When Washington first began its push for health care reform, I was hopeful that a bipartisan effort would yield a bill that would help reduce the cost of healthcare while improving access and quality. Unfortunately the legislation being considered this weekend in Congress achieves none of those goals.

As a breast cancer survivor, I’ve become an involuntary expert on our health care system. I’ve seen both the faults of our system and the miracles it can bring through the inspired and healing hands of our health care professionals.

I want everyone to have access to the same type of care I received when my life was on the line. But what began as a well-intentioned effort to reduce costs and improve quality has been corrupted by Washington insiders and their political games. The bill now being debated looks more like the work of Dr. Frankenstein.

The last thing people want to hear when they are sitting in a waiting room is “the bureaucrat will see you now.” Yet that is exactly where our nation is headed because Democrats continue to ignore the will of the American people in pushing this effort forward. They have further made a mockery of the deliberative process by boxing out Republicans and, amazingly, seeking to pass out a bill without voting on it. It’s no wonder that the majority of voters oppose the reforms currently being considered. Americans are sick and tired of career politicians and the games they play in Washington.

With the $940 billion price tag for this plan in question it isn't clear what the real total cost and impact of this legislation will be. What is clear is that the final number will be at least $2.4 trillion. Estimates are that it will increase premiums by 10% to 13%. In addition, it will result in about $562 billion in new taxes and, at least on the face of it, $523 billion in Medicare cuts.  

Of course the Democrats say that their plan is to "pay for" this behemoth by crediting hundreds of billions of dollars in phony savings in Medicare. But reality is that they're not reforms, they're rate cuts that will probably never occur. Some have even called into question the legitimacy of the measure under pay-as-you-go, which was designed to introduce some fiscal discipline and restraint into the political discourse in Congress. At the end of the day this plan does nothing but create a new government entitlement at the expense of jobs.

This plan does far more than just overhaul 17 percent of our economy. It represents a giant leap toward expanding government-run healthcare. Sunday’s vote is exactly the opposite of what Winston Churchill called “the end of the beginning.” In fact, it’s the beginning of the end when it comes to the government’s every-increasing role in our lives and pocketbooks.

Funny, President Obama was supposed to be against an arrogant foreign policy. Remember his speech in Strasbourg, France last spring? There had been times, he told the European students, "where America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive." Those days are over, he assured them.

Leave aside the question as to whether this characterization of past American arrogance was justified. President Obama now has a year of foreign policy under his belt and in that time he has managed to snub the British prime minister, alienate the president of France, insult the nation of Honduras when it successfully defended its young democracy from a Chavez wannabe, and undercut the people of the Czech Republic and Poland by tossing aside a hard-won agreement to build a missile defense shield.

But in no case has his own arrogance been more transparent than in his treatment of Israel. It didn't begin with the recent spat over housing units in Jerusalem. In formulating his policy, the president could have focused his energy on the problem of a terror regime racing toward acquisition of nuclear bombs. He could have noticed the civil war raging between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. He might have addressed the venomous anti-Semitism and race hatred offered as daily fare in Palestinian media and textbooks.

But from its inception, this administration has signaled that it regards Israeli behavior as the chief obstacle to peace in the region. Israel must halt settlements, the president told Prime Minister Netanyahu, or the relationship between the U.S. and Israel would suffer. Seeing the United States acting as its lawyer, the Palestinian Authority, which in the past had negotiated with Israel without preconditions, could not then set the bar lower than the U.S. president.

Though it received little attention at the time, Obama's rebuke of Israel at the United Nations last October was, particularly in that venue, a deeply unfriendly act. "We continue to emphasize that America does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements," the president intoned. As former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton noted at the time, the use of the phrase "continued" rather than "new" potentially delegitimized every inch of land on which Jews reside. That nuance would not have been lost on the Palestinians, who regard all of Israel as "occupied territory."

Even stipulating that the announcement of new construction in Ramat Shlomo was ill timed, the president's response was extraordinary. Despite the fact that Netanyahu apologized for the bureaucratic gaffe, the president very publicly instructed his secretary of state to call Netanyahu two days later to scold him further -- a task the secretary of state apparently fulfilled with gusto.

So while the Obama administration extends its "open hand" to the butchers of Tehran (even after the hand is repeatedly slapped), and truckles to the regime in Syria, it upbraids Israel.

Choosing to excoriate Israel on the matter of these apartments speaks volumes about the president's view of the conflict in general. The president's outrage is highly selective. Two months before Vice President Biden's visit, Mahmoud Abbas, chairman of the PA, attended a "birthday celebration" for the "martyr" Dalal Mughrabi. Mughrabi led 11 terrorists who carried out the 1978 "coastal road" attack, the worst terror attack in Israel's history. Coming ashore near the northern Israeli city of Haifa, Mughrabi and her heavily armed team hijacked two busses filled with tourists, forced all 71 into one bus, and attempted to take it to Tel Aviv. Along the way, they machine-gunned motorists and some of the passengers. Bodies were dumped on the highway. When police finally stopped the bus by shooting out the tires, the terrorists killed as many people as they could (37, including 13 children) and set the bus aflame before being killed themselves.

