Don't Read the Bill....Trust Us!

Now that the healthcare bill has cleared the house (barely), I have been receiving a number of messages from the Democratic National Committee trying to drum up support for the bill in the Senate. On Tuesday, Tim Kaine sent a request for letters to be written to local newspapers and today I received a call to action from Jen O’Malley encouraging phone calls to Republican Senators to demand that they vote in favor of the legislation.

That’s strange? I thought it was the Republican Party and corporate America that were secretly manufacturing opposition to Healthcare. Nancy Pelosi actually referred to Tea Party opposition to the bill as inconsequential because it was not a legitimate grass roots movement but merely “Astroturf”, which was bought and paid for by Republicans and special interest. I’ve never heard from the Republicans on this but the Democrats have been shamefully trying to stack the deck in favor of this bill from the start.

I have received a lot of information on the healthcare debate from a myriad of sources and it’s true that most of it was very negative. What I find curious is that the opposition to this bill printed their objections and then did something odd. They actually provided a location where one could download the bill in PDF format and then provided the page and section numbers associated with their claims so that anyone could look up the information for themselves. That is hardly a strategy you would expect from them if what they were saying were not true.

The Democratic National Committee, the House and Senate leadership and even the President have only refuted these claims by saying they are lies. In all of the ads, comments and appearances by those in favor of this measure have you seen even one of them offer proof of their claims in black and white? Have they provided links to the bill and page numbers that prove the opposition is lying to us? No they haven’t and the reason is, because they can’t. The only thing they have done is to try to silence the opposition when what we are really asking them to do is answer the damned questions.

Democrats continue to play a game of semantics. They claim the bill will not cover illegal immigrants because you can not find one reference to coverage for illegal’s in the bill. What they do not tell you is that since the bill says “all Americans”, by law that includes anyone that is here. Without definitive language excluding illegal immigrants, it would be unlawful for them to deny coverage to anyone under this legislation. Democrats have refused to put that language in the bill since this debate began.

They claim that if you like your existing insurance plan you can keep it. Again, there is nothing written into the bill that eliminates private insurance. Of course, what they do not tell you is that every major analysis of this bill (excluding the ones funded by the DNC and Congress) say that private insurance cannot compete against a federally subsidized “public option”. In fact, the bill as written provides every incentive for businesses to eliminate their employee’s private insurance benefits as a matter of fiscal policy.

The tax imposed on businesses with more than 100 employees under this bill, is far less than the cost of providing care. That offers a quick boost to the bottom line for employers that dump private insurance and what business owner wouldn’t take that? Under this bill, businesses with less than 100 employees face no penalties for not providing care so those that do not, have no compelling reason to do so now. Those small businesses that do offer benefits will most likely drop that coverage now that their employees have a public option to turn to. Why would they continue to provide care benefits when they can eliminate the expensive premiums of small group health insurance plans and perhaps offer to pay a portion of the public option premium at a fraction of what it cost them to provide coverage in the past?

A better question is how many medium sized companies with 110 or 120 employees will downsize to eliminate the mandate and tax penalty to provide insurance, especially if they do not provide insurance now? Medium sized companies whose specialty is in labor intensive manufacturing ordinarily do not provide healthcare insurance. Not because they are evil but because they cannot afford to. Independent analysis reports this bill will cost the American economy more than 5 million jobs as medium sized companies struggle with the new taxes placed on them.

They say there are no death panels in the bill and that is also true. There is nothing written in the bill that explicitly says that bureaucrats will ration care or determine benefits based on age or health condition. Many of the opponents have also gotten this one wrong by citing the provisions for end of life counseling for people age 65 and over. The end of life counseling is merely meant to offer advice on things like how to construct a living will and how to appoint family members or others to act on your behalf if you are incapacitated.

The real death panel is hidden in the Health Benefits board created by the bill. The board is comprised of a total of twenty-seven appointees that will determine the benefit levels offered under the plan. It’s amazing that actual health benefits or the criteria for delivering that care is not already spelled out but instead, is being left up to a board that will determine that later so in essence, we are being asked to trust them again.

