Empty Promises on Healthcare Will Hurt Obama
by Byron York

Barack Obama is only halfway through his term, but it’s not too early to ask: What is the biggest whopper he has told as president? So far, the hands-down winner is, “No matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise to the American people. If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like your healthcare plan, you’ll be able to keep your healthcare plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what.”

Obama made that particular pledge in a speech to the American Medical Association in June 2009, but he said the same thing, with slight variations, dozens of times during the healthcare debate. And now, exactly eight months after he signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act into law, we’re seeing just how empty the president’s promise was.

The New York Times reports there is a “growing frenzy of mergers” in the healthcare field in which hospitals and other care providers, pressured by the new law’s provisions, are joining forces to save money. “Consumer advocates fear that the healthcare law could worsen some of the very problems it was meant to solve,” the paper reports, “by reducing competition, driving up costs and creating incentives for doctors and hospitals to stint on care, in order to retain their cost-saving bonuses.”

The Obama administration’s answer to the problem will undoubtedly be more regulation. But the wave of mergers is just one of many signs of trouble with the new law.

For example, we know that the government’s Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has found that the new law will increase healthcare costs, rather than reduce them, in the coming decade. We know that cuts in Medicare, with the money saved going to pay for expanding coverage to the poor, will jeopardize seniors’ access to care. We know the law will make it impossibly expensive for companies that currently offer bare-bones health coverage to low-income employees to keep doing so. We know several corporations are taking giant write-downs because the bill will increase the cost of providing prescription-drug coverage to retired employees. And perhaps most important, we know the law offers an enormous incentive for employers who currently provide coverage to workers to stop doing so, sending those workers to buy coverage in government-subsidized healthcare exchanges.

In sum, what the law means for millions of Americans is: No matter what the president said, if you like the coverage you have now, you can’t keep it.

And a lot of people do like their coverage. A new Gallup Poll found that when Americans are asked to assess the quality of their own health care, the results “are among the most positive Gallup has found over the past decade.” A total of 82 percent of respondents rate their health care as excellent or good, while just 16 percent rate it as fair or poor.”

The key question of healthcare reform has always been how to make things better for the 16 percent while not messing things up for the 82 percent. Obama decided to blow up the system for everyone.

In doing so, he has created not just well-founded anxiety in those who are skeptical of the new law but also unrealistic expectations in those who support it. “We just told millions of people that they can go to the exchanges in 2014 and buy insurance,” writes Aaron Carroll, an Indiana University School of Medicine professor who blogs on healthcare issues at a site called the Incidental Economist. “There won’t be any lifetime or annual limits. There won’t be denials for pre-existing conditions. There won’t be any surcharges for having such conditions. And it’s going to be ‘reasonably’ priced.” Carroll talked to lots of insurance executives, and concluded it’s just not going to happen. “I feel like many people think they will have choice of doctor, choice of hospital, and the ability to dictate care,” he writes. “I’m not seeing how insurance companies will be able to offer such products at prices people can afford.”

Is any of this a surprise? The fact is, the president knew or should have known that his healthcare scheme would have these effects. He paid a political price for his actions on Nov. 2. There might be more to pay on Nov. 6, 2012.

Dude, Where’s My Obamacare Waiver?
by Michelle Malkin

More than one million Americans have escaped the clutches of the Democrats’ destructive federal health care law. Lucky them. Their employers and labor representatives wisely applied for Obamacare waivers earlier this fall and got out while the getting was good. Now, it’s time for Congress to create a permanent escape hatch for the rest of us. Repeal is the ultimate waiver.

As you’ll recall, President Obama promised repeatedly that if Americans liked their health insurance plan, they could keep it. “Nobody is talking about taking that away from you,” the cajoler-in-chief assured. What he failed to communicate to low-wage and part-time workers across the country is that they could keep their plans — only if their companies begged hard enough for exemptions from Obamacare’s private insurance-killing regulations.

According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services website, at least 111 waivers have now been granted to companies, unions and other organizations of all sizes who offer affordable health insurance or prescription drug coverage with limited benefits. Obamacare architects sought to eliminate those low-cost plans under the guise of controlling insurer spending on executive salaries and marketing.

It’s all about control. If central planners can’t dictate what health benefits qualify as “good,” what plans qualify as “affordable” and how health care dollars are best spent, then nobody can. The ultimate goal, of course: precipitating a massive shift from private to government insurance.

McDonald’s, Olive Garden, Red Lobster and Jack in the Box are among the large, headline-garnering employers who received the temporary waivers. But perhaps the most politically noteworthy beneficiaries of the HHS waiver program: Big Labor.

The Service Employees Benefit Fund, which insures a total of 12,000 SEIU health care workers in upstate New York, secured its Obamacare exemption in October. The Local 25 SEIU Welfare Fund in Chicago also nabbed a waiver for 31,000 of its enrollees. SEIU, of course, was one of Obamacare’s loudest and biggest spending proponents. The waivers come on top of the massive sweetheart deal that SEIU and other unions cut with the Obama administration to exempt them from the health care mandate’s onerous “Cadillac tax” on high-cost health care plans until 2018. _

Other unions who won protection from Obamacare:

– United Food and Commercial Workers Allied Trade Health and Welfare Trust Fund

– International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Union No. 915

– Asbestos Workers Local 53 Welfare Fund

– Employees Security Fund

– Plumbers and Pipefitters Local 123 Welfare Fund

– United Food and Commercial Workers Local 227

– United Food and Commercial Workers Local 455 (Maximus)

– United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1262

– Musicians Health Fund Local 802

– Hospitality Benefit Fund Local 17

– Transport Workers Union

– United Federation of Teachers Welfare Fund

– International Union of Painters and Allied Trades (AFL-CIO)

– Plus two organizations that appear to be chapters of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA)

Several of these labor organizations did not respond to requests for comment about their waivers. But Jay Blumenthal, financial vice president of the Local 802 Musicians Health Fund in New York, did explain to me: “We got grandfathered in” (his description for getting a pass) because “things were moving so fast” and “we need time now to prepare for the law.” In other words: Policy cramdowns first, political fixes later. A supporter of Obamacare, Blumenthal told me he “sees no irony, no,” in unions supporting the very health care “reform” from which they are now seeking relief.

Chris Rodriguez, director of human resources at Fowler Packing Company in California’s San Joaquin Valley, sees things a little differently. Fowler pursued an HHS waiver because their low-wage agricultural workers would have lost the basic coverage his company has voluntarily offered for years. “We take care of our employees, and we warned (health care officials that) if they imposed this, large numbers of workers would lose access to affordable coverage,” he told me. Rodriguez said he’s grateful the firm won a waiver, but he did not lose sight of the fact that the very policies passed to increase health insurance access are having the opposite effect: “That’s our government at work.”

Indeed, some prominent government officials who lobbied hardest for Obamacare are now also joining waiver-mania — including liberal Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden, who has been pushing for an individual mandate exemption for his state of Oregon, and Democratic Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska, who is pushing to waive Obamacare’s burdensome 1099 reporting requirements of small businesses.

Fearful of retribution by HHS Secretary and chief inquisitor Kathleen Sebelius, who has threatened companies speaking out about Obamacare’s perverse consequences, many business owners who obtained waivers refused to talk to me on the record. One said tersely: “We did what we had to do to survive.”

A new House GOP majority now has the chance to protect the rest of America from this regulatory monstrosity. We want out.

Responding to Obamacare: Restore, Defeat, Defund, Repeal
by Dick Morris and Eileen McGann

Let’s begin our reaction to the passage of Obamacare by remembering Winston Churchill’s famous formulation with which he introduced his war memoirs:

In defeat: defiance.

In war: resolution.

In victory: magnanimity.

In peace: goodwill.

Now is the time for defiance! Here’s what we must do:

1) Restore the Medicare cuts mandated in this bill. Block the reduction of physicians’ fees by 21 percent scheduled to take effect this fall. Override the cuts in Medicare that require annual approval by Congress. Challenge the Democrats over each and every cut. Try to peel away enough votes to stop the cuts from driving doctors and hospitals to adopt the course already taken by the Mayo Clinic in refusing to take Medicare patients.

2. Defeat the Democrats in the 2010 election! Start with the traitors who voted no in November and then switched to a shameful yes when it counted in March. Then go on to win the open seats in the House and Senate. And then fight to replace as many Democrats as possible. Remember: Any Democrat who voted no would have voted yes if they had needed his or her vote. The only way to repeal Obamacare is to vote Republican.

