Posted from the National Center on Policy Analysis

By John Goodman — My faith in democracy is being restored. Take a look at the chart below…..then look again…..and again.

Q:  If the health care system is changed, do you think ….. will get better, worse, or remain the same?

 

Note first that these opinions are not directed at the Kennedy/Dodd bill or the Waxman bill or at a likely Baucus/Grassley bill. They are opinions about health reform as such, or about any reform bill that is likely to pass and be generically referred to as “Obama Care.”

Note second that (a) these are the same people who gave Barack Obama a landslide election victory last November, that (b) Obama’s signature domestic policy issue was health care and that (c) Obama claimed we needed reform for the express purpose of solving the problems of cost, quality and access.

Note third that the opinions reflected in the poll have not been vocalized anywhere on Capitol Hill or anywhere in the mainstream media. Sure, there have been Republican critics of Democratic proposals, and the mainstream media has questioned whether the bills will accomplish all that the sponsors are hoping for. But virtually no politician or news reporter or editorial writer or network talking head has gone so far as to say: not only are these plans not going to work, they are going to make every one of our health care problems worse than they would have been. [Okay, the Wall Street Journal editorial page comes close to being the exception.]

Note finally that the opinions held by the general public are almost certainly correct. As we have explained at this blog on many occasions for well over a year now, the fundamental structure of Obama Care is deeply flawed. So much so, that almost any version of it will likely make our health care problems worse — not better.

Here is a parting question for you to ponder: Why are the people so much more perceptive than the pundits who try to tell them what to think?

Posted from DickMorris.com

As if Obama’s health care proposals were not flawed enough, CBS News reports a previously unnoticed provision of the bill which makes a shambles of any privacy surrounding your federal tax returns.  Under the House bill, the IRS is required to make available to the new government Health Choices Commissioner” established by the legislation and to each state health program all of your personal tax information.

In a blog, CBSNews’ Declan McCullagh reports that “Section 431 (a) of the bill says that the IRS must divulge taxpayer identity information, including the filing status, the modified adjusted grow income, the number of dependents, and ‘other information as is prescribed by’ regulation” to the “new Health Choices Commissioner and state health programs.”

And, McCullagh also reports that, under Section 1801(a) “the Social Security Administration can obtain tax return data on anyone who may be eligible for a ‘low-income prescription drug subsidy’ but has not applied for it.”
 
So the Health Choices Commissioner and anyone in his office, the fifty state health programs and their staffs, and the vast Social Security Administration will all now have access to your personal tax information.
 
It might as well be published in the newspapers.
 
The rationale for providing this confidential tax information to all these people is not only to check on the eligibility of those who are seeking federal subsidy – a possibly appropriate use of it – but, also, to those who have not applied but might be eligible.  This later20provision essentially authorizes the Social Security Administration to seek and obtain anyone’s income tax information under the guise of determining if they should have applied for a subsidy.
 
In his blog, McCullagh quotes Tom Giovanetti of the Institute for Policy Innovation as saying “How many thousands of federal employees will have access to your record?  The privacy of your health records will be only as good as the most nosy, most dishonest, and most malcontented federal employee.”  And not just your health records, your financial records too!
 
This legislation requiring an agency-to-agency transfer of confidential tax information runs against the general policy of the Privacy Act which prohibits such a paper flow.  Generally, information has to come from the individual involved and cannot simply be passed from one government bureau to another.  The IRS takes particular pains to keep tax returns confidential and leaks are rare.  But this legislation will end any hope or pretense of privacy.

Posted from the Daily Mail

Patients in Health Service hospitals are far more likely to go hungry than criminals in jail, scientists warned yesterday.

They say frail and elderly patients do not get the help they need with meals, and nobody checks whether they get enough to eat.

Despite years of Government promises to tackle poor hospital nutrition, food still arrives cold, and patients often miss out because meal times clash with tests and operations.

The Daily Mail has been highlighting the scandal of old people not being fed properly in hospital as part of its Dignity for the Elderly campaign.

Hospital meals are often taken away untouched, because they are either unappetising or are placed out of patients’ reach.

The latest figures show 242 patients died of malnutrition in NHS hospitals in 2007  -  the highest toll in a decade. More than 8,000 left hospital under-nourished  -  double the figure when Labour came to power.

The NHS throws away 11million meals every year, and many nurses say they are too busy to help the frail eat.

Earlier this year the Mail revealed that some hospitals spend less on meals than the average prison.

Ten hospitals spent less on breakfast, lunch and an evening meal than the £2.12 a day allocated for food by the prison service. One spent just £1.

Although most hospitals do spend more than £2.12, prisoners end up better nourished than patients, say experts from Bournemouth University. After studying the food offered to inmates and across the NHS, they found patients face more barriers in getting good nutrition.

