Yes, our mathematically-challenged President actually made this claim. Check out the following video:
For the record – if your employer pays $400 per month currently for your health insurance, and ObamaCare reduced that premium by 100%, your employer wrould then be paying ZERO. At 3000%, your employer would be paying you.
This President will obviously say or do ANYTHING to get his health care reform bill passed. The facts are now 3000% irrelevant.
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President Obama made the following groundbreaking announcement at the abandoned Members Only warehouse this morning (the same warehouse where Derek Zoolander and Hansel held their historic male model "walk-off"):
"Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. As I look around this room, I see many well-dressed people. I see members of Congress, lobbyists for powerful special interests, and media giants in attendance. As the privileged few, we can afford the finest fashions, the best designer clothing. We are the lucky ones, but not everyone in America shares in our good fortune. Throughout this land, the wealthiest country in the world, we have a great disparity in the quality of clothing and accessibility to fine clothing. Even as we in this room don our Brooks Brothers suits and Donna Karan dresses, others, through no fault of their own, are forced to wear sub-standard clothing, such as cheap sweat pants and t-shirts from Value City or Goodwill. Others are forced into wearing threadbare hand-me-downs, and some even make pants out of trash bags, or wear only boxer shorts. Imagine if one of those people was your child or your grandmother.
This is a grave injustice in a country that prides itself on equal rights for all. Quality clothing is a basic human right, and no American should be without it. As many as 60 million in this country suffer from inferior clothing, and many die due to a lack of proper warm clothing in the winter. We have a moral obligation as a people to correct this situation, and that's why I'm calling today for an overhaul of our clothing delivery system. Everybody should enjoy the same quality of fine clothing that Congress receives, and that's the goal of my clothing reform.
We currently have a system where greedy clothing retailers and wholesalers line their pockets with profits while the underprivileged struggle to meet their daily clothing needs. Giant corporate interests and Wall Street gamblers make millions in this immoral de-pantsing of ordinary working people, who often must make a decision on whether to purchase proper clothing or pay their heating bill. CEO's like Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger rake in the big bucks and live in mansions. The same can be said for the supermodels, the beautiful people who serve as hucksters for the corporate world and drive clothing prices out of the reach of most. Together, these shirtsters and shoesters add 30%, 50%, 100%, or more to the cost of our underwear and outerwear.
I receive many letters and e-mails from Americans seeking help with their apparel needs. One such letter came from Mr. Willy Makeit of Gary, Indiana. Willy writes, 'Dear Mr. President. I've been out of work for 6 months, and this morning I finally had a job interview. When I went to put on my one decent pair of dress pants, I noticed the rear end had split out, leaving me nothing to wear for the interview. As a result, I didn't get the job, and now I don't know how I will feed my six kids. Please help. I'm nearly at the end of my rope. I'm also a veteran.'
Hearbreaking stories like this are why I'm calling for a redistribution of our clothing wealth. I am creating a government program that will require the big clothing corporations to provide affordable, quality clothing for all. This program will bend down the clothing cost curve and provide clothing subsidies of up to $1,500 per year to all who need it. I will pay for this program by reversing the Bush tax cuts for the rich, and by imposing a tax on those making more than $250,000 per year. I also mandate that employers give clothing benefits to all employees at a minimum of $1,000 per employee per year. I further mandate that all clothing be union-made to insure that the finest quality is achieved. This will, of course, be resisted by the powerful special interests, but I will not stop. I will create a new government agency, the Federal Department Of Apparel, to insure against price-gouging, excessive profits, and outrageous executive salaries in the garment industry. My goal is to make the United States the best-dressed nation on earth, and I will not stop until this right is bestowed upon every man, woman, and child in this great country. Clothing is a more important right than the right to a job, the right to food, the right to shelter, or even the right to health care. Without clothing, you can't even do these other things. You'd be arrested if you went outside without any clothes on. Clothing is therefore a primary right.
There are naysayers who complain that the U.S. Constitution doesn't give the federal government the power to control the clothing industry. This phony argument presents a false choice, and is only a distraction used for partisan political purposes. In addition, the Constitution has a blind spot when it comes to both casual and formal wear. The founding fathers did not address the issue.
There are others who desire a single-payer clothing system, and while that is an admirable goal, the history of garment development in this country does not easily lend itself to this end. Unfortunately, we have a history of capitalism and free market economics in this country. Despite all it's flaws and inequities, we cannot fundamentally transform this system overnight. It will take time. My clothing reform is an important and critical first step.
I expect Congress to have the Clothing Reform bill on my desk by the end of this year, when I will sign it into law. In closing, I say God bless America, whether your God be Christian, Muslim, Jewish, or whatever, or if you have no God at all. Thank you very much. Yes We Can !"
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As the Democrats move perilously close to destroying America's health care system, a surprising source has stepped forward to expose more of the fatal flaws with ObamaCare….Obama's second cousin (once removed), Dr. Milton R. Wolf, a radiologist from Kansas.
Dr. Wolf must not have received Obama's message that the time for talk about ObamaCare is over. Apparently, neither has the President, who has been touring the country talking incessantly about how the the time for talk is over.
Obama's cuz makes several crucial points about ObamaCare in an essay published in the Washington Times.
1. ObamaCare will kill people.
America has the finest health care delivery system in the world. Let's not forget that and put it at risk in the name of reform. Desperate souls across the globe flock to our shores and cross our borders every day to seek our care. Why? Our system provides cures while the government-run systems from which they flee do not. Compare Europe's common cancer mortality rates to America's: breast cancer – 52 percent higher in Germany and 88 percent higher in the United Kingdom; prostate cancer – a staggering 604 percent higher in the United Kingdom and 457 percent higher in Norway; colon cancer – 40 percent higher in the United Kingdom.
