What Is Reconciliation and Why Are We Using It?

I guess the President still hasn’t explained his healthcare plan adequately because there continues to be massive opposition where it counts most; the opinion of the American people. The healthcare summit was supposed to garner support for the Healthcare Reform Bill but curiously, the American people still reject it by a margin of 2 to 1 with most saying that the President should scrap the bill and start over in a truly non-partisan and transparent process. Most polls show that using reconciliation to pass the current bill would be disastrous for Democrats and should that occur, the 2010 mid-term election would be a referendum on the public’s disenchantment with the underhanded processes used by Democrats to force legislation through not just around the opposition of Republicans but moderate Democrats as well.

Main Street America may not have studied political science at Harvard but they do know when something smells bad. Senator John McCain raised a good point at the healthcare summit and rather than answer that point, the President chose to remind McCain that the campaign was over and the election results were in. The point McCain brought up was that if this bill is so good, then why did Congressional leadership have to buy the votes of so many Democrats? With the Democrats holding a majority in the house and a filibuster proof majority in the Senate for all of 2009, any good bill would have passed easily without a single Republican vote. Truthfully, if it were a good bill, there are an awful lot of moderate Republicans that would have voted for it too. It didn’t pass because it is a lousy bill and everyone knows it.

Now that public rejection of the healthcare bill swept Republican Scott Brown into the Senate seat once held by Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, Progressive Democrats are once again planning to use reconciliation to pass the bill with a simple majority; thwarting the appropriate process that requires a sixty vote majority. On Tuesday, the President sent a perfunctory letter to Republican Congressional leaders stating that he planned to incorporate four Republican ideas into the healthcare bill to gain their support. Of course the President knew his offer would be rejected because the four ideas he said he would include would not change the offensive nature of the bill. Honestly, it was never his intention to gain Republican support; it was merely his intention to be able to say that he tried to at his next photo op.

Republicans remain opposed to the bill because it is an issue of fundamental values. How could a Republican support a bill that would in fact, endanger the Republic? Adding forty pages of low priority Republican ideas to a twenty-seven hundred page tax and spend debacle does not make it less of a debacle. Let’s face it, you can’t add forty pounds of sugar to a ton and a half of salt and call it candy. Truthfully, the talk of reconciliation is being blamed on Republican opposition to the legislation but is that really the issue? I’m sure with some arm twisting, threats of base closures and other funding tricks they could have convinced at least one Republican to vote for this mess. The truth is that if Scott Brown had not won the election they would probably have had to use reconciliation anyway. Even now, there are questions as to whether or not they will have the votes they need because of defections within their own party. Despite the rants of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, moderate Democrats still have to answer to their constituents and their constituents are telling them to vote no or else.

Harry Reid and Barrack Obama have both said that use of reconciliation to forward the Healthcare Bill was perfectly acceptable and that Republican had used this measure numerous times in the past. What Harry Reid didn’t tell you was that every time reconciliation was used by a Republican administration that there were vociferous cries of tyranny from the minority Party which happened to be the same Democrats that are now considering the measure appropriate and correct. What they also failed to mention was that reconciliation had only been used as intended by the act that formed it, The Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 which can be read in text form at - http://uscode.house.gov/download/pls/02C17B.txt .

So what is reconciliation? During the 1972 election campaign, President Nixon asked Congress for authority to cut Federal spending at his own discretion to remain under the proposed $250 billion ceiling for fiscal year 1973. Congress refused to grant such an open-ended grant of authority. Congress and the White House ultimately clashed sharply over President Nixon's aggressive impoundment of (refusal to spend) funds appropriated by Congress. In 1972, as a result of the battle between the Congress and the President, Congress created a Joint Study Committee on Budget Control, composed of members from the House and Senate appropriations and tax committees as well as two members from each Chamber. Included in the committee’s recommendations was a means of improving “the opportunity for the Congress to examine the budget from an overall point of view, together with a congressional system of deciding priorities.'' The report went on to state that it was "important to recognize that the budget deficit be no larger (or the surplus no smaller) than the Congress considers appropriate for economic or other reasons.''

In response to both the frustration generated by the fractured congressional budget process and the perceived encroachment of the executive branch into the budgetary turf of Congress, Congress passed the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974. The major purposes of this Act were to reassert the congressional role in budgeting, to add some centralizing influence to the Federal budget process, and to constrain the use of impoundments.