Professor John Edwards said around 40 per cent of patients were already malnourished when they were admitted to hospital, but their condition did not tend to improve while they were there.

‘If you are in prison then the diet you get is extremely good in terms of nutritional content,’ he said.

‘The food that is provided is actually better than most civilians have.

‘There’s a focus on carbohydrates, then there’s the way they prepare the food, it’s very healthy. They don’t add salt and there’s relatively little frying of food  -  if you have a burger then it goes in the oven. Hospital patients don’t consume enough.

‘And from the work we’ve done we know that people who sit round a table eat a lot more, but this doesn’t happen in hospitals.’

His colleague, Dr Heather Hartwell, said fruit and vegetables were given out in hospitals ‘but this doesn’t mean it’s eaten’.

While patients suffer due to a loss of appetite as a result of their illness, they often go hungry because there is no one to help them eat.

Dr Hartwell said once food was prepared, it generally hangs around waiting for porters to transport it to patients. Then it may be left on wards until it goes cold.

‘Ward staff also don’t actually know how much patients are eating because it is domestics who clear the trays away,’ she said. ‘This is an example of fragmentation in hospitals that does not necessarily happen in prisons.’

The research found temperature and texture are among the most important factors in patients’ satisfaction with food.

It concluded lack of appetite due to a medical problem is probably the main reason for under-nutrition, but said hospitals can make improvements.

Liberal Democrat health spokesman Norman Lamb said: ‘It’s incredible that so many hospitals are failing to serve healthy meals. If prisons can serve good food then so can hospitals.’

The Department of Health said: ‘The majority of patients are satisfied with the food they receive in hospitals, and we are working to improve services further.

‘The Nutrition Action Plan, Improving Nutritional Care, outlines how nutritional care and hydration can be improved and highlights five key priority areas for NHS and social care staff to work with.

‘We have also introduced the concept of “protected mealtimes” where all non-urgent activity on the ward stops, so that patients can enjoy their meals.’

Posted from World Net Daily

By Chuck Norris – Flying under the radar last week was a new government report that forecasts that the national debt will double over the next decade. The White House has projected a cumulative $9 trillion deficit between 2010 and 2019, while the Congressional Budget Office estimates a more optimistic $7.1 trillion based upon the expiration of Bush tax cuts. What this means is that Washington’s out-of-control spending will likely turn the nation’s already-staggering $11 trillion debt into an astronomical $20 trillion.

But there are at least two ginormous expenses that are excluded in these projections. First, both projections from the White House and CBO incorporate their belief that the deficit will decline quickly over the next three years, as they assume less bailouts are needed and the economy rapidly grows. But isn’t there also the real possibility that the economy will not recover as quickly as they hope? Every additional bailout or stimulus (large or small), and every margin of error in their three-year prospective climb-out of the economic pit, will inflate our nation’s debt balloon even more.

The second expense is far less speculative – and it has to do with about one-fourth of America. The 72 million baby boomers (people born in America from 1946 to 1964, excluding immigrants), the largest generation America has produced, are going into retirement over the next two decades and will face the golden years of declining health and rising medical costs. Under current law, if the government were to add the projected baby boomer costs of Medicare and Social Security to its debt tab, it would send deficit projections into the abyss.

Here’s the primary problem: Medicare is bankrupt. Medicaid is bankrupt. And Social Security is bankrupt. Though boomers have paid into these programs via their taxes for decades, there are not enough benefits to offer them, now and even less in the future. The problem is compounded when one understands that the number of people in the United States ages 65 and older is expected to double by 2030, and so is the amount expected to fund their retirement and health care in their twilight years, which relatively few are prepared to handle themselves.

So what is the U.S. government to do, especially when it is already projected to have a $20 trillion dollar debt in 2019 (let alone what it will be in 2030)?

That reform is needed in health care is not a question, mostly because Americans are being raped by the insurance companies. But Obamacare in its present form is not the answer, because it will progressively cut (yes, cut) the care for baby boomers in the future, if not through the reductions and costs of private options then through the mandatory benefit cuts the government has to make in Social Security and Obamacare (former Medicare). Think about it. If government can’t handle the costs of the elderly now in retirement via its Medicare and Social Security programs, do we really expect they will offer the baby boomer better (and more costly) benefits in the future?

The government knows that, with any version of a public option in health care, it is impossible for them to assist the baby boomer generation the way they assist their parents’ generation right now. Do the math. It’s impossible, in any form – not without the biggest tax increases ever levied upon the American people. This Washington knows: It must cut the benefits of Medicare and Social Security, otherwise the government itself will go bankrupt trying to offer those programs to the boomers over the next two decades. For a little inside peak into the Washington corridors on this issue, consider the following. 

