Freedom Line Blog

Even proponents of ObamaCare are now admitting that Obama “has not been honest with the American people about the nature of this bill.”  Those are the words of Yale University professor Jack Balkin, who actually supports the bill.

Throughout his candidacy and now into his presidency, Barack Obama solemnly promised American voters that he wouldn’t raise taxes on anyone earning under $250,000 per year.  Not just income taxes – he said “any form” of taxes.  When he, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid subsequently dumped their ObamaCare monstrosity upon the resistant nation, however, the bill contained an individual mandate under which Americans who failed to purchase insurance for whatever reason would be assessed a punitive tax.  When career liberal George Stephanopoulos pointed out  to Obama during an ABC News interview that this mandate constitutes a tax, even reading a straightforward definition of “tax” from a dictionary, Obama petulantly objected.

That pesky interview from September now safely behind him, however, get a load of the Obama Administration’s new position on the matter.  In its legal brief defending ObamaCare against the lawsuit to overturn it brought by fifteen different states, Obama contends that the Constitution empowers the federal government “power to lay and collect taxes.”

Thus, it appears that Obama intentionally offered two falsehoods to the American people:  (1) that he would not increase “any form” of taxes upon anyone earning less than $250,000, and (2) that he didn’t consider ObamaCare’s individual mandate a “tax.”  How much deeper can this man bury his campaign false promise of “hope” and “change?”

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.

Noting that the health care reform measure passed earlier this year “doubles down on every problem the nation currently faces,” CFIF’s Renee Giachino in this week’s Freedom Minute discusses the effort to repeal ObamaCare in Congress and what you can do to help.

As we mentioned earlier today, Dr. Donald Berwick has received a recess appointment from President Obama to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. You’ll hear a lot in the next few days from the conservative press about Berwick’s radical affection for rationing and his distaste for the free market system. Lest you think any of it hyperbolic, let the man tell you for himself:

The Associated Press reports:

Bypassing Republicans eager to grill an administration official over the new health care law, President Barack Obama is planning to appoint the head of Medicare and Medicaid without Senate hearings.

“Obama intends to use a so-called recess appointment to put Dr. Donald Berwick in charge of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, a White House official said Tuesday night.”

As Freedom Line readers are aware, Dr. Berwick is a self-proclaimed health care rationing enthusiast who openly supports wealth redistribution schemes and a completely government-run single payer health care system. 

Indeed, in an interview just last year Berwick said, “The decision is not whether or not we will ration care — the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open.”  And in 2002, Dr. Berwick wrote, “most people who have serious pain do not need advanced methods – they just need the morphine and counseling that have been available for centuries.”

Seniors beware.  This is the guy who is now in charge of your health care.

Remember when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sought to put the American people at ease by stating “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it?”  

She was talking about ObamaCare, just prior to its final passage.  At the time, few people – including Pelosi and her Congressional colleagues – actually understood the consequences of passing the unpopular 2,000-plus-page bill.  But to Pelosi and her liberal majority, it was “very, very exciting.”  Never mind that it will actually raise health care costs, force people who like their insurance to get a new plan approved by government bureaucrats and limit access to care. Despite all the warnings and opposition from the American people, hindsight is 20/20, you know.

Well, now it appears that another member of the Congressional leadership has decided to follow Pelosi’s lead while announcing his own excitement about the prospect of passing yet another 2,000-page “reform” bill.

At 5:39 EST this morning – when most Americans were still asleep – key House and Senate lawmakers struck a deal on Financial Regulatory Reform, legislation that gives the federal government broad powers over the nation’s financial sector.   As Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) aptly noted, “it deals with every single aspect of our lives.” 

What does that mean for the average American family out there?  Well, according to Mr. Dodd, “No one will know until this is actually in place how it works.” 

Huh?  When the Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee and a chief architect of this legislation admits that he doesn’t know – indeed, that “no one will know” – the  consequences of a bill that he largely wrote and that “deals with every single aspect of our lives,” shouldn’t that be reason enough to oppose it?

Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) today introduced two new pieces of legislation to repeal the most troubling provisions of ObamaCare. 

“The first, The American Liberty Restoration Act (S. 3502), would repeal the individual mandate that Hatch has repeatedly called unconstitutional and has prompted lawsuits by over 20 states. The second, the American Job Protection Act (S.3501), would repeal the job-killing employer mandate that Hatch says would force more layoffs and increase taxes on businesses at a time of near 10 percent unemployment,” reads a press statement released by the Senator’s office.

On the individual mandate, Senator Hatch said:

Congress overstepped its authority by telling Americans that they have to buy health insurance or else.  The Constitution empowers Congress to regulate interstate commerce, but does not tell Americans what they must buy. It’s time to repeal this unconstitutional Washington mandate that encroaches on the principle of federalism and Utahns’ personal liberty.”

