Freedom Line Blog

Today’s Health Care Summit was conveniently set up to be a clash of Democratic versus Republican ideas, plans, proposals, largely positioning the Republicans as obstructionists.

But the animal in the room was not an elephant, but a skunk.

The fact, now seemingly long since forgotten, is that the U.S. Senate has passed its version of health care reform.  If the House of Representatives simply passes the Senate bill as is, and the President, who crafted his most recent plan largely on the Senate bill, signs it, then the game is over, and the Democrats’ Senate bill becomes law.

But just as Senate Republicans did not have the votes (at the time) to stop the Senate bill, House Republicans do not have the votes to stop the House from enacting the Senate bill.

The obstruction is now and has been House Democrats, who will not accept the Senate bill.

People should just remember that as the attacks on “obstruction” continue.

During today’s White House Health Care Summit, President Obama continues to insist that his plan to reform the nation’s health care system is not a government takeover of health care. 

Countering the president’s claim, the Senate Republican Policy Committee released a list of 159 new boards, bureaucracies and programs created in the Senate-passed bill, which serves as the framework for President Obama’s “new” health care proposal, a summary of which was released earlier this week.

View the entire RPC list here.

As President Obama and certain Members of Congress continue with their health care dog-and-pony show today, a new CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey is out confirming what should already be obvious to all politicians in Washington:  The health care bills under current consideration are about as popular as Congress itself.

As CNN reports it:

Twenty-five percent of people questioned in the poll say Congress should pass legislation similar to the bills passed by both chambers, with 48 percent saying lawmakers should work on an entirely new bill and a quarter saying Congress should stop all work on health care reform.”

In politics, those numbers amount to near universal opposition.   But we digress.

Below is one of the latest cartoons from Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

The Associated Press reports:

The lone Republican lawmaker to support Democratic health care legislation has seen his fundraising drop by nearly 40 percent since his vote, and he is quickly burning through a dwindling bank account after resorting to a costly national fundraising operation.”

That “lone Republican lawmaker” is Joseph Cao of Louisiana.  Obama won Cao’s district in 2008 with 75% of the vote.

Hey all you so-called “moderate” Dems seeking reelection in November:  Still think it’s a good idea to vote “Yes” on ObamaCare?

Below is one of the latest cartoons from Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

Below is one of the latest cartoons from Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

In the President’s shiny new once-over-lightly-with-a-higher-price-tag health care proposal (too vaguely written, it seems, for the CBO to score the economic impact), parts of it are implemented all the way to 2018, when the excise tax on expensive health care plans kicks in (and kicks anyone who has one in the groin). 

Many people who believe they don’t have one of those “Cadillac” plans now are likely to find that they do have one by 2018.

Also in the proposal, the fines for those incorrigible scoff-laws who stubbornly refuse to yield to the so-called “individual mandate” start small and progressively increase by year.

Call that slo-mo government, which has the distinct and not-to-be-overlooked advantage that all who impose it will likely have gone on to greater or lesser rewards by the time the populace actually catches on.

As David Brooks points out in his column this morning, “The odds are high that the excise tax will never actually happen.”  But that excise tax (along with other tricks in the bill) is what allows the whole house of cards to be nominally (and nominally only if you are deceiver or deceived) “deficit neutral.”  We thus face punitive taxation or fiscal disaster.

In a different slo-mo government development, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson has informed some unruly coal-state Senators (all Democrats) that they shouldn’t get all worried about that EPA plan to regulate greenhouse gases.  It will now be “phased in” beginning in 2011, so as not to upset the fragile economy. 

Hit the buzz saw with your overreaching, did you, lady?  By 2011, the science on which the EPA determinations are being made will be so discredited that the EPA will have to cop an insanity defense.

There are good and rational reasons for phased-in government projects (such as you don’t build the bridge until you’ve got the road to it, even if it’s going nowhere), but the two aforementioned are not among those.  They are examples of government folly, the former predicted, the latter now being acknowledged.

In the meantime, where are the fast forward projects to get us out of our economic mess?  You know, some stuff the people actually want the government to do.

Time and again – in polls, in protests, in an avalanche of personal, direct pleas, in the Massachusetts Senate election of Scott Brown – the American people have told President Obama to focus administration and congressional activities on jobs and the economy and to start over on “health care reform.”

Time and again, he has refused.  Today, he defiantly raised the stakes, not only presenting a new version of the old versions (with a few pretzel twists) but raising the costs by billions.

In doing so, the President who came into office preaching that dialog could resolve the animosities of the world looks like nothing so much as the current government of Iran.

The more things change, the more they stay the same…

The White House this morning released a summary of President Obama’s latest proposal to reform the U.S. health care system.  Billed by the administration as an “opening bid” for discussion at the president’s so-called “Bipartisan Health Care Summit” later this week, the new plan closely mirrors the Senate-passed legislation. 