According to the Congressional Budget Office’s own report, “The U.S. Retirement System and the Baby-Boom Generation,” “Present trends are unlikely to persist indefinitely, however, because total payments to retirees are expected to grow much faster under current law than either the total incomes of workers who pay Social Security and Medicare taxes or the revenues earmarked for those programs. That widening gap will place increasing stress on both programs. Narrowing the gap could involve slowing the future growth of benefits.”

Notice the words “under current law” and “slowing the future growth of benefits”? That is key. The only way around this future financial dilemma (at least according to this administration) is to change “current law” and to “slow” or lower the benefits for baby boomers. That new law (or basic legislation upon which such changes can be amended) is Obamacare. Are we so gullible to believe that the CBO’s report on baby boomers has no interplay with Obamacare legislation?

Look closely at the carefully stated italicized words (emphasis mine) within the Congressional Budget Office’s political strategy found within that same boomer report: “The extent to which baby boomers are providing for their own retirement – and have time to react to policy changes – is thus an important consideration in evaluating proposals to reform the Social Security and Medicare programs.” The only way the boomers will “have time to react to policy changes” is if they are enacted before they go into retirement! (Are you catching another reason for the White House’s rush to pass this legislation?!)

This is dirty secret No. 4 in Obamacare that our government isn’t telling you: Obamacare is ultimately designed to force retiring baby boomers into a much cheaper version of socialized medicine than Medicare, which is already being positioned to be cut to the tune of $500 billion. Obamacare is not merely about reforming health care to aid 47 million Americans who are uninsured. It is about reforming “current law” to ax 72 million retiring Americans who the government can’t afford to support over the next two decades.

Now you know why President Obama and recently White House budget director Peter Orszag both declared that health-care reform is “central” to economic recovery. Many have wondered how or why they can say that. They aren’t saying so because the government is expanding medical coverage or because it will cost them a trillion more dollars to socialize medicine. They are saying that because offering 72 million baby boomers less Social Security and Medicare benefits (via Obamacare) will save the government trillions over the next couple decades.

Consider the fact that we’re already feeling the birth pains of this generational catastrophe: For the first time in Social Security’s history last week, Social Security checks are projected to freeze or be cut in 2010, 2011 and even 2012. In fact, according to Rep. Spencer Bachus, R-Ala., another bailout could be imminent for Social Security.

Cut Social Security checks?! Let me get this straight. Corporations are given Washington bailouts. Society is infused with government stimuli. Consumers and car lots are given cash for clunkers. And the elderly, who will undoubtedly bear the brunt end of disproportionate medical costs and coverage merely because of their age, are experiencing an economic freeze already from the administration that promises not to cut their future benefits? Sounds to me that health-care rationing has already begun via Social Security!

Bottom line: Washington believes it must control spending on retirement and health benefits before millions of baby boomers retire, and Obamacare is the ticket to accomplish that objective. As Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D., said, “Today’s budget numbers send a clear signal that the time for putting off tough choices is over and the time to act is now.” But wouldn’t you like to know if those “tough choices” had to do with your future health care?

Again, friends, Washington’s whole covert plan can be summed up and seen in these words from the CBO report on baby boomers: “Under current law … slowing the future growth of benefits … have time to react to policy changes.”

I’ll say it one last time: Before so-called universal health care turns into your universal hell-care, write or call your representatives today and protest their rushing and voting Obamacare into law. Remind them what is needed in Washington is a truly bipartisan group that is allowed ample amount of time to work on compromised health-care law that reigns in out-of-control insurance companies and doesn’t raise taxes (for anyone), regulate personal medical choices, ration health care or restrict American citizens’ freedoms in any way.

My last four columns (outlining the four dirty secrets of Obamacare) are more than enough reason to kill this present so-called health-care legislation and send our politicians back to the drawing boards. That is why I’m sending my congressman this message that I also encourage you to send yours: “If you vote in Obamacare, I’ll fight to vote you out of office!”

Read Dirty Secret #1, Dirty Secret #2, Dirty Secret #3

By U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann – 6th District

 Health care reform is on everybody’s mind. And with good reason.

 We have the highest quality health care in the world. Look no further than Minnesota’s Mayo Clinic, which is a world-class destination for care. But high costs put health care out of reach for millions of Americans, especially middle-class families that make too much for government subsidies but struggle to pay the bills. Similarly, small-business owners struggle because they cannot use big business’ economies of scale to get affordable coverage.

We must do something to contain costs and make the high-quality care we have more accessible to everyone.

While the government-run approach, also known as the public option or co-op, is getting the most notice, there are actually a number of less dramatic alternatives that can really make a big difference. Moreover, while some in Washington are talking about what’s being called the “nuclear option,” or a Democratic Congress and White House joining together to pass their reform proposals with no Republican input, many of these lesser-known alternatives individually have broad bipartisan support.