Look closer at the United Kingdom. Britain's higher cancer mortality rate results in 25,000 more cancer deaths per year compared to a similar population size in the United States. But because the U.S. population is roughly five times larger than the United Kingdom's, that would translate into 125,000 unnecessary American cancer deaths every year. This is more than all the mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles, cousins and children in Topeka, Kan. And keep in mind, these numbers are for cancer alone. America also has better survival rates for other major killers, such as heart attacks and strokes. Whatever we do, let us not surrender the great gains we have made. First, do no harm. Lives are at stake.
2. ObamaCare will result in less access to health care.
The justification for Obamacare has been to control costs, but the problem is there is little in Obamacare that will do that. Instead, there are provisions that will ration care and artificially set price. This is a confusion of costs and price.
As one example, consider the implications of Obamacare's financial penalty aimed at your doctor if he seeks the expert care he has determined you need. If your doctor is in the top 10 percent of primary care physicians who refer patients to specialists most frequently – no matter how valid the reasons – he will face a 5 percent penalty on all their Medicare reimbursements for the entire year. This scheme is specifically designed to deny you the chance to see a specialist. Each year, the insidious nature of that arbitrary 10 percent rule will make things even worse as 100 percent of doctors try to stay off that list. Many doctors will try to avoid the sickest patients, and others will simply refuse to accept Medicare. Already, 42 percent of doctors have chosen that route, and it will get worse. Your mother's shiny government-issued Medicare health card is meaningless without doctors who will accept it.
Obamacare will further diminish access to health care by lowering reimbursements for medical care without regard to the costs of that care. Price controls have failed spectacularly wherever they've been tried. They have turned neighborhoods into slums and have caused supply chains to dry up when producers can no longer profit from providing their goods. Remember the Carter-era gas lines? Medical care is not immune from this economic reality. We cannot hope that our best and brightest will pursue a career in medicine, setting aside years of their lives – for me, 13 years of school and training – to enter a field that might not even pay for the student loans it took to get there.
3. ObamaCare will exacerbate existing problems with our health care system, not fix them.
I believe there is a better way. The problems in the American health care system are not caused by a shortage of government intrusion. They will not be solved by more government intrusion. In fact, our current problems were precisely, though unintentionally, created by government.
World War II-era wage-control measures – a form of price controls – ushered in a perverted system in which we turn to our employers for insurance and the government penalizes us if we choose to purchase insurance for ourselves. You are not given the opportunity to be a wise consumer of health care and compare prices as well as quality in any meaningful way. Worse still, your insurance company is not answerable to you because you are not its customer. It is answerable to your employer, whose interests differ from your own.
Insurance companies have been vilified for following the perverse rules that government has created for them. But it gets worse. The government, always knowing best, deploys insurance commissioners across the land to dictate what the insurance companies must provide, whether you want it or not, and each time, your premiums increase. Obamacare will make all of this worse, not better.
One of America's founding principles is our trust in the people and their economic freedom to rule their own lives. We should decouple health insurance from employers and empower patients to be consumers once again. Allow them to determine the insurance plan that best meets their families' needs and which company will provide it. This will unleash a wave of competition that will drive costs down in a way that price controls never have. Eliminate the artificial state boundary rules that protect insurance companies from true competition and watch as voters demand that their state insurance commissioners get the heck out of the way. Innovative companies will drive down costs similar to how Geico and Progressive have worked for automobile insurance. And it won't cost taxpayers a trillion dollars in the process.
This free-market approach has worked for everything from high-definition TVs to breakfast cereals, but will it work for medicine? It already is. Take Lasik eye surgery, for example. Because patients are allowed to be informed consumers and can shop anywhere, doctors work hard for their business. Services, availability and expertise have all increased, and costs have decreased. Should consumers demand it, insurance companies – now answerable to you rather than your employer – would cover it.
ObamaCare will raise your insurance premiums, raise health care costs overall, incentivize doctors to NOT provide health care to the patients who need it the most, reduce access to health care, deter innovation in the health care field, incentivize people to NOT enter the health care field at the same time it increases demand by creating a huge medical welfare state, raise taxes, reduce the number of doctors who will accept Medicare patients, insert the government even more as a middleman in the health care market, distort the free market, force all Americans to purchase health insurance…
Other than that it's great.
Dr. Wolf sums up his opposition to ObamaCare by wishing his cousin success in office:
I wish my cousin Barack the greatest of success in office. But I feel duty-bound to rise in opposition to Obamacare. I must take a stand for my patients, my profession and, ultimately, my country. The problems caused by government will not be solved by growing government. Now that this new era of big-government takeovers has spread to our health care system, it's not just our freedoms or our wallets that are at stake. It's our lives.
I wonder how liberals are going to demonize Dr. Wolf. We shall soon find out, I'm sure.
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Quote Of The Day: "we have to pass the [health care] bill so that you can find out what is in it" – House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)
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Burning Fiscal Issue: "he's trying to pawn himself off as a fiscal conservative. And yet just in recent weeks, two weeks ago it has come out in news accounts he had a Republican Party of Florida credit card that he charged $130 haircut, or maybe it was a back wax — we are not sure what all he got at that place." – Governor Charlie Crist (R-FL), talking about U.S. Senate primary challenger Marco Rubio, who is leading Crist by 32 points in the latest poll.