On the employer mandate, Hatch noted:

The employer mandate would force businesses to let people go or raise the cost of doing business to such an extent that they don’t start hiring. This doesn’t make any sense at any time, but especially when our nation’s unemployment rate remains stuck around ten percent.  Let’s repeal this job-killing provision so businesses can back in the business of hiring.”

It’s time to light up the Capitol switchboard, folks.  Both S. 3502 and S.3501 are more than worthy and in need of your support!

Dr. Donald Berwick, the Obama Administration’s nominee to oversee the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, once praised Britain at the expense of America by saying, “at last a nation where healthcare is a right and carrying a semi-automatic machine gun is a privilege, instead of the other way around.”

Dr. Berwick had worked with Britain’s National Health Service, and callously wrote in 2002 that “most people who have serious pain do not need advanced methods – they just need the morphine and counseling that have been available for centuries.”

Naturally, the Obama Administration said that Dr. Berwick’s comments were “taken out of context” in attempting to sweep the rising controversy under the rug.  The statements, however, speak for themselves.

Get a good look at the potential future under ObamaCare, America.

In an absolutely chilling piece at RealClearPolitics today, Dr. Hal Scherz examines an Obama nominee who otherwise may have escaped public scrutiny: Dr. Donald Berwick, who’s been tapped by 44 to run the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services. The picture that emerges is of an individual who makes even the most wall-eyed health care fears seem credible. Here’s Scherz, quoting Berwick in the first and third paragraphs:

“Any healthcare funding plan that is just, equitable, civilized and humane, must redistribute wealth from the richer among us to the poorer and the less fortunate. Excellent healthcare is by definition redistributional”.

Indeed, lest there be any doubt about the range of Dr Berwick’s schemes for “redistribution” – code for transferring power to the government — he makes clear how grand his vision for statist health care.

“There needs to be global budget caps on total healthcare spending for designated populations (ie-rationing)” Dr. Berwick says. “The simplest way to reach these goals is with a single payer system.”

The whole thing has to be read to be believed, but Scherz wraps it up with a nice injection of humanity:

But if Dr Berwick leaves little doubt who is going to be in charge of the redistribution, global caps, and the single payer systems, he shows with his use of words like “politically accountable” or “democratic”, the sort of verbal tic that betrays his own understanding. He seeks not broad-based, bottom-up decision-making but top-own edicts from elite panels of enlightened and, of course, “global” thinkers like himself that preempt decisions now made by doctors and their patients.

And that is what those of us who are practicing physicians find so troubling about Dr. Berwick’s nomination. We see him as a White House Rose Garden, photo-op doctor with a borrowed white coat; an academic who runs a $58 million institute, who analyzes numbers and reports and theories about populations but is now totally out of touch with his former peers and the patients that they treat every day. And this is the sobering point– Dr Berwick will not be there with us at the patient’s bedside looking them in the eye and telling them that the life saving treatment that they need is not approved because they don’t fit into the right demographic.

That’s the result of a new Rasmussen poll out today that shows 63 percent of voters would like to see the crown jewel of the Obama legacy relegated to the ash heap of history. Per Rasmussen:

Prior to today, weekly polling had shown support for repeal ranging from 54% to 58%.

Currently, just 32% oppose repeal.

The new findings include 46% who Strongly Favor repeal of the health care bill and 25% who Strongly Oppose it.

While opposition to the bill has remained as consistent since its passage as it was beforehand, this marks the first time that support for repeal has climbed into the 60s. It will be interesting to see whether this marks a brief bounce or indicates a trend of growing opposition.

Perhaps this owes to the growing public awareness of some of the facts that Peter Suderman points out at Reason:

Already, businesses small and large are warning of the ill effects of the law’s changes to the tax code. In order to generate the nearly $1 trillion necessary to pay for the law, its authors scoured the tax code looking to squeeze out more money whereever possible. And sure enough, within a few days of its passage, a handful of big companies took tax write downs in response to changes in the tax treatment of an existing drug subsidy. An estimate by Credit Suisse puts the total damage across the economy at around $4.5 billion—with $1 billion coming from AT&T alone.

The change involved the tax treatment of a subsidy that never should have existed, but it suggests the extent to which America’s health care system is already reliant on government meddling, and how costly expanding the government’s role in the system can be. And, perhaps more importantly, a planned investigation into the write-downs revealed that many big corporations are considering dropping their health care coverage and dumping employees onto the public dole.

When Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) heard about the write-downs, he called a hearing with AT&T and other companies claiming big hits. But soon after the subpoenaed corporate documents were turned in, the hearing was canceled. Why? Likely because, as Fortune magazine reported, the documents showed that the companies were considering dropping coverage for many employees—directly contradicting one of the president’s key promises, that, under ObamaCare, “if you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan.” Even with penalties in place for employers who decline to provide health insurance, documents showed that Caterpillar could reduce its health care costs by as much as 70 percent and AT&T could save as much as $1.8 billion by shifting their employees into public programs.

If this sounds like a plan that only a bureaucrat could love, that’s because it is. Check out this underreported nugget from the Rasmussen poll:

The Political Class continues to be a strong supporter of the plan, however. While 67% of Mainstream voters believe the plan will be bad for America, 77% of the Political Class disagree and think it be good for the country.

The political class is about to get knocked on their heels. And to show how it can happen (warning: incoming teaser) , later this week I’ll be looking at a couple of little known-provisions in the health care bill that could prove its ultimate undoing.

In an interview with CFIF, Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum discusses the lawsuit brought by at least 20 states challenging the constitutionality of ObamaCare and why the new law’s unprecedented mandates are an affront to individual freedom.

Listen to the interview here.

Pardon our John Kerry-accented French, but who the hell does Barack Obama think he is?

This was Obama, once again saturated in his own false sense of economic prowess, speaking yesterday to an ever-dwindling audience of true believers in Illinois:

I do think, at a certain point, you’ve made too much money.”

Really?  Does the $5,505,409 that Obama earned last year happen to conveniently fall just below that “too much money” threshold?  What about his multimillionaire supporters Oprah Winfrey and George Soros?  And more importantly, who does this man think he is to instruct the most dynamic and prosperous society in human history that “you’ve made too much money?”

Somewhere, Joe the Plumber must be shaking his head over a cold beer and sighing, “I tried to warn you.”  It’s too bad that more people didn’t heed his warning after Obama suggested that we “spread the wealth around” during the 2008 campaign, but there’s always the opportunity for a “do over” in November 2010 and 2012.

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.

Merely weeks after the passage of ObamaCare, experts are already sounding the alarm:  The nation doesn’t have enough doctors!

Suzanne Sataline and Shirley S. Wang of The Wall Street Journal report:

At current graduation and training rates, the nation could face a shortage of as many as 150,000 doctors in the next 15 years, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. …

“The greatest demand will be for primary-care physicians. These general practitioners, internists, family physicians and pediatricians will have a larger role under the new law, coordinating care for each patient. …

“A shortage of primary-care and other physicians could mean more-limited access to health care and longer wait times for patients.”

Read the full piece here.

Congressman Bart Stupak (D – Michigan), whose “I voted against the bill before I voted for it” sellout proved pivotal in foisting ObamaCare upon America, now announces he will not run for reelection this November.

So tell us, Congressman – was it all worth it?  You initially took a principled stand against ObamaCare, but then sold out your own cause on the basis of a promise from Barack Obama to issue an executive order, which doesn’t carry the force of Congressional law.  This is the same Barack Obama who promised during his campaign to abide by public campaign finance limitations, then changed his mind when that became politically inconvenient.  The same Barack Obama who opposed Hillary Clinton’s healthcare proposal because it imposed an individual mandate, but whose ultimate bill included that same individual mandate.

Now, even Politico comments that “without Stupak on the ballot, the seat becomes an immediate pickup opportunity for Republicans.”  In other words, even Nancy Pelosi now knows how it feels to be blindsided by Bart Stupak.

Here’s another warning about Barack Obama’s impending Med-State (in a tribute to the founder of medicine, would this be called a Hippocracy?)

The Cato Institute’s Dr. George Avery, a public health professor at Purdue, uses a recent briefing paper to look at how science has been manipulated for political purposes in both the health care and climate change debates. But while his examination of the “Climategate” scandal out of the University of East Anglia is old news by now, his insights into health care are chilling. To wit:

In health care policy, critics have long worried about the inordinate influence of pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers on research to show the safety and viability of new products. Recent information, however, shows that government agencies may cause more problems in this area — a worrisome development considering that health care legislation recently passed by the United States Senate would allow federal agencies to punish organizations whose researchers publish results that conflict with what the agency feels is appropriate.

The specific language in the bill relating to comparative effectiveness research (essentially a way of studying medical best practices) allows the federal government to withhold research dollars when the results are not “within the bounds of and entirely consistent with the evidence.” Apart from being absurdly vague, this is also a threat to intellectual honesty in science — obviously every new breakthrough is, by definition, not “entirely consistent with the evidence” that preceded it.