One of the most important developments to emerge from the 1974 Act has been reconciliation, a process that allows Congress to change existing laws to conform with the tax and spending levels established in a proposed budget. This developed into an important procedure for implementing the policy decisions and assumptions as enunciated in a budget resolution; a policy that was not envisioned when the Budget Act was written. Under the original design of the 1974 Budget Act, reconciliation had a fairly narrow purpose. It was expected to be used in conjunction with a second resolution, was to apply to a single fiscal year and be directed primarily at spending and revenue legislation acted on between the adoption of the first and second budget resolutions.

Regardless of the rants of Harry Reid, reconciliation has never before used by either Party to pass legislation that hasn’t already been presented to the President. It was meant to move important legislation beyond the roadblock of a reluctant President and the subservient members of his Party in Congress. This is clearly a violation of ethical behavior on the part of Reid, Pelosi and Obama to mutate a clearly defined budgetary process to enact unpopular legislation.

Again, the use of this legislative “trick” to move the bill forward is not being used to bypass the Republican Party. It is being used to bypass moderate Democrats that realize what this bill means and are as reluctant to vote for it as the Republicans are. Unfortunately for those moderates, the openly tyrannical antics of the Democratic leadership and Progressive Democrats will damage their prospects for reelection as well. The damage this legislation will bring cannot remain hidden once it is past and that is when those that refused to believe the warnings will be aghast at what has been done. It is nothing less than the creation of a government agency that will have all the authority it needs to unilaterally control ever aspect of healthcare in this country.

Paul

What is actually in the Healthcare Bill?

During the healthcare summit there was a charged moment where President Obama accused Republican Senator Lamar Alexander of misrepresenting how the cost of private healthcare insurance premiums would change if the current Senate bill were adopted. The President chided Senator Alexander, speaking down to him as you would an unruly child, “This is one of those times when it is important to get the facts straight” insisting that premiums for private healthcare insurance would go down under his plan.

As it turns out, the President’s figures are, as usual, a product of careful crafted semantics. According to the CBO analysis, the cost for private healthcare insurance will rise between ten and thirteen percent but the president doesn’t want to discuss that. What he referred to are plans that will be constructed with the new mandates for increased coverage; plans that the insurers will have to provide if they wish to sell their insurance as one of the “approved” plans through the proposed exchange. If private insurance currently offered plans that cover pre-existing conditions and if they offered plans that provided portability and only if these plans were available to anyone regardless of which state they live in; these expanded plans offered through the government exchange would be lower in cost than you could have purchased them without the exchange.

Well, that assessment may be theoretically correct but it’s hardly honest. Those plans do not exist because the mandates that will force insurers to provide the key components have not been passed into law, at least not yet. Senator Alexander was absolutely correct in stating that the plan that you have now will see a price increase of ten to thirteen percent as a direct result of the passage of this bill. How the President claims that premium costs for a plan that doesn’t exist yet will drop is nothing more than D.C. trickery and can only be achieved if you are willing to imagine what those plans would have cost if they did exist in the absence of a national exchange, premium caps and government subsidies.

If just the first five minutes of the summit exposed such a blatant lie, then what else is there? Let’s start with their favorite phrase…budget neutral. The President said he would not sign a bill that added one dime to the deficit. Really? This week, everyone is aware of Senator Bunning’s resistance to the passage of a bill that will provide an emergency extension of unemployment benefits and will extend Medicare payments that were facing an automatic 21% cut. The emergency bill has a price tag of ten billion dollars and Bunning wants to know how it is being paid for before he votes for it. The Senate just passed “Pay-go”, a Senate law that requires them to offset new spending with either tax increases or corresponding cuts in other areas of the budget. It is Bunning’s opinion that if the can’t find ten billion for this, then what is the possibility that they will obey the Pay-go mandate on larger bills that require even harder choices; like healthcare.

As it turns out, the Healthcare bill would have added to the deficit even with the planned $500 billion in Medicare cuts and $500 billion in new taxes so they resorted to nothing less than voodoo economics to show the neutrality the President said he would require. The taxes and spending cuts begin in year one while the expenditures are pushed off until 2014. The CBO analysis shows ten years worth of income but only six years of expenses but since Congress didn’t request an analysis of the ten years from 2014 to 2024, the report doesn’t show the real deficits in the legislation. The 2014-2024 analysis was performed through a series of independent audits and estimates the real deficit to be anywhere from $2.7 trillion dollars to a whopping $5 trillion dollars. Why don’t I believe the CBO? Well, they can only score what is given to them and this bill was written by the masters of deception to intentionally take advantage of the scoring system. Congress used the same tactics to pass Johnson’s “Great Society” and the result was the CBO said Medicare and Medicaid would only cost $9 billion dollars a year by now and it is currently a mind numbing $408 billion dollars or 13.34% of the Federal budget. With all this in mind, do you trust the CBO?