We shouldn’t get lost in the glamour of big overhauls and look past meaningful reforms, like association health plans that let small businesses bond together to reduce coverage costs or health savings accounts that let you save for care tax-free. Bigger is not necessarily better.

Changes to the tax code, for instance, would make care and coverage more affordable while preserving consumer choices.

I’ve introduced the bipartisan Health Care Freedom of Choice Act to put patients in charge of their health decisions by tweaking the tax code. Under current law, businesses are allowed to deduct the cost of employee health care from their taxes, while individuals and families cannot. This bias in favor of employer-provided coverage leads to higher costs overall and reduces accessibility to care.

My legislation would erase this bias and extend the same tax incentives to businesses and individuals alike. From co-pays and premiums to long-term care, vision and dental, your high out-of-pocket costs would no longer be a barrier to care.

I’ve also cosponsored the Empowering Patients First Act, which puts the focus of health care decisions back on the patient, where it belongs. This legislation includes a sliding scale refundable tax credit for lower income Americans. It also covers pre-existing conditions and protects employer-sponsored insurance.

The bill would increase consumer choice by allowing individuals to shop for their health insurance across state lines, similar to how we purchase auto insurance, creating competition and giving Americans the greatest value for the coverage that best fits their needs.

Allowing consumers to cross state lines to purchase insurance would apply positive pressure to end the burgeoning number of health insurance mandates. If you don’t want to pay for hair prostheses in your coverage, you shouldn’t have to, but one in five states mandates that you do.

According to a study by the Council for Affordable Health Insurance, each mandate typically increases the cost of health insurance coverage by up to 3 percent. And, they identified 1,961 mandates in 2008.

Another provision in this legislation would rein in the money wasted on frivolous lawsuits.  Malpractice awards alone drive up the annual cost of U.S. health care by $20 billion to $40 billion a year. But even worse is the cost of defensive medicine, or responses a doctor utilizes primarily to avoid liability.One study by the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons puts the cost of defensive medicine at as much as $178 billion per year. We must have tort reform so that doctors can be doctors without fear of frivolous, career-ending lawsuits.

 And we must have tort reform so that doctors don’t abandon difficult specialties because their medical malpractice insurance makes it cost prohibitive. Increasing numbers of obstetrician-gynecologists, for instance, won’t deliver babies any more; it’s just too costly. Patients — particularly in underserved areas — are the ones who lose when doctors are forced to drop these important specialties.

These are just a few of the health care proposals we can enact that won’t break the bank and can pass quickly and with broad bipartisan support.

Our nation’s deficit and debt are at all-time highs. Medicare and Medicaid are broke. Social Security is broke. Can we really afford to trust Washington when it asks you to entrust them with your health care saying it will not only reduce costs, but increase both accessibility and efficiency for all Americans?

Posted from Heritage Foundation

by Nina Owcharenko

Current efforts by Congress to “reform” the health care system are centered on several flawed policy initiatives that will transfer more power and decisions to Washington and away from patients and families.

Rather than create a massive government-based health care system and dislocate people from their existing private coverage, policymakers should focus on putting the health care system on a path where individuals and families are in control of their health care dollars and decisions.

Shortfalls of the Health Care Bills

The following five provisions are the cornerstone of the House and Senate bills and unavoidably result in legislation taking health care reform in the wrong direction.

1. New Public Plan and Federal Exchange. Both the House and Senate bills would create a new government-run health care plan through the establishment of a federally run national health insurance exchange. The result: widespread erosion of private insurance and substantial consolidation of federal control over health care through the exchange.[1] As is evident in the details of the House bill (H.R. 3200), there is no level playing field for competition between the government plans and private health plans. Plus, the incentives in the legislation guarantee that millions of Americans will lose their existing employer-based coverage.

2. Federal Regulation of Health Insurance. Both the House and Senate bills would result in sweeping and complex federal regulation of health insurance. Moreover, it would take oversight away from states and concentrate it in Washington.[2]

3. Massive New Taxpayer-Funded Subsidies. Both the House and Senate would expand eligibility for Medicaid, but they would also extend new taxpayer-funded subsidies to the middle class. Such commitments would result in scores of Americans dependent on the government to finance their health care.[3] This is unfortunate because Congress could have reformed the tax treatment of health insurance to enable people to keep their existing private coverage and buy better private coverage if they wished to do so.

4. Employer Mandate. Both the House and Senate bills would impose an employer mandate for employers who do not offer coverage and for those whose benefits do not meet a new federal standard. An employer mandate would hurt low-income workers the most and would also stifle much-needed economic growth.[4] Employer mandates are passed on to workers in the form of reduced wages and compensation. This is exactly the wrong prescription for businesses, especially during a recession.