In other words, ObamaCare 2.0 3.0 … 12.0 (sorry, we lost count) is filled with the same tired proposals that the American people have already overwhelmingly rejected:  an individual mandate, drastic cuts to Medicare Advantage, taxes on so-called “Cadillac” insurance plans, etc., etc., etc. 

The release of the administration’s latest proposal comes on the heels of reports that Congressional Democrats are leaning heavily towards passing ObamaCare via reconciliation, a procedural trick enabling them to circumvent a filibuster of the legislation in the Senate.  Indeed, according to White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer, Obama’s latest health care plan was carefully crafted with that in mind.

The proposal is designed to provide “maximum flexibility to ensure that we can get an up or down vote if the opposition decides to take the extraordinary step of filibustering health reform,” Pfeiffer said on a conference call with reporters this morning. 

Will someone please remind us again what opponents of ObamaCare stand to gain by participating in the sham that is Obama’s “Bipartisan” Summit on Thursday?

Over 90 percent of doctors admit to practicing defensive medicine – focusing just as much on preventing lawsuits as on preventing disease.  In last week’s Freedom Minute, CFIF’s Renee Giachino discussed the dire need for meaningful medical liability reform to reduce U.S. health care costs.

First, President Obama “invited” Republicans to view the Democrats unveil yet another version of ObamaCare (live on television, to make up for all those previously broken promises of an open process).  That little trap is scheduled for next week.

Now, House Republicans want Democrats to debate unemployment on live television.  That is scheduled for…never, we think.

There is, of course, considerable evidence that nothing is real that doesn’t appear on television.  But if all this talking is only about political oneupsmanship, as it surely seems, we would modestly suggest that pistols at dawn make better television (commercial proceeds going to reduce the deficit), with much greater personal and public consequence.

Over at the Weekly Standard, the Pacific Research Institute‘s Jeffrey Anderson has a very sharp piece on how President Obama’s self-designated role as philosopher king is (a) antithetical to the American system and (b) impeding his legislative agenda. A sample:

In a moment of candor, [Obama] essentially said [he embraced the philosopher-king role] to [CBS News’ Katie] Couric:

“Look, I would have loved nothing better than to simply come up with some very elegant, you know, academically approved approach to health care [that] didn’t have any kinds of legislative fingerprints on it, and just go ahead and have that passed. But that’s not how it works in our democracy. Unfortunately what we end up having to do is to do a lot of negotiations with a lot of different people.”

With the possible exception of Woodrow Wilson, can you imagine any of our prior presidents having said that?

Our democratic process, our separation of powers, and our federalist design frustrate Obama. But, far from being unfortunate, the negotiations and multiple levels of approval that they require, from a myriad of different citizens, is largely what secures our liberty—protecting it from those who would otherwise impose their own comprehensive goals from their lofty theoretical perches. The Founders were surely not Obama’s intellectual inferiors, but they were practical men. The Constitutional Convention was nothing if not high-level give-and-take, tinkering and refining. One imagines Obama showing up at Independence Hall with his own plan in hand (probably adapted from Rousseau’s in The Social Contract, with Obama cast in the role of the Legislator) and being surprised when the other delegates resisted his eloquence and, correspondingly, his proposal.

A great piece. Read the whole thing here.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s senior health care advisor said this week that Democratic leadership has settled on a procedural strategy to pass ObamaCare. 

The story was first reported by Congress Daily (which can only be accessed with a subscription).  Here’s how LifeNews.com reported it:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s top health care aide Wendell Primus admitted top Democrats have already decided on the strategy to pass the Senate’s government-run health care bill…

Primus explained that the Senate will use the controversial reconciliation strategy that will have the House approve the Senate bill and both the House and Senate okaying changes to the bill that the Senate will sign off on by preventing Republicans from filibustering.

“The trick in all of this is that the president would have to sign the Senate bill first, then the reconciliation bill second, and the reconciliation bill would trump the Senate bill,” Primus said at the National Health Policy Conference hosted by Academy Health and Health Affairs.

 “There’s a certain skill, there’s a trick, but I think we’ll get it done,” he said.

The news had The Washington Examiner’s Mark Tapscott pondering, “[W]hy call a health care summit and challenge congressional Republicans to come with their best ideas when the plan is already in place to use legislative trickery to pass Obamacare?”

Good question.  One that Tapscott himself answered very adequately by writing:

The most logical answer would seem to be that the summit is part and parcel of a White House/congressional Democratic strategy to distract attention from what is about to happen on the Hill. It’s the classic magician’s trick of distracting you with the left hand while the right hand does the “trick.”

That’s the question Congressman Darrell  Issa (R-CA) is hoping to get answered with regard to President Obama’s promise, made during a speech before a joint session of Congress last September, to consider medical malpractice reform as a means of lowering U.S. health care costs.