Worse yet is the $500 billion in Medicare cuts are being counted twice; once to reduce the cost of the Medicare program and then again to expand Medicare coverage to the poor. Well, everyone knows you can’t spend the same dollar twice; everyone that is, except Congress. That logic reminds me of the old cartoons where the character had a string tied to his nickel so he could pluck it back out of the pay phone after making his call. Yeah, it was an old cartoon. The point is that was theft and so is this. In fact, if anyone else tried this budget maneuver, especially public companies, it would be a criminal act but somehow, Congress has exempted itself from any real examination so I guess it’s only a criminal act if someone is watching. That this is the lesson we have learned from the actions of Congress is shameful.

Republicans have been asking for the retirement of a Federal regulation that prohibits health insurers from competing across State lines. The President says this is already in the Senate bill; but is it? What the Republicans are talking about is an actual free market reform where the insurance companies themselves would advertise their product and compete with each other. What the President is talking about is the exchange. The exchange would feature plans from a whole host of providers that meet the government seal of approval. These plans would be available only through the exchange so there would be no competition between plans across State lines unless the Federal government has its fingers in the middle of it. What is the difference? Free competition across State lines doesn’t cost the American taxpayer anything. The exchange is a part of this multi-trillion dollar healthcare bill.

If you have a plan that you like you can keep it also seems to have been subtly changed. If you’ve noticed, they haven’t really been saying that lately and have changed it by saying instead “you can keep your doctor”. Ok, you can keep your doctor as opposed to what? Seeing a plumber or a used car salesman for medical care? They gave up on saying that you can keep a health insurance plan you like because that is simply not true with this legislation. Certain plans that meet government approval will be “grandfathered” in, only to be phased out at a later date. Of course the grandfathering will depend on whether or not those plans will even exist once the mandates for expanded care and pre-existing conditions have been imposed. Those that already meet government approval are the higher priced “Cadillac” plans that will have an additional tax placed on them. When that tax will be imposed depends largely on which plan makes it through the reconciliation process. The President’s alternative delays that tax until 2018 while the Senate bill imposes the tax immediately.

This is just the tip of the iceberg with other, more nefarious, details carefully hidden from view until the controlling board is formed and the mandates start flowing from that body of twenty-six Presidential appointees, shaping the care you will receive. When the President says there are no death panels or rationing in this bill, he is right; to a point. The reason that the opposition cannot find them and the President can stand firm on his claims that they don’t exist is that the bulk of what this “reform” legislation is capable of doing is entirely in the hands of the new bureaucracy it will create. The health benefits board will determine what benefits will be covered and who will receive them. We saw a preview of that when the government panel that advises the nation on healthcare issues released a document downgrading the importance of breast cancer screenings; raising the age when first screenings should take place and limiting them to once every two years instead of the currently recommended annual examination.

Of course, doctors and women’s rights advocates across the county shouted out against this and the government dismissed the outcry, saying it was merely a suggestion but what happens when the government controlled health benefits board begin to make policy that affects medical insurance coverage based on those recommendations? We already have a fiscal crisis looming that will affect every man, woman and child in America as our deficit and debt spiral out of control. If I am right in my assessment and all we will have after ten years of government control of health insurance is government health insurance or “Universal” care, will that care be rationed because of the financial crisis? Of course it will. All you need to do is look at the nations that have already adopted a single payer healthcare system and every one of them has rationed care, waiting lists or both.

Paul

What is the Real Goal of Healthcare Reform?

There were angry people yelling out against the healthcare bill at town hall meetings and the House passed it in a rare late night, weekend session of Congress. There were massive protests against the healthcare bill in Washington DC and at every Senator’s local offices all over the country. Despite these protests, the Senate still passed the bill in another late night, weekend session of Congress. The approval rating for the President and the Congress have plummeted in response to those votes and they still vowed to proceed. Democrats lost major elections in New Jersey, Virginia and Massachusetts with the election of Scott Brown being a clear referendum against the healthcare bill and the President still stood before the nation at the State of the Union Address and said they must push forward on healthcare. The polls in favor of the healthcare bill are an abysmal 37% and now the Senate wants to use the legislative trick of reconciliation to move it through with a simple majority. The real question is why?