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A New York Corruptocrat State Of Mind: Recent scandals in New York…Gov. Eliot Spitzer, Gov. David Paterson, Rep. Charlie Rangel..and now, I give you Rep. Eric Massa, who recently resigned from Congress amid year-long allegations of improper sexual contact with male staffers. This guy is some piece of work. In recent days, Massa said he wouldn't seek re-election because he had cancer. Then he resigned immediately when the sexual allegations came out. Then he said he was pressured out by Democrats because he was against ObamaCare (ObamaCare isn't liberal enough for Massa). Then he went on Glenn Beck's show and said he did grope and tickle a male staffer. Then he went on Larry King's show a few hours later and said he didn't grope anyone. Massa called Obama's Chief Of Staff Rahm Emanuel "the son of the devil's spawn," and described the following nude shower scene, with Emanuel allegedly threatening Massa that he better vote for ObamaCare or else – "I am showering, naked as a jaybird, and here comes Rahm Emanuel, not even with a towel wrapped around his tush, poking his finger in my chest, yelling at me." The White House denies the incident ever occurred. When Larry King asked Massa if he was gay, Massa refused to answer, saying the question was an insult to gay people. If you are interested in this bizarre tale, The Washington Post has a pretty good take on it here.
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ObamaCare To Bring Down Deficits, Part Red Sea: Here's President Obama singing the merits of health care reform, from Fox News:
"Our cost-cutting measures mirror most of the proposals in the current Senate bill, which reduces most people's premiums and brings down our deficit by up to $1 trillion dollars over the next decade because we're spending our health care dollars more wisely," Obama told an audience at Arcadia University in Glenside, Pa., a suburb north of Philadelphia.
Obama was so proud of these cost-saving numbers in the latest version of health care reform, he delved into a bit of Washington-speak to back them up.
"Those aren't my numbers," Obama said to the rising applause of the estimated 1,300 in attendance. "They are the savings determined by the Congressional Budget Office, which is the nonpartisan, independent referee of Congress for what things cost."
Sorry, Mr. President. You're numbers are a wee bit off. The actual ObamaCare deficit reduction estimate from the CBO over the next decade – $132 billion. The real deficit increase estimate over the next decade after all the Democrats smoke and mirrors accounting tricks are stripped away from ObamaCare -$460 billion. (link)
Nice try, Obama.
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Canadian Socialist Health Care Paradise: Because almost every pro-ObamaCare Democrat under the sun has come out with some American health care horror story in order to further their cause via emotion rather than logic, I have one such story from that wonderful government-run Canadian health care system, where everyone is covered for everything and life is beautiful all the time (or so say liberals). From the Toronto Sun, this article is titled 'Sick Man Faces Bankruptcy Or Death':
Kent Pankow lives in Edmonton, in a province and a country that is trying to either kill him or bankrupt him.
No sense mincing words.
Suffering from brain cancer, Kent Pankow was literally forced to go to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. for lifesaving surgery — at a cost to family and friends of $106,000 — after the health-care system in Alberta left him hanging in bureaucratic limbo for 16 crucial days, his tumour meanwhile migrating to an unreachable part of the brain, while it dithered over his case file, ultimately deciding he was not surgery worthy.
Now, with the Mayo Clinic having done what the Alberta Cancer Board wouldn’t authorize or even explain, but with the tumour unable to be totally removed, the province will now not fund the expensive drug, Avastin, that the Mayo prescribed to keep him alive and keep the remaining tumour from increasing in size — despite the costs of the drug being totally funded by the province for other forms of cancer.
Kent Pankow, as it turns out, has the right disease but he has it in the wrong place.
Had he lung cancer, breast cancer, or colon cancer, then the cost of the drug — $4,555 per treatment, two times a month — would be totally covered by Alberta’s version of OHIP.
But he doesn’t.
And so he is not only a victim of brain cancer, he is also a victim of arbitrary discrimination.
Our supposedly universal federal health care system, the pride of most Canadians and the political struggle of America, is only as good as the length of the waiting line and whether you have the right disease at the right time.
After writing more than 150 letters to everyone from the prime minister to virtually all health authorities both federal and provincial, and being ignored in return, Kent Pankow’s wife, Deborah Hurford, decided to finally go public.
Btw, Canadian official Danny Williams, the premier of Newfoundland and Labrador, chose to have his heart surgery in the United States. Williams said, and I quote, "This was my heart, my choice and my health…I did not sign away my right to get the best possible health care for myself when I entered politics." So much for Canada's universal health care paradise.
Exit question – Is MORE bureaucracy really the way we want to go with health care in America ? With ObamaCare, that is exactly what we will get.
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I have to start today's post with a tip of the hat to the Iraqi people, who have seen more than their share of wars and brutal dictatorial regimes. Yesterday, the Iraqis flocked to the polls to vote in huge numbers in democratic elections, despite a string of bombings by what our media refers to as "insurgents" (and what I refer to as cowardly fascist terrorist scumbags). At this point, the "insurgents" don't represent anything but their own fascist wet dreams of power. The "insurgents" are nothing but thugs trying to step on the necks of the Iraqi people, and the Iraqis are sick of them. President Obama was correct when he said yesterday's elections were an "important milestone." Obama also said the following, according to the New York Times:
In Washington, President Obama praised the vote. “I have great respect for the millions of Iraqis who refused to be deterred by acts of violence and who exercised their right to vote today,” he said in a statement. “Their participation demonstrates that the Iraqi people have chosen to shape their future through the political process.”
The attack by the "insurgents" didn't signal the weakness of the Iraqi government. It signaled the weakness and desperation of the "insurgency." The Iraqis were unfazed. They persevered. The Times also reported the following:
The deadliest single attack occurred when what the police said was a Katyusha rocket collapsed an apartment building, located in the Ur neighborhood in northeastern Baghdad. The Interior Ministry said 25 were killed.
Mr. Bedawi, who witnessed the carnage, said the attack hardened the resolve of Iraqis to vote. “Everyone went,” he said. “They were defiant about what happened. Even people who didn’t want to vote before, they went after this rocket.”
