American support for the Democratic healthcare plan continues to fall and each new appearance of President Obama, Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi seems to have the effect of chipping away at what little remains. The White House claims that the loss of support only means they haven’t done an effective job of “explaining” the initiative while Congressional Democrats blame the Republicans and corporate America for seeding the discussion with lies. Neither school of thought will be effective at selling the proposal because both contain the same message; the American people are ignorant and gullible.
The President and his friends in Congress will not win the hearts of the American people by telling them that their opposition to his plan is because he didn’t use little words that they would understand. Are Progressive Democrats so arrogant that they believe their plan has very little approval simply because people can't understand it? The American people have actually taken a long hard look at the legislation and are appalled at what they’ve found. The waning support for healthcare reform has nothing to do with the rhetoric of talk radio, Fox news or Congressional Republicans and has even less to do with televised commercials. It does however; tie in very neatly with the ever increasing list of broken promises and lies attributed to this President. The fact is that the American people do not trust Barack Obama and have even less faith in the actions of Congress. The deficit of trust is so bad that only four in ten Americans would shake the President’s hand without examining it first and that drops to one in five if you are talking about a Congressman.
As the White House struggles to redefine the argument, they have obviously reached out to their friends in the Liberal Press. The real polls have shown that 60% of America wants no part of the Democrat’s healthcare plan so the media is now attempting to reverse those numbers by targeting poll questions to reinforce the President’s assertion that they simply didn’t explain it well enough. A recent poll conducted by Newsweek, or should I say “News-weak”, states that the 49% that oppose the healthcare bill virtually disappear as people were made aware of what the bill contains. By dissecting the bill and asking about individual components, they claim that their poll shows a huge increase in support for the individual provisions this bill would offer.
If News-weak were honest instead of engaging in a battle of semantics, they would have asked the real questions. How much are those provisions worth to you? News-weak claims that 81% support a healthcare insurance marketplace or “exchange” where individuals can compare plans and buy insurance at a competitive rate. What they didn’t tell the respondents is that current Federal Law prohibits insurance companies from competing across state lines. An Exchange would give us new insurance options but this plan requires an entirely new and extremely expensive Federal bureaucracy to do what the free market system could provide for free. Removing Federal roadblocks to insurance competition would give us all of those options without the additional burden of supporting a new Federal Agency.
They continue by citing that 67% thought healthcare insurers should be required to cover anyone who applies, including those with pre-existing conditions. That is doable provided you are willing to pay for a whole new type of policy. There is no other insurance on the planet that is expected to cover a pre-existent condition. Anyone that has collision insurance on their car knows that insurance companies require photographs of the insured vehicle to prevent people from filing claims for “pre-existent” conditions. You cannot purchase homeowner’s insurance after the flood has swept your house away and expect that your new insurance will somehow rebuild it for you. Auto and homeowner’s insurance pays one claim for one incident so health insurers are already providing far more coverage than any other type of insurance by providing on-going care for a chronic condition.
Once again, no one has come up with the dollar and cent’s comparison of what this new expanded coverage will cost. Some estimate place the increase at more than 100% over current premium costs. Are the currently insured willing to pay double for their healthcare plans if the government is given the authority to force insurers to cover pre-existent conditions for people that did not have the good sense to have insurance to start with? After all, we are talking about pre-existent conditions which means that they had the condition before attempting to purchase insurance.
News-weak also said that 75 percent of the poll respondents agreed with requiring most businesses to offer health insurance to their employees, with incentives for small-business owners to do so. Of course we already know, simply by looking at the unemployment rate, increased taxes and government mandates on business results in fewer employees. The healthcare plan currently being discussed is estimated to cost America another two million jobs if fully implemented; something that is bad for any economy and just plain insane is a recession. Large businesses have the means to outsource overseas, completely avoiding the mandates and small business incentives fail to sufficiently cover the actually cost of government requirements; so while the incentives look good on paper, they rarely have the desired results.
Since News-weak decided to use their slanted poll to insinuate that there is consensus support for key provisions within the healthcare bill if the public been adequately informed, they have provided me with the license I need to dissect their article and assumptions. My quick summary of the article is that in more than two-thousand pages of legislation, there are five key principals out of the eight that they detailed, that Americans can support provided you don’t tell them what it will cost them. Out of those five principals, only three were supported by a large enough margin to have been worthy of mention. The smallest percentage noted was 67% so we can safely assume the remaining two must have been over 50%, but not by much.