If this were a simple matter of providing affordable healthcare for all Americans or just fulfilling the promise to cover the thirty million Americans that reportedly cannot afford healthcare insurance, most of the people trying to move the legislation forward would have given up when the tide of public opinion began to disfavor the bill. Instead, the President and Progressive Democrats have showed an obsessive resolve to pass this massive 2700 page bill even though the American people have made it clear that the 2010 election will be used to punish anyone that votes for it.

The truth is this bill will raise the cost of insurance for everyone that currently has insurance. There are an enormous number of new taxes that will be raised on everything from medical devices to cosmetic surgery; tanning salons to high cost health insurance plans; high wage earners and even additional payroll taxes. There will be a half a billion dollars cut from Medicare not to extend the life of the program, but to fund an expansion of Medicaid to cover millions more that cannot afford healthcare coverage. While our Presidential master of semantics says there are no mandates for business in his compromise plan there will be a fee assessed on any business whose employees receive assistance through the insurance exchange. In fact, if a company has a combined payroll of more than $500,000 and if only one of their employees receive Federal assistance to purchase insurance through the exchange, a fee of up to $750 is assessed for each and every employee of that company.

This isn’t about healthcare coverage or people without insurance; it is about money and control. As we discussed yesterday, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid already consume forty percent (40%) of the current Federal budget. The current increases plotted through the near future show that this level of spending cannot be maintained through 2019 without bankrupting the United States. Our government has neither the political will nor the backbone to scale back Federal entitlement spending so they really have only one other option. That option is the healthcare bill.

They couldn’t get the bill through the Senate with the dreaded “public option” so they crafted a plan to create an exchange where people could purchase competing private healthcare plans. Of course they could have just removed the Federal prohibitions that prevent these same companies from competing nationally but then the plan would fall apart. The plan is that the new mandates that will be imposed on private insurance to eliminate restrictions on pre-existing conditions, life time coverage limitations and expanded well care provisions will dramatically increase the cost of private insurance. The government also wants to create a regulatory board that will place limits on how much private insurance can raise the cost of premiums. The combination of mandates and price controls will severely impact private insurance companies driving them out of the exchange or out of business altogether.

Of course you can’t have an exchange if there are no participating insurance companies and the government will just have to create a publically funded national insurance option to fill the gap. As insurance companies are slowly squeezed out of existence this public option will, out of necessity, become the only option and America will have been duped into accepting a European style Universal healthcare system because nothing else will exist. All of the resistance against Universal care will have been neatly euthanized by legislative trickery and Progressive subterfuge.

With the eventual adoption of a Universal healthcare system, all of the money currently spent on private healthcare in the United States would then pass through the Federal entitlement machine first. This new revenue stream will help conceal the depth of imbalance in the government entitlement structure. Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security were all created by the Progressive movement to do an end run around the Constitution and create the strong central seat of control that the founding fathers had feared. Knowing the dangers of centralized leadership, they specifically denied all but the most basic powers to the Federal government. Since the days of Teddy Roosevelt, Progressives have largely ignored those constraints using legislative loopholes and the allure of entitlement largess to coalesce powers the Federal government was never meant to have.

Social Security was targeted at a relatively small segment of the population when it was conceived in 1935 and was sold to America as a minor tax of just over 1% to help provide security for the elderly. We were a compassionate people and who wouldn’t agree to that? Of course we now know that the passage of this Act was just the starting point and that FDR intentionally funded it through weekly payroll contributions rather than a new tax or surcharge, just to give Americans a false sense of ownership; ownership that would prevent future law makers from dismantling Social Security later. Today, Social Security has transformed into a burdensome program that has expanded in cost and scope well beyond what was promised to America to gain support and passage. It was the benign benevolence of Social Security that was used as the shining example to gain passage of Medicare and Medicaid thirty years later and now these programs are being used by Congress to claim the authority to seize control of the entire healthcare industry.

Despite the 1965 assurances that the cost of Medicare and Medicaid would remain a relatively low portion of the Federal budget, these programs have assumed massive proportions and threaten to consume most of the Federal budget within the next 10 years. Federal meddling in the free market has created a monster that has disrupted the normal flow of healthcare dollars. As the government sheds more of the fiscal responsibility it promised to seniors and the poor on to the doctors and hospitals that must provide that care, those providers then shift the cost to private insurance and to those that can afford a fee for service.

