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

Newsweek's Curious Adoration of Al Gore

Barack Obama is an unqualified disaster so rather than accept fact, Newsweek (or is it News-Weak?) is taking a trip down memory lane so they can play “What if Gore won the 2000 election?” In what may be the most idiotic article to ever to stain the pages of that Liberal rag-sheet, News-weak has decided to imagine a fantasy timeline to give us a glimpse of what a Gore Presidency would look like.

We know Liberals are all about fantasy. After all, in a Liberal’s world, hard work and research just can’t yield the concrete results that wearing ribbons do. If they could only convince all Americans to wear the appropriate ribbon of awareness, think how much human suffering would vanish overnight. In fact, the ribbons possess so much power; Liberal’s would rather wear those than waste their money on funding established research or support centers. That is unless they are one of those filthy rich liberals. In that case, they use their money to create foundations; accepting donations to raise awareness among the massive population of insensitive people that do not wear ribbons.

The other thing Liberals love to do is dream about the utopian society they could create if last remnants of capitalism were finally swept away and the progressive (Marxist) agenda were realized in totality. Since Obama clearly can’t deliver on that, they did the next best thing and created a dream world where Bush was defeated and Gore took his rightful place as the 43rd President of the United States.

In David Rakoff's dream world, 9-11 never happened because Gore took the appropriate steps to prevent it and Gore’s attention to the environment, particularly the restoration of wetlands and erosion prevention on the gulf coast, mitigated the severity of Katrina and the swift response of the Federal government under Gore, prevented countless deaths and needless devastation. Obama maybe a weak and ineffectual Liberal but he is still a Liberal so they just couldn’t ignore him. In Rakoff's world, Gore would eventually name Obama as a Supreme Court Justice.

The piece begins by eluding all sense of Constitutional law as the United States, under Gore, finally becomes party to the Kyoto Protocol and passes a comprehensive energy bill. Somehow, the mystical powers of Al Gore can even circumvent the Constitutional requirement that the Senate ratify our treaties with a 2/3 majority, something that could not happen with Kyoto and would not happen even if Copenhagen managed to cobble an agreement together within the next few days. The comprehensive energy agreement is also a work of fiction since that was proclaimed dead on arrival with democrats in control of both houses of Congress and a President that is willing to sign it. But this is a work of fantasy so to hell with logic and law….let’s dream on

At the ceremony to mark the signing of the Kyoto Protocol, President Gore announces ground breaking for high speed maglev rail along the Eastern Seaboard. Old rail cars would be sunk offshore to create artificial reefs and by September 2009, the system is opened, offering high speed rail service from Portland, Maine to Jacksonville, Florida. Of course, since Al Gore is the patron saint of the religion of Climatology, he would have no problem at all persuading the eco-fascists that the rail line is an important step in the “greening” of America….or would he?

Environmental activists have fought every major project, green or otherwise, under the banner of protecting the diversity of species and to restore the natural beauty of a planet untouched by human activity. If the project was to replace an existing system rail by rail and tie by tie, I am sure they would find some foul species of hairless mouse that has called the existing rail line home. Even if none were found, they would still sue to force us to do another one of those endless environmental impact studies before the basic route survey could even begin. Damn! Those little details keep ruining the plot.

The story continues with Gore’s superior intellect being able to decipher a disjointed and seemingly meaningless string of information (which is all that was left of our intelligence gathering capabilities after Clinton-Gore gutted the system) whereby he discovers a plot crafted by Osama Bin Laden to attack the United States. Despite his historical disdain for the military and his repeated assertions that war is an option only needed by those that fail at diplomacy, Gore races to the nearest phone booth and dons his “Commander in Chief” Underoos before ordering preemptive strategic bombing strikes on Al Qaida training camps in Afghanistan near the Pakistani border, averting the disaster of 9-11 altogether.

Just to imply the petty hardships that a victorious Al Gore would have to contend with as President, Rakoff adds that President Gore signs the Patriot Act to provide an additional measure of security for the country but since he is not George Bush, the Supreme Court rules it unconstitutional. He also says that a Gore administration would be ridiculed and denigrated at every turn which I take as more of a slap at Obama than a commentary on Gore. In Mr. Rakoff’s world, Gore is unaffected by his critics; making the hard decisions that he apparently feels Mr. Obama is incapable of.

To further show his fierce determination and Gore’s iron will, when Vice President Joe Lieberman speaks out against healthcare reform, Gore demands, and gets, his resignation which only proves the adolescence of the author. When this article was written, Lieberman was still holding out on healthcare so he apparently felt compelled to throw a few literary rocks at him. After all, since Lieberman is obviously not part of the collective mind, he must be eliminated, even in a fantasy administration. Of course, Hillary Clinton is named as Lieberman’s replacement. Colin Powell steps down as Secretary of State and Bill Clinton assumes that position.

Just to prove that this is indeed, OZ and not a work of fact driven speculation; Gore supposedly signs a bill providing tax cuts equaling $1.35 trillion dollars over ten years to America’s wealthiest citizens, drawing harsh criticism from both the left and the right. He also faces the nation during his 2002 State of the Union address and singles out Iran, Iraq and North Korea as having goals similar to the Axis powers of World War II.

Fear not…all ends well with King Al Gore the first. He is eventually recognized for his bold actions and foresight in preventing not only an imminent attack on the US by fundamentalist terrorists but in preventing catastrophe through his environmental restoration of the Gulf of Mexico coast line, which saved thousands of lives and billions in property damage. The number of Gore’s successes are eventually criticized in the Senate because the sheer amount of time they have to spend commending this President’s actions are seen as distracting the Senate from their primary purpose.

Of course no story in News-Weak would be complete if it didn’t trash Bush too. Now that Gore has completed his two terms, it is finally Hillary Clinton’s turn. The Democratic ticket for 2008 is Hillary Clinton with her mate and running mate, Bill. Just as strange is the notion that George Bush throws his hat in the ring in a bid to finally capture his second term with brother Jeb as his running mate. Rakoff suggests that George Bush’s fortunes begin to turn after a televised and tearful interview about his alcoholism with Dr. Drew Pinsky; a condition that Bush supposedly falls pray to after his 2000 loss to Gore.

Really? Apparently Mr. Rakoff is under the delusion that Al Gore would have been able to have see what dozens of experts could not, where Islamic terror is concerned. Much like the followers of Nostradamus, the snippets of information about Bin Laden’s activities could only have been reasonably connected after the attack when the names and countries of origin of the perpetrators were known. Similarly, Rakoff assumes that Gore would have found a stomach for military action if the need arose and that he would even care about the environment if he were not in a position to personally accrue millions of dollars by exploiting the fears of the Eco-weirdoes on a national level.

No, Gore is a lack-luster and unpolished imitation of a politician frustrated by his failed bid for the Presidency. His lack of substance and personality is why he was not elected in spite of every felonious act of voter fraud committed by the left.

Now that climate-gate has proven the fraud of environmental extremism and may even be the largest hoax of the century, perhaps Gore will finally find some other kind of snake oil to peddle. Maybe he can retire to a local park and sell snow cones this summer to help in the fight against seasonal global warming?

Paul