During his nationally-televised September speech, Obama said:

Now, finally, many in this chamber – particularly on the Republican side of the aisle – have long insisted that reforming our medical malpractice laws can help bring down the cost of health care. … Now, I don’t believe malpractice reform is a silver bullet, but I’ve talked to enough doctors to know that defensive medicine may be contributing to unnecessary costs. So I’m proposing that we move forward on a range of ideas about how to put patient safety first and let doctors focus on practicing medicine. I know that the Bush Administration considered authorizing demonstration projects in individual states to test these ideas. I think it’s a good idea, and I’m directing my Secretary of Health and Human Services to move forward on this initiative today.”

However, according to a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee report on the benefits of capping non-economic damages and passing other tort reform measures released last week, it appears the President wasn’t being sincere when he made that directive.  The report, on page 4, reads:

Committee staff inquired of HHS whether they had an updated figure [on how much the federal government spends annually for malpractice coverage and the costs of defensive medicine], but staff was told by personnel of the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation that the report in question involved medical litigation which ‘is not a priority for this Administration.’”  

“The first question I have for President Obama is if he still stands by his call for tort reform or was he just lying to Congress when he directed Secretary [Kathleen] Sebelius to pursue an initiative addressing the costs of defensive medicine,” Issa, who is the ranking Republican on the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said in a statement released Monday. 

With all due respect Congressman, do you even have to ask?  The President’s commitment to meaningful tort reform is about as sincere as his commitment to bipartisanship.  Both are simply “not a priority for this Administration.”

It is now clear to all but the mentally challenged (you won’t read no retard talk here), that President Obama’s plan for a televised health care summit has zero to do with listening to Republican ideas, but everything to do with trotting out the snake oil bill yet again to demonstrate to five-and-a-half liberals who care deeply that the vast Republican minority is obstructionist.

Based on enough polling numbers to make up the deficit, it is also clear that Americans who vote (not those who are voted for or increasingly against) would like to send that bill on the last American flight to space.

Given a White House that has mastered no known public relations discipline, including the sort of fundamental “know your audience” one, we’d be betting that there is going to be a mudslide off the summit right back into the President’s lap.  That is, of course, unless some as yet unidentified White House smart person gets it canceled on the basis that George W. Bush didn’t do one and everything the White House is in trouble on must be based on what George W. Bush did.  (Should Bush be prosecuted for getting an illegal third term by proxy?)

We further suspect that the primary reaction of the summit’s television audience (see Americans above), complete with a Frank Luntz focus group to prove it, will be, “Didn’t we tell you morons to focus on jobs and the economy, not producing an SNL skit?”

At a Democratic National Committee fundraiser late last week, speaking about his stalled health care “reform,” President Obama said, “…if Congress decides we’re not going to do it, even after all the facts are laid out, all the options are clear, then the American people can make a judgment as to whether this Congress has done the right for them or not.  And that’s how democracy works.  There will be elections coming up, and they’ll be able to make a determination and register their concerns.”

Translation:  My term’s not up until 2012.  Yours are up, oh goodness, this year.  Rahm, how many people can we throw under one bus?  Need to make sure we have enough.

Not that many moons ago, Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana was haughtily correcting reporters that the price tag for the so-called “Louisiana Purchase” of her vote for the now-stalled health care reform bill was not the early-reported $100 million, but closer to $300 million (there are estimates approaching $400 million).

Yesterday, Miss Piggy Landrieu took to the Senate floor to whine about the attacks on her resulting, well, for her pigginess.  Among her remarks, “I know what I am inside.  I don’t need anyone to remind me of the goodness I have inside…”

We must have missed all those stories that attempted to remind her of the goodness she has inside.

Virginia is now one of many states pushing through a legislative response to complete federal control of health care.  Today, 23 Virginia Senators voted to exempt the Commonwealth from ObamaCare’s individual health insurance mandate.  Five Democrats joined all 18 Republicans to enact the measure in the Democratic-controlled Senate.

If President Obama’s health care bill does come back to life in the U.S. Congress, it appears that more states will follow Virginia’s lead to fight ObamaCare locally.

According to The Hill newspaper, Democrats reached a tentative compromise on health care just days before Massachusetts elected Scott Brown.  Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) stated that an agreement was reached on January 15. 

Of course, it is an indictment of this Administration’s transparency pledge that you’re reading about this news in February and didn’t watch the discussions live on C-SPAN.  Senator Harkin’s revelation underscores just how deceptive the White House was in negotiating the future of health care behind closed doors and how important Scott Brown’s victory was in defeating ObamaCare.

A few million Americans in Massachusetts made their voices heard loud and clear, but judging from last week’s State of the Union Address, the White House is still not listening.