So President Barack Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi managed to twist enough arms and bribe enough House members to gain a five vote margin of victory (220-215) on their healthcare bill.

I'd love to be able to inform you of all of the troubling aspects of the 2,000-page bill, fill you in on all of the ways the bill will kill our quality of health care, let you in on how many of our freedoms will be trampled on because of the provisions in the bill, but I am unable to do so. You see, just as candidate Obama lied when he promised that all of the health care negotiations in Congress would be broadcast on C-Span and streamed live on the Internet, Mrs. Pelosi's nose should have been growing when she promised to post the entire bill online for all to see, for a full 72 hours prior to a vote. What do they say about birds of a feather? One thing I can tell you is that, under the House bill, if you don't buy the healthcare coverage that the government tells you to buy, you could be headed for jail.

The non-partisan Joint Committee on Taxation took a look at some of H.R. 3962 and found that Americans who do not maintain "acceptable health insurance coverage" and who choose not to pay the bill's new mandate tax (about 2.5% of income) are subject to numerous civil and criminal penalties including fines of up to $250,000 and up to five years in prison.

They found that possible criminal penalties include Section 7203 which says, "misdemeanor willful failure to pay is punishable by a fee of up to $25,000 and for imprisonment up to one year.” Section 7201, for you really bad folks, says, "felony willful evasion is punishable by a fee of up to $250,000 and for imprisonment up to five years.” Understand that this is Mrs. Pelosi's bill. She wants the refusniks thrown in jail. That's who she is. The Senate version so far has language shielding Americans from civil and criminal penalties for choosing to opt out.

So what else will the House bill do? Let me tell you what it won't do. "It won't offer most Americans any appreciable decline in the cost of their health insurance nor clear improvement in the efficiency or quality of the health care they receive." Furthermore, the bill will result in "extra costs that will be borne by the Americans who will be required to buy insurance but won't qualify for federal assistance, along with Medicare beneficiaries who will be paying more and receiving less." These are not my opinions, they are the words of non other than former Bill Clinton Labor Secretary and Obama advisor Robert Reich.

Now let me tell you what Mr. Obama, Mrs. Pelosi and Mr. Reid healthcare reform will do. Again, I source Mr. Reich. He was speaking at the University of California Berkeley back in September of 2007. The presidential race was in full swing. Mr. Reich told his audience that no candidate could be truthful about what healthcare reform would actually entail, or he or she would never get elected. So he decided to make up a speech, as if he were a presidential candidate who didn't care about winning the election, but just wanted to tell the truth about healthcare reform.

"In other words, this is what the truth is and a candidate will never say, but what a candidate should say," Mr. Reich said. He began, "Look, we have the only health care system in the world that is designed to avoid sick people. And that's true and what I'm going to do is that I am going to try to reorganize it to be more amenable to treating sick people but that means you, particularly you young people, particularly you young healthy people...you're going to have to pay more."

It gets better. Mr. Reich continues, "And by the way we're going to have to, if you're very old, we're not going to give you all that technology and all those drugs for the last couple of years of your life to keep you maybe going for another couple of months. It's too expensive. So we're going to let you die." Can you say death panel?

And what about for the rest of us who are not that young or that old? Mr. Reich says, "Also I'm going to use the bargaining leverage of the federal government in terms of Medicare and Medicaid...to force drug companies and insurance companies and medical suppliers to reduce their costs. What that means, less innovation and that means less new products and less new drugs on the market which means you are probably not going to live much longer than your parents." (This view is backed up by Jeff Stier, associate director of the American Council on Science and Health and Henry Miller, a physician and Hoover Institute fellow who was an FDA official from 1979-1994, among others)

It looks like the only thing Mr. Reich left out of his mock speech on healthcare reform was that some of us would be eating a lot more bread and water behind bars as a result.