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By Greg Pierce

END OF THE ROAD

"It didn't take long to run into an 'uh-oh' moment when reading the House's 'health care for all Americans' bill. Right there on Page 16 is a provision making individual private medical insurance illegal," Investor's Business Daily says in an editorial.

"When we first saw the paragraph Tuesday, just after the 1,018-page document was released, we thought we surely must be misreading it. So we sought help from the House Ways and Means Committee," the newspaper said.

"It turns out we were right: The provision would indeed outlaw individual private coverage. Under the Orwellian header of 'Protecting The Choice To Keep Current Coverage,' the 'Limitation On New Enrollment' section of the bill clearly states: 'Except as provided in this paragraph, the individual health insurance issuer offering such coverage does not enroll any individual in such coverage if the first effective date of coverage is on or after the first day' of the year the legislation becomes law.

"So we can all keep our coverage, just as promised - with, of course, exceptions: Those who currently have private individual coverage won't be able to change it. Nor will those who leave a company to work for themselves be free to buy individual plans from private carriers. ...

"What wasn't known until now is that the bill itself will kill the market for private individual coverage by not letting any new policies be written after the public option becomes law."

COBURN'S MOVE

Sen. Tom Coburn is a physician who until recently still went home to Oklahoma to deliver babies. He believes Congress should weigh the dangers of a nationalized health system much more seriously than it has," John Fund writes at www.opinionjournal.com.

"In the tradition of someone using a 2x4 to win the attention of a mule, [Wednesday] he successfully pressed the Senate Health Committee to approve his idea of requiring members of Congress themselves to enroll in whatever 'public plan' is passed to compete with private insurance companies," Mr. Fund said.

" 'Let's demonstrate leadership - and confidence in the system - by requiring that every member of Congress go into it,' Mr. Coburn told his colleagues as they were marking up the health care proposal championed by Sen. Ted Kennedy. His idea wasn't exactly greeted warmly by many public plan supporters. Sen. Jeff Bingaman, a New Mexico Democrat, responded: 'I don't know why we should require ourselves to participate in a plan that no one else needs to participate in. This bill goes to great lengths to show that the choice is there for everybody.'