3. Defund. Once we get the majority in both chambers, defund appropriations for the Obamacare program. The bill passed by the Congress and signed by the president is simply an authorization measure. Funds must be appropriated for it each year by Congress. Through zero funding these changes, we can cripple them before they take full effect.

4. Repeal. And, once we defeat Barack Obama, we need to proceed to repeal this disastrous plan before it can ruin our health care system. Then, we must replace it with a Republican alternative that relies on the marketplace, tax incentives and individual responsibility to provide health care to all Americans.

Above all, we must finally learn the fundamental lesson this political process we have been through has to teach: that there is no such thing as a conservative or moderate Democrat. Blue dogs don’t exist in real life. Only yellow dogs.

The days when there were Democrats who refused to follow their radical left-wing party line are over. There are no longer “state” Democrats who vote conservative as opposed to “national” Democrats who vote with the left. They are an extinct species. Some senators and congressmen capitalize on our memories of those days and pretend to be moderates. But they are just faking it.

Nancy Pelosi knew — as Harry Reid knew in the Senate — that she had the potential support of every single Democrat in her chamber if only the price was right. The sole difference between moderate and liberal Democrats is their asking price. Moderates require slightly higher bribes to assure their votes.

There are only two kinds of congressmen or senators: Democrats and Republicans. We have had a national education, and it’s time to learn from it. In days gone by, intelligent people liked to say that they voted for the person, not the party. Now those who say this are fooling themselves. There is only party! The most conservative Democrat is way to the left of the most liberal Republican.

The Democratic victory on Obamacare will prove the most expensive in the party’s history. It will lead to the eradication of their majority, the defeat of more than 50 of their congressmen, the switch of Senate control and Republican domination for decades. And, in the end, it will have done nothing to improve health care. But, fortunately, we can win the 2010 election to stop it from doing much damage.

Dems’ Health Strategy Doesn’t Add Up to a Win
by Michael Barone

“More talk, no deal” was The Wall Street Journal’s headline on Thursday’s Blair House health care summit. “After summit flop, Democrats prepare to go it alone on Obamacare,” proclaimed the headline here at The Washington Examiner. These were appropriate verdicts if you viewed the summit as an attempt to reach bipartisan agreement or even a limited consensus.

But that of course was not why Barack Obama convened this unique colloquy. He did so as part of an attempt to pass some Democratic health care bill, somehow, through both houses of Congress — and to discredit the Republicans who opposed the bills passed by the House in November and the Senate in December.

In that he seems to have failed. The Atlantic’s Clive Crook, who supports the Democratic bills, concluded that “the Republicans did not come across as the party of no. They looked well-informed, pragmatic and engaged in the discussion. It was the Democrats who leaned more heavily on talking points, and seemed evasive and unspecific.”

Kevin Drum, blogging for the left-wing Mother Jones, agreed. “My take is that the summit was basically a draw, but with a slight edge to the Republicans. They didn’t have to win, after all. They just had to seem non-insane, and for the most part they did. What’s more, Obama missed a chance to provide a punchy 60-second sales pitch for the Democratic plan.”

Obama and the Democrats face problems with both public opinion — their bills are hugely unpopular — and with legislative procedure. The problem with public opinion has been undeniable since Republican Sen. Scott Brown’s victory five weeks ago in Massachusetts. The problem with legislative procedure is more complex.

Democrats could theoretically solve that problem by having the House pass the Senate bill in toto, ready for Obama’s signature. But Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has proved herself a fine vote-counter, doesn’t have the votes. Last month, she said “unease would be the gentlest word” to describe House Democrats’ resistance. They understandably don’t want to cast votes for the Senate’s Cornhusker Kickback and Louisiana Purchase.

In November, Pelosi had 220 votes for the House bill. The one Republican is now a no, one Democrat has died, one resigned last month, and another turned in his resignation Friday. That leaves her with 216, one less than the 217 she needs.

There is another problem. The Senate bill lacks the amendment sponsored by House Democrat Bart Stupak banning abortion coverage, and Stupak says that he and about 10 other Democrats will accordingly vote no. That leaves Pelosi around 205. She may have commitments from former no voters to switch to yes (especially from three who’ve announced they’re retiring), but she doesn’t have more than 10 other votes in her pocket — or she wouldn’t have accepted the Stupak amendment.

So the House wants the Senate to go first and pass changes to its bill through the reconciliation process that requires 51 rather than 60 votes. But Senate Budget Chairman Kent Conrad says that you can’t use reconciliation on a bill that hasn’t already become law. And reconciliation is probably not available on abortion issues.

All of which reminds me of Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens’ attempt to allow oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reservation in 2005. Stevens got it in the reconciliation process in the Senate, where it had 51 but not 60 votes. But House Republicans couldn’t get it into reconciliation, even though a majority of House members were for it. The Senate could pass it by reconciliation but not regular order; the House could pass it by regular order but not reconciliation. Result: It never passed.

There are two differences here. ANWR drilling would have little effect on most Americans. The health care bill would affect almost everybody — by raising taxes, cutting Medicare spending, abolishing current insurance — as Republicans pointed out in Blair House.

The second difference is that ANWR drilling was reasonably popular with the public, and there were majorities in both houses for it. Neither is true of the Democrats’ health care bills today.

Last month, we were told that Obama would switch his focus from health care to jobs. But Democrats have spent February and seem about to spend March focusing on health care. It’s hard to see how they can navigate the legislative process successfully — and even harder to see how they turn around public opinion. Summit flop indeed.

Oba-Kabuki: A Box-Office Bomb
by Michelle Malkin

The Oba-Kabuki health care show at Blair House kicked off with a big lie on Thursday morning — and it all went downhill from there. The taxpayer-funded infomercial backfired by exposing the president’s thin skin, the Democrats’ naked disingenuousness and the ruling majority’s allergies to political and policy realities.

Responding to Sen. Lamar Alexander’s opening call for Democrats to renounce parliamentary tactics designed to limit debate, circumvent filibusters and lower the threshold for passage of health care reform to a simple 51-vote majority, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid sputtered indignantly: “No one’s talking about reconciliation!” Everybody and their mother has been invoking the “R” word on Capitol Hill, starting with Reid.

In a letter on Feb. 16, four Democratic senators pushed Reid to adopt the procedure, normally reserved for budget matters. A few days later, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs discussed the option. Then Reid himself talked up reconciliation on a Nevada public affairs show as an option to ram the government health care takeover through in the next 60 days.

According to The Hill, Reid said that “congressional Democrats would likely opt for a procedural tactic in the Senate allowing the upper chamber to make final changes to its health care bill with only a simple majority of senators, instead of the 60 it takes to normally end a filibuster.” A few days after that, Reid snapped that Republicans “should stop crying” about the abrogation of Senate minority rights, since the GOP had used the reconciliation process in the past.

So, the cleanest, most ethical holier-than-thou Congress ever is now defending the unprecedented adoption of ram-down rules for a radical, multitrillion-dollar program to usurp one-seventh of the economy on the grounds of “two wrongs make it right”? Hope and change, baby.

For his part, President Obama responded with one part pique and two parts diffidence. After the summit lunch break, Republicans pushed the reconciliation issue again in the face of the Democrats’ refusal to disavow the short-circuiting of the deliberative process. “The American people,” an annoyed Obama asserted, “are not all that interested in procedures inside the Senate.” Oh, really? A new USA Today/Gallup poll reports that 52 percent of Americans oppose using the procedural maneuver to pass the health care bill in the Senate.

The survey also showed that Americans oppose Demcare-style health care “reform” by 49 percent to 42 percent — with those “strongly” opposed outnumbering those “strongly” in favor by 23 percent to 11 percent. Obama’s best and brightest team of Chicago strategists, new-media gurus and communications specialists still hasn’t figured it out: Voters are as fed up with the corrupt process in Washington as they are with the White House’s overreaching policies. It’s both, stupid.

When he wasn’t cutting off Republicans who stuck to budget specifics and cited legislative page numbers and language instead of treacly, sob-story anecdotes involving dentures and gallstones, Obama was filibustering the talk-a-thon away by invoking his daughters, rambling on about auto insurance and sniping at former GOP presidential rival John McCain. “We’re not campaigning anymore,” lectured the perpetual campaigner-in-chief.

After ostentatiously disputing the GOP’s claims that health care premiums would rise under his plan, Obama walked it back. Confronted with more GOP pushback on the failure of Demcare to control costs, Obama told GOP Rep. Paul Ryan that he’d rather not “get bogged down in numbers.” Not numbers that he couldn’t cook on the spot without staff consultation, anyway.

