Is Heathcare Reform a Bolshevik Plot?

I was watching video of the speech the President gave on the economy that sparked his argument with Las Vegas. He began by saying “When times are tough, you tighten your belt. You don’t go buying a boat when you can barely pay your mortgage. You don’t blow a bunch of cash in Vegas when you’re trying to save for college.” I’m not sure why Las Vegas was so upset with that. I’m sure even the Mayor of Las Vegas would agree you spend vacation money in Las Vegas and not your kid’s college savings; but my interest really isn’t on his fight with Vegas. My interest is in the idea behind that paragraph and how it was directed at the American people.

The United States now has a National Debt of over twelve trillion dollars and the White House’s own budget estimate shows a doubling of that debt over the next decade. When times are tough, you tighten your belt, you don’t jump into an ideological frenzy to pass sweeping reforms that will change the banking, healthcare and energy industries; especially when those changes will add trillions more in debt to the current estimates. Oh sure the CBO says the healthcare plan is budget neutral and the President claims it actually brings deficit reduction, but the CBO estimates are based on ten years of spending cuts and tax increases while only counting six years of expenditures. Great idea! I’m sure I could show some incredible savings if I could collect ten years worth of income and only pay six years worth of bills but I doubt I could sell that idea to the utilities, the supermarket or my mortgage company.

The primary reason why America is not buying the President’s healthcare plan is because we know it doesn’t make sense. We see past the shady accounting and know it’s not going to reduce the deficit. We know you cannot provide health insurance for thirty million more Americans, most of which would need subsidies, and still lower healthcare costs. We especially know that you can’t mandate new and expensive benefits that health insurers will have to provide, cap their rate increases and expect them to remain in business for very long. No, it doesn’t make sense unless that is the goal. It is no secret that Progressives have long wanted America to shift to a single payer, Universal healthcare system. Now it has even become an imperative for more moderate politicians as Medicare and Medicaid are about to bankrupt the Federal government. It is especially appetizing for States that have tried to enact public health insurance on their own like Massachusetts, Tennessee and Oregon.

No, healthcare reform isn’t about making health insurance more affordable for average Americans; it is about making healthcare more affordable for the Federal government and for the States that have tried to make it a local entitlement. While we are not currently discussing a Universal, single payer healthcare system or for that matter, a public option; this plan is crafted to bring us to that point in time. As health care insurers are driven out of business, the Federal government will “have to” step in and offer a public option to shore up the exchange. Of course, since the public option is the only one that will be federally funded, it will be the only one that survives the mandates and price controls leaving us with a single payer system by default. With all Americans forced to buy into the government plan every penny that America spends on healthcare will be funneled into the Federal entitlement machine for distribution. With all that money I’ll bet they can keep the new system afloat for twenty years before they have to start rationing care or denying services.

I am sick to death of hearing the President and his Progressive friends talk about how health care is now a right. Food is a far more basic need but somehow, we are not all being forced to buy into a government food plan. The same can be said for clothes, housing and utilities but somehow we have avoided all but meager assistance programs for the very poorest. If you live in a rural community without mass transit, couldn’t a car be considered a basic need and therefore, a right? I am dead set against the Federal government, or any government providing “rights” for me. The Constitution was not meant to provide my rights; it was meant to protect my rights from government interference. The founders understood that any rights created by law could be as easily taken away by the same legal process.

The President stood before the cameras at his January meeting with Congressional Republicans, criticizing them for portraying his health-care plan as “some Bolshevik plot” and telling the public that he is “doing all sorts of crazy stuff that is going to destroy America.” Obama also refutes the charges that he is a Socialist but the one thing I’ve learned about the man is that he is not so much a liar as he tells selective snippets of the truth. For instance; just before the election he declared that we were “five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States.” While some would think that this was simply campaign rhetoric, I knew that he not only meant what he was saying but since he never mentioned his views of “fundamental transformation”, people would not be getting what they thought they were voting for. Never having mentioned what the transformation would consist of, he neatly avoided a debate on the substance of change.

