ObamaCare Updates

A disaster in the making ....

'If You Think Health Care is Expensive Now — Just Wait Until it’s Free.' [Veronique de Rugy]

Cato Institute's Chris Edwards has a new Tax and Budget Bulletin about how to pay for President Obama's $1.5 trillion health-care plan. As it turns out, in spite of many promises not to increase taxes on the lower and middle classes, the administration won't have a choice. However, there are many ways to skin a cat, as Edwards demonstrates. The president could tax employer-provided health insurance, eliminating HSAs and FSAs, limit the deductibility of medical expenses, increase taxes on alcohol and beverages, or hike the already too high corporate taxes. Either way, the cat won't like it.
Keep reading this post . .


It’s Getting Less Inevitable by the Day [James C. Capretta]

The administration and Democrats in Congress have been trying to cultivate the impression in the media that passage of an Obama-style, sweeping health-care reform bill is all but inevitable — the only questions are about details and when.

But Obamacare was never inevitable (see my post from April), and it is getting less so by the day.

The reason is simple: There is no coherent and credible plan to pay for it. Most observers expect the legislation will cost somewhere between $1.0 trillion and $1.5 trillion over ten years.

Keep reading this post . .


Obama Packs Green Bay with Health-Care Delusions [John R. Graham]

Speaking at a rally of the faithful in Green Bay, Wisc., President Obama proclaimed that his health reforms would bring the whole country up to the health-care standard of this high-quality, low-spending community. If it were 1959, instead of 2009, he’d have said his football policy would bring every NFL team up to the standard of the Packers under their flawless new coach, Vince Lombardi.

The Obama White House has succumbed to the fundamental fallacy of socialism: believing that the government can collect information, analyze it, and then command its citizens to act in accordance with the government’s conclusions. In this case, the information is the Dartmouth Atlas, a well-known body of research that documents variance in Medicare spending and outcomes across the country. While places like Green Bay demonstrate low spending and high quality, places like Miami or Los Angeles demonstrate the opposite.

Advocates of the practice of medicine by government dramatically oversimplify the implications of the Dartmouth research, claiming that the variance is caused by too much medical care delivered to patients who actually suffer from it. If the government just commanded all medical providers to deliver the same volume of care nationwide, we’d cut health spending by 30 percent.

Well, okay: If President Obama believes that he’s got enough charm to convince Miami’s seniors that Medicare is going to cut back their access to care by 30 percent (sorry, we’ve already done all the coronary artery bypass grafts allocated to this ZIP code for this year), then he’s got political guts — that’s for sure.

But the truth is more complex. In the journal Health Affairs, Dr. Richard Cooper analyzed data which included private health spending, as well as Medicare spending, and concluded that more spending did result in better outcomes.

Dr. Cooper’s findings indicate that it is the centrally controlled Medicare program that has trouble paying for quality, not the 1,800 private insurers that compete against it.
— John R. Graham is director of Health Care Studies at the Pacific Research Institute.


Go with the Flow [Mark Steyn]

This story from Le Journal de Montréal is en français, but you don't have to know the lingo of the Continent to figure out the meaning of le mot "incontinent":

Des patients souffrant d'un problème d'incontinence grave doivent attendre jusqu'à trois ans pour une opération qui dure à peine 30 minutes.

Which means: In the Province of Quebec, patients suffering from serious incontinence — ie, they have to aller aux toilettes jusqu'à 12 fois par nuit (that's 12 times a night) — have to wait three years for a half-hour operation. That's 3 years times 365 nights times 12 trips to the bathroom.
There are only two urologists in the province who perform the operation, in part because hospital budgets are so tight they decline to buy the necessary "neurostimulator."

The central point about socialized medicine is that restricting access is the only means of controlling costs. And, when comparisons of health "costs" between nations are made, the time you spend in the bathroom each night and the subsequent impact on your work performance the following day are not factored in.

