The House of Representatives is expected to vote TOMORROW on H.R. 3962, the Affordable Health Care for America Act, Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) disastrous healthcare reform bill.

I urge you, if you haven’t already, to tell your U.S. Representative that you OPPOSE this absolutely unaffordable government takeover of healthcare!

As if the original House healthcare reform bill that sparked outrage at congressional town hall meetings in August weren’t bad enough, Speaker Pelosi has now crafted a 1,990-page regulatory and fiscal nightmare.

CCAGW Member, H.R. 3962 poses a fundamental threat not only to our nation’s and your own financial health and prosperity, but to every American’s individual liberties and right to free choice!

According to an initial estimate by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), H.R. 3962 will cost our country a minimum of $894 billion over 10 years. Robert Pear of The New York Times reported on October 30, “By the most commonly used yardstick, the bill would cost $1.05 trillion over 10 years.” Historically, healthcare programs have cost more than predicted — in 1990 Medicare spending was nearly 10 times what was originally estimated in 1967 — and this is the biggest healthcare plan in history.

Quite frankly, America cannot afford even the minimum price tag for Speaker Pelosi’s healthcare scheme when the federal deficit stands at an all-time record and the national debt is projected to nearly double over the next 10 years.

What’s more, President Obama has said that his healthcare “reform” will cut costs in the long run, but CBO’s preliminary analysis of H.R. 3962 found that the bill would bend the federal cost curve for healthcare UP, not down.

H.R. 3962 would also inflict a whole host of new taxes and costly mandates on individuals and businesses as American families struggle to make ends meet and unemployment approaches double digits.

For example, the bill would impose an individual mandate tax of up to 2.5 percent of income on individuals earning as little as $9,350 who do not purchase “acceptable health care coverage.” The National Federation of Independent Business estimates that the employer mandate in H.R. 3962 will disproportionately affect small businesses, triggering up to 1.6 million lost jobs. The direct impact on families of all the new rules, regulations, and tax increases will be an additional $500 per year in the cost of insurance.

And I can’t believe I’m saying this, CCAGW Member, but the financial burden of this healthcare plan to our government and the costs to American businesses, taxpayers, and our economy aren’t even the worst of it.

The most dangerous part of Speaker Pelosi’s healthcare “reform” bill is that it paves the way to a complete government takeover of healthcare in this country that will dramatically expand the size of government; allow bureaucrats and politicians to dictate your choice of doctors, treatments, and medicines; and ration quality care to control costs.

H.R. 3962 creates 111 new federal boards, bureaucracies, commissions, and programs. It also expands Medicaid to all individuals with incomes below 150 percent of the federal poverty level, an estimated 10 million Americans.

President Obama has repeatedly vowed that “if you like your health plan, you can keep it,” but the so-called “public health insurance option” that Speaker Pelosi included in her bill at the urging of her pro-socialized medicine backers will quickly undermine private insurance by undercutting its costs. A study earlier this year by The Lewin Group, a respected economics consulting firm, projected that 83.4 million Americans would lose the private coverage they have today if a “public option” becomes law.

On top of everything else, Speaker Pelosi proposes to pay for this government takeover of healthcare with massive cuts to Medicare. Those include more than $170 billion in cuts to Medicare Advantage Plans that will gut the program, forcing the more than 10 million seniors who opt for it back into traditional fee-for-service Medicare, which has higher out-of-pocket expenses.

Make no mistake. With these cuts to Medicare coming as the Baby Boomers are retiring and the program is facing bankruptcy in just seven years, seniors will be the first to experience rationing and a decline in their quality of care!

CCAGW Member, that’s why it’s so vitally important that you tell your U.S. Representative vote NO on H.R. 3962 today!

If we don’t succeed in blocking this very dangerous government takeover of our healthcare, you and I and all Americans will have no choice but to live under the mandates, restrictions, and rationing that federal bureaucrats and politicians in Washington will impose to curb costs.

The goal of Speaker Pelosi and her pro-socialized medicine backers is clear: to put all Americans under a single-payer, government-run healthcare system, like those in Canada and Great Britain, that will dictate our choice of doctors, treatments, and medicines and ration the care we can receive.