5. Individual Mandate. Both the House and Senate bills would require all people to buy health insurance. There is no doubt that such a mandate would result in a tax increase on individuals and families whose health insurance does not meet the new federally determined standards. This means that Congress will, for the first time, force Americans to buy federally designed packages of health benefits, even if they do not want or need those benefits.

It also means that health benefits will tend to become increasingly costly as powerful special interest groups and representatives of the health industry lobby intensively to expand the legally mandated health benefits, medical treatments and procedures, and drugs that all Americans must buy under penalty of law.

A Better Direction for Health Care Reform

Congress should stop and take a step back from these divisive House and Senate measures. Instead of trying to overhaul one-sixth of the American economy and seize an unprecedented amount of political control over health care decisions and dollars, policymakers should consider proceeding with smaller, incremental improvements. Policymakers need to proceed slowly and deliberately, making sure that the initial steps they take are not disruptive of what Americans have and want to keep, actually work, and do not result in costly and damaging and unintended consequences. There are three broad areas where Members can and should find consensus:

1. Promote State Innovation. Congress should preserve the states’ autonomy over their health care systems and give them greater legal freedom to devise solutions that meet the unique characteristics of their citizens. In addition, individuals should also have the freedom to purchase coverage from trusted sources and not be restricted by where they happen to live. This means that Americans should be able to buy better coverage across state lines. Congress should respect and encourage personal freedom and diversity.

2. Establish Fairness in the Tax Treatment of Health Insurance. There is little disagreement that today’s health care tax policy–which favors coverage obtained through the workplace–distorts the market and is inequitable. Instead of expanding government-run programs like Medicaid, policymakers should offer tax relief to those individuals who purchase private health insurance on their own, regardless of where they work.

At the same time, Congress should make sure that tax relief goes only to taxpayers. Congress should also devise a voucher program, giving low-income citizens the opportunity to get private coverage if they wish to do so. There is a broad bipartisan consensus that Congress should help low-income working families with direct assistance to enable them to get health insurance.

3. Get Serious About Entitlement Reform. Medicare and Medicaid, the giant health care entitlement programs, are not only increasingly costly, but they are also not delivering value to the taxpayers. The best way to secure value to patients (not government officials) is to compel health providers to compete directly for consumer dollars by allowing seniors and the poor to choose the coverage that is right for them using the money that is already available to them in these programs. This will “bend the cost curve” while at the same time allowing private-sector innovation to flourish.

Consumer-Driven Reform

Americans want to fix the problems in the health care system–but not at the expense of their own coverage. It is time policymakers recognize the lack of support for a major overhaul. But instead of continuing to protect the status quo, Congress should advance improvements that put the health care system on a path to reform.

Such improvements should be focused on increasing choice and competition not by turning control over to Washington but by empowering individuals and families to control their health care dollars and decisions.

Nina Owcharenko is Deputy Director of the Center for Health Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation

Posted from OneNewsNow.com

A new poll finds that despite the American Medical Association’s support for President Obama’s healthcare plan, most specialty doctors strongly oppose the plan.

The American Society of Medical Doctors has released a poll of physicians that finds 86 percent of specialty doctors believe that the American Medical Association has become too political and has lost touch with the doctors it represents.
 
The American Medical Association, or AMA, which gave Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy its highest award for public service earlier this year, has endorsed President Obama’s government-run healthcare plan. Seventy percent of the specialty doctors surveyed in the poll said they oppose current congressional and White House proposals for healthcare reform.
 
Jean Card, a spokeswoman for the American Society of Medical Doctors, says the polling shows that many doctors fear President Obama’s healthcare plan threatens their ability to honor the Hippocratic Oath.
 
“If you can’t live up to your oath, if you feel like this bureaucracy and this clumsy government system is in between you and your patient, well then a doctor thinks ‘No, I have to go with my oath, and if I have to say no to government to follow my oath, then I will,’” she says.
 
The poll released by the American Society of Medical Doctors also found that 66 percent of specialty physicians believe that a government-run health insurance plan would restrict doctors’ ability to give the best advice and offer the best possible care to their patients.

Posted from OneNewsNow.com

A free-market think tank is warning that the House healthcare bill could potentially give thousands of federal employees access to citizens’ financial records.  

The House healthcare bill, H.R. 3200, expressly gives the new Health Choices Commissioner the right to look at an individual’s tax return to determine what medical benefits or subsidies that person qualifies for. Section 431 of the bill allows the new commissioner to view individuals’ filing status, adjusted gross income, number of dependents, and tax credits taken.
 
Tom Giovanetti with the Institute for Policy Innovation says there are egregious violations of privacy in the draft legislation.
 
