President Clinton preferred to use reconciliation to pass HillaryCare in the 1990s, but he was dissuaded by West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd, who argued that it would be an abuse of the process. Mr. Byrd, author of a four-volume history of Senate rules and procedures, told the Washington Post last March that “The misuse of the arcane process of reconciliation—a process intended for deficit reduction—to enact substantive policy changes is an undemocratic disservice to our people and to the Senate’s institutional role,” specifically citing health reform and cap and trade.

Furthermore, Democrats are outright misleading the American public by advertising the cost of their plan to be only $849 billion over its first 10 years. According to the CBO analysis, only 1 percent of the costs will have even started to accumulate during the first 4 of those 10 years, so the “first 10 years” metric is misleading in itself. When taking a more honest look at the costs, the CBO’s numbers read quite differently (from the New York Post):

As the CBO analysis indicates, the bill’s real 10-year costs would start in 2014. And in its true first decade (2014 to 2023), CBO projects the bill’s costs to be $1.8 trillion — double the price Reid is advertising.

And that’s even though the CBO optimistically assumes the government-run “public option” wouldn’t cost a cent.

Over this same 10-year span, the 2,074-page bill would hike taxes and fines on Americans by $892 billion — more than the alleged price of the bill.

Why then are we adding more entitlement programs that we cannot afford? How are we going to pay for this? Of course, the answer is, and has been for some time, to simply borrow more from other countries like China (from the National Review):

Consider next the matter of debt. Obama inherited the Bush budget deficits — and then drove them through the roof. Indeed, he is on schedule not only to run up consecutive trillion-dollar-plus annual shortfalls, but also in his tenure nearly to match the aggregate debt piled up by all previous administrations combined.

A large portion of the new Obama borrowing has to be covered abroad, mostly through Chinese and Japanese purchase of U.S. government bonds.

The Obama administration expects to borrow yearly hundreds of billions of dollars from the Chinese to expand American health care. In some sense, therefore, 400 to 500 million Chinese — most of them without much access to even rudimentary medicine, doctors, and hospitals — will be working overtime to loan Americans enough money to ensure universal access to hip replacements, gastric bypasses, and flu shots.

Cut through the soaring rhetoric: We are left with an America that assumes the world’s less well-off will directly subsidize our own better-off.

No wonder that Obama has cooled his rhetoric on Chinese smoky coal plants, Tibet, mercantile trade policies, and human rights. All such idealism falls before America’s voracious appetite for borrowed cash.

In Charanya Krishnaswami’s defense of the Democratic health reform plan on Tuesday, she reiterates some common fallacious arguments that are misinformed, misrepresent the opposition, and frame the debate in a rather elementary fashion.

Krishnaswami seems to believe that the “public option” will bring honest competition to the health insurance market. This could not be further from the truth. The proposed plan has the very real potential of crowding out private insurance; and by force, not by providing more competitive rates.

In the latest Pelosi bill, an employer mandate will require small business owners to provide coverage for their employees or face an 8 percent payroll tax. Many economists have predicted that small business owners will drop their employees onto the “public option” since the 8 percent payroll tax will most likely be cheaper than the cost of providing private insurance.

Private insurers will also be subject to new regulations that control the price of premiums and require insurers to provide an “essential” level of coverage and benefits. This would be like Apple forcing Dell to put more expensive hardware in their computers and charge less to sell them. Dell would most certainly shut down as that level of production would be unsustainable. In short, the Pelosi bill is to competition as Yasser Arafat was to world peace — the relationship only seems harmonious if you’re liberal.

Then Krishnaswami goes on to imply that opponents prefer the “status quo” where rape victims are denied care on the basis of “pre-existing conditions.” All emotionally ridden anecdotal arguments aside, the notion that opponents prefer the “status quo” is elementary thinking to say the least. Everyone, for the most part, agrees that our current health care system can be improved and that reform is needed in certain areas. No one wants to see anyone get turned away for “pre-existing conditions” or get denied care because they can’t afford insurance.

But, if opponents are guilty of defending the “status quo,” so is President Obama. President Obama has said that the goal of the “public option” is to provide “a better range of choices, make the health care market more competitive, and keep the insurance companies honest.” Everyone agrees that these principles are desirable, but it is ironic that President Obama has spent his entire political career voting against every effort to make the health insurance market more open and accessible.

While serving in the Senate, President Obama voted against allowing tax deductions for health care costs, against allowing competition across state lines, against allowing the use of tax-free Health Savings Accounts to pay for health insurance coverage, against requiring undocumented immigrants to own health insurance, and against other reform efforts that would have increased competition, decreased costs, expanded coverage, or some combination of the three.

Another issue with Krishnaswami’s logic is the assumption that having no insurance implies that no health care is provided. This is, of course, false. For example, just a few miles away, Parkland Memorial Hospital provides millions of dollars of health care services to thousands and thousands of uninsured undocumented immigrants every year. Parkland has even sent an invoice to Mexico without expecting to actually be paid.

Krishnaswami also cites the number of uninsured to be around 46 million, which has been broken down numerous times and exposed as the scare tactic that it is. For example, 17.6 million uninsured earn more than $50,000 and can easily afford private insurance. 9.7 million are undocumented immigrants or non-U.S. citizens and should not be covered by the American taxpayer anyway. 14 million qualify for Medicaid or other government programs that already exist. That leaves around 5 million out of 307 million that are truly uninsured and can’t afford insurance.

Lastly, health care is not a human right as Krishnaswami claims, but a commodity just like food, water, or shelter. However, health care is arguably already treated as a positive right in America as more than half of Americans receive “free” health care from government programs like Medicare and Medicaid at the expense of the American taxpayer of both today and, as debt continues to accumulate over time, tomorrow.