A Health Care Horror Story about the House Bill

Here is the TRUTH about the House Health Care bill. It runs just over ten minutes and is a pure horror story of government control over whether you live or die and every bit of personal and business information of a nature Americans have always considered rightfully to be private.

The Perfect Storm

By Alan Caruba

The term, ‘”the perfect storm”, has come to mean how circumstances and bad judgments come together to create havoc and death.

I have begun to conclude that America is caught in a perfect storm. It didn’t occur overnight, but it has rapidly reached a point wherein the very life of the nation is at stake.

The tipping point, if I may be permitted another cliché, was the election of Barack Hussein Obama as President. Though efforts, including several books, attempted to flesh out what little was actually known about Obama, it was the skillful packaging that turned him into a rock star whose theme “hope and change” could and did mean anything the voter imagined.

Obama arrived in the Oval Office with virtually no paper trail. He had not ever managed a business, never made a payroll, and had not worked in the private sector. He had been “a community organizer” and had taught constitutional law as a lecturer at the University of Chicago. In this regard, he was spectacularly ill-prepared to make decisions regarding the greatest economy in the history of civilization.

He had been preceded by a Congress controlled by the Democrat Party as of the 2006 midterm elections as voters wearied of the long war in Iraq and, typically, the second term of then-President Bush. Leading the new Congress was, by any standard one could apply, two of the most stupid politicians to hold high office. Sen. Harry Reid (NV) was Senate Majority Leader and Rep. Nancy Pelosi (CA) was Speaker of the House.

Sen. Reid had famously said, “The war is lost” and Rep. Pelosi told the world that the CIA “lies to Congress all the time” and has called insurance companies “villains.” Not exactly a vote of confidence in the nation’s military or its intelligence agency. When did insurance companies, banks and investment firms become the enemy? The burst mortgage loan bubble was the creation of the federal government.

It is the perfect storm.

It was, however, the economy that took the first body blow with the sudden, though predicable, bursting of the mortgage loan “bubble.” There had been earlier warnings but as in any perfect storm, they were ignored. It goes back to the days of the Carter administration when legislation was passed to give everyone the “right” to own a home. Banks and mortgage firms were literally required by law to ignore normal lending caution. When there were more bad loans than good, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, government “entities”, owned more than half of all the mortgage loans in the nation.

At that point, in what can only charitably be called total panic, Congress authorized the U.S. Treasury to spend $700 billion in TARP funds to “bail out” troubled financial institutions instead of letting them fail. The word was that they were “too large to fail” and had to be rescued and there may be some truth to this, though Lehman Brothers was allowed to fail. To this day, Congress does not know much, if anything, about the distribution of TARP. It can’t even audit the Federal Reserve.

It is the perfect storm.

In a similar fashion, instead of allowing General Motors and Chrysler to go through the tried and true bankruptcy process, the government “invested” billions before, inevitably, they did undergo bankruptcy. The government now owns some 60% of GM; its unions own most of the rest. Its creditors are suing to get their legal and proper compensation. The government is not supposed and is not allowed to own private enterprises; (though it does own government “entities” like Amtrak which has never made a profit.)

It is the perfect storm.

The country is watching a “Cap-and-Trade” bill pass through Congress that everyone, including its authors, agrees is a massive tax on the use of electricity, one that will drive up the cost of electricity to every American and all business and industry in America. It is based on the assertion that “greenhouse gases” must be reduced to avoid “global warming”, but there is no global warming and greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide play no role in climate change.

When the cost of energy is increased, the cost of everything that depends on energy use increases and that is, well, everything.

At the same time, for decades the United States has placed every possible obstacle before the exploration and extraction of vast oil, natural gas, and coal resources that exist within the nation and offshore on its continental shelf. Plans for more than a hundred coal-fired plants have been abandoned despite a growing population that is using more electricity. There hasn’t been a single new refinery built since the 1970s. The construction of nuclear plants has been painfully slow due to regulatory hurdles. The nation’s electrical distribution grid was built largely in the 1950s and 60s. It is in desperate need of expansion.

While coal provides 50% of our electricity and nuclear 20%, the rest is taken up by natural gas and hydroelectricity (water). Just over 1% is provided by wind and solar energy and the government proposes to provide billions in subsidies to its producers.
In much the same fashion, the government mandates the inclusion of ethanol in all gasoline sold even though ethanol provides less energy and adds to the cost not only of the gasoline, but to food products that utilize corn, the primary source of ethanol. We are burning food to fuel cars, trucks, and buses.