Nowhere does the article mention that support for these few principals had changed the respondents’ minds about their lack of support for the Democrat’s bill. Most of the legitimate polls I’ve seen show that there are several ideas that most Americans agree on but those polls clearly show that Americans want the current plan scrapped and new, bipartisan negotiations opened with these basic ideas included in the discussion. America has no faith that Congress can create an agency that can run our healthcare system better than the free market can and in fact, most Americans think that the Federal government will do a far worse job overall.
Of course, no News-weak article on healthcare would be complete without resurrecting the anger of last year’s town hall meetings. The News-weak article used to present their poll data included a photograph of an angry town hall participant from last summer complete with the caption “Town Hall Face - An unsightly condition caused by unsanitary health-care politics.” While they are trying to show would-be protestors how ugly that can look, for once they aren’t howling about the angry zealots disrupting the peace of public meetings. Instead they are following the lead of the President and Congressional Democrats; blaming the climate of anger on some phantom misinformation campaign.
This tells me two things. First, even News-weak has finally recognized that the opposition to this bill is far wider than originally thought and denigrating that dissent only angers the very people they are hoping to sway. Second, since there was no mention of the Tea Party, the tide might be turning for that movement, at least in the press. Now that Tea Party membership has swollen to more than fifteen million Americans, they are too large to be called a fringe group of right wing extremists. In fact, the newest membership demographics are showing some interesting trends. Independents and Conservative Democrats are aligning with Tea Parties all over the country as they become more disenfranchised by the Progressive movement within the “new” Democratic Party. Even the few remaining Congressional Democrats that still have some measure of self respect are distancing themselves from this dangerous radical ideology and are switching Parties or just leaving politics altogether.
The next few weeks will be extremely interesting. People are not buying the President’s promise of meaningful healthcare reform and Congressional Democrats might as well be selling “Snake Oil” for all the credibility they currently hold with the public. It is clear that the healthcare plan represents something far more important to Progressives than mere savings for Americans otherwise they would yield to public opinion and scrap this mess instead of risking wholesale losses in this November’s elections. The question that needs to be answered is the one that was not asked by News-weak; “Why is the President and the Progressive arm of the Democratic Party so obsessed with passing this bill?” As Shakespeare had written “Me thinks the Lady protests too much”. There is nothing in the bill to warrant this kind of devotion unless it is really just a spring board for the kind of reform the President wanted before his campaign began in earnest…a European style, single payer, government controlled Universal Healthcare System.
Paul
The President and his friends in Congress will not win the hearts of the American people by telling them that their opposition to his plan is because he didn’t use little words that they would understand. Are Progressive Democrats so arrogant that they believe their plan has very little approval simply because people can't understand it? The American people have actually taken a long hard look at the legislation and are appalled at what they’ve found. The waning support for healthcare reform has nothing to do with the rhetoric of talk radio, Fox news or Congressional Republicans and has even less to do with televised commercials. It does however; tie in very neatly with the ever increasing list of broken promises and lies attributed to this President. The fact is that the American people do not trust Barack Obama and have even less faith in the actions of Congress. The deficit of trust is so bad that only four in ten Americans would shake the President’s hand without examining it first and that drops to one in five if you are talking about a Congressman.
As the White House struggles to redefine the argument, they have obviously reached out to their friends in the Liberal Press. The real polls have shown that 60% of America wants no part of the Democrat’s healthcare plan so the media is now attempting to reverse those numbers by targeting poll questions to reinforce the President’s assertion that they simply didn’t explain it well enough. A recent poll conducted by Newsweek, or should I say “News-weak”, states that the 49% that oppose the healthcare bill virtually disappear as people were made aware of what the bill contains. By dissecting the bill and asking about individual components, they claim that their poll shows a huge increase in support for the individual provisions this bill would offer.
If News-weak were honest instead of engaging in a battle of semantics, they would have asked the real questions. How much are those provisions worth to you? News-weak claims that 81% support a healthcare insurance marketplace or “exchange” where individuals can compare plans and buy insurance at a competitive rate. What they didn’t tell the respondents is that current Federal Law prohibits insurance companies from competing across state lines. An Exchange would give us new insurance options but this plan requires an entirely new and extremely expensive Federal bureaucracy to do what the free market system could provide for free. Removing Federal roadblocks to insurance competition would give us all of those options without the additional burden of supporting a new Federal Agency.
