices, and number of private sellers of health insurance" that companies like WellPoint might need to "be considered part of the federal budget."

But even among the four health plan templates there apparently is not that much of a difference.  The New York Post describes it this way.... 

While these four plans vary from low- to high-cost options, the benefits offered under them are pretty much the same. The difference between the cheaper and pricier plans is mostly the amount of cost sharing (e.g., you pay less for insurance if your co-pays are higher).

So what does this mean?

It means that everyone is going to end up with essentially the same health insurance.

2 Places To Get Health Coverage

The Senate health care reform bill also gives Americans just two places from which to acquire health care coverage.  Either they can get it from their employer, or they can buy it from one of 50 state-based insurance "exchanges".

Reuters has posted a breakdown of how these state-based insurance exchanges will work....

The proposed government-run insurance option would be dropped from the bill. Instead, the federal government would contract with insurers for two national or multi-state health insurance plans that would be offered through the new insurance exchanges. The U.S. Office of Personnel Management, which oversees health policies for 8 million federal workers and their families, would manage the public plans.

So what does this do to health insurance companies?

It fundamentally changes their nature.

The Wall Street Journal put it this way....

With formerly private insurers converted into public utilities, for instance, they'll inevitably be banned from selling products like health savings accounts that encourage more cost-conscious decisions.

1 Giant Socialist Mess

So where does this leave the American people?

It leaves them with a giant socialist mess of a health care system.

The American people are going to be furious when they learn about the minimal health care choices that they have under this new system.

Experienced U.S. doctors will leave or retire in massive numbers.  One recent poll found that 45 percent of American doctors said that they would quit or retire if Barack Obama's health care reform plan is adopted. 

If there is a mass exodus of doctors, it would absolutely cripple the health care system in America. 

The level of medical care in America will also probably experience a dramatic decline if the Senate plan is adopted.  Just ask veterans or those on Indian reservations how well U.S. government managed health care works. 

The truth is that whenever the U.S. government gets involved in health care it quickly becomes a nightmare.

But now that is what all Americans will have - government planned health care.

The new Wall Street Journal editorial about the Senate plan expressed amazement at "the hubris of an Administration that thinks it can substitute government planning for market forces in determining where the $33 trillion the U.S. will spend on medicine over the next decade should go."

The truth is that the U.S. government is replacing a capitalist health care system with a socialist one.

The American people are not going to like it, doctors are not going to like it, employers are not going to like paying for it and the U.S. government is going to drown in red ink trying to pay for it.

But the Democrats are going to ram it down our throats anyway.

Most Americans seem to think that the world leaders gathered at the U.N. Copenhagen climate change summit are simply discussing ways to help improve the environment. Unfortunately that is not anywhere close to the truth. The draft of the Copenhagen climate change treaty now circulating would represent a giant step towards a "world government", it would establish brutal new world taxes which would transfer massive amounts of wealth from the United States to other nations, and it would create 700 new bureaucracies to enforce this new treaty. Not only that, but according to the provisions of the treaty, the United States would never be able to get out of it. The wording of the treaty makes it crystal clear that no future president, no future Congress and no future U.S. court would be able to extricate the United States from this horrific agreement.

An earlier version of the Copenhagen climate change treaty can be found here.  However, the version of the treaty now being circulated in Copenhagen is not available to the public at this point. 

Fortunately, there are some officials who have seen the latest version and who are willing to speak out.  One of them is Lord Christopher Monckton - a former official in the Thatcher administration.

We already knew that the Copenhagen Treaty was going to be incredibly bad, but according to Lord Monckton it is going to be even worse than we anticipated.

So just what is this horrific treaty going to do?

#1) A World Government

The Copenhagen Treaty is going to be a gigantic step towards world government.  Lord Monckton recently said the following about what the drafters of this treaty are trying to do.....

"Once again they are desperately trying to conceal from everybody here the magnitude of what they’re attempting to do – they really are attempting to set up a world government."

The wording of the treaty creates governmental bodies with a vast array of power over environmental affairs.  The treaty gives these new governmental bodies tremendous power over the lives of every man, woman and child on earth.  It even grants these new governmental authorities authority over the U.S. government and the U.S. Constitution.

When you have world governmental authorities that can micromanage the smallest details of our lives and that can trump the U.S. Congress and the U.S. Constitution, what do you have?

World government.