The extensive use of mortars and rockets suggested that a weakened insurgency had to shift tactics, perhaps because it was unable to get cars or suicide bombers through an intense security lockdown, with some checkpoints erected every few hundred yards.
The insurgents still fighting in today’s Iraq face a far stronger government, capable now of saturating the country with police officers and soldiers. Even more important, they face an Iraqi people far less willing to support, or even sympathize with, violent resistance against the country’s democratic government. Iraqis, seemingly inured to violence, even mocked the attacks.
“We have experienced three wars before,” Ahmed Ali, a supporter of Mr. Maliki, said in Ur, “so it was just the play of children that we heard.”
There is a lesson here. Though I was against the Iraq war prior to the U.S. invasion, with my thinking being that we were biting off more than we could chew, that a democratic Iraq seemed like such a longshot, I am happy to report it appears I will be wrong. The only way we have reached this point in Iraq is through perseverance. Now, it appears a democratic Iraqi government will be able to stand on it's own, and I thank God for that.
If there is one person on earth responsible for the transformation of Iraq, it is former President George W. Bush. Without his resolve and the resolve of our soldiers, the Iraq war would have failed back in 2006, when cowardly liberal naysayers such as Harry "the war is lost" Reid (D-NV) were ready to give up the fight when things got tough. Imagine where Iraq would be today if the lack of character illustrated by Harry Reid and company had prevailed. I guarantee you Iraq would be far worse off, even though the naysayers would be patting themselves on the back for ending the war (and leaving Iraq in chaos). For all the talk of American imperialism spewed forth from the lefties over the last seven years, it was never about that. We aren't going to run Iraq. The Iraqis are going to run Iraq. It wasn't about a "war for oil" either, which was always a nonsensical notion. The war was about replacing a brutal dictator, Saddam Hussein, with a democratic Iraq that could stand on it's own and provide more stability in the Middle East, a very unstable region. I used to think that was an overly ambitious goal. Today, I think less that way.
There is still work to be done, but perseverance has it's rewards. As a reminder to what we face regarding Islamic terrorism, following is what the Islamofascist terrorist scum want to do. This statement comes from the U.S. born terrorist, Al Qaeda member Adam Gadahn:
“Brother Nidal [the Ft. Hood shooter] is the ideal role-model for every repentant Muslim in the armies of the unbelievers and apostate regimes.”
“You shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking that military bases are the only high-value targets in America and the West. On the contrary, we should look for targets which epitomize western decadence, depravity and atheism.
“It is rapidly becoming clear that this already hot global battle is about to get even hotter.This is a war which knows no international borders and knows no single battleground. And that is why I am calling on every honest and vigilent Muslim, unsheath your sharpened sword and rush to take your rightful place among defiant champions of Islam.”
There is no negotiating with this mindset. We must either submit or stamp them out, and obviously, we won't submit. The only thing we can do going forward is to continue the Iraq success, be successful in Afghanistan, assist the Pakistani government in achieving success in Pakistan, stand firm against the Iranians, and continue to improve our intelligence to keep Americans as safe as possible at home. This is the situation we are in, the hand we've been dealt. The only thing to do is persevere.
We also should turn a deaf ear to the defeatists on the left who think America is to blame. That will get us nowhere, and will only make our enemy stronger, which in turn will raise the threat level to Americans and further subjugate the people in the Middle East, who have already suffered so much.
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President Obama often refers to "the failed policies of the past" to criticize his predecessor, President Bush. One of those Bush "failed policies," according to Obama, was the Bush tax cuts, which the President and practically every other Democrat have railed against for years. There is a reason for such criticism, though it really wasn't the Bush tax cuts alone that caused the problem. It was Bush cutting taxes at the same time he ramped up federal spending that led to federal deficits and a net increase in federal debt of around $4.5 trillion during his tenure in office.
Keep Obama's "failed policies of the past" rhetoric in mind as you read the CBO's latest debt projections on Obama's watch. From the Washington Post:
President Obama's proposed budget would add more than $9.7 trillion to the national debt over the next decade, congressional budget analysts said Friday. Proposed tax cuts for the middle class account for nearly a third of that shortfall… "Over the next 10 years, those policies would reduce revenues and boost outlays for refundable tax credits by a total of $3.0 trillion," wrote Douglas W. Elmendorf, the CBO director. Combined with interest payments on that shortfall, the tax cuts account for the entire increase in deficits that would result from Obama's proposals.
If Bush cutting taxes and increasing federal spending was a "failed policy of the past," then how should we describe Obama's cutting taxes and increasing spending at twice the rate Bush did, resulting in twice as much debt as Bush ? Should we call Obama's policies, failed policies of the past on steroids, or what ??? When Obama promised change, I'm betting most of you didn't anticipate a change for the worse.
Any long-term CBO debt projection contains assumptions, of course, and the current CBO projections (through 2020) include assumptions that GDP will increase over 4% per year, that unemployment will gradually fall to 4.8%, and that the price index will remain relatively stable. I don't want to be a pessimist here, but what if those assumptions DON'T come to pass ??? The accumulated debt will then be even greater. Even if the CBO assumptions are correct, we will have a federal debt well over $20 trillion by the end of the decade, with interest payments on the debt soaring to $800 billion annually.
And that renders most of Obama's presidential economic pronouncements to be little more than the politics of the meaningless.
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Welcome To The Machine - On the same day President Obama invited Rep. Jim Matheson (D-UT) to the White House to pressure him to switch his vote on health care reform, Obama appointed Matheson's brother, Scott Matheson, to a judgeship on the 10th Circuit Court Of Appeals. I'm sure that was an entirely random, coincidental event with absolutely no underlying political calculations whatsoever…not at all similar to the way things are done in Obama's old stomping grounds…not at all similar to the Chicago way….not at all. This is the most ethical administration ever…especially when they aren't lying about everything.