I believe Obama when he stands tall and says he’s not a Socialist and that his healthcare plan is not a Bolshevik plot. Obama is a Progressive but if you have read anything about Progressive goals, they are identical to that of Socialists. The major difference between Socialists and Progressives is that Socialists force change through revolution while Progressives use subterfuge and strategy to bring about an incremental, evolutionary change in the political structure. If the strategy is properly applied, the changes cannot be reversed without causing severe hardship to those who benefit from the programs; creating what is in essence, a sacred cow that no politician would dare challenge. Does that sound like Social Security or Medicare? You bet it does. The transformation of those programs into the leviathan they now are was gradual and intentional. Now that so many rely on them there can be no conversation on whether or not they should exist. The only conversation we are allowed to have is on how to sustain them.

Healthcare a Bolshevik plot? This was a clever method of defining and directing the argument by the President. He didn’t deny it was a plot; he intentionally said it wasn’t a Bolshevik plot knowing that Stalin had essentially declared that the Bolshevik Party no longer existed in 1952. It’s not even a Communist plot. It is a Progressive plot based on the strategies of Saul Alinsky. In Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” he cautioned that revolutionaries don’t stand out and scream about their plans…they wear suits and ties, speaking in a voice and in terms that would be accepted by the middle class. They don’t engage in a battle over agenda, they control the terms of the discussion so they can extract the answers they need to move forward. Most importantly, that the end goals are never disclosed, only the incremental steps that must be accepted by the public to achieve those goals. You have to admit; that sounds like a brief summary of the healthcare debate that has been raging for over a year.

Only the radical lefts like Van Jones, George Soros, Bill Ayers and Andy Stern have been shouting from the roof tops. They feel the time for extreme change is now; that the President should abandon Alinsky theory and force the agenda through while he has the votes and momentum to get it passed. They all know what the goal posts are and since the Democratic Party is already controlled by Progressives, they believe the President should forget about making short strides and just go for the touchdown before America has the chance to elect the road blocks to stop it.

Paul

The President's Healthcare Plan - Just More Things to Despise

To make good on his promise, or threat depending on how you look at it, the President released a summary of his healthcare proposal on Monday morning. I haven’t been able to find a full copy of the text as of yet and if all he intends to post to the internet is a summary / infomercial, then I am truly concerned. Considering what is in the summary, I can only imagine what horrors the full text of the proposal has in store for us. Bear in mind, this is not a full proposal designed to replace the bill that a majority of Americans would like to see tossed; this is yet another addition to the more than two thousand pages that already exist.

In essence, the President’s proposal has taken a bill Americans already hate and gave us even more to despise. There are more tax increases, higher penalties for not purchasing health insurance, a clever renaming of the medical device fee to an excise tax and a “millionaire’s tax” of 5.25% levied on people earning a quarter of what it takes to be a millionaire. Incidentally, the millionaire’s tax also contains a marriage penalty where tax is levied against single people earning more than $200,000 and couples earning more than $250,000.

The President’s plan still punishes health insurance companies, extorting $67 billion dollars in fees to help the enrollment process on the assumption that insurance companies are going to make so much money from all the new people that will be forced to purchase insurance. Well, if this plan is meant to allow access to health insurance for the 30 million Americans that are reportedly without insurance, then what are we talking about, a ten percent increase in business? But wait, the income assessment used to force people to purchase insurance doesn’t kick in until you earn more than $18,700 per year so you can hack off a healthy portion of that 10%. This does not take into consideration that once the exemptions for pre-existing conditions are removed from the equation, some will simply prefer to pay the penalty knowing that they can always get insurance later when it is an absolute necessity saving themselves thousands in premium costs.