Our law makers are not pushing this hard for healthcare reform because of a sense of duty to the average American, they are pushing because it is the Federal government that created the crisis and they need this legislation to provide them with the financial cushion they hope will give them a little more time to figure out what to do about it. Like a drug addict, Congress doesn’t believe their habit is the problem; it is the lack of money to feed their habit that is the problem. Only the United States government could be bold enough to say that the solution to out of control spending is even more spending; that the problem wouldn’t exist if they started with a larger program than what we have today.

Nancy Pelosi said in an interview Saturday that this was too important to let fail and that members of Congress would have to show the same “courage” used to pass Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. In essence, she was asking members of her own Party to sacrifice their careers for this “noble cause’. To Progressives, this is critical. They have been on a slow march to total control over the lives and actions of America’s citizens for the past hundred years. They had nearly achieved their goals through healthcare reform and cap and trade but now both are crumbling before their eyes.

The healthcare bill represented more that money to them; it represented an unprecedented amount of government control over your life. So many things could be done under the guise of healthcare from directing diet, exercise and even gun control. Don’t forget, that Progressives believe that only the elite can make informed decisions and the average American is ill equipped to make those choices for themselves and needs to be nudged and guided to a better life. The key to government control is in buying the apathy of the American people. As long as most believe they are getting something for nothing, anything is possible.

Even if this bill fails, beware. Progressives have never taken no for an answer. Just as the EPA is threatening to enact key provisions of cap and trade through regulatory action without the consent of Congress, key provisions of the healthcare bill will be tucked away and hidden inside other spending bills and future budgets. Expect that the Department of Health and Human Services and the Social Security Administration will try to do the same with healthcare. If they can’t get this through the front door, they will try to sneak it in piece by piece through the window if we are not vigilant. Unfortunately, a free society cannot coexist with the socialization of basic needs. For any government to state that medicine, food and housing are all rights that must be provided for, they must first assume enough control to make all of those choices for you. So the real question is….is this the America you want to leave to your children?

Paul

What is the Crisis with Healthcare?

Years ago, when I lived in Ozone Park, New York, there was a local auto glass company that did fairly well in that area. There was always an element of vandalism one could expect in New York City and there were always kids playing ball in the streets which would invariably lead to a stray home-run breaking a windshield or two. Rarely did a day go by when there wasn’t a window broken here and there in the neighborhood and a local auto glass installer was a convenient fix for people on the go. Quite suddenly, the incidence of vandalism rose sharply and for a period of months, someone would target two or three blocks during the night with a BB gun and knock out 10 or twelve car windows per block.

Ozone Park was semi-famous back then as the location of the “Bergen Hunt and Fish Club”, one of the popular hang-outs of the notorious mobster, John Gotti. Someone overheard an employee of the local auto glass company bragging about how much business they had gotten from all the broken windows in the neighborhood and a few of the local tough guys put two and two together. Mysteriously one evening, the auto glass company burned to the ground in what was called a “suspicious fire”. Just as mysteriously, the crime wave of auto glass vandalism vanished for good.

Ok Paul, that was an interesting, if not amusing story but what does that have to do with the Healthcare Reform bill that has been making headlines for the past year? What if I told you that the current spike in healthcare insurance premiums were not caused by evil profiteering insurance companies? What if I told you that despite government claims of windfall profits that health insurers, as an industry, have a profit margin of less than three and a half percent (3.5%)? What if I told you that Medicare, Medicaid and government regulations are actually to blame for the spiraling costs of healthcare in this nation? Would that story have a little more relevance then?

Medicare and Medicaid were enacted in 1965 under the Johnson Administration as part of his “Great Society” initiative. The rationale for Medicare was that senior citizens were finding it difficult to afford private healthcare premiums on a fixed retirement income. Medicaid was similarly included to give the poor access to healthcare that would have ordinarily been out of reach for them. The fixed income argument for senior citizens was valid but not the whole story. Since America passed the Social Security Act in 1935 under FDR, a growing number of citizens failed to invest in private retirement programs because of a false sense of “security” this national safety net had given them.

In recently disclosed documents it was found that FDR only included the individual contribution mandate in Social Security so that future politicians could not dismantle the program later. After all, if people paid into it, then you cannot lawfully take it away from them without compensating them first. What he unwittingly did was create a thought process among the citizenry that these same individual contributions had taken the place of any contributions they could make into private retirement accounts. “Why pay twice?” became the general mindset of the public. We now know that because of numerous amendments to the Social Security Act as part of the “great society”, that a great many program expenses were added such as survivor’s benefits and disability benefits; expenses the system was never designed to incur.

