Michael Tanner, a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, presented at the North Dakota Policy Council’s town hall meeting on health care last week. I’ve seen Mr. Tanner speak before and was excited to see his return. Sadly, this time around he’s talking about a health care takeover bill that’s been signed into law, not one that was a distant possibility. He did provide some insight into ways that this unconstitutional power grab could be defeated as a whole or in part.

This is the creepiest slide of his presentation, although there were others that had more specifically bad news for North Dakota. This is a diagram of the new Obamacare health care bureaucracy. Looks easy to navigate, doesn’t it? So much for making things simpler!

By the way, if you bought into the line that adding millions of extra insured people to the system was going to bring costs down, don’t forget to add in the costs of all the new unionized government employees required to staff those little colored boxes in the diagram above. Still feeling all Hopey-Changey™ about health care? I didn’t think so.

The North Dakota Policy Council represents the interests of North Dakotans in a variety of ways. By visiting policynd.org regularly you can find out about events like this one where you can ask your own questions. You can find links to videos from past events as well. You may even consider supporting the NDPC to the degree that you choose. I’m glad that they, along with folks like Mr. Tanner, are doing the research to see how all this Hope™ and Change™ is really going to affect North Dakotans.