The President couldn’t eliminate the additional tax on “Cadillac” healthcare plans to make his union friends happy without an uproar so he did the next best thing. He postponed that tax until 2018 and by then, private insurance should be a thing of the past. Oh yes, private insurance will be decimated by the President’s plan. His proposal includes capping premium costs knowing that the industry only has a 3.4% profit margin now; a margin that will not be able to keep up with rising health provider costs as more people are absorbed into Medicaid and Medicare. You see, it is the paltry amount that the Federal government reimburses doctors and hospitals for Medicare and Medicaid services that created the problem in the first place. Hospitals and doctors are forced to increase their charges to private insurance to make up the shortages and private insurance must pass that on to you in what is really, the largest hidden tax to fund those programs ever perpetrated on the American people.

The President’s plan has a “grandfather” clause that will allow people that like their current insurance to keep that plan. Hmmm? Why would we need a grandfather clause if their intention wasn’t to force people to accept certain plans that the government will choose for you? In fact, the grandfather clause isn’t worth much since the government will force changes to these plans that will no longer make them profitable. You see, you can’t get to the single payer system the President really wants if you get to keep a plan that will not go away. The changes that the providers of these plans will have to make will ensure they cannot remain competitive.

The President’s summary states: “Within months of legislation being enacted, it requires plans to cover adult dependents up to age 26, prohibits rescissions, mandates that plans have a stronger appeals process, and requires State insurance authorities to conduct annual rate review, backed up by the oversight of the HHS Secretary. When the exchanges begin in 2014, the President’s Proposal adds new protections that prohibit all annual and lifetime limits, ban pre-existing condition exclusions, and prohibit discrimination in favor of highly compensated individuals. Beginning in 2018, the President’s Proposal requires “grandfathered” plans to cover proven preventive services with no cost sharing.” In short, by 2018, these plans will either be eliminated by the provider or will be too expensive to purchase to all but a few.

Pharmaceutical companies will also be hit hard as official preference is given to generic drugs. Ignoring the companies that actually pioneered the creation of new drugs and had to fund the expense of clinical trials and Federal approval will create a stagnant climate within the pharmaceutical industry. This short sighted approach will have a detrimental limiting effect on research and development of new drugs and treatments. The President’s plan also increases the government theft of pharmaceutical company profits $10 billion dollars more than the Senate plan proposed for a total of $33 billion over ten years.

Medicare Advantage is also targeted by the President’s plan and while the summary makes a base assessment that Medicare overpays private plans by an average of 14% to provide the same services as the regular Medicare programs, his summary refuses to actually say what is going to be cut and where. His plan creates a set of benchmark payments at different percentages based on the current average fee-for-service costs in an area. Of course while his summary calls this section “Improving Medicare Advantage Payments” it could just as easily be called “good luck finding a doctor that will accept Medicare Advantage now”. The only reason people go through the expense of paying for Medicare Advantage is that many doctors simply do not take “traditional” Medicare because of the their miserable payment rates. Adjusting the rate structure to something more like Medicare will only make Medicare Advantage as unpopular with doctors as Medicare is currently.

There is the creation of what the President himself calls an “unprecedented array of aggressive new authorities to fight waste, fraud and abuse.” Ok, so we are expected to believe that the savings from the “waste, fraud and abuse” uncovered by this “array” of new authorities will not be consumed entirely by the “array” of new authorities. Call me silly but couldn’t fraud and abuse be adequately pursued and prosecuted by an already bloated and underutilized Justice Department? As far as fraud is concerned, that simply sounds like there needs to be a little house cleaning over at the existing Medicare and Medicaid administrations so that these people actually perform their jobs.