Obama and the Democrats labored mightily to create the illusion of almost-there bipartisanship by repeatedly telling disagreeing Republicans that “we don’t disagree” and “there’s not a lot of difference” between us. But the dogs weren’t riding the ponies in this show.

This was a set-up from the start. The “we’re so close” mantra is the rhetorical wedge the White House will use to blame Republicans for fatal obstructionism, while whitewashing festering opposition from both pro-life Democrats who oppose the government funding of abortion services still in the plan and left-wing progressives in the House who are clinging to a full, unadulterated public option.

While Republicans came off well, the six-hour blowhard-fest was a monumental waste of time. Obamacare Theater tied up GOP energy and resources as the White House readies its “Plan B” (expanding government health care coverage, just at a slower pace) and Democratic leaders prep their reconciliation ram-down for early next week. This Washington box-office bomb is a prelude to much bigger legislative horrors still to come. Don’t you love farce?

ObamaCare: Freedom on Life Support
by Larry Elder

Ignore, for the moment, the ludicrous claim that giving 30 million Americans health insurance actually lowers the cost of health care. What happened to freedom, to the opposition to an intrusive federal government?

Ask a liberal what he most dislikes about the “right”? “I resent the attempt to tell me how to live my life,” he’ll say. He’ll mention abortion and say that the decision belongs to a woman and her doctor. He’ll mention same-sex marriage and say that government should not prevent two people of the same sex from marrying, especially if one objects based upon religious grounds. He’ll argue that a Supreme Court “stacked” with right-wingers threatens his liberty.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia gives liberals hot flashes. He is religious. He calls the Constitution a “contract,” not a “living, breathing” document on which one can discover or project nonexistent rights. He is a “strict constructionist,” or an “originalist,” who believes that the literal words in the Constitution have meaning. He thinks his job is to figure out what the original Framers meant, not what he would like them to have meant.

Ask a liberal how Scalia and those who share his “conservative” philosophy think the Supreme Court should decide issues like abortion, same-sex marriage and doctor-assisted suicide? He’ll say, “Scalia would impose his religiously based worldview on society — anti-same-sex marriage and anti-abortion — because the federal government should always preserve life.”

No, Scalia would not. In fact, Scalia has publicly said these issues are none of the Court’s business. He’s said that however he feels personally about these contentious matters, the Constitution gives the Court neither the authority nor the expertise to decide them — and such matters are ideally left to the states.

This brings us to ObamaCare.

What words in the U.S. Constitution allow the federal government to compel every American to purchase health insurance? Where does the Constitution allow the federal government to take money from some Americans and give it to others so that they may purchase health insurance?

Recall the anger at former President George W. Bush, who, to fight the war on terror, “trashed” and “shredded” the Constitution. The same people who railed against the Patriot Act, the terror surveillance program and “illegal” torture happily unleash the power of the federal government to redistribute wealth for ObamaCare, a socially desirable objective. Never mind the absence of authority in the Constitution.

The left tells us that “health care is a right, not a privilege.” Surely the Constitution says so. No, it does not. Article I, Section 8 details the limited power, duties and responsibilities of the federal government. Extracting money from your paycheck and giving it back to you when you retire — Social Security? Not there. Taxing workers to pay for the health care of seniors — Medicare? Not there. Mandating that employers pay workers a minimum wage? Not there.

This is not hypothetical. During the Great Depression, the Supreme Court struck down much of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal on constitutional grounds. No, said the Court, the federal government cannot use the Constitution’s commerce clause to regulate virtually all economic activity. No, said the Court, the federal government cannot use the welfare clause to redistribute wealth, whether or not it accomplishes a socially or economically desirable objective.

The Court asserted that the Constitution meant what it said and said what it meant. This infuriated FDR. He threatened to expand the number of Court justices, adding jurists who saw the Constitution the way he did until he got the kind of decisions he wanted. Intimidated, the Court blinked. Actions by the federal government that the Court once had deemed illegal suddenly became permissible.

A liberal once asked me: “What should society do about the poor? Is your attitude ‘just (expletive) them’?” I said: “Allow me to rephrase your question. Because of someone’s plight, is he entitled to money from you?” “No,” he said, “but it’s the right thing to do.” Yes, a moral, compassionate society cares for those who cannot care for themselves. This is, however, an entirely different matter from using the power of government to take from someone who has, to give to someone who doesn’t. The Constitution does not provide that authority. Nor has it been amended to do so.

What about the poor? Through economic freedom and competition, we make goods and services cheaper, better and more accessible. Health care is less affordable because of well-intentioned rules and regulations. When government officials go beyond passing laws to protect us against force or fraud, they raise costs and hurt the poor.

Finally, what of charity? Americans are the most generous people on earth. The religious and those who believe in limited government are the most generous of all. By design, the federal government plays a limited role. The rest is up to us. Our country was founded in opposition to tyranny by government.

Today we submit to it.

Less Health Care for More Money
by Ann Coulter

The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof recently wrote a column about John Brodniak of Oregon, who developed a cavernous hemangioma, causing him great pain as blood leaks into his brain.

According to Kristof, Brodniak can’t get medical help because we don’t have universal health care. Senators who vote against ObamaCare, Kristof said, are morally equivalent to someone who would walk past a man “writhing in pain on the sidewalk.”

In another article in the Times, William Yardley wrote about Melvin Tsosies — also of Oregon — who ended up with $200,000 in medical bills after having a heart attack.

As of March 2008, Yardley reported, Tsosies was waiting to find out if he would win the Oregon lottery for health insurance. But with 600,000 uninsured state residents and a “universal” health care program with only enough money to pay for about 24,000 of them, Tsosies is more likely to win a Powerball lottery.

How can this be happening? Oregon already has “universal health care”! (Probably just a coincidence, but isn’t Oregon also the only state with physician-assisted suicide?)

Once again forgetting about the existence of the Internet, the Times neglects to mention its own erstwhile enthusiasm for Oregon’s universal health care plan, introduced back in 1990.

Back then, the Times published an editorial titled “Oregon’s Brave Medical Experiment,” hailing this technocratic monstrosity as an example of “hardheaded compassion” designed to make “health coverage available to many more families.”

Ron Wyden — then a congressman from Oregon, now a U.S. senator at the forefront of pushing “universal health care” onto the nation — said: “This is a strong dramatic step toward universal access of health care.” He predicted, “[T]his is going to be copied everywhere.”

No wonder Wyden is such an ardent proponent of national health care — it will force states that didn’t adopt these idiotic universal health care schemes to bail out the ones that did.

Liberals cite medical horror stories from the very states they once cheered for enacting universal health care in order to argue for a national health care plan that will wreck the entire nation’s medical care the same way liberal states already wrecked their own medical care.

Only Democrats could propose fixing one Bernie Madoff-style scam with an even bigger Bernie Madoff-style scam.

Maybe when national universal health care fails, we’ll be able to go international. Then interplanetary — then interstellar! Why should I pay for my gall bladder surgery when some Venusian could?

Eighty-five percent of Americans are happy with their health care, but Democrats have a plan to make it worse for more money. As a bonus, national health care will add trillions of dollars to the national debt, and your insurance rates will skyrocket.

Democrats are being utterly disingenuous to say that you won’t have to leave your current plan under national health care. Maybe, but it won’t be your choice: Your employer will be making that decision for you.

Recall that one of the big selling points of national health care is that it is supposed to reduce costs for American businesses. The only way national health care will make American companies “more competitive” is if they dump their employees into the public health care system.

It’s so weird! We expected X number of people to show up for health care and instead 75X showed up! Yeah, just like every other government program in the history of the world.

Ten years from now, we’ll be talking about cost overruns of $6 trillion — but by then, national health care will be an untouchable “third rail” of politics, just as Medicare is now. (Ironically, injuries sustained from actually touching the third rail won’t be covered under ObamaCare.)

As with Medicare, voters will be terrified to go back to even the wisp of a free market system we have now, afraid that they’ll never be able to get health insurance without the government providing it. Having been dragged unwillingly into the government plan, how will a 58-year-old be able to leave the public system and get insurance on the free market?

Speaking of which, how many of you are planning to retire on your Social Security benefits? Just you there, with the shopping cart full of cans?

The only solution will be for the government to keep running up gigantic deficits and raising taxes on “the rich,” which, in turn, will stifle job creation and economic growth in a phenomenon known to economists as “the Carter years.”

In addition to forcing Americans into dealing with surly government workers in order to obtain medical care, sooner or later, there’s no free lunch. (And if government X-rays are anything like the photos the DMV takes for your license, count me out. I don’t want my lungs looking like they had a bad hair day.)