Of course, if you get sick of the three-year wait, you can always drive a couple of hours south, with frequent rest stops, to Fletcher Allen Hospital in Vermont or Dartmouth-Hitchcock in New Hampshire, and write a check. For the moment. Once the U.S. system has been "reformed" so that its wait lists are up to Euro-Canadian standards, poor incontinent Quebeckers will have to drive to Costa Rica. And that's a lot more rest stops.


Have Americans Accepted the Idea of Big-Government Health Care? [Michael G. Franc]

Today’s Washington Post contains a story that assesses the political prospects for the most brazen attempt ever to insert the government into the day-to-day micro-management of our $2 trillion health care system.

"The great unknown of the health-care debate," Post reporter Shailagh Murray writes, "is whether the current political landscape will prove more hospitable to mandates, cost controls and tax increases — all measures now on the table that helped doom the Clinton plan."As part of her assessment, Murray dismissed Senate Republican opposition to the "big government" elements of the recently released Democratric proposal as nothing more than a throwback to a bygone era, a veritable "Back to the Future" political moment. She writes:

But Republicans are betting that the specter of "big government" can still unsettle voters. When Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) spoke on the chamber floor Thursday morning, his remarks sounded as if they had been pulled from an early-1990s focus group.

Advocates of the big government approach, she reports, believe things have changed enough since 1994 to allow the reform effort to succeed. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (Mont.) insists that a successful health-reform effort this time is "a given" and, indeed, "inevitable." Democratic pollster Geoff Garin believes the odds of a reform measure passing are greater because we’re in a moment of "greater realism."

Are Senate Republicans and their colleagues in the House stuck in some sort of time warp? Are Americans more open to a government takeover of our health system today than 16 years ago?
Well, let’s go to the videotape.
Keep reading this post . . .


Trouble in Paradise [Yuval Levin]

The Obama administration and congressional Democrats have been doing all they can to keep the medical provider groups on board with their health-care reform plans, and as long as those plans remained just vague promises they seemed to have some success. But now that they’re getting to particulars — like a huge new government role in health insurance aimed at driving private insurers out of the game — the coalition is beginning to fray. Yesterday the American Medical Association, the most significant of the groups the Democrats seek to keep on board, announced it would oppose any plan with a public insurance “option” component. “The introduction of a new public plan threatens to restrict patient choice by driving out private insurers, which currently provide coverage for nearly 70 percent of Americans,” the AMA said.

The idea of compelling doctors who take Medicare funds to participate in the new public plan is especially onerous, the organization argued, and it even took it upon itself to remind Congress of its fiscal responsibilities (someone has to), writing in a letter to the Senate Finance Committee that driving private insurers out of business would create a flood of refugees into the public plan, and “the corresponding surge in public plan participation would likely lead to an explosion of costs that would need to be absorbed by taxpayers.” Quite right.

The doctors are surely also worried about the broader effects of a greater government role in their profession, worries well described by Scott Gottlieb last month.

It is no coincidence that the AMA’s announcement came just a few days before President Obama addresses a large AMA gathering, on Monday. We’ll see how he handles their challenge, but it’s increasingly apparent that the path to Obamacare is not as clear as it looked earlier this spring. Other major players in this debate, and especially employer groups (concerned about the employer mandate in the drafts now beginning to leak out) and the health insurers (concerned about being strangled to death), are gearing up for a fight. All that combined with the facts that this plan would cost at least $1.5 trillion, create a huge and growing new entitlement that isn’t paid for in any evident way, lead more or less inescapably to serious health-care rationing in the future, and do very little else to control health-care costs should give Republicans something to talk about, shouldn’t it?


How Not to Stop Socialized Health Care [Ramesh Ponnuru]

Karl Rove's WSJ op-ed on health care reflects the thinking of a lot of Republicans. He concludes, "Defeating the public option should be a top priority for the GOP this year. Otherwise, our nation will be changed in damaging ways almost impossible to reverse." In my view, Rove is defining Republican goals too narrowly.

