In the next 24-48 hours, the House will “vote” and the Senate health care reform bill will be passed – or “deemed” passed. There will be debate and lawsuits to follow as to whether President Obama can sign the Senate bill or whether the Senate must approve the House’s “fixes” first, etc. ad infinitum.

Democrats have been trotting out tragic case after tragic case of people who’ve somehow gotten screwed by the American health care system. It’s not that these people haven’t received care – you know what medical difficulties all of these people have, so they’ve at least seen a doctor and been diagnosed.

The bill purports to extend insurance coverage to an additional 30 million Americans – and it will in 2014 after they’ve been collecting taxes for four years to make it appear as though you can save about $100 billion by spending $1 trillion. What this bill doesn’t do is increase the number of doctors, nurses and hospitals to treat those 30 million people. Many people who currently have health insurance realize how long it can take to get necessary, but not emergency, surgeries done.

Again, health insurance coverage is not synonymous with health care.

Let’s simplify the math here. In order to extend health insurance coverage to 30 million people, Congress is allegedly going to raise taxes by $500 billion and cut Medicare by $500 billion over 10 years and then offer only 6 years of benefits in the first decade. That’s how they got the Congressional Budget Office to score their “reform” as “saving” $100 billion in change over the first 10 years.

A word on the CBO. The CBO does calculations based upon what it is told will happen – no more, no less. If you say you’re going to cut doctors’ pay by 20 percent (the so-called “doctor fix” that isn’t even included in the “reform” calculation), then CBO will dutifully run the numbers – even if politically it will never happen.

You could tell the CBO that you’ve discovered a herd of unicorns that crap gold bars at a rate of 12 oz./hour and the CBO would salute and look up the closing price of gold on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

This “reform” is going to cost the American people far more than they will receive in increased medical coverage. Heavy equipment maker Caterpillar came out yesterday and said the proposed reform would cost them $100 million in additional costs the first year. And that’s without the re-hired employees that President Obama said would get their jobs back if the stimulus bill was passed.

Your premiums aren’t going to go down 3,000 percent. They’ll continue to go up – only slower because the government will be throwing your tax dollars at them.

Where’s the government going to be getting those tax dollars? Not from the aforementioned unicorn herd. And not from the rich – there’s not nearly enough of them.

Remember that promise about not raising any taxes on the middle class? That’s reached its expiration date. Massive tax hikes will be required to provide this benefit – and don’t even get me started on eventually paying down the national debt.

The transformation of America into a European statist economy has become. 10+ percent unemployment will become the norm. Taxes on the middle class will be 50 percent or better (once you add in state and local levies).

It’s time to bring back the old Reagan-era slogan: Recession is when your neighbor loses his job. Depression is when you lose your job. Recovery is when Barack Obama loses his job.