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Global Warming Kettle Calls Pot Black – "First of all, we just got five feet of snow in Washington and so everybody is like — a lot of the people who are opponents of climate change, they say, see, look at that, there’s all this snow on the ground, this doesn’t mean anything. I want to just be clear that the science of climate change doesn’t mean that every place is getting warmer; it means the planet as a whole is getting warmer. But what it may mean is, for example, Vancouver, which is supposed to be getting snow during the Olympics, suddenly is at 55 degrees, and Dallas suddenly is getting seven inches of snow." – Barack "The Weatherman" Obama.
The glaring problem with Obama's "everything is climate change now" rhetoric is that Vancouver doesn't usually get much snow in February. The average temperature there in February is 48 degrees Fahrenheit. Not exactly snow weather, and a temp of 55 degrees is just an example of normal weather variation. Exit questions – What if Sarah Palin said something this dumb ? How many months would it be before the media stopped talking about it ?
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Nominee For Idiot Of The Year - The following video shows MSNBC talker Dylan Ratigan "interviewing" a Tea Party representative, and hijacking his own interview by refusing to allow the Tea Party guy to answer the questions put to him. Ratigan instead used the segment as a transparent ploy to parrot the constant MSNBC propaganda point that the Tea Party movement is a racist movement.
This might be a new low in what passes for journalism. Either that, or Ratigan fancies himself the next Keith Olbermann, a dubious aspiration at best.
While I'm on the subject of the Tea Party movement…I keep hearing from liberals that the Tea Parties are chock full of racist signs, and having attended Tea Parties, I haven't seen any. Not one. I have seen a couple signs on the internet that COULD be interpreted as racist (and could also be liberal plants), out of the hundreds of thousands of signs from which to choose at Tea Party events. Can some liberal please show me all these racist Tea Party signs ??? I really want to see what all the fuss is about.
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A Good Day To Die – "Today is a big day in America. Only 36,000 people lost their jobs today, which is really good." – Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) link
I've heard of the bigotry of soft expectations, but this is ridiculous. By Reid's standard, if only 20,000 people lost their jobs next month, that would be, as Tony the Tiger used to say, "GRRREEAAT !"
Time for a new Senate Majority Leader. This one's broken.
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Rules ? We Don't Need No Stinking Rules - From NBC News:
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said today the American people ought to know more about what she called "total obstruction" by the Republican Party in the Senate. Referring to Sen. Jim Bunning's hold-up of unemployment benefits earlier this week, Pelosi said, "It's not about rules, it's about a decision they've made to obstruct."
Here we have Pelosi admitting that the Pay-Go rules passed by the Democrats a couple weeks ago are basically meaningless. They bypassed them the first time they had the opportunity to enforce them, and then they have the gall to portray the one Senator who called the Dems on their dishonesty an obstructionist. Wow. Words fail me.
Time for a new Congress. This one's broken.
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Obama As The New Bush - Students in Jakarta, Indonesia are protesting President Obama's upcoming visit to that country. Obama previously has been very popular in Indonesia, having spent part of his childhood in Jakarta. From the Associated Press:
Scores of Islamic students staged protests outside Jakarta's parliament and in at least three other major Indonesian cities on Friday against President Barack Obama's upcoming visit to this predominantly Muslim country.
The students carried banners branding Obama as an enemy of Islam and an imperialist in downtown Jakarta as well as in the provincial capitals Padang, Yogyakarta and Surabaya.
They also threw shoes at large pictures of Obama's head. An Iraqi journalist was sentenced to a year in prison for throwing his shoes at U.S. President George W. Bush during a news conference in Baghdad in 2008.
Protest organizer Ahmad Irhamul Fikri, spokesman for the Coordinating Board for Campus Proselytizing Institute, said bigger rallies will be staged next Friday in more Indonesian cities ahead of Obama's March 20-22 visit.
If there's a bright side here…maybe this will shut up some of the fringe element nuts known as the Birthers, who think Obama is a foreign-born Muslim who wants to establish a Caliphate here in America, or something.
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"The status quo is not acceptable….What is really scary, what is really risky, is to do nothing." – President Obama, talking about health care reform.
President Obama and the Democrats are pretending America's choices on health care reform are either – A) Pass ObamaCare, or B) Stick With The Status Quo.
To us another Obama catchphrase, the President is presenting us with a "false choice." In a year of debate on the issue of health care reform, I haven't heard one person in Congress say we should stick with the status quo and do nothing. That is not the debate. The debate is over what is the best way to reform health care in this country to lessen costs and provide access to health insurance for every American who wants it.
Obama and company believe massive government intrusion, forcing all Americans to buy health insurance, massive tax increases, and kicking massive subsidies back to the insurance companies for tens of millions of Americans is the way to go. Obama, like so many liberals, believes having the government intrude more between the doctor and patient, along with insurance companies intruding between doctor and patient, along with the legal tort system intruding between doctor and patient, along with your employer intruding between the doctor and patient, is somehow going to result in a better, more cost-effective health care system. I simply don't get it.
I believe just the opposite is true. I believe the more middlemen there are between the doctor and patient, the more the individual is relieved of all responsibility for his/her own health care costs and choices, the more out of control our health care system will become.
With the President set to release his latest health care plan today, I'd like to present some different solutions, that might at first seem radical to some when compared to the status quo, but they aren't radical. They're just different than Obama's big government takeover plans. I'm going to accept the goal of insuring every American citizen, and this alternative plan will do that. I call this the Returning Your Health Care To You plan. Because this is only one short post, I'll only cover the major points broadly. I don't have time to produce a 2,400 page document (nor would I want to, and it isn't necessary to reform health care).