Congress and the president can expand federal control of the health-care system a great deal without a "public option" (that is, a new government program to provide health insurance to people who choose it). They could set mandatory minimum standards for health insurance, impose price controls, mandate that individuals or employers buy insurance, and so forth. If Republicans say that the public option is the chief defect of liberals' approach to health care, they may be leaving themselves with no rationale for opposing these steps if the Democrats drop it—which they might just do. (Or they might cosmetically weaken the public option in various ways. They could, for example, set up a "trigger" that brings the option into being only if certain conditions in the health market are met, and then design those conditions so that they will be met.)

The public option appears to be one of the biggest political vulnerabilities of the Democrats' emerging health-care plan, but it isn't the only one, and it shouldn't be targeted to the exclusion of the plan's other features—or of its general government-first orientation. Republicans ought to be making the case against individual mandates and employer mandates as well, both of which are disguised tax increases.

It isn't incumbent on Republicans to see that a health-care bill passes Congress. To warrant conservative support, a bill should have no public option—but also no mandates and no price controls. Which is to say: No government-directed health-care system.

What I Find Annoying and/or Disturbing Today ....

So much to choose from, so let's just put 3 items out there:

1. Joe Biden - don't mess w/ Joe !
2. Miranda Rights for Terrorists -- have I mentioned how horrible Eric Holder is lately ?
3. Obama's Arrogance towards Allies -- Ralph Peters strikes again !


http://www.nypost.com/seven/06102009/postopinion/opedcolumnists/bams_euro_freeze_173408.htm

An excerpt:

WHEN Europeans wish upon a star, they get an American president with a huge Third World chip on his shoulder.

Those "sophisticated" Europeans dismissed "cowboy" Bush as a rube beneath their contempt. If the continent's opinion-makers could've changed their voter registrations, they would've flown to Chicago to vote for Barack Obama last fall.

They got what they wanted. But it isn't what they expected.


Joe Biden -- Jay Leno would have a field day with this guy; what a terrible VP ...

The vice presidential gaffe machine was in high gear Tuesday. During a press conference call with reporters, Joe Biden was asked to explain how exactly the administration plans to create 600,000 new jobs this summer.

But according to The American Spectator, when reporters asked the VP to explain how the White House even came up with the 600,000 number, he asked for a pass, saying a question like that is "above his pay grade" and, "I'm sorry, I'm not an economist. My background is in foreign policy."

That is so comforting coming from the guy who President Obama tasked with implementing the stimulus plan.


Miranda Warnings for Terrorists — Thank Sen. McCain [Andy McCarthy]

Steve Hayes is getting lots of well deserved attention for his report at the Weekly Standard today about how the Obama/Holder Justice Department has quietly instructed the FBI to start giving Miranda warnings to captured alien combatant terrorists — the next logical move in the ongoing effort to move us away from a war approach and return us to the law-enforcement paradigm for dealing with international terrorism.

Obama will obviously be embarrassed by the revelation, especially since, as the Standard's John McCormack recounts, candidate Obama (and fledgling President Obama) scoffed at the claim by us knuckle-draggers that he wanted foreign terrorists to get Miranda protection upon capture. But once he recovers his footing, I guarantee the president will argue that he is merely bringing government agents operating overseas into compliance with the McCain Amendment (enacted as part of the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act).

I hate to say I told you so, but back when we were having this debate, thanks to Senator McCain's grandstanding on "torture," I warned that his amendment would lead to the legal claim that American agents — including the military — were now required to give Miranda warnings to captured terrorists outside the U.S. (See, e.g., here, here, here and here (under "The Domestic Agenda")). Live by demagoguery, die by demagoguery.