Even if national health care puts the screws to doctors and pharmaceutical companies by reimbursing them below cost — so all future doctors will soon resemble DMV employees and no new drugs will ever be invented — the government is still going to have to cut services and pay for the system with massive tax hikes.

Which is exactly what happened with Oregon’s “Brave Medical Experiment.”

The Depths of Demcare Demagoguery
by Michelle Malkin

How low can they go? The desperate Democratic peddlers of a government health care takeover have proclaimed an insurance “holocaust in America” (Fla. Democratic Rep. Alan Grayson), lambasted conservative health care town hall protesters as “political terrorists” (Indiana Democratic Rep. Baron Hill), sent SEIU thugs to demonstrate outside Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman’s private residence, and derided senior citizens questioning President Obama’s fuzzy math savings claims (California Democratic Rep. Pete Stark: “I wouldn’t dignify you by peeing on your leg. It wouldn’t be worth wasting the urine.”) Now, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is leading them deeper into demagogic mire.

This week, Reid pummeled opponents with the worn-out race card. Following in the mucky footsteps of former President Jimmy Carter (who blamed GOP Rep. Joe Wilson’s objections to Obama’s policy deceptions on a “racism inclination”) and Jesse Jackson (“You can’t vote against health care and call yourself a black man”), Reid likened Republicans who object to socialized medicine to slave masters, enemies of women’s suffrage and Bull Connor.

Reid’s rhetorical aim was worse than the unhinged Minnesota protester who threw tomatoes at Sarah Palin during a book signing and hit a police officer instead. Splat.

Mustering up as much indignation as his taut face could exhibit, Reid lectured those standing in the way of Demcare: “When this country belatedly recognized the wrongs of slavery, there were those who dug in their heels and said, ‘Slow down. It’s too early. Things aren’t bad enough.’

“When women spoke up for the right to speak up, they wanted to vote, some insisted, ‘Slow down. There will be a better day to do that. Today isn’t quite right.’

“When this body was on the verge of guaranteeing equal civil rights to everyone regardless of the color of their skin, some senators resorted to the same filibuster threats that we hear today.”

It was the GOP that fought slavery and the Democratic Party that battled to preserve it. It was then-Democrat Strom Thurmond who led the civil rights filibuster that Reid tried to lay on Republicans. And it’s the Democratic Party, not the GOP, that boasts ex-Klansman Sen. Robert Byrd among its senior leaders. But don’t confuse Reid with history while he’s chasing Republicans around with his “RAAAACISM!” stamp.

The more the American public learns about the choice-limiting, debt-exploding, bureaucracy-multiplying health care takeover, the more opposition increases. And the more unhinged the Democratic majority and its supporters get.

There is now a $200,000 “bounty” on the head of U.S Chamber of Commerce CEO Tom Donohue. Left-wing activist website “Velvet Revolution” published a want ad this week with Donohue’s picture on it, soliciting information leading to “the arrest and conviction” of the business leader for “opposing progressive initiatives.” The witch-hunt is targeting Donohue for his outspoken criticism of the costs and impact of the Dems’ health care legislation on small businesses across the country.

Such reckless propaganda accusing opponents of “criminality” isn’t limited to nutroots publications. In the august pages of The New York Times last week, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Nicholas Kristof titled his universal care manifesto, “Are We Going To Let John Die?” Kristof elevated unemployed Oregon sawmill worker John Brodniak, 23, as the Demcare poster child. Reportedly diagnosed as having a cavernous hemangioma, a neurological condition, Kristof bemoaned: “Without insurance, John has been unable to get surgery or even help managing the pain.”

An emergency room asked Brodniak not to return without insurance, Kristof claims (a practice that is prohibited by federal law). No doctor would treat him, Kristof reported (get your grain of salt ready). Isn’t it “monstrous,” Kristof concludes (hanky alert), “for politicians to avert their eyes, make excuses and deny coverage to innumerable Americans just like John?”

Ready for the punch line? Brodniak not only has coverage through Oregon’s Medicaid program, but has also been a patient at the prestigious Oregon Health and Science University in Portland (a safety-net institution that accepts all Medicaid patients) for the past three weeks — a fact Kristof either deliberately ignored and suppressed from readers or didn’t bother to find out before publishing his screed.

In other words, Brodniak was already being treated and cared for by a top-notch neurologist under our existing health care system when Kristof came along to scream at Congress for letting him die.

Kristof’s tale follows on the heels of at least two dubious horror stories disseminated by President Obama. In September, Obama told of Illinois cancer patient Otto Raddatz, who supposedly died after he was dropped from his insurance plan when his insurer discovered an unreported gallstone the patient hadn’t known about. The truth? He got the treatment he needed in 2005 and died just this year.

In another case, Obama claimed, a woman with breast cancer lost her insurance because “she forgot to declare a case of acne.” In fact, she failed to disclose a previous heart condition and did not list her weight accurately, but her insurance was restored anyway after intense public lobbying.

But why bother with troublesome facts? In the insatiable pursuit of government control, truth and rationality are the first casualties.

Spin Doctors for Obamacare
by Michelle Malkin

Lights, camera, agitprop! The curtains opened on yet another artfully staged performance of Obamacare Theater this week. One hundred and fifty doctors took their places on the plush lawn outside the West Wing — many acting like “Twilight” groupies with cameras instead of credible medical professionals. The president approved the scenery: “I am thrilled to have all of you here today, and you look very spiffy in your coats.”

White House wardrobe assistants guaranteed the “spiffy.” As the New York Post’s Charles Hurt reported, the physicians “were told to bring their white lab coats to make sure that TV cameras captured the image.” President Obama’s aides hastily handed out costumes to those who came in suits or dresses before the doc-and-pony show began.

But while Halloween came early to the Potomac, these partisan single-payer activists in White House-supplied clothing aren’t fooling anyone.

Obama’s spin doctors belong to a group called Doctors for America (DFA), which reportedly supplied the white lab coats. The White House event was organized in conjunction with DFA and Organizing for America, Obama’s campaign outfit.

OFA and DFA are behind a massive new Obamacare ad campaign, letter-writing campaign and doctor-recruitment campaign. The supposedly “grassroots” nonprofit DFA is a spin-off of Doctors for Obama, a 2008 campaign arm that aggressively pushed the Democrats’ government health care takeover. DFA claims to have thousands of members with a “variety of backgrounds.” But there’s little diversity in their views on socialized medicine (98 percent want a taxpayer-funded public insurance option) — or in their political contributions.

DFA president and co-founder Dr. Vivek Murthy, an internal medicine physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an instructor at Harvard Medical School, served as a member of Obama’s Health Policy Advisory Committee and the New England Steering Committee during the 2008 presidential campaign.

DFA vice president Dr. Alice Chen of Los Angeles is an Obama donor and avowed supporter of Organizing for America, Obama’s campaign shop run by the Democratic National Committee. On Monday, she posted on the OFA website with an appeal to Democratic activists for letters to the editor in support of Obama’s “health care reform.”

DFA “senior adviser” Jacob Hacker is an Obamacare architect who laughed at criticism of the plan being a Trojan horse for single-payer coverage. “It’s not a Trojan horse, right?” he retorted at a far-left Tides Foundation conference on health care. “It’s just right there! I’m telling you. We’re going to get there.”

And here’s a brief political donation history of other top DFA docs compiled by Brian Faughnan at theconservatives.com:

Dr. Hershey Garner (who stood on stage with Obama at the White House event): more than $10,000 in donations to Democratic candidates since 2001.

Dr. Winfred Parnell: More than $5,700 in donations to Democrats since 2001.

Dr. Michael Newman: $4,550 in donations to Democrats since 2001.

Dr. Boyd Shook: $3,500 in donations to Democrats since 2002.

Dr. Jan Sarnecki: $3,400 in donations to Democrats since 2004.

Dr. Amanda McKinney (who also flanked Obama at the White House event): $2,750 in donations to Democratic candidates since 2001.

Dr. Tracy Nelson: $1,500 in donations to Obama.

Dr. Stanton McKenna: $1,000 in donations to Democrats since 2001.

Dr. Jason Schneider: $600 in donations to Democrats since 2001.

Dr. Biron Baker: $500 donated to Obama last year.

Dr. Nick Perencevich: $500 in donations to Democrats since 2008.

Dr. Elaine Bradshaw: $500 in donations to Obama last year.