Another interesting note: Dr. Avery concedes that medical research underwritten by a company that stands to make a profit on the underlying product often results in pressure on the researchers. No real surprise there (you budding economists will recognize a principal-agent problem at work). However, he notes that similar pressure from  government is much more omininous, since the monopoly power of the state can much more effectively suppress contradictory findings.

Within days of ObamaCare’s passage, AT&T, Caterpillar and other American employers announced hundreds of millions of dollars in earnings writedowns pursuant to U.S. accounting laws.  Although Democrats falsely claim that these restatements are mere political attacks aimed at Barack Obama, the simple fact is that they are legally required to report the corporate costs of ObamaCare’s tax increase on the retiree drug benefits that they pay each year. Specifically, the Financial Standard Accounting Board’s 1990 Statement Number 106 mandates earnings restatements due to anticipated future retiree liabilities.  If these employers did not report the writedowns, they’d be prosecuted.

The most despicable reaction of all, however, may be that of two Congressmen who played a critical role in imposing ObamaCare in the first place.  Henry Waxman (D – California) and Bart Stupak (D – Michigan), those two profiles in cowardice and malevolence, have now demanded the CEOs of AT&T, John Deere, Caterpillar and Prudential appear to justify themselves before their committee.   According to their letter, “the new law is designed to expand coverage and bring down costs, so your assertions are a matter of concern.”

In other words, who are you going to believe – Henry Waxman, Bart Stupak, Barack Obama and their doctored Congressional Budget Office predictions, or your own actual bottom line and real-world numbers? Every person with a grain of sense anticipated the negative consequences of ObamaCare, but such effects seem to have blindsided ObamaCare’s advocates.

More generally, who are Henry Waxman and Bart Stupak to be hauling the CEOs of some of America’s most valuable and successful companies to Capitol Hill to explain themselves?  Shouldn’t it be the other way around?  How many jobs have Waxman and Stupak created in their lives compared to AT&T, Caterpillar, John Deere and others?  How many successful products have Waxman and Stupak contributed to the world economy and human progress?  Why aren’t the CEOs the ones hauling Waxman and Stupak to explain their retrograde economic views and the destruction that they are wreaking on America, rather than vice-versa?  Why aren’t Waxman and Stupak explaining their toxic behavior to a nationwide audience?

We live in an increasingly Orwellian era, and the sheer weight of absurdity may soon cause a snap.

FoxNews.com reports:

The 11 House Democrats led by Rep. Bart Stupak who dropped their opposition to health care reform legislation mere hours before the final vote have requested $3.4 billion in earmarks — and one watchdog group wants to know whether the money represents business as usual or political payoffs. 

“The Sunlight Foundation says it plans to track the earmark requests, which were put in one day after health care reform cleared Congress, to see whether they’re approved and whether it appears lawmakers are being rewarded for their vote. “

Of course, Stupak’s office claims there is no link between the earmarks and health care votes.   But if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck…

Welcome to the ObamaCare hangover, America.

In his weekly Main Street column entitled “The Tax Police and the Health Care Mandate,” Wall Street Journal columnist William McGurn points out a malignant paradox within ObamaCare.  Namely, that ObmaCare’s infamous individual mandate (which compels uninsured Americans to suddenly purchase insurance under penalty of prosecution) will have one of two consequences.  It will either (1) penalize poorer Americans who fail – or find themselves unable – to purchase insurance by unleashing a horde of IRS enforcers upon them;  or, alternatively, (2) remain lightly enforced in order to avoid punishing the poor, thereby escalating our collective taxpayer cost into the stratosphere.

The rationale behind the individual mandate, of course, is that many of ObamaCare’s provisions, such as forcing insurers to cover people with preexisting conditions, would make its total cost unaffordable unless healthier and younger uninsured Americans were required to buy coverage.  McGurn notes that Obama was against this individual mandate before he was for it, opposing it during the 2008 Democrat primaries against Hillary Clinton, but unsurprisingly inserting it into ObamaCare’s provisions later on.  Nevertheless, enforcing the individual mandate will require new legions of IRS agents to target Americans who refuse to either purchase insurance or pay the federal tax penalty.

Which creates the paradox.  Those who consider themselves too poor to buy insurance today may still feel that way even when ObamaCare’s mandate is imposed, in which case they’ll find themselves the targets of the IRS.  If, however, federal bureaucrats in their famed mercy refrain from enforcing ObamaCare’s individual mandate in order to avoid persecuting poorer Americans (just as they do not penalize failure to return census forms), the total cost of ObamaCare will far exceed what its proponents promised us while they shoved it up our…  noses.

Nancy Pelosi was right about one thing, though.  We’re sure finding out a lot about ObamaCare now that it’s passed.