Social Security was designed to provide a safety net for those Americans whose incomes would not support retirement savings and lived beyond an age that they could reasonably be expected to work. It was insurance but unlike life insurance, it was insurance that the government gambled that you would never collect. The age at which benefits could be collected had been arranged so that the age of retirement was nearly ten years older than the average life expectancy in the United States. The few that beat the odds would have a rich pool from which to draw a subsistence level of income if they had been unable to save for retirement in their youth. Well, the average life expectancy rose and while there were some adjustments in the age of retirement, they simply did not keep pace with the outlays of the program.

So now we have a large group of seniors drawing on Social Security as their only means of income and of course, by 1965, were unable to live on that and pay for healthcare insurance. Progressives like Lyndon Johnson could only see the solution in another large government program. Rather than offer assistance to seniors to help those that could not afford insurance to purchase it, he devised an enormous single payer healthcare system that would provide all seniors with medical care at affordable rates. He also enacted the single payer counterpart to Medicare for the poor but of course, the government couldn’t foot the whole bill for that so it became a shared responsibility between the Federal government and the individual States.

In 1965, the projected government costs for these programs were a measly nine billion dollars over ten years but by 1968; they were both over budget and in danger of collapse. In response the government would do something that only governments do. They raided the Social Security trust fund and placed Social Security on the Federal budget and into a massive new program that included Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. The best minds knew that this was little more than a temporary fix and as the baby-boomers reached retirement age, there was no way the government could afford to repay all of the IOU’s they just stuffed into FDR’s “sacred trust” and meet the obligations of Johnson’s Great Society. So what…right? They would all be out of office and possibly dead before it all fell apart but for now, they were heroes.

Today, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid represent nearly forty percent (40%) of the entire Federal budget. As the Federal government struggled to meet its other financial obligations and keep these social programs afloat they turned to massive deficits and have incurred an enormous National Debt in the process. In the creation of Medicare/Medicaid, the government failed to adequately forecast the innovation in medicine that is synonymous with vibrant economic conditions in a free society. In 1964, there were no advanced diagnostic procedures and no such things as MRI’s or Cat Scans; there were no transplant surgeries and there certainly was no definitive studies on nutrition or well care that would keep people and healthier for far longer periods of time. Costs for medical care climbed because the care was better and the outcomes were healthier so people lived longer.

Through Medicare and Medicaid, the Federal government now pays more than fifty percent (50%) of all the medical related expenses in the United States. In an effort to reduce their own costs they have systematically capped payments to doctors and hospitals and have reduced their reimbursements to the States for their portion of the shared burden of Medicaid. They passed legislation for indigent care which makes it unlawful for hospitals to refuse emergency treatment solely on the ability to pay and have ignored most of the financial burden associated with that mandate; leaving up to the hospitals and the States to absorb the impact.

Of course hospitals and doctors can only absorb so much and what they have had to do is recalculate their fee structure to offset the losses. The reduction of Federal reimbursements and the imposed caps of the costs of services for Medicare and Medicaid patients have forced care providers to pass those shortages on to someone that will pay….private insurance companies. Does anyone hear glass breaking yet? With an average profit margin of 3.5%, insurance companies had to raise their premium rates in response to the increased cost of care or go out of business. That has made insurance nearly impossible to obtain and yes, even led to the draconian practice of lifetime benefit caps and the denial of pre-existent conditions.

So what came first; the chicken or the egg? While it may not be intentional “vandalism”, it is clear that the meddling of the Federal government through their nearly fifty year experiment of socialized medicine bears the lion share of the blame. Of course, since we have become a society that relies on insurance or government to pay for our healthcare costs, we stopped asking questions like “How much does that cost?” or “Do I really need this?” We need to ask what we expect from insurance. Do we want insurance to cover every aspect of healthcare and if so, we need to realize that it is no longer insurance but pre-paid medical care and that is going to be extraordinarily expensive no matter who provides it. If we want catastrophic insurance that would keep us from going bankrupt should the worst happen, that will cost far less but we will have to pay for our own doctor visits, examinations and yes, even our own medications.

Tomorrow we will examine why the Federal government is so insistent that you need this massive 2,700 page healthcare bill and why it looks like they are not going to take no for an answer.

Paul

Is Newsweek Stacking the Deck for Heathcare Reform?

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