Who unveiled Doctors for America earlier this spring? No, not ordinary citizens outside the Beltway. The decidedly un-grassroots sponsors of the Doctors for America launch were Democratic Sen. Max Baucus, chair of the Senate Finance Committee, and the left-wing Center for American Progress, which is run by liberal operative John Podesta and underwritten by far-left billionaire George Soros.

CAP is a lead organization in the Health Care for America Now coalition, the so-called “grassroots” lobbying group for Obama’s health care takeover legislation run out of 1825 K Street in Washington, D.C., with a $40 million budget. CAP is also the parent group of Think Progress, the far-left website leading the smear campaign against fiscally conservative activists who protested at congressional town halls this summer. And several CAP alumni are now leading the Obamacare push at the Department of Health and Human Services, including special HHS assistant Michael Halle and HHS Director Jeanne Lambrew, a former senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who worked on health policy in the Clinton administration.

CAP/HCAN’s most recent initiative? Bussing protesters to the private homes of health care executives last week to bully them over the public option — even as many health care executives line the pockets of Obama administration officials and allies lobbying on their behalf.

It’s all in keeping with the elaborate Kabuki productions that have marked Team Obama’s efforts to manufacture support for government-run health care. They’ve been doctoring it up from Day One.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pELOy2fAR_Y

Whose Medical Decisions? Part IV
by Thomas Sowell

The serious, and sometimes chilling, provisions of the medical care legislation that President Obama has been trying to rush through Congress are important enough for all of us to stop and think, even though his political strategy from the outset has been to prevent us from having time to stop and think about it.

What we also should stop to think about is the mindset behind this legislation, which is very consistent with the mindset behind other policies of this administration, whether the particular issue is bailing out General Motors, telling banks who to lend to or appointing “czars” to tell all sorts of people in many walks of life what they can and cannot do.

The idea that government officials can play God from Washington is not a new idea, but it is an idea that is being pushed with new audacity.

What they are trying to do is to create an America very unlike the America that has existed for centuries– the America that people have been attracted to by the millions from every part of the world, the America that many generations of Americans have fought and died for.

This is the America for which Michelle Obama expressed her resentment before it became politically expedient to keep quiet.

It is the America that Reverend Jeremiah Wright denounced in his sermons during the 20 years when Barack Obama was a parishioner, before political expediency required Obama to withdraw and distance himself.

The thing most associated with America– freedom– is precisely what must be destroyed if this is to be turned into a fundamentally different country to suit Obama’s vision of the country and of himself. But do not expect a savvy politician like Barack Obama to express what he is doing in terms of limiting our freedom.

He may not even think of it in those terms. He may think of it in terms of promoting “social justice” or making better decisions than ordinary people are capable of making for themselves, whether about medical care or housing or many other things. Throughout history, egalitarians have been among the most arrogant people.

Obama has surrounded himself with people who also think it is their job to make other people’s decisions for them. Not just Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, his health care advisor who complains of Americans’ “over-utilization” of medical care, but also Professor Cass Sunstein, who has written a whole book on how third parties should use government power to “nudge” people into making better decisions in general.

Then there are a whole array of Obama administration officials who take it as their job to pick winners and losers in the economy and tell companies how much they can and cannot pay their executives.

Just as magicians know that the secret of some of their tricks is to distract the audience, so politicians know that the secret of many political tricks is to distract the public with scapegoats.

No one is more of a political magician than Barack Obama. At the beginning of 2008, no one expected a shrewd and experienced politician like Hillary Clinton to be beaten for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States by someone completely new to the national political scene. But Obama worked his political magic, with the help of the media, which he still has.

Barack Obama’s escapes from his own past words, deeds and associations have been escapes worthy of Houdini.

Like other magicians, Obama has chosen his distractions well. The insurance industry is currently his favorite distraction as scapegoats, after he has tried to demonize doctors without much success.

Saints are no more common in the insurance industry than in politics or even among paragons of virtue like economists. So there will always be horror stories, even if these are less numerous or less horrible than what is likely to happen if Obamacare gets passed into law.

Obama even gets away with saying things like having a system to “keep insurance companies honest”– and many people may not see the painful irony in politicians trying to keep other people honest. Certainly most of the media are unlikely to point out this irony.

Whose Medical Decisions?
by Thomas Sowell

There was a time when rushing a thousand-page bill through Congress so fast that no one has time to read it would have provoked public outrage. But now, this has been attempted twice in the first 6 months of a new administration.

The fact that they got away with it before, with the “stimulus” bill, may have led them to believe that they could get away with it again.

But the first bill simply spent hundreds of billions of dollars. The current “health care” bill threatens to take life-and-death decisions out of the hands of individuals and their doctors, transferring those decisions to Washington bureaucrats.

People are taking that personally– as they should. Your life and death, and that of your loved ones, is as personal as it gets.

The mainstream media are again circling the wagons to protect Barack Obama, but this time it may not work. One of those front-page editorials disguised as a news article in the New York Times begins: “The stubborn yet false rumor that President Obama’s health care proposals would create government-sponsored ‘death panels’ to decide which patients were worthy of living seemed to arise from nowhere in recent weeks.”

Nowhere? Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel is “Special Advisor for Health Policy” for the Obama administration. That’s nowhere? He is also co-author of an article on Americans’ “over-utilization” of medical care in the June 18, 2008 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. Is that nowhere?

Dr. Emanuel’s article points out that Americans do not visit doctors or go into hospitals more than people in other industrialized countries. In fact we go to both places less often than people do in those other countries, which include countries with government-controlled medical care.

As the article points out, “It is more costly care, rather than high volume, that accounts for higher expenditures in the United States.”

There are more Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) devices per capita in the United States, more coronary bypass operations and Americans use more new pharmaceutical drugs created within the past 5 years.

Americans also have more of what the article calls “amenities” with their medical care. “Hospital rooms in the United States offer more privacy, comfort and auxiliary services than do hospital rooms in most other countries.”

In other words, it is not quantity but quality that is different– and more expensive– about American medical care. This is what Dr. Emanuel’s “over-utilization” consists of.

At one time, it would have been none of Dr. Emanuel’s business if your physician prescribed the latest medications for you, rather than the cheaper and obsolete medications they replaced. It would have been none of his business if you preferred to have a nice hospital room with “amenities” rather than being in an unsanitary ward with inadequate nursing care, as under the National Health Service in Britain.

The involvement of government gives Dr. Emanuel the leverage to condemn other Americans’ choices– and a larger involvement of government will give him the power to force both doctors and patients to change their choices.

As for a “death panel,” no politician would ever use that phrase when trying to get a piece of legislation passed. “End of life” care under the “guidance” of “some independent group” sounds so much nicer– and these are the terms President Obama used in an interview with the New York Times back on April 14th.

He said, “the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill out there.” He added: “It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels. That is why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance.”

But when you select people like Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel to give “independent” guidance, you have already chosen a policy through your choice of advisors, who simply provide political cover. The net result can be exactly the same as if those providing that guidance were openly called “death panels.”

‘Conservatives, Shut Up and Step Aside’
by David Limbaugh

The hubris, arrogance and deceit of President Barack Obama and the Democratic leadership are breathtaking. In their maniacal frenzy to assume control over every aspect of our lives through socialized medicine, they are behaving like the thuggish autocrats they have proved themselves to be.

The jig is up on their designs, evidenced by the very contents of the health bill they’re promoting. As increasing public awareness has translated into increasing grass-roots opposition to the bill, the Democrats have ratcheted up their bullying tactics and deceit.

Our self-styled bipartisan president is telling his critics to shut up, while his partners in crime, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her colleagues, are calling them un-American and Nazis.

Understand this: The people who are showing up in droves with righteous anger befitting a body politic steeped in a unique liberty tradition are exercising the very type of bottom-up citizen protest and government watchdogging our Founding Fathers envisioned. They are not the artificially driven “AstroTurf” phonies the Democrats are depicting them to be. No, such activities are the province of Alinsky/Obama-type “street organizers” and union thugs enlisted by the administration to discredit these legitimate protests.

It wasn’t enough for Pelosi to call us Nazis. She also co-wrote, with House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, an op-ed in USA Today calling us un-American and projecting her own nefarious tactics onto her opposition.

Pelosi and Hoyer accuse the protesters of engaging in “an ugly campaign … not merely to misrepresent the health insurance reform legislation, but to disrupt public meetings and prevent members of Congress and constituents from conducting a civil dialogue.”

They say: “The first fact is that health insurance reform will mean more patient choice. It will allow every American who likes his or her current plan to keep it. And it will free doctors and patients to make the health decisions that make the most sense, not the most profits for insurance companies.”