Don’t forget that it wasn’t all that long ago in Oregon, where they have both a state run public option healthcare plan and have allowed doctor assisted suicide, that death panels became a reality. A cancer patient in Oregon received a letter from the state run health plan stating that they would not cover the cancer drugs prescribed by her doctor but would instead cover “comfort care” and “doctor aid-in-dying”. If you want to know the purpose of a heath benefits board and the compassion of a government run health system you would be wise to look to Oregon for the example. Oregon has both and they are doing now what a national system will do later if this bill ever becomes law. By the way, despite distribution of that infamous letter to the media, Oregon heath plan officials still deny the existence of “death panels” in their health system.

Just as Oregon denies what is painfully obvious to anyone that investigates what they will and will not cover, Democrats continue to deny the most disturbing provisions in their own plan for healthcare overhaul. There are few progressive Democrats that have not been caught on film at one time or another calling the public option an important first step on the road to a single payer, government run system. Even the President admitted in an interview filmed as recently as 2007 that they will not be able to eliminate private healthcare insurance immediately and there would necessarily be a “transition” period to achieve universal care. Even though so many Democrats have said that universal care is their ultimate goal, they still publically deny that this bill is a Trojan horse to bring us to that reality.

I’m sorry. I just don’t trust them. Not because I am a cynic at heart (I am) but rather, I do not trust them for very tangible reasons. They have never offered black and white guarantees in the legislation that would prevent these things from becoming reality. Instead they say, “Trust us”. They have never offered the page numbers and excerpts from the actual bill that would refute their critic’s charges. Instead they say, “Trust us”. In fact, they didn’t even want to put the bill on line for us to see. Dripping with condescendence, they insisted that the legal language in the bill would be too complicated insinuating that the average American peasant is far too ignorant to make sense of it and that we would be far better off just trusting the people we sent to Congress to do what is best for us.

Well, all the trust we placed in Congress in the past has brought us to a twelve-trillion dollar national debt, one-hundred trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities for our current social programs, more than ten percent unemployment and the loss of not just jobs, but entire industries because of bad treaties and confiscatory taxation. This is not only a bad bill; it is in fact damaging to the economic future of this nation and will jeopardize the quality of the healthcare we currently receive.

Paul

Promises, Promises

During the campaign, Barack Obama fended off attacks by his opponents and made a number of promises that apparently appealed to a majority of voters. He said that we could judge him by those he would chose as his advisors and rattled off a litany of names to cover each policy area critical to the Presidency. Now that the election is over and the Obama administration in its tenth month, it is needless to say, the people he mentioned have not been tapped for their expertise. Instead, the President’s closest advisors are a veritable legion of people with worrisome ideologies, troubling pasts and curious connections to members of the radical left. Actually, the President has more connections to the radical left than the Czars do.

The President promised bipartisanship and that a government under his leadership would finally work together for the good of the nation. Well, the Republicans have been prevented from offering amendments to the healthcare bill, the stimulus bill and the climate bill. They have even been kept out of one of the meeting rooms when the Democratic chairman of that committee recently had the locks changed. Committee Chairman Towns (D-NY) ordered the locks changes when Republicans filmed every Democrat of the House Oversight committee racing out of the back door of the committee room to avoid a vote to subpoena documents relating to the Countywide Financial investigation; a scandal involving at least four Democratic government officials, including two Senators.

Democrats were rightfully incensed when Republican Joe Wilson shouted out “You Lie” during the President’s speech to congress; an action for which Wilson apologized directly to the President after being admonished by the minority leadership. The same Democrats watched glowingly as Freshman Congressman Allan Grayson made claim after claim that the Republican idea of healthcare was “Don’t get sick, and if you do, die quickly”. He equated the so-called healthcare crisis to the holocaust and called Republicans “knuckle-draggers”. There has been no apology from Mr. Grayson and there has been no admonishment from the Democratic leadership even though the basic principals of decorum had been grossly violated. Maybe this is how they talk in the Florida legislature but it has never been acceptable in the United States Congress.

Representative Issa, a Republican member of Congress, questioned the legality of the White House’s “flag@whitehouse.Gov” ; a site that was created to provide e-mail access for people to report anyone that sent negative information out about the healthcare bill. In response to Mr. Issa’s questions, the White House online director, Macon Phillips, indicated “there was little chance for cooperation with a member of a minority political party without significant power.” Somehow, none of this spells out any intent of bipartisanship to me. If the Congress just can’t help themselves, then where is the President’s outrage over the appearance that his promises will not be kept? Apparently that outrage has been reserved for Fox News and others that dare to question the motives of the President’s agenda.