The day after the vice president departed the region, a square was named for Mughrabi near Ramallah. Tawfiq Tirawi, a member of the Fatah Central Committee (the PA's predecessor organization), told the crowd, "We are all Dalal Mughrabi." Mughrabi is celebrated in other ways as well. Palestinian Media Watch reports that in the past two years, the PA has named two girls high schools, a soccer match, two summer camps, and a computer center after the "martyr."

To get a sense of the true nature of the conflict, the president need do no more than watch kids' television in the Palestinian areas. On the PA program "Chicks," children are encouraged to "explore your country" with a map that shows the entire nation of Israel labeled "Palestine."

Awaiting the secretary of state's outraged call to Abbas.

With all the minor adjustments Nancy Pelosi is making to the potential costs of health care in order to get more Democrats on board, everyone seems to be forgetting one thing: What happens when the individual mandate is declared unconstitutional and all that expected revenue is lost? The individual mandate has been of particular focus this week in relation to the potential expansion of IRS powers.   

In case you missed the IRS story, not paying the required fine for lack of health insurance would be considered tax evasion punishable as a Federal crime. Moreover, the IRS would be able to garnish your tax returns before sending your hard earned money back to you. Right…you couldn’t afford to buy health insurance to begin with, so now O’s going to fine you. Now who’s really the party of the little man?

Anyway, the Democrats are counting on the revenue generated by the fine people would pay if they did not purchase heath insurance. However, there are some genuine concerns that the mandate will be struck down. Let’s examine why exactly the individual mandate could be unconstitutional. 

The Dems say the fine is simply a “tax,” falling under Congress’ plenary authority to lay and collect taxes under Article I, Section 8, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution. Alternatively, they say it is a “direct tax” applicable to all citizens as allowed under Article I, Section 9, Clause 4. 

Both the “lay and collect taxes” clause and the “direct tax clause” are modified by other phrases in those respective clauses. The lay and collect taxes clause is followed by “Shall be uniform throughout the United States,” while the direct tax clause is followed by “In Proportion to the Census or Enumeration herein.” 

Congress obviously does not know the purpose of either of those two additional phrases. Those two modifiers mean that taxes should be applied uniformly when laying and collecting taxes and in proportion to the populations of the states when in the form of a direct tax. The proportional requirement of a direct tax basically means that if California residents make up roughly 9% of the population, they owe 9% of any direct taxes levied by Congress. There is nothing uniform or proportional about only taxing one segment of the population that has not purchased health insurance.

Another argument by the left is that the fine provided by the individual mandate is constitutional in light of Congress’ power to regulate interstate commerce. We have to get a little more philosophical when it comes to the meaning of our Constitution on this one. 

The individual mandate essentially “taxes” inaction rather than action. It does not tax earning money, buying goods, owning property or any other commercial activity. This type of law is completely unprecedented. It would literally be a crime to do nothing and not afford the penalty for doing nothing. How’s that for liberty?! One can only imagine what the Framers and the original Tea Partiers would say.

Besides those constitutional objections to the individual mandate, I’ve got two more the left can’t even argue. First, how about the “right to privacy” created by the Supreme Court under the Fourteenth Amendment? That legal theory took abortion out of democracy’s hands. It also gave individuals the right to regulate their reproductive health with contraceptives despite a Connecticut law banning them. Those rulings were inherently about a person’s right to make decisions concerning their own health. Purchasing health care is too, even if your choice is no care at all.

Next comes the freedom to contract. Our founding document prohibits states from restricting the right to contract. Not only that, but the freedom to contract itself has been one of the cornerstones of our legal tradition - a legal tradition dating back to common-law England and separating us from virtually every other legal system in the world. As the Heritage Foundation observed, “No where in the constitution is Congress granted the authority to mandate that individuals enter into a contract with a private party….The government has never required people to buy any good or service as a condition of lawful residence in the United States.”

There you go, dear readers. When the individual mandate gets struck down on any of these constitutional grounds and the proverbial gravy-train runs out, we’ll be even more broke than current estimates project. Don’t you just love Nancy Pelosi? 

If you cannot trust government's numbers, you cannot trust government's words. This is the lesson of the House Democrats' desperate promotion of a phony-baloney Congressional Budget Office analysis of their latest health care takeover package.

Democratic leaders leaked a solid-seeming price tag -- $940 billion over 10 years -- before the CBO released any official comment or report. Liberal blogs and mainstream newswires started parroting Democrats' claims that their plan "would cut the deficit by $130 billion over the next decade, and $1.2 trillion in the second decade of the plan's implementation" -- again, before the CBO had released an iota of information, and hours before the House Rules Committee posted the long-awaited reconciliation bill.