How can these government propaganda ministers sleep at night? They are the ones misrepresenting the legislation and closing their meetings to genuine dissent.

In the first place, it is not “health insurance reform.” It is an effort to fundamentally transform the entire health care industry and how decisions are made. Their recent move to euphemize this monstrosity as “insurance reform” is part of their strategy to demonize insurance companies in their ruthless quest to shove this down our throats.

The bill would not allow Americans to keep their plans. It would crowd out and eventually eliminate private care; enormously reduce choice, as well as the quantity and quality of care; and be a fiscal nightmare, as verified by Congressional Budget Office projections. Worst of all, it would further destroy our liberties.

And by Obama’s own words, it would decrease doctors’ prerogatives over the type of care they provide. He admits he’d control doctors by making their “bundled payments” conditional on their meeting quality standards imposed by an omniscient, omnipotent government, not doctors and their patients.

Pelosi and Hoyer’s most laughable claim is that their plan “will stand up to any and all critics.”

If that’s so, why don’t they tell the truth about what’s in the bill and truly answer legitimate questions and concerns about it instead of resorting to name-calling and intimidation? If that’s so, why is Obama sending out his hired mouthpiece, Linda Douglass, to deny what Obama most clearly said? She protests that his statements promoting a single-payer system were taken out of context and then gives us absolutely no evidence they were. We are just supposed to disbelieve our lying eyes and ears.

It’s also disingenuous to argue that in any event, Obama’s earlier statements are irrelevant because he says he does not favor a single-payer system today and would protect our right to private care. Again, we have the bill itself, which would phase out private care — mandatorily — so the denials are self-evident lies.

Obama isn’t delegating all the dirty work to his surrogates. Our pseudo-cool leader himself has become conspicuously unglued. About opponents of his outlandishly reckless agenda, he said that he doesn’t “want the folks who created the mess to do a lot of talking”; he wants “them just to get out of the way so (Democrats) can clean up the mess.” He went on, “I don’t mind cleaning up after them, but don’t do a lot of talking.”

He obviously thinks that he has the unilateral right as president, with 53 percent of the vote, to use our money to impoverish and enslave us and destroy our health care and that we have no right even to object. We only get to speak every two years.

Well, this president — with a faux-messianic wind boomeranging in his face — has now met his match: an increasingly informed, vigilant, politically engaged and liberty-loving citizenry. And none too soon.

Obamacare meets Twitter
by Star Parker

President Obama is a clever and ambitious man. And he has surrounded himself with a clever and ambitious staff.

This bright crew understood from the outset that time would determine if they would succeed with their health care plan.

They understood that their plan, which would require massive new expenditures, new taxes, and major new government interventions, had to be done quickly if it would get done at all.

They understood that it had to be done while the president’s approval ratings were still high so that Congress would bend to his will. And that it had to breeze through and land on the president’s desk before the general public could scrutinize it and understand the major way it would impact their lives.

As result, we’ve been hearing for months about the President’s deadlines, tied to a list of explanations (economic recovery, if we don’t do it now we’ll never do it, growing hordes of uninsured, etc.) why the world will collapse if these sweeping reforms were not passed by August.

Now Washington’s hot and humid August is here, Congress is adjourned, health care reform did not reach the House or Senate floor, and the White House is in panic. What they knew and feared they now confront. Dropping approval ratings and rising public awareness.

When the administration kicked this off with its White House Health Care Summit early last March, the president’s 62-percent approval, per Gallup, was 36 points higher than his 26-percent disapproval. Now, at 56-percent approval and 37-percent disapproval, the gap has shrunk to 19 points.

A new poll from Quinnipiac University has him at 50-percent approval and 42-percent disapproval.

And, the details of the 1,000-page monstrosity, word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, are being delivered to desktops, laptops, and blackberrys. Group emails, websites, twitter and facebook accounts are churning.

Old discredited socialist ideas meet the new economy and free people are reacting and revolting — as the White House knew they would if they got a chance to know what was going down.

Ironically, this technologically savvy administration is being hung by its own petard.

Rather than concluding that the public understands what they are being served up and doesn’t want it, the White House damage control machine is breaking out the smoke and mirrors, determined to spin government health care past the American people if they won’t buy it outright.

Instead of talking about “health care reform”, the White House website now uses the focus group tested “health insurance reform.” Make the insurance companies the bad guys.

And they, along with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, claim that grassroots protests at town hall meetings are manufactured.

Perhaps they also think that Quinnipiac University pollsters, who now report that 39 percent of Americans “approve of the way Barack Obama is handling health care” and 52 percent disapprove, are being paid off by insurance companies.

Suggestions that grass roots protests prevent the White House from getting its message to the public are hilarious. This president has been on a honeymoon with the press for the last six months. You can’t turn the TV on without seeing him.

He has had an unprecedented four prime time press conferences in six months. No. Their problem is not that President Obama has not communicated. Their problem is that he has. We’ve got the message and we don’t want it. We don’t want bureaucrats determining what health care is and how we get it. We don’t want abortion, much less federally funded. Or government meddling with how our elderly live out their lives. And we don’t want trillion dollar deficits. Perhaps Mr. Obama, who once suggested he admires Lincoln, will grasp Lincoln’s understanding that ours is a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

Health Care Reform: A Better Plan
by Charles Krauthammer

In 1986, Ronald Reagan and Bill Bradley created a legislative miracle. They fashioned a tax reform that stripped loopholes, political favors, payoffs, patronage and other corruptions out of the tax system. With the resulting savings, they lowered tax rates across the board. Those reductions, combined with the elimination of the enormous inefficiencies and perverse incentives that go into tax sheltering, helped propel a 20-year economic boom.

In overhauling any segment of our economy, the 1986 tax reform should be the model. Yet today’s ruling Democrats propose to fix our extremely high quality (but inefficient and therefore expensive) health care system with 1,000 pages of additional curlicued complexity — employer mandates, individual mandates, insurance company mandates, allocation formulas, political payoffs and myriad other conjured regulations and interventions — with the promise that this massive concoction will lower costs.

This is all quite mad. It creates a Rube Goldberg system that simply multiplies the current inefficiencies and arbitrariness, thus producing staggering deficits with less choice and lower-quality care. That’s why the administration can’t sell Obamacare.

The administration’s defense is to accuse critics of being for the status quo. Nonsense. Candidate John McCain and a host of other Republicans since have offered alternatives. Let me offer mine: Strip away current inefficiencies before remaking one-sixth of the U.S. economy. The plan is so simple it doesn’t even have the requisite three parts. Just two: radical tort reform and radically severing the link between health insurance and employment.

(1) Tort reform: As I wrote recently, our crazy system of casino malpractice suits results in massive and random settlements that raise everyone’s insurance premiums and creates an epidemic of defensive medicine that does no medical good, yet costs a fortune.

An authoritative Massachusetts Medical Society study found that five out of six doctors admitted they order tests, procedures and referrals — amounting to about 25 percent of the total — solely as protection from lawsuits. Defensive medicine, estimates the libertarian/conservative Pacific Research Institute, wastes more than $200 billion a year. Just half that sum could provide a $5,000 health insurance grant — $20,000 for a family of four — to the uninsured poor (U.S. citizens ineligible for other government health assistance).

What to do? Abolish the entire medical-malpractice system. Create a new social pool from which people injured in medical errors or accidents can draw. The adjudication would be done by medical experts, not lay juries giving away lottery prizes at the behest of the liquid-tongued John Edwardses who pocket a third of the proceeds.

The pool would be funded by a relatively small tax on all health-insurance premiums. Socialize the risk; cut out the trial lawyers. Would that immunize doctors from carelessness or negligence? No. The penalty would be losing your medical license. There is no more serious deterrent than forfeiting a decade of intensive medical training and the livelihood that comes with it.

(2) Real health-insurance reform: Tax employer-provided health care benefits and return the money to the employee with a government check to buy his own medical insurance, just as he buys his own car or home insurance.

There is no logical reason to get health insurance through your employer. This entire system is an accident of World War II wage and price controls. It’s economically senseless. It makes people stay in jobs they hate, decreasing labor mobility and therefore overall productivity. And it needlessly increases the anxiety of losing your job by raising the additional specter of going bankrupt through illness.

The health care benefit exemption is the largest tax break in the entire U.S. budget, costing the government a quarter-trillion dollars annually. It hinders health-insurance security and portability as well as personal independence. If we additionally eliminated the prohibition on buying personal health insurance across state lines, that would inject new and powerful competition that would lower costs for everyone.