It is the perfect storm.

Under the Obama administration, the nation is borrowing more and running up a deficit that is, in his own words, “unsustainable”, but the government is making no effort to seriously cut spending. Instead, it passed a “stimulus” bill that is largely devoted to helping states fund government mandates such as Medicare and Medicaid, thus failing to create any new jobs in the private sector, most of which would come from investment in infrastructure. The “stimulus” bill is pure pork, a political Christmas tree.

It is the perfect storm.

Meanwhile, it is no secret that the United States is the world’s policeman. Our navy ensures that the world’s vital sea lanes remain open. Our military has some 800 bases, large and small, around the world. It is engaged in fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan and it is withdrawing from active fighting in Iraq. Billions have been expended in both of these campaigns to defeat an enemy sworn to destroy America.

Then too the borders of the nation and its sovereignty are being ignored and reduced by the tide of illegal immigration and by ratification of United Nations treaties that supersede U.S. legislation and rights. An obscure group of bureaucrats in the Department of Commerce are still working on plans to merge the U.S., Canada, and Mexico into a single political and national entity called the North American Union.

It is the perfect storm.

The United States, an experiment in individual liberty and federal rule; a nation that survived a Civil War, that struggled another century to end racial discrimination, that fought in many wars including two world wars in the last century, is now disintegrating financially and will soon lack the means to provide adequate power to its cities and towns.

Most of the nation’s individual States are, for all intents and purposes, broke and laboring under public service sector union contracts that impose huge present and future costs on their citizens.

To the astonishment of every economist in the world, the White House and Congress are proposing to raise taxes in the midst of a recession. John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush all lowered taxes and made their recessions go away.

In mid-July, the Vice President said, “We have to go spend money to keep from going bankrupt.” That is impossible.

It is the perfect storm.

The nation’s voters are almost completely divided between those on the Left and those on the Right. There is an all-or-nothing, winner-takes-all quality to our political system and has existed since the FDR era. The middle ground of independent voters literally determines most elections or at least those that are no longer stolen such as the recent one in Minnesota that sent a former comedian to the Senate.

That brings us to the observation that we have a very unsavory group of politicians in government these days. There are exceptions, but the revelations of sexual infidelity or misconduct as well as outright theft have become routine. The vile politics of Chicago and Cook County have now been imported into the White House.

The worst development, however, is the creation of “czars” empowered to make and shape policy without ever being subject to review or oversight by Congress. That is a kind of gangster government.

Lastly, it comes as no news to anyone that the nation has been sinking into a era of decadence since the 1960s in which the consumption of illegal drugs is widespread and sexual license is reflected in popular entertainment as well as high divorce rates, single parents, and, of course, abortion. There’s a lot to be said for morality.

I am by nature an optimist and I remain hopeful that elections and protest movements will alter future events, but for now it is the perfect storm.

The Real Crisis is Obamacare

By Alan Caruba

President Obama has never met a crisis he didn’t love; particularly the ones that involve spending trillions of dollars. What fun it is to propose programs that involve borrowing or taxing Americans to death.

On June 9, the Associated Press reported, “President Barack Obama on Tuesday proposed budget rules that would allow Congress to borrow tens of billions of dollars and put the nation deeper in debt to jump-start the administration’s emerging health care overhaul.”

Since the stealth heathcare “reform” that Bill and Hillary Clinton tried to foist on Americans during the 1993-94 Congress, this “crisis” has been off the radar screen of Americans who have the audacity to think they should decide whether and how much health insurance they want and to expect healthcare that is not rationed on the basis of how old they are and other factors determined by some faceless government bureaucrat.

Liberals obsess over healthcare options because, of course, they want “fairness” no matter how much it will cost Americans in general and the economy in particular.

To that end, various “progressive” (liberal) groups have gotten together and have launched an $82 million campaign to support President Obama’s healthcare program. The umbrella for this massive public brainwashing is called Health Care for America Now. Why is it that everything Obama wants has to be done “now”? Oh yes, I forgot. It’s a “crisis.”

Health Care for America is directed by Richard Kirsch and has been joined by AFL-CIO, MoveOn.org, and Democracy for America, a group founded by former Democratic National Committee Chairman, Howard “the scream” Dean. The group is essentially a re-branded version of liberal lunatic groups.