“A lot of people who are concerned about privacy, they’re concerned about privacy from corporations. They’re worried about things like browser cookies….And our point here is that what we really ought to be concerned about is privacy from government,” he suggests. “Hewlett Packard can’t knock my door in, handcuff me, and carry my child away; but the federal government can do that. It does have that kind of power.”
 
Giovanetti calls it a “top-down, government-knows-all approach.”
 
“So, it’s for the government to decide who qualifies for what and who needs what assistance. So to make those decisions, they’ve got to find out all sorts of details about your finances,” he points out. “There’s another provision in the bill that gives them the right to look at your Social Security records. They’ll be able to look and see what your Social Security benefits are. They’ll be able to look and see how much you’ve paid in.”
 
According to Giovanetti, a companion bill in the Senate leaves open the possibility that the new government Health Choices Commission would have the ability to look into a person’s bank accounts to view the account balance at the time of medical service to determine whether he or she has the ability to pay.

With the Democrats getting slaughtered — or should I say, “receiving mandatory end-of-life counseling” — in the debate over national health care, the Obama administration has decided to change the subject by indicting CIA interrogators for talking tough to three of the world’s leading Muslim terrorists.

Had I been asked, I would have advised them against reinforcing the idea that Democrats are hysterical bed-wetters who can’t be trusted with national defense while also reminding people of the one thing everyone still admires about President George W. Bush.

But I guess the Democrats really want to change the subject. Thus, here is Part 2 in our series of liberal lies about national health care.

(6) There will be no rationing under national health care.

Anyone who says that is a liar. And all Democrats are saying it. (Hey, look — I have two-thirds of a syllogism!)

Apparently, promising to cut costs by having a panel of Washington bureaucrats (for short, “The Death Panel”) deny medical treatment wasn’t a popular idea with most Americans. So liberals started claiming that they are going to cover an additional 47 million uninsured Americans and cut costs … without ever denying a single medical treatment!

Also on the agenda is a delicious all-you-can-eat chocolate cake that will actually help you lose weight! But first, let’s go over the specs for my perpetual motion machine — and it uses no energy, so it’s totally green!

For you newcomers to planet Earth, everything that does not exist in infinite supply is rationed. In a free society, people are allowed to make their own rationing choices.

Some people get new computers every year; some every five years. Some White House employees get new computers and then vandalize them on the way out the door when their candidate loses. (These are the same people who will be making decisions about your health care.)

Similarly, one person might say, “I want to live it up and spend freely now! No one lives forever.” (That person is a Democrat.) And another might say, “I don’t go to restaurants, I don’t go to the theater, and I don’t buy expensive designer clothes because I’ve decided to pour all my money into my health.”

Under national health care, you’ll have no choice about how to ration your own health care. If your neighbor isn’t entitled to a hip replacement, then neither are you. At least that’s how the plan was explained to me by our next surgeon general, Dr. Conrad Murray.

(7) National health care will reduce costs.

This claim comes from the same government that gave us the $500 hammer, the $1,200 toilet seat and postage stamps that increase in price every three weeks.

The last time liberals decided an industry was so important that the government needed to step in and contain costs was when they set their sights on the oil industry. Liberals in both the U.S. and Canada — presidents Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter and Canadian P.M. Pierre Trudeau — imposed price controls on oil.

As night leads to day, price controls led to reduced oil production, which led to oil shortages, skyrocketing prices for gasoline, rationing schemes and long angry lines at gas stations.

You may recall this era as “the Carter years.”

Then, the white knight Ronald Reagan became president and immediately deregulated oil prices. The magic of the free market — aka the “profit motive” — produced surges in oil exploration and development, causing prices to plummet. Prices collapsed and remained low for the next 20 years, helping to fuel the greatest economic expansion in our nation’s history.

You may recall this era as “the Reagan years.”

Freedom not only allows you to make your own rationing choices, but also produces vastly more products and services at cheap prices, so less rationing is necessary.

(8) National health care won’t cover abortions.

There are three certainties in life: (a) death, (b) taxes, and (C) no health care bill supported by Nita Lowey and Rosa DeLauro and signed by Barack Obama could possibly fail to cover abortions.

I don’t think that requires elaboration, but here it is:

Despite being a thousand pages long, the health care bills passing through Congress are strikingly nonspecific. (Also, in a thousand pages, Democrats weren’t able to squeeze in one paragraph on tort reform. Perhaps they were trying to save paper.)

These are Trojan Horse bills. Of course, they don’t include the words “abortion,” “death panels” or “three-year waits for hip-replacement surgery.”

That proves nothing — the bills set up unaccountable, unelected federal commissions to fill in the horrible details. Notably, the Democrats rejected an amendment to the bill that would specifically deny coverage for abortions.

After the bill is passed, the Federal Health Commission will find that abortion is covered, pro-lifers will sue, and a court will say it’s within the regulatory authority of the health commission to require coverage for abortions.