Repealing the exemption has one fatal flaw, however. It was advocated by candidate John McCain. Obama so demagogued it last year that he cannot bring it up now without being accused of the most extreme hypocrisy and without being mercilessly attacked with his own 2008 ads.

But that’s a political problem of Obama’s own making. As is the Democratic Party’s indebtedness to the trial lawyers, which has taken malpractice reform totally off the table. But that doesn’t change the logic of my proposal. Go the Reagan-Bradley route. Offer sensible, simple, yet radical reform that strips away inefficiencies from the existing system before adding Obamacare’s new ones — arbitrary, politically driven, structural inventions whose consequence is certain financial ruin.

What Barack Obama Fails To Understand About America
by Bill O’Reilly

The stunning collapse in public opinion for President Obama’s health care plan demonstrates a weakness in the president’s overall vision. According to a new Gallup Poll, 55 percent of Americans now believe Obama is doing a poor job on health care reform, his signature issue. The main reason for this is that few understand what the deuce is going on. I analyze the news for a living, and I can’t explain what the House bill would do. It’s more than a thousand pages long, for crying out loud, and reading it could cause your head to explode.

Americans elected Obama to change things that are failing. No question but that the health industry is in chaos. Price gouging, frivolous lawsuits and poorly run hospitals all add to the apprehension of the regular folks. But the president is not reforming, he’s reinventing. He wants the government to set up a parallel health care apparatus, a giant entanglement of entitlements.

Did I mention that no one can explain it?

It’s not only confusion that is causing Americans to bail on Obamacare. Most of us value freedom and have a healthy distrust of government. Time after time, we have seen the feds screw things up: Iraq, Katrina, immigration, Vietnam, the war on drugs, public schools, the list is endless. And we are going to put our troubled appendix in the hands of these people?

If the president’s plan were clearly presented with the costs spelled out, I believe it would have a chance of passing. But just about everybody knows the USA might be facing bankruptcy, which would damage Americans far more than a troubled health care system. Even though he will not admit it, there is huge financial risk in Obama’s health care vision, and Americans are starting to wise up about the danger.

Finally, there is the freedom factor. Your health is obviously personal. You want to have as much control as possible when you get sick. In Canada, where the government runs the health care industry, there are waiting lists for treatment in some places and a shortage of doctors in others. Americans fear that if medical choices are dictated by the feds, that kind of chaos will happen here.

Also, federal health care means all of your medical records are in the hands of the government. Do you want that?

Don’t be surprised if the federal health care plan goes down in flames and Obama is dealt his first major setback. This whole thing is poorly thought out, rushed and full of peril.

It’s almost enough to make you sick.

Why Obamacare is Sinking
by Charles Krauthammer

What happened to Obamacare? Rhetoric met reality. As both candidate and president, the master rhetorician could conjure a world in which he bestows upon you health care nirvana: more coverage, less cost.

But you can’t fake it in legislation. Once you commit your fantasies to words and numbers, the Congressional Budget Office comes along and declares that the emperor has no clothes.

President Obama premised the need for reform on the claim that medical costs are destroying the economy. True. But now we learn — surprise! — that universal coverage increases costs. The congressional Democrats’ health care plans, says the CBO, increase costs in the range of $1 trillion plus.

In response, the president retreated to a demand that any bill he sign be revenue neutral. But that’s classic misdirection: If the fierce urgency of health care reform is to radically reduce costs that are producing budget-destroying deficits, revenue neutrality (by definition) leaves us on precisely the same path to insolvency that Obama himself declares unsustainable.

The Democratic proposals are worse still. Because they do increase costs, revenue neutrality means countervailing tax increases. It’s not just that it is crazily anti-stimulatory to saddle a deeply depressed economy with an income tax surcharge that falls squarely on small business and the investor class. It’s that health care reform ends up diverting for its own purposes a source of revenue that might otherwise be used to close the yawning structural budget deficit that is such a threat to the economy and to the dollar.

These blindingly obvious contradictions are why the Democratic health plans are collapsing under their own weight — at the hands of Democrats. It’s Max Baucus, Democratic chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, who called Obama unhelpful for ruling out taxing employer-provided health insurance as a way to pay for expanded coverage. It’s the Blue Dog Democrats in the House who wince at skyrocketing health-reform costs just weeks after having swallowed hemlock for Obama on a ruinous cap-and-trade carbon tax.

The president is therefore understandably eager to make this a contest between progressive Democrats and reactionary Republicans. He seized on Republican Sen. Jim DeMint’s comment that stopping Obama on health care would break his presidency to protest, with perfect disingenuousness, that “this isn’t about me. This isn’t about politics.”

It’s all about him. Health care is his signature reform. And he knows that if he produces nothing, he forfeits the mystique that both propelled him to the presidency and has sustained him through a difficult first six months. Which is why Obama’s red lines are constantly shifting. Universal coverage? Maybe not. No middle-class tax hit? Well, perhaps, but only if they don’t “primarily” bear the burden. Because it’s about him, Obama is quite prepared to sign anything as long as it is titled “health care reform.”

This is not about politics? Then why is it, to take but the most egregious example, that in this grand health care debate we hear not a word about one of the worst sources of waste in American medicine: the insane cost and arbitrary rewards of our malpractice system?

When a neurosurgeon pays $200,000 a year for malpractice insurance before he even turns on the light in his office or hires his first nurse, who do you think pays? Patients, in higher doctor fees to cover the insurance.

And with jackpot justice that awards one claimant zillions while others get nothing — and one-third of everything goes to the lawyers — where do you think that money comes from? The insurance companies, who then pass it on to you in higher premiums.

But the greatest waste is the hidden cost of defensive medicine: tests and procedures that doctors order for no good reason other than to protect themselves from lawsuit. Every doctor knows, as I did when I practiced years ago, how much unnecessary medical cost is incurred with an eye not on medicine but on the law.

Tort reform would yield tens of billions in savings. Yet you cannot find it in the Democratic bills. And Obama breathed not a word about it in the full hour of his health care news conference. Why? No mystery. The Democrats are parasitically dependent on huge donations from trial lawyers.

Didn’t Obama promise a new politics that puts people over special interests? Sure. And now he promises expanded, portable, secure, higher-quality medical care — at lower cost! The only thing he hasn’t promised is to extirpate evil from the human heart. That legislation will be introduced next week.

Take Two Aspirin and Call Me When Your Cancer is At Stage Four
by Ann Coulter

All the problems with the American health care system come from government intervention, so naturally the Democrats’ idea for fixing it is more government intervention. This is like trying to sober up by having another drink.

The reason seeing a doctor is already more like going to the DMV, and less like going to the Apple “Genius Bar,” is that the government decided health care was too important to be left to the free market. Yes — the same free market that has produced such a cornucopia of inexpensive goods and services that, today, even poor people have cell phones and flat-screen TVs.

As a result, it’s easier to get your computer fixed than your health. Thanks, government!

We already have near-universal health coverage in the form of Medicare, Medicaid, veterans’ hospitals, emergency rooms and tax-deductible employer-provided health care — all government creations.

So now, everyone expects doctors to be free. People who pay $200 for a haircut are indignant if it costs more than a $20 co-pay to see a doctor.

The government also “helped” us by mandating that insurance companies cover all sorts of medical services, both ordinary — which you ought to pay for yourself — and exotic, such as shrinks, in vitro fertilization and child-development assessments — which no normal person would voluntarily pay to insure against.

This would be like requiring all car insurance to cover the cost of gasoline, oil and tire changes — as well as professional car detailing, iPod docks, and leather seats and those neon chaser lights I have all along the underbody of my chopped, lowrider ‘57 Chevy.

But politicians are more interested in pleasing lobbyists for acupuncturists, midwives and marriage counselors than they are in pleasing recent college graduates who only want to insure against the possibility that they’ll be hit by a truck. So politicians at both the state and federal level keep passing boatloads of insurance mandates requiring that all insurance plans cover a raft of non-emergency conditions that are expensive to treat — but whose practitioners have high-priced lobbyists.

As a result, a young, healthy person has a choice of buying artificially expensive health insurance that, by law, covers a smorgasbord of medical services of no interest to him … or going uninsured. People who aren’t planning on giving birth to a slew of children with restless leg syndrome in the near future forgo insurance — and then politicians tell us we have a national emergency because some people don’t have health insurance.

The whole idea of insurance is to insure against catastrophes: You buy insurance in case your house burns down — not so you can force other people in your plan to pay for your maid. You buy car insurance in case you’re in a major accident, not so everyone in the plan shares the cost of gas.