House Majority Whip James Clyburn pronounced himself "giddy" over the supposed CBO scoring. Math lover and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi proclaimed: "I love numbers. They're so precise."

But "precise" does not mean "accurate." And the most "precise" numbers can be utterly worthless. That is basically what CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf pointed out in his summary of the unofficial preliminary analysis of Demcare:

"Although CBO completed a preliminary review of legislative language prior to its release, the agency has not thoroughly examined the reconciliation proposal to verify its consistency with the previous draft. This estimate is therefore preliminary, pending a review of the language of the reconciliation proposal, as well as further review and refinement of the budgetary projections."

Translation: Garbage in, garbage out. Elmendorf's weary number crunchers know they are just more stage props in the Oba-Kabuki health care theater. Like the president's partisan donor-doctors dressed up in their White House-supplied lab coats, the CBO's statistical authorities are being exploited to lend credibility and solidity to the Democrats' legislative vaporware.

The CBO didn't release its non-report because it was finished. The agency released it because Democrats needed cover for their bogus transparency pledge to post the bill 72 hours before voting on it (which they still didn't fulfill).

The good news is that the number crunchers say they may have a real, final, useful analysis done by Sunday. The bad news is that House Democrats -- moving forward with their "deem-and-pass" trickery -- are scheduled to ram this monstrosity through by Sunday.

Pelosi touted fantasy savings from cutting Medicare waste, fraud and abuse totaling some $500 billion over the first 10 years of the Demcare plan. But House Democrats are relying on reaping massive dividends from Medicare reimbursement cuts that no one in Congress has had the courage to make. They also set aside the projected $200 billion so-called "doctor fix" to Medicare to make their math fit.

The first four years of Demcare clock in at $17 billion, which means the last six would cost a whopping $923 billion. As the CBO noted, it "does not generally provide cost estimates beyond the 10-year budget projection period" -- with second-decade projections subject to "an even greater degree of uncertainty" than its projections for the first 10 years.

Yet, over the past week, Democratic leaders blithely jiggered and re-jiggered their plan to get below a trillion-dollar spending threshold. Like the children's building-block game of Jenga, they stacked tax hikes and subsidies onto Medicare cuts and illusory savings until a rickety tower of budget deception was formed. Then they gingerly slid out the priciest pieces, rearranged them all and pushed back the spending kick-ins until the resulting edifice stood steady long enough to stay beneath 12 zeroes for a passing moment.

There's an old saying that "figures don't lie, but liars sure do figure." Every major Demcare statistic -- from the inflated number of uninsured to the politicized junk-science statistic on the number of Americans who purportedly die from lack of health insurance to the mythical savings that will come from squandering "$940 billion" -- is a single-payer-promoting figment of liberal imagination.

Mathematical corruption is ideological corruption. The health care battle -- and the battle over truth in government accounting -- is not just about health care. It's about the lies that will be used to ram through cap-and-trade, illegal alien amnesty and endless bailouts.

As Pelosi vowed last week, "Kick open that door, and there will be other legislation to follow. We'll take the country in a new direction." Yep -- straight to a red-ink-stained hell in a handbasket.

From the Sam Adams Alliance…

Two weeks ago, Sam Adams Alliance released a groundbreaking study on the Tea Party movement. Our report, The Early Adopters: Reading the Tea Leaves offers the first-ever insights into the Tea Party movement that include a survey sample made up entirely of recognized Tea Party leaders.

In this edition of Engaging Democracy, Eric O'Keefe sits down with Anne Sorock, who oversaw the study, to find out what motivates the Tea Party leaders, what issues they care about, and who they would vote for in the 2012 Presidential election. Some of the results may surprise you.

Watch or Listen to the podcast. And for more info like this, follow our blog, The Point.

Sam Adams Alliance needs your help to keep creating pro-freedom content and tools to help people and organizations who support free-market principles and self-governance. Please consider a donation of $50 today.

Sent to me by a Hill staffer just a short while ago, below is a list of what is for now believed to be the most up-to-date list of Democrats who are "in play" outside of the Stupak 12:

Altmire* (PA)

Costa (CA)

Arcuri (NY)

Ellsworth (IN)

Giffords (AZ)

Kosmas* (FL)

Markey* (CO)

Murphy* (NY)

Tanner* (TN)

An asterisk (*) denotes a "no" vote on health care the first time around.

Again, these are apparantly the folks Democrats are pushing on, as evidenced by this reported lobbying effort by George Stephanopoulos, and we should push back, too.

Each name above is linked to that member's contact page. Pick up the phones people. And Red County readers: if you're seeing this story in your county section, it means there's someone from your state on that list above.

Late today, Michael Barone published this very interesting, in-depth look at why the Democrats may be farther away from their necessary votes than most believe, but there's no time to rest. Make as much noise as you can to fight the healthcare takeover today and tomorrow. And start with the folks listed above.