An excellent analysis of Obamacare has been published by the Cato Institute in a May 21 Policy Analysis (No. 638) titled appropriately as “Seven Bad Ideas for Health Care Reform. Authored by Michael Tanner, it points out some very ugly truths.

--At the time of rising unemployment, the government would raise the cost of hiring workers by requiring employers to provide health insurance to their workers or pay a fee (tax) to subsidize government coverage.

--Every American would be required to buy an insurance policy that meets certain government requirements.

--A government-run plan similar to Medicare would be set up in competition with private insurance.

--The government would undertake comparative-effectiveness research and cost-effectiveness research and use the results to impose practice guidelines on providers, initially in Medicare and Medicaid, but ultimately extending the rationing to private insurance plans.

--Private insurance would face a host of new regulations.

--Subsidies would be available to help middle-income people purchase insurance while expanding Medicare and Medicaid.

--Finally, the government would subsidize and manage the development of a national system of electronic medical records.

According to a June 8 Bloomberg News report, “President Barack Obama wants Congress to consider taxing the wealthy instead of workers to pay for a health-care overhaul.” This is yet one more lie by the Obama administration in the run-up to impose the most vile form of government control over everyone’s lives imaginable.

The American Medical Association, the nation’s largest physician organization, has let it be known that it will oppose creation of a government-sponsored insurance plan.

The promise of the Declaration of Independence that everyone has a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness will be rendered meaningless by Obamacare if your life depends on government policies regarding healthcare.

A June 1 Business Week commentary pointed out that “there are only three ways to pay for universal coverage: Raise taxes, cut payments to medical providers, or ration care.” All three are the worst possible options imaginable.

“The Congressional Budget Office estimates that covering the uninsured could add anywhere from $1 trillion to $2 trillion to the federal budget over ten years,” said the BW commentary. “On top of that, government economists expect Medicare to run out of money in 2017 if current spending trends continue.”

Here’s a handy tip regarding estimates by government economists. Multiply them by a factor of ten!

As this healthcare horror awaits its run through Congress, think of it as a massive Medicare, the government program for seniors that cost 3.2 percent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product in 2008 and which will become insolvent this year! Medicare faces $34 trillion in unfunded liabilities; the cost of services for which seniors are eligible in the future.

According to the Medicare Trustees, the program will require a 134 percent increase in the payroll tax paid by every working American in order to remain solvent!

And this insane Democrat-controlled Congress wants to expand on Medicare while requiring everyone to purchase healthcare insurance, even if they don’t want to. Then it will compete against existing private insurance companies without having to have the funds in place as they must to meet their obligations.

This isn’t healthcare reform. It is the destruction of the best healthcare system in the world. It is the destruction of the nation’s economy. It, along with the tax on energy use, must be stopped.

We are being attacked by one “crisis” after another when the only one that matters is the restoration of the full faith and credit of the U.S. dollar. If the “health” of the U.S. dollar is not restored, nothing else will matter very much.

Healthcare is Your Business, Not the Government's

By Alan Caruba

I know spring has arrived because my seasonal allergy has returned. When it goes from winter to spring and sometimes fall to winter, I suffer all the usual symptoms. It happened last night, but I got up and took a Claritin pill and was able to survive the first attack. I renewed my supply today, giving thanks for Schering-Plough, the pharmaceutical company that spent millions to invent this drug.

No one ever talks about the millions pharmaceutical companies spend on “research and development”, nor the fact that for every new drug they discover there are any number that simply do not make it to the medical community or the shelves of your local pharmacy.

Yes, these companies do reap profits, but they need them in order to continue looking for the next new drug. They need those millions to get through the onerous and costly Food and Drug Agency’s approval process.

The Heartland Institute has published “More Choices, Better Health” a booklet ($2.95) by Bartley J. Madden, an independent researcher, about the FDA monopoly on which drugs make it to the marketplace and which do not.

Madden points out that we have grown accustomed to the monopoly, “but prior to 1962, new drugs had to pass only safety trials to be legally marketed.” It was left to physicians and consumers to determine how effective they were.

Today, it is a three-step process that takes an average of 8.5 years! If you want to know why drugs cost so much more, try calculating the millions involved in the R&D phase that is then followed by the millions that the approval phase costs.

In addition to an insane budget that Barack Obama wants the Congress to approve—one that will drive the nation’s spending through the ceiling and imposes huge deficits for years to come—the other item on his wish list is healthcare coverage for those people who are not insured.