#2) Brutal New World Taxes

The Copenhagen Treaty will also establish crushing new taxes which will further devastate the economy of the United States and which will transfer massive amounts of wealth to developing nations.

This is what Lord Monckton had to say about the taxes in the Copenhagen Treaty.....  

"Tax the American economy to the extent of 2 percent GDP, to impose a further tax of 2 percent on every financial transaction….and to close down effectively the economies of the west, transfer your jobs to third world countries – all of that is still in the treaty draft."

To illustrate just how massive these new taxes would be, he pointed out that they would amount to at least half of the entire U.S. defense budget.

That is huge.

So where would all of this money go?

It would be transferred to third world nations to help them build "green" economies and it would go towards running the new socialist world governmental bodies.

This would be a blow that the U.S. economy may never recover from.  Already the U.S. economy is coming apart like a house of cards.

What would these new taxes do to it?

#3) Creation Of 700 New Bureaucracies To Enforce The Treaty

According to Lord Monckton, the Copenhagen Treaty will create 700 new bureaucracies to enforce the provisions of the agreement.....

"We’re looking at a grab for absolute power and absolute financial control worldwide by the UN and its associated bureaucracies and 700 new bureaucratic bodies."

This would not mean 700 new officials.

This would mean 700 new bureaucracies.

700 new organizations that would be crawling all over the world micromanaging the lives of every man, woman and child - making sure that they are adhering to the edicts of the new environmental world laws.

Lastly, perhaps the most ominous provision of this treaty is that it states that once a nation has signed on to it, it may not ever cancel its membership without the approval of all the other member nations.

Do you understand what that means?

It means that unless every single other nation agrees, the United States can never, ever get out of it.

Ever.

No future president would be able to do anything.

No future Congress would be able to do anything.

The United States of America would be under the thumb of this treaty forever.

We would be obligated to pay their world taxes forever.

We would be obligated to transfer our wealth to other nations forever.

We would be obligated to submit to the extremist regulations of world environmental bodies forever.

Are you starting to get the picture?

As world leaders prepare to converge on the U.N. climate change convention in Copenhagen next week, the belief in global warming and climate change is increasingly becoming less science and more religion.  In fact, Al Gore himself, the one being called the "eco-prophet" and "the Moses of this generation" recently admitted as much.  In his new book, "Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis", Gore focuses on the "spiritual side" of fighting global warming.  As far as allowing the science to persuade people about the threat of global warming goes, Gore puts it very bluntly in his book: "Simply laying out the facts won't work."  Why won't laying out the facts work?  Well, the truth is that as Climategate has revealed, the science is not on the side of the global warming extremists, so blind faith must be called for.

For those not familiar with Climategate, essentially what happened is that hacked emails and documents from the University of East Anglia’s Hadley Climate Research Unit were posted on the Internet which prove that many of the key scientists involved in the theory of global warming conspired to falsify climate data in order to prop up the premise that mankind is causing climate change.  A great summary of this unfolding scandal can be found here.

Why did they did those scientists have to falsify the data?

Why?

Because the actual science simply does not support the theory of man-made global warming.  If you are not aware of how the scientific data clearly shows that man is not causing global warming, please read the article that we recently posted on our sister site entitled "How To Save The Environment? Get Al Gore The Heck Away From It".

But Climategate is not about to stop Barack Obama from heading to Copenhagen.  In fact, world leaders from all over the globe will soon be pouring in to Copenhagen ready to sign a treaty that will pledge their nations to make deep sacrifices in order to fight the threat of climate change.  The Copenhagen Treaty will give an as yet unnamed U.N. body the power to directly intervene in the financial, economic, tax and environmental affairs of all the nations in order to fight the threat of climate change.  It would represent a gigantic step towards world government.  In fact, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon recently wrote an editorial in the New York Times that openly declared that "global governance" is needed to fight the threat of global warming.

In his editorial, Ban Ki-moon made the following very disturbing statements.....

"All agree that climate change is an existential threat to humankind."

"A deal must include an equitable global governance structure."

"All countries must have a voice in how resources are deployed and managed."

Sorry Ban Ki-moon, but all do not agree.

In fact, the whole Climategate scandal has revealed that the top global warming scientists have been deliberately lying to us.

In response to Climategate, White House Spokesman Robert Gibbs stated that for the Obama administration it really does not change anything.....