Then we’ll watch a parade of senators and congressmen indignantly announcing, “Well, I’m pro-life, and if I had had any idea this bill would cover abortions, I never would have voted for it!”

No wonder Democrats want to remind us that they can’t be trusted with foreign policy. They want us to forget that they can’t be trusted with domestic policy.

Read Part 1

Posted from Family Research Council

In 1787, when the Constitutional Convention decided not to reform the weak Articles of Confederation but rather assemble a new constitution, they faced a tremendous challenge in gaining the support of the citizens of this young nation. The process lasted for months and included numerous public “townhall” type meetings. Many of these meetings were held in churches, moderated by prominent pastors.

Nearly two and a quarter centuries later, such involvment by churches is more urgent than perhaps ever before. Under the proposed health insurance scheme being advanced by President Obama and his allies in Congress, Americans would be compelled to:

• Pay for abortion on demand by financing insurance companies that pay for abortion services.
• Fund the leading provider of abortion in the nation, Planned Parenthood.
• Foot the bill for government panels that would foster the notion that self-termination
  (i.e., suicide) is a sound moral and financial option for the elderly.
• Pay for abortifacient contraceptives.

Additionally, the Obama proposal fails to protect vital conscience rights for health care providers, thereby exposing them to the threat of being required to perform abortion-related services.

We are calling on pastors and Christian leaders nationwide to hold forums in your churches where these matters can be discussed and exposed. And it’s to that end that we are offering for download FRC Action’s Townhall Kit – so that you can create your own townhall meeting, just as churches did more than two centuries ago, to inform and activate the people in your pews and communities.

Take a few moments to download and review the Townhall Kit. We are providing you with all the material you will need to conduct a powerful, respectful and informative event.

The Founders understood that without the churches of America, the new nation could never have been formed. Without the churches today, I would argue it cannot be sustained. Your role in this effort is critical, and thank you for all you are doing for our country and its future.

Sincerely,
Tony Perkins
President

Posted from the Wall Street Journal

Competition” has become a watchword of Team Obama’s push for its health-care bill. Specifically, the Administration has defended its public insurance option as a necessary competitive goad to the private health insurance industry.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius routinely calls for more choice and competition in health care. In his weekly address this past weekend, President Obama raised the issue directly: “The source of a lot of these fears about government-run health care is confusion over what’s called the public option. This is one idea among many to provide more competition and choice, especially in the many places around the country where just one insurer thoroughly dominates the marketplace.” We take it this refers to a state in which one insurer holds most of the business.

It is no secret that this page is all for competition in the marketplace. If indeed that’s the goal, allow us to suggest a path to it that will be a lot easier than erecting the impossible dream of a public option: Let insurance companies sell health-care policies across state lines.

This excellent idea has been before Congress since at least 2005, when Rep. John Shadegg of Arizona proposed it. It came up again recently in an exchange between Chris Wallace of Fox News Sunday and John Rother, executive vice president of AARP.

Mr. Wallace: “If you really want competition why not remove the restriction which now says that if I live in Washington, D.C. I’ve got to buy a D.C. health plan, and instead create a national market for health insurance, so that if there’s a cheaper plan in Pennsylvania, I could buy in Pennsylvania?”

Mr. Rother: “There are states and localities where health care is much less expensive than others, and if we allow people to buy all their insurance from those places, it will raise the rates there. And it’s called risk selection. It’s a real problem, given the fact that health care costs can vary substantially from one place to another. So I think while the idea sounds appealing, the consequence would be it would make health care more expensive for those people who live in those low-cost areas.”

How did Mr. Rother arrive at this conclusion?

His claim assumes that what makes insurance expensive in places like New Jersey—where the annual cost of an individual plan for a 25-year-old male in 2006 was $5,880—is merely the higher cost of medical services in the Garden State. He sounds an alarm in the rest of the country by suggesting that an individual living in, say, Kentucky—where an annual plan for a 25-year-old male cost less than $1,000 in 2006—would be asked to subsidize plan members living in high-priced states.

That’s not how interstate insurance would work. Devon Herrick, a senior fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis who has written extensively on this subject, notes that insurance companies operating nationally would compete nationally. The reason a Kentucky plan written for an individual from New Jersey would save the New Jerseyan money is that New Jersey is highly regulated, with costly mandated benefits and guaranteed access to insurance.

Affordability would improve if consumers could escape states where each policy is loaded with mandates. “If consumers do not want expensive ‘Cadillac’ health plans that pay for acupuncture, fertility treatments or hairpieces, they could buy from insurers in a state that does not mandate such benefits,” Mr. Herrick has written.