This does not mean they will not be cared for if they are ill. The law requires that hospitals tend to the ill even if they arrive penniless and quite a few do. As often as not, they are illegal aliens.

The figure we keep hearing is that “46 million” Americans are uninsured. In a recent American Spectator article, Philip Klein dissected “The Myth of the 46 Million.” The figure comes from the Census Bureau in 2007.

As Klein points out, statistics can lie and liars can use statistics. For example, the same data shows “that 9.7 million of the uninsured are not citizens of the United States.”

The reality is that the Census Bureau made a guess about the number of people without health insurance and the figure they cited “more closely approximates the number of people who are uninsured at a specific point during the year” such as those between jobs that provide such insurance and “the number of people uninsured for the entire year.”

That brings the number closer to between 31 and 21 million people. At least 18.3 million of the uninsured were under 34, an age group that might conclude they are healthy enough to do without the cost of coverage.

A BlueCross BlueShield study determined that 8.2 million Americans are without coverage for the long haul because they are too poor to purchase health care insurance, but earn too much to qualify for government assistance. Remember, though, they too will receive health care when they show up at the emergency room.

The law requires that no one in need is ever turned away unless, of course, they showed up at the hospital for which Michelle Obama was formerly an executive. She devised a plan to send the poor to other hospitals in Chicago.

We have now come a long, long way from the “46 million” that Barack Obama and news media keep repeating.

What they don’t tell you, however, is just how astonishingly bad universal healthcare as practiced in England and Canada can be. In a recent article in Health Care News, a monthly Heartland Institute publication, Devon Herrick , a senior fellow and health care economist with the National Center for Policy Analysis, noted that in Canada, “at any given time, nearly 750,000 Canadians are waiting for a medical procedure. According to a report by the Commonwealth Fund, 42% of Canadians with chronic illnesses said they had to wait more than two months to see a specialist.”

The one thing that will ensure health care providers will provide the best care at the lowest price is the competition based on price and quality that is the hallmark of a free market economy.

It’s socialists like Obama who keep insisting that the government has to determine who gets health care, what kind of health care they receive, and how much hospitals and physicians can charge for it.

As Herrick says, “Instead of wasting time on a system that limits our choices, creates long waiting times, and can jeopardize our health, the United States should opt for a system of innovation and choice.”

Instead, Obama wants the government to creep ever more into every aspect of your life, every choice you make about anything essential to your well being, and to begin pre-school programs to indoctrinate your toddlers while requiring older ones enroll in “volunteer” programs that are anything but voluntary.

In October 2010, U.S. voters will have an opportunity to take control of Congress away from the Democrats and make Obama wait two years while he is rendered unable to do any more harm.

To enjoy the cartoon better, click on it to enlarge the image

Sailing on the USS Obama

By Alan Caruba

There’s a song, “Smooth Operator”, sung by the incomparable Sade that kept running through my head as I listened to Barack Obama conduct an hour-long press conference Tuesday evening.

At the very end, he referred to the American government and economy as “a big ocean liner” that doesn’t turn around swiftly and the last image that passed through my mind was that of the Titanic sinking beneath the waves of the chill Atlantic.

One is reminded why the crowds loved him as he campaigned for the presidency, their hearts beating as one, seeing before them the man who would bring “change” when elected.

He has brought change. His proposed budget would triple the national debt. According to the Congressional Budget Office, Obama’s proposed budget would generate deficits averaging almost $1 trillion a year in red ink over 2010-2019. Moreover, the deficit would never go below 4% of the size of the economy, which an Associated Press report noted were “figures that economists agree are unsustainable” The figure cited was $9.3 trillion over the next decade, “more than four times the deficits of Republican George W. Bush’s presidency.”

None of this seemed to perturb Obama.

What was most noticeable, if one was actually paying attention to the substance of what he was saying, was the repeated use of the word “invest”. Democrats never “spend” money, they “invest” it.

Obama wants to “invest” lots and lots and lots of money, most of which will have to be borrowed. He is focused on “long term growth” scanning the far horizon from the bridge of the USS Obama, plowing through a dark night of financial distress.

He offered a host of extremely bad ideas in order to get to the next shore. The Democrat Congress has set its face against any growth in the actual energy sources upon which the nation depends for electricity and for transportation.

There will be no exploration and drilling for oil and natural gas off the nearly 85% of the continental shelf where huge amounts are believed to exist. There will be no drilling in ANWR. There will be no new leases in states known to be sitting atop huge untapped reserves. As for the coal which provides just over 50% of all our electricity, the entire industry has been targeted for destruction by the President.