They continue by citing that 67% thought healthcare insurers should be required to cover anyone who applies, including those with pre-existing conditions. That is doable provided you are willing to pay for a whole new type of policy. There is no other insurance on the planet that is expected to cover a pre-existent condition. Anyone that has collision insurance on their car knows that insurance companies require photographs of the insured vehicle to prevent people from filing claims for “pre-existent” conditions. You cannot purchase homeowner’s insurance after the flood has swept your house away and expect that your new insurance will somehow rebuild it for you. Auto and homeowner’s insurance pays one claim for one incident so health insurers are already providing far more coverage than any other type of insurance by providing on-going care for a chronic condition.
Once again, no one has come up with the dollar and cent’s comparison of what this new expanded coverage will cost. Some estimate place the increase at more than 100% over current premium costs. Are the currently insured willing to pay double for their healthcare plans if the government is given the authority to force insurers to cover pre-existent conditions for people that did not have the good sense to have insurance to start with? After all, we are talking about pre-existent conditions which means that they had the condition before attempting to purchase insurance.
News-weak also said that 75 percent of the poll respondents agreed with requiring most businesses to offer health insurance to their employees, with incentives for small-business owners to do so. Of course we already know, simply by looking at the unemployment rate, increased taxes and government mandates on business results in fewer employees. The healthcare plan currently being discussed is estimated to cost America another two million jobs if fully implemented; something that is bad for any economy and just plain insane is a recession. Large businesses have the means to outsource overseas, completely avoiding the mandates and small business incentives fail to sufficiently cover the actually cost of government requirements; so while the incentives look good on paper, they rarely have the desired results.
Since News-weak decided to use their slanted poll to insinuate that there is consensus support for key provisions within the healthcare bill if the public been adequately informed, they have provided me with the license I need to dissect their article and assumptions. My quick summary of the article is that in more than two-thousand pages of legislation, there are five key principals out of the eight that they detailed, that Americans can support provided you don’t tell them what it will cost them. Out of those five principals, only three were supported by a large enough margin to have been worthy of mention. The smallest percentage noted was 67% so we can safely assume the remaining two must have been over 50%, but not by much.
Nowhere does the article mention that support for these few principals had changed the respondents’ minds about their lack of support for the Democrat’s bill. Most of the legitimate polls I’ve seen show that there are several ideas that most Americans agree on but those polls clearly show that Americans want the current plan scrapped and new, bipartisan negotiations opened with these basic ideas included in the discussion. America has no faith that Congress can create an agency that can run our healthcare system better than the free market can and in fact, most Americans think that the Federal government will do a far worse job overall.
Of course, no News-weak article on healthcare would be complete without resurrecting the anger of last year’s town hall meetings. The News-weak article used to present their poll data included a photograph of an angry town hall participant from last summer complete with the caption “Town Hall Face - An unsightly condition caused by unsanitary health-care politics.” While they are trying to show would-be protestors how ugly that can look, for once they aren’t howling about the angry zealots disrupting the peace of public meetings. Instead they are following the lead of the President and Congressional Democrats; blaming the climate of anger on some phantom misinformation campaign.
This tells me two things. First, even News-weak has finally recognized that the opposition to this bill is far wider than originally thought and denigrating that dissent only angers the very people they are hoping to sway. Second, since there was no mention of the Tea Party, the tide might be turning for that movement, at least in the press. Now that Tea Party membership has swollen to more than fifteen million Americans, they are too large to be called a fringe group of right wing extremists. In fact, the newest membership demographics are showing some interesting trends. Independents and Conservative Democrats are aligning with Tea Parties all over the country as they become more disenfranchised by the Progressive movement within the “new” Democratic Party. Even the few remaining Congressional Democrats that still have some measure of self respect are distancing themselves from this dangerous radical ideology and are switching Parties or just leaving politics altogether.
The next few weeks will be extremely interesting. People are not buying the President’s promise of meaningful healthcare reform and Congressional Democrats might as well be selling “Snake Oil” for all the credibility they currently hold with the public. It is clear that the healthcare plan represents something far more important to Progressives than mere savings for Americans otherwise they would yield to public opinion and scrap this mess instead of risking wholesale losses in this November’s elections. The question that needs to be answered is the one that was not asked by News-weak; “Why is the President and the Progressive arm of the Democratic Party so obsessed with passing this bill?” As Shakespeare had written “Me thinks the Lady protests too much”. There is nothing in the bill to warrant this kind of devotion unless it is really just a spring board for the kind of reform the President wanted before his campaign began in earnest…a European style, single payer, government controlled Universal Healthcare System.
Paul
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