Mr. Obama promised his administration would display unparalleled transparency in government. Democrats have voted down several Republican proposals that would have required the completed healthcare bill be posted on-line for the American public a minimum of 72 hours before a vote would take place. This action was taken even though the President promised Americans that we would get five days to review all major legislative pieces on-line before a vote. Despite this obvious abridgment of one of candidate Obama’s promises, President Obama remained silent. Now that the Baucus Bill is out of the finance committee it too has been taken behind closed doors to begin the process of merging it with the health committee bill. No cameras, no coverage and once again, no Republicans.

Nancy Pelosi complained that the opponents of healthcare reform were scaring people so much that now they were demanding to see the bill before congress could vote on it. What troubles me is that she doesn’t appear to understand that it is not the healthcare opponents that scare America, it is the Congress; the mad rush to pass legislation representing one sixth of the United States economy, the admission of Congressmen that they don’t have the time to read the bill, the revelation that sources and special interests outside of the government were involved in writing key portions of the bill, the inconsistencies of the statements of what is actually in the bill. All of this is what shook what little confidence we ever had in the intent of the bill.

When the CBO initially scored the healthcare bill it showed that it would add substantially to a Federal budget deficit that was already seriously out of control. However, shortly after another “closed door” meeting between President Obama and CBO chief Douglas Elmendorf, Mr. Elmendorf and the CBO apparently changed their criteria and the bill miraculously became “budget neutral”. In a stroke of fiscal genius but political subterfuge, the Senate Finance Committee constructed their bill so that the tax increases and spending cuts took place immediately after passage but the benefits didn’t take effect until year five.

The CBO scored the Baucus bill saying it represented an eighty-one billion dollar savings over ten years but let’s dissect that. The CBO saw no red flag in claiming the savings even though the revenue generating mechanisms begin immediately, while the benefit spending does not take full effect for five years. Funny thing…the CBO says that scoring bills beyond 10 years is unreliable so they just can’t give us an apples to apples view of how “budget neutral” this bill will be with ten years of revenues paying for a full ten years of benefits.

I’m sure you’ve seen those ads on TV where you can buy a house full of furniture with no payments for eighteen months. Sooner or later you have to start making the payments and if you couldn’t afford the payments when you signed the order, chances are you still won’t be able to afford the payments eighteen months later. If the Congress is resorting to shifting the curve to hide the full effects of this bill, then chances are we can’t afford this either. This isn’t the first piece of legislation that was scored based on promised cuts in spending to pay for at least a portion of the cost. Historically, Congress has never been able to actually make those promised spending cuts so the CBO scoring proved meaningless.

This may be at least part of the reason the CBO has underscored every major spending bill with the exception of Medicare D, by roughly, a factor of ten. Even if valid estimates showed the bill was budget neutral, the history of CBO accuracy tells us that the nine-hundred billion dollar price tag is probably going to end up being closer to nine-trillion after ten years. The only difference is that with healthcare, there is no furniture to repossess. The collateral for this “purchase” is our viability as a nation.

The President also promised us that he would not sign a healthcare reform bill that was not budget neutral. It is apparent that he has already found a formula the CBO could use to find that neutrality and the Congress is also willing to play along with their neat little trick of presenting a bill for scoring that has ten years worth of revenue and only five years of expenditures. At the end of the day, I would have to call this one an empty promise as well.

Our military forces in Afghanistan are in jeopardy and the President still hasn’t committed to providing the reinforcements that General McChrystal (the General Mr. Obama placed in command of the theater) requested over a month ago. After it became public that Obama had only spoken with General McChrystal once since he was deployed in Afghanistan, the President graciously gave McChrystal twenty-nine minutes of his precious time while he was in Copenhagen lobbying to bring the 2016 Olympics to Chicago. Curiously, in one more “closed door” meeting this week, the President found he could spare an hour and a half to spend with CNN, MSNBC and other networks that have the White House seal of approval. Maybe he’s planning to send them to Afghanistan to bolster General McChrystal’s force? I’m sure there are enough of them.

So far, I can’t think of one promise that Mr. Obama made that he has even pretended to keep. Oh well, other Presidents have broken campaign promises too but Mr. Obama isn’t “other” Presidents. In fact, he made it very clear that he was different. He was the man of change; the One. Well, the only change I have seen is a blatant disregard for the Constitution, the rule of law and in the outward hostility he displays towards anyone or anything that disagrees with him.

Paul