The notion that “clean” or “renewable” energy (solar and wind) will ever provide more than the 1% of electricity it presently does is a pipedream. That, however, is Obama’s only “solution.”

Imposing a "cap-and-trade" program of emissions credits on all energy use would chase major industries from the nation while doing nothing to end a global warming that is not happening.

There was much talk of reforming healthcare. A more competitive healthcare system would undoubtedly reduce costs, but that is not Obama’s vision, nor does he acknowledge that healthcare costs are rising in response to an aging American population, living longer lives, requiring more care.

He spoke of investing in education. We spend more per pupil in America than any other nation on Earth and we have one of the most failed educational systems in the world. Eliminating the Department of Education and one-size-fits-all programs would go far to improve education. Loosening the grip of the teacher’s unions would liberate the system entirely.

In point of fact, Obama, the smooth operator, just signed a “stimulus” bill with 9,000 earmarks that is not likely to achieve any real stimulus any time soon. His budget simply exacerbates the Democrat spending frenzy going on in Washington, D.C.

So, here we all are, sailing along on the USS Obama. The captain looks and sounds like he knows what he’s doing, but he is either clueless or deliberately plotting a course for the biggest ice berg he can find.

It’s time for the band to start playing “Nearer My God to Thee”.

Move Over, Slick Willy!

By Alan Caruba

Does it seem to you that Obama is seeking to dominate the news cycle with a lot of appearances on television? If so, you’re right. This is a presidency that understands that a large portion of the population will respond to the mere fact that he is on television, but not to the specifics of his message.

Even so, he is a masterful orator. He is so relaxed, so smooth, so apparently in control of his alleged facts, and has such a light touch when he needs it to inject a bit of humor that he challenges the likes of former President Bill Clinton for the moniker of “Slick.”

The contrast with former President George W. Bush is particularly sharp. Bush was one of the least articulate speakers, subject to all kinds of distracting quirks when he spoke, prone to malapropos, and an accent that most people associate with good ole’boys having a beer at the local bar.

Despite that, we tend to forget that Bush got most of his bills through Congress, especially spending bills like the Medicare Prescription program and “No Child Left Behind”, a liberal education program for which few have anything good to say. He was, however, unable to convince either Congress or most Americans that Social Security is a ponzi scheme that must inevitably fail.

Obama is utterly charming and beguiling and he knows it.

He has arrived at the Oval Office with one of the thinnest resumes for any actual achievement, other than running for office, of any prior President. At least Clinton and Bush had been governors, a common platform for the leap to the White House.

I hear from a lot of people who say the same thing. Obama scares them.

They have good cause. Few people are aware of the influence that Frank Marshall Davis had on the adolescent Obama. Davis was a newspaper journalist, poet, and organizer for the Hawaii Communist Party, part of the CPUSA. Born in Kansas, living much of his life in Chicago, he moved to Hawaii in 1948. He would claim that he had been “brain-washed for years after the Bolshevik revolutions.” An Afro-American, one can easily see how Obama would identify with him while being raised by his white grandparents.

When you combine the way Obama was marinated in communism during his teen years and, after an Ivy League education, followed his mentor’s footsteps to Chicago where he studied the techniques of “community organizer”, Saul Alinsky, the separate threads of Obama’s path to the White House begin to come together. Alinski literally wrote the book on how to deceive people into accepting communism.

Little wonder the inclusion of a major revision in healthcare was discovered buried deep in the so-called “stimulus” bill. The socialist healthcare programs in Canada, in England, and elsewhere are a horror. Imposing a socialist healthcare program on America has nothing to do with job creation and everything to do with expanding an ever growing and ever more intrusive government bureaucracy.

And yet Obama’s actual election margins are slim. He won by 53% in the general election with 46% of the voters choosing other candidates. Very nearly half of the voters did not and presumably still do not support him. They are the ones who are scared and they should be.

“We won” in a constitutional republic does not mean you are free to govern by executive order and with a majority in Congress that is determined to impose the largest spending bill in the history of the nation.

The refusal to compromise, a rush to impose legislation without the traditional debate and discussion process, and a cult around the man in the White House is a danger to the republic.

With less than a month in office, Obama has managed to unify the Republican Party in ways we have not seen in decades. They understand the danger even if they don’t have the votes to deter it.