Just as people use vastly different amounts of gasoline, they also use vastly different amounts of medical care — especially when an appointment with a highly trained physician costs less than a manicure.

Insurance plans that force everyone in the plan to pay for everyone else’s Viagra and anti-anxiety pills are already completely unfair to people who rarely go to the doctor. It’s like being forced to share gas bills with a long-haul trucker or a restaurant bill with Michael Moore. On the other hand, it’s a great deal for any lonely hypochondriacs in the plan.

Now the Democrats want to force us all into one gigantic national health insurance plan that will cover every real and mythical ailment that has a powerful lobby. But if you have a rare medical condition without a lobbying arm, you’ll be out of luck.

Even two decades after the collapse of liberals’ beloved Soviet Union, they can’t grasp that it’s easier and cheaper to obtain any service provided by capitalism than any service provided under socialism.

You don’t have to conjure up fantastic visions of how health care would be delivered in this country if we bought it ourselves. Just go to a grocery store or get a manicure. Or think back to when you bought your last muffler, personal trainer, computer and every other product and service available in inexpensive abundance in this capitalist paradise.

Third-party payer schemes are always a disaster — less service for twice the price! If you want good service at a good price, be sure to be the one holding the credit card. Under “universal health care,” no one but government bureaucrats will be allowed to hold the credit card.

Isn’t food important? Why not “universal food coverage”? If politicians and employers had guaranteed us “free” food 50 years ago, today Democrats would be wailing about the “food crisis” in America, and you’d be on the phone with your food care provider arguing about whether or not a Reuben sandwich with fries was covered under your plan.

Instead of making health care more like the DMV, how about we make it more like grocery stores? Give the poor and tough cases health stamps and let the rest of us buy health care — and health insurance — on the free market.

Obamacare for Illegal Aliens
by Michelle Malkin

Big Nanny Democrats want to ration health care for everyone in America — except those who break our immigration laws. Last week, the House Ways and Means Committee defeated an amendment that would have prevented illegal aliens from using the so-called “public health insurance option.” Every Democrat on the panel voted against the measure.

Nevada GOP Rep. Dean Heller’s measure would have enforced income, eligibility and immigration verification screening on all Obamacare patients. Unlike most everything else stuffed into the House Democrats’ plan, the citizenship vetting process would not have required building a new bureaucracy. Heller proposed using existing state and federal databases created years ago to root out entitlement fraud.

If the congressional majority are truly committed to President Obama’s quest to wring cost savings from the system, why won’t they adopt the same anti-fraud checks imposed on other government health and welfare beneficiaries? Maybe an intrepid reporter could ask the president at his next Obamacare show to explain.

The Democratic leadership denies that an estimated 12 million to 20 million illegal immigrants will receive taxpayer-subsidized health insurance coverage. Senate Finance Committee Chair Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., calls the proposition “too politically explosive.”

But Obama lit the fuse in February when he signed the massive expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. That law loosened eligibility requirements for legal immigrants and their children by watering down document and evidentiary standards — making it easy for individuals to use fake Social Security cards to apply for benefits with little to no chance of getting caught. In addition, Obama’s S-CHIP expansion revoked Medicaid application time limits that were part of the 1996 welfare reform law. Immigration activists see the provisions as first steps toward universal coverage for illegals.

“Explosive”? The applause certainly was. Obama’s praise of the weakened immigrant eligibility rules drew the strongest claps and cheers from members of Congress at the S-CHIP signing event.

Immigration analyst James R. Edwards Jr. reported last week in National Review that “no health legislation on the table requires federal, state or local agencies — or private institutions receiving federal funds — to check the immigration status of health-program applicants, so some of the money distributed via Medicaid and tax credits inevitably would go to illegal aliens.” Moreover, the Senate Finance Committee plan creates a new preference for illegal aliens by exempting them from the mandate to buy insurance.

That’s right. Law-abiding, uninsured Americans would be fined if they didn’t submit to the Obamacare prescription. Law-breaking border-crossers, visa-overstayers and deportation fugitives would be spared.

The solution is not to give them health insurance, but to turn off the magnets that draw them to enter illegally in the first place.

For years, advocates of uncontrolled immigration have argued that illegal aliens are not getting free health care, and that even if they were, they would not be not draining government budgets. The fiscal crisis in California gives lie to those talking points. In March, the Associated Press reported that Sacramento and Contra Costa counties were slashing staff and closing clinics due to the prohibitive costs of providing non-emergency health services for illegal immigrants.

“The general situation there is being faced by nearly every health department across the country, and if not right now, shortly,” Robert M. Pestronk, executive director of the National Association of County and City Health Officials, told the AP. The Texas state comptroller put the price tag for illegal alien hospital care at $1.3 billion in 2006. USA Today reported that from 2001 to 2004, spending for emergency Medicaid for illegal immigrants rose by 28 percent in North Carolina alone. Clinics across the Midwest have also been shuttered under the weight of illegal immigrant care costs.

At a time when Democratic leaders are pushing rationed care in a world of limited resources, Americans might wonder where the call for shared sacrifice is from illegal immigrant patients like those in Los Angeles getting free liver and kidney transplants at UCLA Medical Center. “I’m just mad,” illegal alien Jose Lopez told the Los Angeles Times last year after receiving two taxpayer-subsidized liver transplants while impatiently awaiting approval for state health insurance.

Now, multiply that sense of entitlement by 12 million to 20 million illegal immigrants. Welcome to the open-borders Obamacare nightmare.

Medical Care Confusion
by Thomas Sowell

Is there a coherent argument for government-controlled medical care or are slogans and hysteria considered sufficient?

We hear endlessly about how many Americans don’t have health insurance. But, if we stop and think– which politicians hope we never do– that raises the question as to why that calls for government-controlled medical care.

A bigger question is whether medical care will be better or worse after the government takes it over. There are many available facts relevant to those crucial questions but remarkably little interest in those facts.

There are facts about the massive government-run medical programs already in existence in the United States– Medicare, Medicaid and veterans’ hospitals– as well as government-run medical systems in other countries.

None of the people who are trying to rush government-run medical care through Congress before we have time to think about it are pointing to Medicare, Medicaid or veterans’ hospitals as shining examples of how wonderful we can expect government medical care to be when it becomes “universal.”

As for those uninsured Americans we keep hearing about, there is remarkably little interest in why they don’t have insurance. It cannot be poverty, for the poor can automatically get Medicaid.

In fact, we already know that there are people with substantial incomes who choose to spend those incomes on other things, especially if they are young and in good health. If necessary, they can always go to a hospital emergency room and receive treatment there, whether or not they have insurance.

Here, the advocates of government-run medical care say that we all end up paying, one way or another, for the free medical care that hospitals are forced by law to provide in their emergency rooms. But unless you think that any situation you don’t like is a reason to give politicians a blank check for “change,” the relevant question becomes whether the alternative is either less expensive or of better quality. Nothing is cheaper just because part of the price is paid in higher taxes.

Such questions seldom get asked, much less answered. We are like someone being rushed by a used car dealer to sign on the dotted line. But getting stuck with a car that is a lemon is nothing compared to signing away your right to decide what medical care you or your loved ones will get in life and death situations.

Politicians can throw rhetoric around about “bringing down the cost of health care” or they can even throw numbers around. But the numbers that politicians are throwing around don’t match the numbers that the Congressional Budget Office finds when it analyzes the hard data.

An old advertising slogan said, “Progress is our most important product.” With politicians, confusion is their most important product. They confuse bringing down the price of medical care with bringing down the cost. And they confuse medical care with health care.

Nothing is easier than for governments to impose price controls. They have been doing this, off an on, for thousands of years– repeatedly resulting in (1) shortages, (2) quality deterioration and (3) black markets. Why would anyone want any of those things when it comes to medical care?

Refusing to pay the costs is not the same as bringing down the cost. That is why price controls create these problems. When developing a new pharmaceutical drug costs roughly a billion dollars, you are either going to pay the billion dollars or cause people to stop spending a billion dollars to develop new drugs.

The confusion of “health care” with medical care is the crucial confusion. Years ago, a study showed that Mormons live a decade longer than other Americans. Are doctors who treat Mormons so much better than the doctors who treat the rest of us? Or do Mormons avoid doing a lot of things that shorten people’s lives?

The point is that health care is largely in your hands. Medical care is in the hands of doctors. Things that depend on what doctors do– cancer survival rates, for example– are already better here than in countries with government-run medical systems. But, if political rhetoric prevails, we may yet sell our birthright and not even get the mess of pottage.