1) Make health insurance premiums tax deductible, up to $4,000 annually per individual or $8,000 per family. This would be in the form of a refundable tax credit, and would adjust for health care inflation/deflation.
This would apply to all Americans, whether they were working or not. For non-working Americans, this would serve as a subsidy, but it would go to the individual, not to the insurance company, as would happen with ObamaCare. The deduction must be used to purchase health insurance, or you won't get it. This measure wouldn't force anyone to buy insurance, but it would strongly incentivize them to do so. This should solve the problem of so many Americans being uninsured, and it will serve as a defacto wage increase for every American.
2. Employers will no longer be responsible for health insurance for workers.
Because step #1 puts the burden of health insurance back where it belongs, on the individual or the family, there is no reason for employers to insure workers. This has great benefits. Employers will no longer be burdened with the growing health care costs that keep them from being competitive in the marketplace. They will be able to hire more workers, LOTS more workers. This will fix the unemployment problem, which in turn will generate more tax revenue for the government. Secondly, it solves the existing problem we have with unemployed workers not having access to insurance, because insurance now follows the individual instead of the job. You won't lose your health insurance just because you lose your job. With employers relieved of paying for health insurance costs, worker take-home pay will increase again.
3. Eliminate health insurance "pools."
It is discriminatory for some people to be able to pool together and receive a lower group insurance rate while others are unable to do so, and are forced into paying higher rates. The "pool" of the insurance companies will be all it's customers, and all customers will pay the same insurance rate for the same level of coverage. With all customers paying the same rate, the insurance company will be incentivized to see that it's more unhealthy customers, the ones with the highest risk factors, seek preventative health care measures which will result in overall lower payouts for the insurance companies. Absent "pooling," insurance companies will also be incentivized to offer their lowest possible price to everyone, lest they lose business.
4. Tort reform with lawsuit caps.
To lower health care costs and defensive medicine costs. I've covered this before, so I won't go into detail here.
5. Nationwide insurance competition.
To lower costs. This shouln't even be debatable. We don't tell Walmart it can't operate in Oklahoma, and we don't tell Applebee's it can't operate in Ohio. This is a free country. In order to do this, we probably will need some minimum insurance guidelines to come from the feds. The feds will NOT, however, mandate what will and will not be covered under an insurance policy, with two exceptions – people cannot be denied for pre-existing conditions and people cannot be canceled if they run up high medical costs. Insurance companies will not be allowed to deny any U.S. citizen coverage.
6. More choices of insurance coverage, not less.
The current ObamaCare boondoggle would tell insurers what they must cover. This is the wrong path. Insurers will cover anything, but we need a variety of types of coverage instead of a one-size-fits-all model. For example, some people might prefer catastrophic-only coverage with high deductibles and pay for all their routine medical care themselves (I'm one of these). Others may want everything and anything covered. There may be several levels in between. There should be a variety of choices available instead of the government dictating coverage.
7. End Medicare.
If you didn't notice, since everybody is going to get a health care tax credit, we don't need Medicare anymore, because seniors will get the tax credit too, and they will be paying the same insurance rates that a healthy 25-year-old would pay. I just solved the long-term unfunded liability problem that threatens to bankrupt the country.
How much will my health care plan cost ? Well, I'm not the CBO, and I've only worked on this for a couple hours this morning, but I guess-timate that the tax credits will cost roughly $1 trillion ($4,000 x 250 million adults in the U.S.) if everybody signed up. That's a lot of money, but by eliminating existing government health care plans, I estimate we'd save about $600 billion of that, leaving about $400 billion to raise via reducing federal spending or raising taxes. Because raising taxes is counterproductive, especially in this struggling economy, I'd suggest the federal government reduce spending by $400 billion. If this sounds impossible or radical, consider that Barack Obama RAISED federal spending by far more than that in his first year in office, and wants to raise it a lot more to pass ObamaCare. We could reduce federal spending by $400 billion just by eliminating Obama's spending increases SO FAR.
Obama's plan is what sounds radical to me. My two-hour effort today addresses unemployment, addresses the unsustainable long-term unfunded entitlement liability problem, reduces the size of government, stimulates the economy, makes our businesses more competitive, doesn't raise taxes, provides health insurance for any American who wants it, creates jobs, and increases worker wages. Does Obama's disaster of a plan do ANY of that ? Nope. What Obama's plan does is vastly increase the size of our already unsustainable federal government and adds to our collective tax burden, which makes everyone POORER over the long run.
Obama and the Democrats are just wrong. They don't get it. Obama's so-called "change" is just more of the same thing that has gotten America into the fiscal problems we face today. We HAVE to defeat ObamaCare. There is a better way, and the majority of Americans know it.
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The following video is from 2005, when the Senate majority Republicans were contemplating the use of the "nuclear option" to stop the minority Democrats from blocking Bush's judicial nominees. The Republicans wanted the judicial nominees to be allowed an up or down vote. Adoption of the nuclear option would have changed longstanding Senate rules requiring a 60-vote supermajority to overcome a filibuster and invoke cloture (ending debate and allowing a vote). With the nuclear option, only a simple majority of votes (51) would have been required for cloture. In 2005, the Republicans wanted the nuclear option to apply only to judicial nominees. The nuclear option was never implemented. Instead, a deal was struck between the Democrats and Republicans regarding Bush's judicial nominees.
Here is how Democrats reacted to the spectre of the nuclear option back in 2005.
My, how things change. Now those same Democrats are pondering the use of reconciliation (abandoning the 60-vote supermajority and invoking cloture with a simple 51-vote majority) to pass ObamaCare, one of the largest pieces of legislation in American history. This isn't about some Bush judicial nominees, like it was in 2005. This is about 1/6th of the U.S. economy, and many Democrats, including the President, want to silence the minority voice.