Auto Company Updates (on the trampling of the rule of law)

1. Zero Hedge: http://zerohedge.blogspot.com/2009/06/richard-mourdocks-take-on-scotus.html

http://zerohedge.blogspot.com/2009/06/supreme-court-stays-chrysler-deal.html

http://zerohedge.blogspot.com/2009/06/obama-claims-tarp-issue-is-out-of.html

2. Chrysler [Stephen Spruiell]
Anything that slows down the process is bad for the administration, because the Chrysler sale doesn't hold up well under scrutiny. Also, Ginsberg's decision raises all kinds of questions for Sotomayor. The Court will probably be asked to hear other TARP cases, and the administration will probably keep arguing that TARP is beyond the Court's reach. What does Sotomayor think about the legality of using TARP as an all-purpose executive-branch slush fund? Over at Heritage, Andrew Grossman has posted an analysis of the decision that includes this bit at the end:

The Constitution matters: Too often, the Supreme Court defers to the government on economic policy rather than enforce the Constitution’s limits on government powers. This is because only four Justices on the Court today adhere to the Constitution as it was originally written. The rest allow their personal preferences to influence their decisions, leading to an ever-larger and more powerful federal government. That’s why it is crucially important the President nominate judges who follow the law as it was written, not as they think it should be. Otherwise, there is no hope that the federal government will continue to respect the rights of its citizens and the limits of its own power.

3. George Will: http://www.nypost.com/seven/06082009/postopinion/opedcolumnists/gm__thats_govt_mandates_to_you_173073.htm

Obama's Cairo speech -- cont'd

This is what you get when the President is influenced by the likes of Rashid Khalili, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and William Ayers.....


Re: The Cairo Speech [Anne Bayefsky]

President Obama’s Cairo speech was nothing short of an earthquake — a distortion of history, an insult to the Jewish people, and an abandonment of very real human-rights victims in the Arab and Muslim worlds. It is not surprising that Arabs and Muslims in a position to speak were enthusiastic. It is more surprising that American commentators are praising the speech for its political craftiness, rather than decrying its treachery of historic proportions.

Obama equated the Holocaust to Palestinian “dislocation.” In his words: “The Jewish people were persecuted. . . . anti-Semitism . . . culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust. . . . Six million Jews were killed. . . . On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people — Muslims and Christians — have suffered in pursuit of a homeland.” This parallelism amounts to the fictitious Arab narrative that the deliberate mass murder of six million Jews for the crime of being Jewish is analogous to a Jewish-driven violation of Palestinian rights.

Speaking in an Arab country to Arabs and Muslims, Obama pointedly singled out European responsibility for the Holocaust — “anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust.” In other contexts, the European emphasis would be a curiosity. In Egypt, it was no accident. The Arab storyline has always been that Arabs have been forced to suffer the creation of Israel for a European crime.

In fact, Obama’s Egyptian hosts would have been only too familiar with Arab anti-Semitism during World War II (and beyond). After all, Obama was speaking in the country that schooled and later welcomed back Grand Mufti Haj Muhammed Amin al-Husseini as a national hero. This was the man who spent the war years in Berlin as Hitler’s guest facilitating the murder of Jews.

Obama thought he would prove his even-handedness towards Israel by boasting of Friday’s trip to a concentration camp and rejecting Holocaust denial. In this context, however, the move of doing Jews these supposed favors appears to be cynical political opportunism, especially having just set the Holocaust side-by-side with the “suffering” and “pain” of Palestinians “for more than 60 years.” After all, the president made no emotive references to the “intolerable” “suffering” of Israeli victims of Arab terror “for more than 60 years.” The word “terrorism” never left his lips. Far from bolstering the fight against terror and the anti-Semitism driving it, such maneuvers embolden more hate and violence against Israelis.

