Any measure that stretches private insurers’ monopoly over health care and transfers millions of taxpayer dollars to private corporations is not real health-care reform. Real reform would bring competition into insurance markets, force insurers to cut unnecessary administrative expenses and spend health-care dollars caring for people. Real reform would importantly lower costs, improve the delivery of health care and give all Americans a meaningful choice of coverage. The senate bill accomplishes none of these. Real health-care reform is supposed to do away with discrimination based on preexisting conditions. But the legislation allows insurance companies to ask older Americans up to three times as much as younger Americans, pricing them out of coverage. The bill was due to give Americans alternatives about what kind of system they wanted to register in. Instead, it penalizes Americans if they do not sign up with an insurance company, which may take up to 30 % of your premium dollars and spend it on CEO salaries-in the range of $20 million a year and on return on equity for the company’s shareholders. Few Americans will see any benefit until 2014, by which premiums are likely to have doubled. In short, the Victorians in this bill are insurance companies; the American taxpayer is about to be fleeced with a bail out in a situation that dwarfs even what happened at AIG.