At thursday's' health care summit, the following occurred regarding reconciliation. From NBC:
In yet another exchange he had with GOP Sen. John McCain, President Obama affirmed that the Democratic Senate would pass any health-care fixes via reconciliation, if he and the Republicans were unable to reach an agreement.
It began when McCain mentioned his "Gang of 14" work to resolve the Senate stand-off on George W. Bush's judicial nominees. McCain warned that using reconciliation would have potentially disastrous results.
Obama suggested that reconciliation was a legitimate course of action. "I do think [the American people] want a vote on how we're going to move this forward," he said. "A majority vote makes sense."
You see, when Obama wants to dispense with Senate supermajority rules, it "makes sense." When Republicans thought about doing it in 2005 for Bush's judicial nominees, Obama fretted that it would lead to "majoritarian absolute power" that would "change the Senate forever," that is was "not what the Founders intended."
In other words, Obama is an absolute hypocrite with no integrity whatsoever. This isn't the Audacity Of Hope, it's the Arrogance Of Power, and our lightweight President thinks the American people are too dumb to notice. He also thinks the American people don't care. He said that at the health care summit too. Well, you better care America, because over 200 years of unlimited Senate debate on major legislative issues may be coming to a crashing end if the Dems use reconciliation now. If the supermajority requirement is thrown away on this issue, it can and will be thrown away on anything. Things WILL never be the same. The minority voice will be in effect silenced.
Those Democrats on the video were right in principle in 2005, even if they are on the verge of betraying their own stated beliefs now.
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I suppose I should write about yesterday's bipartisan health care summit, although I'm not sure exactly why. Nothing was accomplished. Nothing changed. Republicans believe the existing comprehensive health care reform bills should be scrapped and a more incremental approach should be taken. Democrats believe the whole health care shebang should be changed with one 2,400-2.700 page bill. We already knew these things going into the historic health care summit, and that's where things stand today. What both sides do agree upon is that we need health insurance reform of some kind.
Btw, the only reason I'm calling the health care summit 'historic' is because CNN referred to it that way about 5,000 times yesterday. I'm not sure what was so historic about it, except for the fact that it occurred. By that definition, everything that happens is historic. By that definition, I'm writing a historic blog entry right now. However, I don't think I'll be notifying the Smithsonian of my efforts. I'm not that impressed with myself, and I wasn't that impressed with the health care summit. It wasn't exactly the signing of the Declaration of Independence or the Emancipation Proclamation. Those are things I consider historic. I suppose if one hadn't paid any attention to the nearly year-long health care debate, and then watched yesterday's summit, it would have been illuminating. For anyone who has been paying attention, it was just more of the same. I'm trying to think of anything I learned that I didn't know before, and I can only think of one thing. Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN) said if we took away all the profits of all the insurance companies, it would pay for 2 days of health care, leaving the other 363 days of the year still to be paid. I didn't know that before.
There were some ironic moments in the summit. The despicable Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) tried to claim that none of the Democrats were talking about using reconciliation to pass the health care reform bill, in response to Lamar Alexander urging Democrats not to use it. After Reid's denial that the Democrats were considering using reconciliation, several other Dems voiced their tacit approval of the tactic, including the President hiimself, thus disproving Reid. You always can tell when Harry Reid is lying…his lips move.
President Obama and Senator Alexander got into an argument over whether the Senate health care reform bill raises or lowers premiums. Alexander pointed out that CBO scoring shows premiums will be 10-13% higher than they were before health care reform. Obama said no, they would be 14-20% lower. Who was correct ? Alexander was correct, but there are some qualifications. If a person could keep the exact same private insurance they had now under ObamaCare, that person's premiums would be lower, as Obama claimed. However, under ObamaCare you CAN'T keep the exact same insurance you have now. That's the idea behind reform. Under ObamaCare, there would be all kinds of new government regulations (such as coverage of pre-existing conditions and a ban on recissions) which would drive your insurance premiums higher, as both the CBO and Alexander pointed out. You would get better coverage with ObamaCare, but it will cost more. Also, a lot of individual people would get cheaper coverage due to the subsidies under ObamaCare, but that doesn't drive down the overall cost, it merely transfers the burden from one person to another. The overall cost of ObamaCare is far higher than what we have now, but it will cover 30 million more people. As Obama said himself, covering all those people will cost money.
While I'm on the subject of cost, Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI) obliterated the Democrats dishonest cost estimates and deficit reductions claims for ObamaCare, as follows:
"The Majority Leader said the bill scores as reducing deficit by $131 billion over the next 10 years.
First a little bit about CBO: I work with them every single day; very good people; great professionals. They do their jobs well. But their job is to score what is placed in front of them. And what has been placed in front of them is a bill that is fill of gimmicks and smoke and mirrors.
Now what do I mean when I say that?
First off, the bill has ten years of tax increases and ten years of Medicare cuts to pay for six years of spending. The true ten year cost when subsidies kick-in? $2.3 trillion.
The bill is full of gimmicks that more than erase the false claim of deficit reduction:
- $52 billion of savings is claimed by counting increased Social Security payroll revenues. These dollars are already claimed for future Social Security beneficiaries, and claiming to offset the cost of this bill either means were double-counting or were not going to pay Social Security benefits.
- $72 billion in savings is claimed from the CLASS Act long-term care insurance. These so-called savings are not offsets, but rather premiums collected to pay for future benefits. Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad has called these savings, A ponzi scheme that would make Bernie Madoff proud.