Of course nothing is more devastating than the employer mandates. The President insists that there are no employer mandates in his plans but there are fees that start with companies of 50 or more employees. A fee of $750 would be assessed for every one of that company’s employees even if only one of those employees should purchase insurance with taxpayer assistance; that my friends, is known as a job killer. The carrot of a tax credit is meaningless because the requirements outlive the credits and leave businesses holding the bag for all time. Companies with 55 or 60 employees will find a way to get the job done with 54 and many larger companies will just close their American plants and outsource to foreign companies in countries that were smart enough not to elect a socialist President. There is also an additional tax for employers that offer no insurance or insurance that does not meet “government standards”. The tax would roughly be an 8% payroll tax phased in for employers with annual payrolls from $500,000 to $750,000 which really doesn’t take that much to reach these days now does it?

Of course no plan ever crafted by a Progressive Democrat would be complete without a little bait and switch. The President’s proposal gives billions to Community based health centers and that just sounds like a big “Thank You” from the President to all of the Community organizations that helped him get elected. While the Nebraska deal is tossed out in the President’s plan, the Senate’s “working girl” from Louisiana, Mary Landrieu, gets to keep her $300 million bribe and other States will get a kickback of one degree or another to buy their silence. The President also plans on using this bill to close what he calls a tax loophole in an entirely unrelated clean energy tax credit bill and clearly states that some of the money you good people will be paying for the Healthcare reform bill will be diverted, if needed, to shore up Social Security.

This is nothing less than a nail gun to seal the coffin of private healthcare insurance in this country. Why would the President and Progressive Democrats want to cripple the healthcare system? Because they need to redirect all of the money spent on healthcare in this country into one massive entitlement program just to keep the failed programs of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security on life support for the next ten or twelve years. This is a shameless attempt to trick the American people into believing that this about healthcare when it is just another attempt to funnel more power and money into the corrupt abyss of Washington.

Paul

Obama's Recession

Any discussion about who is ultimately responsible for the recession would not be complete without a clear definition what a recession is. In economics, a recession is a business cycle featuring a general slowdown in economic activity over a period of time; usually two fiscal quarters or longer. The other criterion for identifying a recession is an increase in unemployment of greater than 1.5%. It is clear based on the generally accepted criteria that the recession began under George Bush with the third quarter of 2008 showing a 2.7% decrease in GDP and the decline jumping to 5.7% in the forth quarter of 2008 and a corresponding increase in unemployment from 5.8% to 7.2% over the same period.

Except for the last two quarters of 2008, unemployment during the Bush administration had cyclically fluctuated between four and six percent just as it had during most of the Clinton administration. Clinton stepped into office with unemployment at 7.3%; remaining at or near that level until October of 1993. Of course the banking system was still generally believed to be in good shape then and since we found out that most of the deregulation that nearly collapsed the system had not occurred yet, it probably was. I find in curious that the real reduction in unemployment during the Clinton years did not take place until he abandoned his plans for healthcare reform. Apparently, the business community had the same reservations about the future of their profitability with Clinton-care as they do with Obama-care. While Clinton did not lower taxes, his advisors did convince him to reduce the capital gains tax and that made the risk of investment more palatable.

Obama has not enjoyed a reprieve from high unemployment because the threat of his agenda has kept the business community from investing in labor or expansion. The measly incentives he proposed to help small business during his State of the Union Address lost weight and credibility when juxtaposed against his assertions in the same speech that he intended to follow through with healthcare, cap and trade and the hair-brained scheme of debt forgiveness for student loans for anyone that could avoid paying them for twenty years (ten, if you were employed in the service of the government).

There is nothing in the President’s agenda that does not take from those that earn wealth only to be given to those that don’t and that is what is killing new job creation. In fact, it took all eight years of the Bush administration for unemployment to rise 3%; Obama nearly achieved that in his first year in office. The President may have inherited a large national debt, high unemployment and a sagging economy; but he did not inherit the agenda proposals that have made all of these indexes far worse. That agenda is all his (or at least, it belongs to whoever is pulling his strings).