Time is short! The House will vote TOMORROW, Saturday, November 7. Tell your U.S. Representative today to vote NO on this costly and dangerous government takeover of healthcare.

Speaker Pelosi and the Democratic congressional leadership have engaged in an all-out strategy to ram through Congress legislation designed to remake America without time for public debate or even for members of Congress to read the legislation they are voting on.

From the failed “economic stimulus” bill to the cap-and-trade energy tax to bailouts of the auto and financial industries to government-run healthcare legislation, Speaker Pelosi is refusing to give members of Congress and the public time to read the final versions of legislation – let alone debate it.

This “trust me, vote now and read it later” approach effectively turns Congress into a rubber stamp for President Obama’s policies and gives Speaker Pelosi and her fellow liberal lawmakers almost unlimited power.

That is why CCAGW has joined 182 members of Congress in fighting for vote on H. Res. 554, which would change the Rules of the U.S. House of Representatives to require Speaker Pelosi to post, without exception, all final versions of legislation on the Internet at least 72 hours before holding a vote.

Here is just one example of why this 72-hour review period is so important.

At approximately 2:45 a.m. on the day the House passed the wildly expensive cap-and-trade energy tax, the liberal leadership of the House mysteriously added a whopping 300-page amendment to the legislation. Congress had spent weeks crafting the bill, and this massive amendment contained new and radical provisions.

One of the worst of the wee-hours-of-the-morning provisions requires you to receive permission from the Environmental Protection Agency in order to sell your home.

Unbelievable, but true! The EPA will review the energy efficiency of your appliances, windows, roof, furnace, air conditioning, and walls to determine if you meet their standards for private homes. If they do not approve of your home, you will be required to make changes, regardless of the cost, before you can sell.

CCAGW is fighting tooth-and-nail to keep this outrageous, authoritarian provision out of the Senate version of cap-and-trade legislation, which is not expected to come up for a vote until next year.

However, we can prevent more radical policies like this EPA home-sale approval requirement RIGHT NOW by stopping Speaker Pelosi and her left-wing minions from being able to call for votes on legislation without time for members of Congress, the public, and policy experts like CCAGW to review the details of a bill.

Not surprisingly, Speaker Pelosi and the ultra-liberal House leadership are blocking vote on H. Res. 554 by bottling it up in the Rules Committee and refusing to let it come to the House floor.

The only way to force a vote on H. Res. 554 is for 218 members of Congress to sign what is known as a Discharge Petition requiring that the 72-hour rule change come to the House floor.

Concerned Taxpayer, as someone who has counted votes in Washington for decades, I can tell you that if this rule change is put to a vote on the House floor an overwhelming number of members of Congress will vote for it – because more than 80 percent of the American people support having all legislation posted on the Internet for 72 hours before a final vote.

Speaker Pelosi’s only chance to block the public and members of Congress from reading and discussing legislation before it becomes law is if she can stop the Discharge Petition from gaining 218 signatures.

As I send you this e-mail, 182 members of Congress, both Republicans and Democrats, have stepped forward to sign the Discharge Petition.

We need just 36 more.

And we have more than enough top targets whom we are heavily lobbying. For example, 24 Representatives co-sponsored vote on H. Res. 554 but have yet to sign the Discharge Petition due to pressure from Speaker Pelosi.

Concerned Taxpayer, we can win these 24 signatures and reach the 218 required, but we urgently need your help.

We must demonstrate in the most concrete manner possible that not only are Americans solidly behind the posting of all legislation on the Internet for at least 72 hours, but that taxpayers are willing to fight for this new rule.

That is why I need you to sign on to the very same Discharge Petition that we are urging members of Congress to sign. We will tabulate your signature, along with the tens of thousands of others, and publicize the results to the members of Congress whose support we are lobbying to secure.

Please, before you do anything else today, take a moment to sign on to the Discharge Petition for H. Res. 554.

In reality, this cap-and-trade plan is nothing more than a hidden tax that The Heritage Foundation has estimated could increase the average American family’s energy bill by $1,500 annually!

That’s why I urge you, before you do anything else today, to tell your U.S. Representative to vote NO on the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009.

Introduced by Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.), the so-called Waxman-Markey bill will place a severe regulatory burden on American businesses, which will increase their costs and reduce their competitiveness, hurting our nation’s economy.

