Kucinich caves - will now support Obamacare

Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) appeared on television this morning to announce his reluctant support for the healthcare bill. Kucinich had originally signed a letter along with 77 other Democrats opposing the healthcare bill because the current bill failed to include a “robust” public option. He maintained that this was not the bill he wanted to support and while he wanted the nation to finally embrace a European style, not-for-profit national healthcare system as opposed to working with for-profit, health insurance companies, he decided to surrender his opposition so that some measure of reform could take place. Dennis Kucinich has made a career out of convincing people that he fights for “the little man”. Well, I suppose that’s true; at 5’7” Kucinich is a little man and there is no doubt that he fights very effectively for his own interests and his interests alone.

There were several areas of Kucinich’s statement that made absolutely no sense and left me wondering if these people even listen to their own words before the cameras are turned on. Kucinich began by recounting storied from his own past and how he survived a youthful brush with poverty that had him living in his car at times. Now I’m not calling the man a liar but I have found very little to substantiate his claims of poverty. His father was a truck driver of Croatian ancestry and his Irish American mother was a homemaker. Since he grew up in the 1950’s, his father was apparently the only truck driver that couldn’t find steady work in the boom times that followed World War II. Curiously contradictory to his story of an impoverished youth is the fact that he somehow managed to attend Cleveland State University from 1967 to 1970 and in 1973, managed to pursue and obtain a Master of Arts Degree in speech and communication from Case Western Reserve University.

Kucinich spoke about how he has been afflicted with Crohn's Disease for much of his adult life which led him to “take charge” of his own healthcare decisions, prompting him to follow the recommendations of traditional physicians and to modify his diet and lifestyle, embracing a more holistic approach of self care. Apparently, Dennis Kucinich doesn’t see the irony of his statements that display the contrasts between his personal life story and his political beliefs. On one hand, he speaks of how he took command of his own healthcare choices in his fight with Crohn’s Disease and then speaks forcefully of his belief that government has to take action to provide a healthcare system that would prevent anyone else from having the ability to exercise that freedom of choice within their own lives.

Kucinich would undoubtedly argue that his belief in a national healthcare system is prompted in part, by his own experience in dealing with Crohn’s Disease and therefore, in trying to make those battles easier for others. I would suggest that his experience not only displays that our current healthcare system worked but when he was faced with the challenge, he found the care he wanted and made the choices that needed to be made to obtain that care. To have government provide health care would relieve people of the responsibility of making beneficial choices for themselves and cheapen the outcome. I submit that is was the absence of a national healthcare system that forced Kucinich to take his participation in his own treatment far more seriously than he would have if some massive government entity relieved him of the responsibility of making his healthcare choices for himself.

While angry Socialists and Progressives may believe that Kucinich has turned his back on the last credible chance to bring about a national healthcare system, I maintain that his opposition is simply window dressing designed to conceal what is hidden deep in the bowels of the Democrat’s 2700 page Progressive manifesto. Kucinich may have wanted to skip a few steps and force a vote for socialized medicine now but the end game will eventually bring that about anyway. You cannot force insurers to provide more coverage, cap the cost and expect that they will stay in business; especially since the health insurance industry only posts a 3.5% profit margin now.

Wait a minute! I thought those evil insurance companies were making billions of dollars? The President said so. Yeah, well that was a cute little trick designed to anger people and create some false support for the bill. If you take all of the insurance companies in the industry and pool all of their profits together, it is billions of dollars but those billions still only represent a measly profit of just 3.5%. The Federal number crunchers know very well when to use dollars and when to use percentages to make their point. In the end, private insurance cannot survive this healthcare plan and that will “force” the government to step in and take their place. It’s a neat little trick to get socialized medicine in through the back door but we know what they are doing and we will blame them when they do it.

The Progressives in Congress know their numbers don’t add up so most have abandoned using them altogether and have resorted to one sob story after another in an attempt to soften the opposition to the bill by appealing to our humanity. Too bad all of the stories they have used are full of lies and half truths. The President spoke of Natoma Canfield during his visit to Ohio. Natoma Canfield is a cancer patient who could no longer afford her healthcare premiums for fear of losing her home. The President made an impassioned plea for his healthcare plan, challenging people to “remember Natoma” and support this plan. Of course what he didn’t tell you is that Natoma was being treated at the state of the art, Cleveland Clinic. Spokesmen for the Clinic said that Natoma is not only eligible for Medicare but that the Clinic itself, has a large charitable endowment of more than one-hundred million dollars with which they can provide free care for people like Natoma, who have no other options.

In another shameless display, Senate Democrats paraded 11 year-old Marcelas Owens before a press conference on Thursday. Coached by his activist grandmother, Gina Owens, Marcelas told a packed room of reporters that he wanted the president and Congress to come together and pass health insurance reform. “I am here because of my mom,” said Owens. “My mom was diagnosed with pulmonary hypertension in 2006. She missed so much work she lost her job. And when my mom lost her job, she lost her health care. And losing her health care ended up costing her her life.” As it turns out, Marcelas grandmother is an activist with the Washington Community Action Network, which is another misguided group of community activists that espouse a platform of socialist ideals. If fact, Gina Owens is now preparing Marcelas 7 year-old sister to play her part in this disgusting display of emotional manipulation. Grandma….have you no shame? Of course not…Socialists have no shame because the ends justify the means.
The truth is that it is the existing government healthcare programs that failed Tiffany Owens. If a sick, single mother of three cannot get Medicaid….who can? Where was the activist grandmother during this travesty of justice? Where is her outrage at the social programs that should have saved her daughter’s life? Better still…why wasn’t the activist grandmother actively involved in helping her navigate the Medicaid application process? After all, isn’t that what activism is all about?

There is no doubt that Tiffany Owens succumbed to her illness (pulmonary hypertension) but there are so many pieces of the puzzle still missing. Tiffany had already received care, including an 8 day hospital stay, but when she began vomiting blood, she failed to seek additional care which eventually contributed to her death. Was she too weak to get to a doctor and where was her activist mother at the moment when her needs were greater than anytime before? Where was the Medicaid system that was specifically created to provide care for people just like Tiffany? Most importantly, why should we trust a government with our care when they failed so miserably in the case of Tiffany Owens?

One would think that if seventy people a day are dying because of the lack of affordable healthcare insurance as Progressive Democrats claim, that the President could easily pick case after case where the death of an individual can be solidly linked to the lack of health care but instead, they choose ones that fall completely apart under the slightest scrutiny. The reason they don’t is because they can’t. This nation has had a long standing practice of providing care for anyone that needs it and while there are stories of financial difficulties, those come after the care has already been given and the money is sorted out later. No one in America dies because of a lack of care. Kucinich can claim that insurance companies, from time to time, may unfairly deny paying for a procedure, leaving the patient with the bill but that truth is also a hard indictment of government care. What Kucinich and his President never told you is that the insurance companies that lead the nation in claim denial are the Federal government programs of Medicare and Medicaid. Imagine that!

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