For all the damage that his proposals have wrought on the economy and no matter how many people tell him that this is what has stalled business, he still intends to follow through. I haven’t decided if that is just stubbornness on his part or if these are the marching orders from his number one White House visitor, Andy Stern. I think it is fair to question his motives and when you follow the money and the intent of the people that are pressing heavily for these socialist programs like Andy Stern, some interesting things happen.

Obama has recently made some very impassioned speeches where he says that he promised healthcare would pass and that is exactly what he is going to do. Well, he promised to close Guantanamo Bay in the first year and it is still open. He promised transparency in his administration; that healthcare debates and meetings would take place on C-Span. Not only have the meetings on healthcare barred C-Span coverage but congressional Republicans have been barred as well. He said there would be no more back room deals and then offered $300 million to Mary Landrieu for her vote and only God knows how much for Ben Nelson. Bernie Sanders got billions for community health services but in all fairness, that was to expand national programs and not just those in Vermont. All of that money and more had been handed out in closed door, back room deals.

Obama also said there would be no middle class tax increases. Those of us that watch this nonsense knew that was a lie of semantics from the start. His plans and programs, not to mention the FY2011 budget, call for a whole host of new taxes on goods and services; taxes that will be passed on to you by the businesses they affect. He could stand firm on his promise of not taxing you directly while taking it from business knowing they were taking it from you. Now apparently he is going to make the same mistake George H.W. Bush made. Remember “Read my lips – no new taxes”? Bush reneged on that and Clinton never let you forget it during the campaign.

Now that Obama has blown through four years worth of Bush deficit spending in his first year in office, the nation is crying for fiscal conservatism. Fiscal conservatism for most of us in this country means cutting spending to live within our means. For a tax and spend Progressive, fiscal conservatism means making sure you have enough tax revenue to cover your planned spending. It was announced this week that the President is considering a middle class tax increase now that the Congress has passed “Paygo”. Paygo simply means Pay as you go; a mandate that Federal spending increases have to be offset by a decrease in spending elsewhere or an increase in taxes. So now, in a recession, the President wants to tax the middle class twice; once directly and then again by turning overtaxed businesses into tax collection middlemen. That is why they are trying to sell us on the notion that the recession is finally easing.

There was a modest gain in GDP and a slight easing of unemployment last month. Both of which are easily explained by the billions spent in stimulus money and the increase in government employment as they ramp up for the 2010 census. Neither of these small increases are the result of real economic growth and neither will be lasting. So now that he is planning to raise taxes to show his fiscal conservatism, where are the corresponding spending cuts? Well, the President of semantics has the answer to that too. He increased discretionary spending 25% in 2009 and will add another 20% in 2010 but he promises to freeze discretionary spending in FY2011. Mr. President that is not a spending cut; that is freezing your insane increases so they can’t be cut.

Early in the Twentieth Century, America had a similar crisis. After World War I, America was faced with a deep recession brought on mostly by huge increases in the personal income taxes imposed to pay for the war. By 1920 we had slipped into depression and unemployment had topped 12% but unlike this President, the drastic steps that were needed were actually taken. Congress halved government expenditures and slashed taxes to nurture the economy. The result was a period of unprecedented growth not seen since the creation of America and that brought the country out of depression within two years when unemployment had dropped to just over 3%.

Until there is a recognition that government is the problem and not the solution there will be no meaningful progress in spending cuts, debt reduction or economic development. If there is ever going to be an epiphany in Washington on this, it certainly will not begin with this President. If America can elect a Congress this November that can put an end to Obama’s agenda that will be a good start. They might even be coerced by an active and involved electorate to propose legislation to finally restrain the wasteful ways of Washington. The bad news is that unless those daring individuals are elected in numbers sufficient to override a Presidential Veto; that new legislation will have to wait until a responsible President can be elected in 2012.

None of this would be needed if Washington actually obeyed the Constitution and had not ignored the Tenth Amendment for the past hundred years. Tomorrow, we will discuss what our government would look like if we had a Federal Government that actually resembled the intentions of the founding fathers.

Paul