These higher operating costs for utilities, oil companies, and industry will ultimately trickle down to individual Americans, and you and I will pay an estimated 74 percent more for gasoline, 90 percent more for electricity, and 55 percent more on our natural gas bills. And that’s not the end of it. We’ll also pay more for every product that requires fossil fuels in its manufacture or transportation!

The Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade plan will also grow the size and cost of government by requiring the Environmental Protection Agency to establish a greenhouse gas (GHG) registry, create a GHG emission allowance transfer system, and set emission allowances from 2012-2050. This army of new bureaucrats will eventually control every aspect of industrial, commercial, and individual energy use. What’s more, the cap-and-trade program will necessarily be ripe for political favoritism and corruption, as politicians and bureaucrats manipulate the system for favored industries.

Friend, climatologist Chip Knappenberger has estimated that the 83 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions mandated under Waxman-Markey by 2050 will result in a drop in climate temperature of only nine-hundredths of 1 degree Fahrenheit. That’s equivalent to just two years of avoided global warming.

In short, the Waxman-Markey bill will achieve virtually no environmental pay-offs, while imposing huge costs on our businesses, our economy, and each and every one of us as a taxpayer and consumer.

Please tell your U.S. Representative today to vote NO on the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill)!

The House and Senate are scheduled to vote on their respective budget resolutions this week. The Budget Committees of both chambers largely adopted President Obama’s record-shattering $3.6 trillion budget proposal in tact. That’s why I urgently need you to tell your elected officials to save this country and each and every one of us from financial ruin by voting NO on the budget.

As reported by the Washington Post, President Obama is right now marshalling his grassroots network of campaign supporters to ram through Congress with little debate the far-reaching changes to our nation’s healthcare, energy, and education systems contained in his budget.

We must counter their efforts before they bankrupt this country and set America on a path to becoming a social welfare state. That’s why your Senators and Representative urgently need to hear from you today!

President Obama’s budget would raise income taxes on individuals and small businesses by $636 billion over 10 years. It creates a $634 billion “reserve fund” for nationalizing healthcare that would be paid for with a combination of tax increases and cuts to Medicare and Medicaid. His budget would also impose a “light bulb tax” on all Americans by implementing a cap-and-trade energy policy, where companies would have to pay the federal government to use oil, natural gas, and other fossil fuels. That tax alone could cost American families as much as $3,100 per year in higher prices for electricity, gasoline, and other products and services.

Not only would these tax increases further drain American families and businesses of income during the recession, they will stifle economic growth, just when our elected leaders should be enacting policies to promote it!

This massive $3.6 trillion budget proposal comes on top of the $787 billion “economic stimulus” package; $410 billion fiscal 2009 omnibus spending bill that was loaded with more than 8,000 earmarks; and the $700 billion bailout of Wall Street, Detroit automakers, and homeowners who took out mortgages they can’t afford.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has predicted that the Obama budget will push the federal deficit to a mind-numbing $1.85 trillion this year and pile up $9.3 trillion in deficits over the next decade, on top of the existing $11 trillion national debt! CBO called these deficits, which would never fall below 4 percent of our economy’s gross domestic product, “unsustainable.”

Friend, please tell your U.S. Senators and Representative today to reject the Senate and House budget resolutions.

The House and Senate gave final congressional approval to sweeping economic-recovery legislation, marking a new milestone of federal intervention in the nation’s economy.

The action came a little more than a year after the Democratic Congress, pushed by then-President George W. Bush, adopted a stimulus package that was less than a third the size of the revised $787.2 billion plan approved Friday.

How am I going to spend my extra $8.00/week, what will I do with my stimulus money? Obama and the Democrats are too kind to the American citizens.

After a month of wrangling, Congress voted to pass a compromise economic recovery package of spending provisions, tax cuts and aid to laid-off workers and their families. The 1,073-page bill contains hundreds of provisions.

Not a single Republican backed the package Friday in the House, where seven Democrats joined 176 Republicans in opposition, and 246 voted for it.

Hours later, the Senate, voting 60-38, cleared the measure to be sent to the White House for President Barack Obama to sign into law. Three Republicans joined with 57 Senate Democrats in support of the package; 38 Republicans voted against it. source.

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