"In the order of several thousand scientists have come to the conclusion that climate change is happening," Gibbs told reporters. "I don’t think that any of that is, quite frankly among most people, in dispute."

But it is not just the denial of good science that makes global warming like a religion.  The truth is that global warming extremism has now essentially become a religion.

In fact, one judge in the U.K. has issued an opinion giving belief in global warming the status of a religion.  Just check out what Justice Michael Burton wrote.....

"A belief in man-made climate change, and the alleged resulting moral imperatives, is capable, if genuinely held, of being a philosophical belief for the purpose of the 2003 Religion and Belief Regulations. The belief must be of a similar cogency or status to a religious belief, the ECHR jurisprudence is directly material and the limitations on the concept and extent of a philosophical belief can be derived from that, without the need to place any additional limitation on the nature or source of the belief."

In addition, many of the world's most prominent religious leaders have expressed their belief in global warming and in the importance of trying to stop climate change.  The Dalai Lama himself now says that the world's leaders must give the highest priority to the issue of global warming.  Earlier this month Pope Benedict told a United Nations world food summit that "the Earth can sufficiently feed all of its inhabitants" despite the "devastation" caused by global warming.  The World Council of Churches is calling on churches around the world to ring their bells 350 times during the Copenhagen climate change summit as a call to action on global warming.

Not only that, but some of the top environmental extremists associated with the U.N. actually want to equate the battle against global warming with religion.  According to a paper written two years ago to influence the future strategy of the United Nations Environmental Program, environmentalism should be considered to be on the same level with religion as it is "the only compelling, value-based narrative available to humanity."

But nobody is doing more to equate global warming with religion than Al Gore is.  Already dubbed "the eco-prophet" by environmental extremists, Al Gore is stressing the "spiritual side" of climate change in his new book.

In fact, Gore has developed specific environmental training programs for each of the major world religions.

Newsweek quotes Gore as saying the following regarding these training programs.....

"I've done a Christian [-based] training program; I have a Muslim training program and a Jewish training program coming up, also a Hindu program coming up. I trained 200 Christian ministers and lay leaders here in Nashville in a version of the slide show that is filled with scriptural references."

The truth is that belief in global warming is quickly becoming a global religious movement.  Those without blind faith need not apply.  A global treaty is about to be signed which will impose strict regulations on the lives of every man, woman and child on the planet to fight a threat which the science says simply is not there.  To question this insanity is to risk being branded as a heretic by the environmental extremists that control the United Nations and most of the governments around the world. 

The fight against global warming is now part of the official orthodoxy of the 21st century.  To question it is to question the very world system that we are all a part of.  The global elite intends to use this belief system to impose tyrannical regulations on the entire planet all in the name of saving the earth.

If you plan on speaking up about this you better do so while there is still time.

Consumer electronics retailer Best Buy has completely banned the words "Merry Christmas" from its advertising, but it apparently has absolutely no problem at all running a national ad which wishes their customers a "Happy Eid al-Adha" - an important Muslim holiday. A full size picture of this stunning advertisement is posted below. The message wishing their customers a "Happy Eid al-Adha" is circled in red in the lower left hand corner. This advertising circular was reportedly included in Sunday newspapers throughout the United States - including the Seattle Times. This truth is that Best Buy has been caught red-handed in a blatant form of politically-correct hypocrisy.

So just what is Eid al-Adha?

Well, Wikipedia defines the Islamic festival of Eid al-Adha in this manner....

"Festival of Sacrifice" or "Greater Eid" is a holiday celebrated by Muslims (including the Druze) worldwide to commemorate the willingness of Ibrahim to sacrifice his son Ismael as an act of obedience to God.

So Best Buy has no problem openly wish Muslims a Happy Eid al-Adha when they have been at the forefront of the war on Christmas?

If you will recall, way back in 2006, Dawn Bryant, a spokeswoman for Best Buy, made the following statement regarding Best Buy's decision to ban the word "Christmas"....

"We are going to continue to use the term holiday because there are several holidays throughout that time period, and we certainly need to be respectful of all of them."

Since that time Best Buy has decided that they can use the word "Christmas" but they continue to ban all uses of the term "Merry Christmas".

The truth is that Best Buy should feel free to acknowledge all holidays if they wish, but when they openly discriminate against Christian holidays that is not acceptable.

Please get this out to everyone that you know.  Perhaps when thousands of people express their outrage Best Buy will reconsider their hypocritical approach to religious holidays.