Additionally, the nearly half-trillion dollars in Medicare cuts cannot be counted twice. Medicare is in dire need of reform in order to make certain that we can ensure health security for future seniors.
Using Medicare as a piggy bank, it raids a half trillion dollars from retirees health coverage to fund the creation of another open-ended health care entitlement.
The Presidents chief Medicare actuary says up to 20% of Medicare providers may go bankrupt or stop taking Medicare beneficiaries as a result. Millions of seniors who have chosen Medicare Advantage will lose the coverage they now enjoy.
Objections to the policy aside, you cannot use these savings twice to both extend the life of Medicare and to pay for other spending. The half-trillion dollars in Medicare cuts are either to extend the programs solvency or to reduce the cost of this deficit but not both as its authors claim.
When you strip away the double-counting of Medicare cuts, the so-called savings from Social Security payroll taxes and the CLASS Act, the deficit increases by $460 billion over first ten years and $1.4 trillion over second ten years.
Finally, one of the most expensive and most cynical of the gimmicks applies to Medicare physician payments, the so-called Doc Fix.
By your own estimate, the Doc Fix adds an additional $371 billion to the cost of health care reform. With the price tag beyond what most Americans could handle, the Majority decided to simply remove this costly provision and deal with it in a stand-alone bill.
Ignoring this additional cost does not remove it from the backs of taxpayers. Hiding spending doesnt reduce spending."
After this de-pantsing of health care reform costs, the President immediately changed the subject to Medicare Advantage. No Democrat offered a shred of evidence to counter Ryan. Good job, Rep. Ryan. The truth will set you (and us) free.
In general, I noticed that the Democrats tended to offer emotional pleas for health care reform, while Republicans tended to offer more logical solutions. A slew of Democrats told what I call 'poor little Jimmy' stories, about how poor little Jimmy needed a kidney transplant or something, and the mean old insurance company wouldn't pay for it, or poor little Jimmy's parents couldn't afford health insurance because Jimmy's dad lost his job, etc. Democrats specialize in using the sad story as a weapon. It's like they are saying Americans should go along with absolutely anything the Democrats propose, because the Democrats are so GOOD, so moral. This kind of anti-logical thinking can be dangerous, because if we bankrupt our country or destroy our health care system in the process of "fixing" health care insurance, we'll have even more 'poor little jimmy' stories than we have now. We can't think only with our hearts. We must think with our heads as well. I'd love to be able to wave a magic wand and have everybody get comprehensive health insurance that will cover everybody and everything for ten cents per month, but it just isn't realistic. As they say, there's no such thing as a free lunch.
In summary, if you look at health care reform as a moral obligation, a right, then you might favor ObamaCare, the costs be damned. If you look at it as a massive increase in entitlements when the country is already suffocating under the weight of existing entitlements, if you look at it as increasing taxes on our struggling economy and imposing new burdens on our already struggling businesses, if you look at it as another massive increase in the size of big government, then you are probably against ObamaCare. The polls show the majority of people are against ObamaCare (but for health care reform in general). This lends some popular support for the Republicans 'back to the drawing board' suggestion.
If you missed the health care summit, the Washington Post has a transcript here.
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For most of the last year, I thought the Republican party should have been the party of 'no.' Resisting Obama's health care takeover, the stimulus boondoggle, and cap-and-trade….those were definitely times for the GOP to say 'NO'.
But lately, the GOP has been saying 'NO' to things they should be saying 'YES' to, such as the jobs bill and the Congressional deficit reduction committee.
The cornerstone of the $15 billion jobs bill is to give employers tax credits for hiring new workers. How can the GOP be against that, other than to resist the Democrats ? For the last year, Republicans have been rightly calling the stimulus package a failure because of it's enormous cost and because it didn't do enough to help the private sector, but then when the jobs bill comes up to help private sector businesses, including small businesses, the GOP votes against it. The GOPers will say 'we voted against the jobs bill because it's money we don't have, and it will add to the deficit.' That may be true as a standalone policy, but….the GOP voted against the deficit reduction committee !…which could have reduced government spending and voila!, more than offset the cost of the jobs bill. In addition, creating jobs will reduce the deficit by increasing government revenue, which has fallen due to rising unemployment. By voting against both policies, which have traditionally been policies Republicans would embrace, Republicans have in effect voted against their own stated beliefs in tax cuts and deficit reduction.
New Senator Scott Brown (R-MA) and four other Republicans broke ranks with the party to help pass the jobs bill. Good for them. As a result of the GOP helping to shoot down the deficit reduction committee, President Obama is forming his own deficit reduction committee, which is a much weaker substitute for a Congressional deficit reduction committee. Congress is where the legislative authority to make budget cuts resides. The President's committee has no such power. It is more of a cosmetic exercise, and the GOP is partly to blame for that.
The GOPers are saying the deficit reduction committee is just a front for the Democrats to justify tax increases, but GOP involvement could have helped insure that it wasn't. If the Dems had only proposed big tax increases and little in the way of spending cuts (as they probably would have), then the GOP could have rightly highlighted that and pointed out that the Democrats were not serious about reducing government spending. Instead, the party of 'no' missed the boat altogether, and the country missed a chance to reduce the deficit, which is our number one long-term problem.
Thanks for nothing, GOP. After a year of complaining about the lack of bipartisanship, you missed two golden opportunities to engage in it. You just became what you've been complaining about.
In fairness to the GOP, it wasn't only Republicans who voted against the Congressional deficit reduction committee. 23 Republicans voted against it, but 23 Democrats also voted against it. The final vote was 53-46, seven votes shy of adopting the committee. There was a lack of seriousness and bipartisanship from both sides of the aisle, and our deficit problem remains unaddressed. Shame, shame. This is why Americans are dissatisfied with both parties, and the political games they play.
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