Instead, Obama sought Arab and Muslim approbation by drawing a moral equivalence between those who have rejected Israel from the outset (and still seek its outright destruction or a “right of return” intended to terminate a Jewish majority) and the Jews who have kept them at bay since May 14, 1948. In his words: “There has been a stalemate: two peoples with legitimate aspirations, each with a painful history. . . . It’s easy to point fingers — for Palestinians to point to the displacement brought about by Israel’s founding, and for Israelis to point to the constant hostility and attacks.” Calling the Israeli-Arab conflict a “stalemate” represents an abysmal failure to acknowledge historical reality. The modern state of Israel emerged after an internationally approved partition plan of November 1947 that would have created two states, one Jewish and one Arab; this plan was accepted by Jews and rejected by Arabs. One people has always been prepared to live in peace, and the other has chosen war in 1948 and 1956 and 1967 and 1973 and 1982, and renewed terrorism after its every loss.

Bereft of the most basic understanding of Judaism and Jewish history, Obama claimed that “the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied,” for “around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries.” A Jewish homeland in Israel is not rooted in tragedy or in centuries of persecution around the world. It is rooted in a wondrous, unbroken, and spiritual relationship to the land of Israel and to Jerusalem for thousands of years. Coupled with the president’s stress on “European responsibility” for the Holocaust, his words reinforced the lethal belief that Israel is the creature of transplanted, alien Jews.

Obama’s stunning offense to Israel and the Jewish people went farther. Israelis have come to occupy territory in response to Arab-initiated wars of intended annihilation, but Obama analogized Palestinian “daily humiliations . . . that come with occupation” to the “humiliation of segregation” of black slaves in America and the “moral authority” of “people from South Africa.” His Arab audience understood that the president of the United States had just given a nod to the single most potent defamation of the Jewish state today — the allegation that Israel is a racist, apartheid state.

After expressing his belief in a moral equivalence between the claims of Palestinians and the claims of the victims of slavery and apartheid, Obama juxtaposed his admission of Israel’s “right to exist” with his assertion that “the United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements.” Every word of this speech was carefully weighed. It was therefore no mishap that for the first time a U.S. president has denied the legitimacy of Israeli settlements, period. Such an assertion abrogates every agreement between Arabs and Israelis, which have always left the ultimate determination of which settlements will stay or go to a bilateral peace process and final status negotiations. Even the Roadmap reads: “Phase III: Permanent Status Agreement and End of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict . . . a final, permanent status resolution . . . on borders, Jerusalem, refugees, settlements.”

Furthermore, the idea that Jews are not permitted to live in any territory that might become part of a future Palestinian state means only one thing: apartheid Palestine. Twenty percent of Israel’s population,1.5 million people, are Arab (with more democratic rights than in any Arab state). But the notion of any Jewish presence in Palestinian territory is allegedly an abomination. Why should a future transfer of governmental authority mean “no Jews allowed”?

But judging by Obama’s speech, only one “dislocation” counts. After placing the Holocaust side-by-side with the Palestinian “pain of dislocation,” he ignored the dislocation of 800,000 Jewish refugees from all over the Arab Middle East in response to the creation of Israel.

Jewish refugees from Arab intolerance were not the only human-rights casualties the president chose to dismiss. Three different times Obama defended the right of Muslim women to cover up their bodies. Never once did he mention the right of Muslim women to refuse to cover up their bodies — a right denied on pain of arrest and death by many of the very communities he was addressing. In the name of “freedom of religion” he chose to “welcome efforts like Saudi Arabian King Abdullah’s interfaith dialogue.” The Saudi Arabian government criminalizes the public practice of any religion but Islam. This manufactured human-rights fantasy has done a tremendous disservice to the oppressed across the Arab and Muslim world.

President Obama’s meticulously planned and executed Egyptian speech marks the lowest point in the U.S. presidency’s understanding and appreciation of the Jewish state, its history, and its people’s future. Added to his administration’s evident infirmity on Iran, the speech of June 4, 2009, by the supposed leader of the free world will be remembered as a major decline in human history.

— Anne Bayefsky is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and at Touro College. She is also editor of www.EyeontheUN.org.

"You Scare Me" - an open letter to Obama

http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/youscareme.asp