A 2008 publication “Consumer Response to a National Marketplace in Individual Insurance,” (Parente et al., University of Minnesota) estimated that if individuals in New Jersey could buy health insurance in a national market, 49% more New Jerseyans in the individual and small-group market would have coverage. Competition among states would produce a more rational regulatory environment in all states.

This doesn’t mean sick people who have kept up their coverage but are more difficult to insure would be left out. Congressman Shadegg advocates government funding for high-risk pools, noting that their numbers are tiny. The big benefit would come from a market supply of affordable insurance.

Mr. Rother also said “risk selection” is a problem. But the coverage mandates cause that. As more healthy people opt out of health insurance because it is too expensive relative to what they consume, the pool transforms into a group of older, sicker people. Prices go higher still and more healthy people flee. High-mandate states are in what experts call an “adverse selection death spiral.”

Interstate competition made the U.S. one of the world’s most efficient, consumer driven markets. But health insurance is a glaring exception. When the competition caucus in Team Obama has to look for Plan B, this is it.

Posted from LifeSiteNews.com

Americans worried about President Barack Obama’s health care reforms turning into “death panels” have a new cause for concern: the Obama Administration has mandated that government-run Veterans Affairs hospitals give their patients a handbook on advanced directives including “end-of-life counseling” created by advocates for legal euthanasia.

Last week, LifeSiteNews.com reported that Compassion & Choices, formerly known as the Hemlock Society, is aggressively promoting a measure (sec. 1233) in the “American Affordable Choices Act of 2009″ (HR 3200) as the “centerpiece” of health care reform. (see coverage here) The proposal is to incentivize doctors and medical professionals to offer “end-of-life” consultations every five years with elderly and infirm patients, and offer them more frequently as a patient’s health condition deteriorates ever closer toward death.

However, opponents fear this could lead to medical professionals initiating conversations that could pressure patients into accepting lower-quality care or into denying themselves life-sustaining treatment, such as antibiotics, or “artificially administered nutrition and hydration.”

Since government would control the rate of medical reimbursement, it could substantially increase the financial incentive for doctors to have these conversations, especially in a possible scenario of dealing with runaway health-care costs. Just last Friday, the Obama Administration revealed government deficit would increase $9 trillion over the next ten years, nearly doubling a national debt already totaling $11.67 trillion.

“There are legitimate concerns that it would give doctors a financial incentive to encourage patients to sign pull-the-plug orders, and that patients would feel pressured to do so by the doctor’s authority,” said Jim Towey, a former director of the White House Office of Faith-Based Initiatives (2002-2006) and founder of the nonprofit Aging with Dignity, in an article written last Tuesday for the Wall Street Journal.

Towey writes that concerned Americans should look no further than the government’s Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), which has an advanced directives manual called “Your Life, Your Choices,” authored by Dr. Robert Pearlman, the chief of ethics evaluation at the VA’s National Center for Ethics in Health Care. Towey points out that Pearlman advocated for physician-assisted suicide in 1996 in the US Supreme Court case Vacco v. Quill and also is an advocate for health-care rationing.

According to his VA bio, Pearlman’s chief expertise is “clinical ethics (especially end-of-life care)” and has focused his research on “euthanasia, medical futility, advance care planning, physician-assisted suicide, and relief of patient suffering.”

The 52-page end-of-life planning document, as Towey explained, “presents end-of-life choices in a way aimed at steering users toward predetermined conclusions,” and also “lists various scenarios and asks users to then decide whether their own life would be ‘not worth living.’”

Such scenarios have VA patients consider whether: “I can no longer contribute to my family’s well being,” “I am a severe financial burden on my family,” and that the patient’s health condition “causes severe emotional burden for my family.”

But Towey points out that “the only resource” on advance directives cited in “Your Life, Your Choices” is the pro-euthanasia organization Compassion & Choices, while faith-based or disability-rights advocates are not included as a resource. LifeSiteNews.com found that the 1997 version included contact info only for Choices in Dying, a predecessor to Compassion and Choices. However, the official VA link to the version updated this year by the Obama Administration is now disabled. LSN found that the site now only features the first edition, but with the last page on “other resources” conveniently missing.  

“When the government can steer vulnerable individuals to conclude for themselves that life is not worth living, who needs a death panel?” asked Towey, pointing out that the Obama Administration resuscitated the manual after the Bush Administration had banned the VA from giving it to the nation’s wounded and disabled veterans.

Towey added that the VA instructed its doctors last month to discuss “advanced care planning” with all VA patients and “to refer them to ‘Your Life, Your Choices.’”

Dan Kennedy, CEO of Human Life Washington, told LifeSiteNews.com that much of the problem with the massive health-care overhaul of HR 3200 is that the language leaves too much room open for interpretation, and that can have enormous consequences down the road as government bureaus or courts fill in the details.

“People need to realize, that any health care legislation that is passed, though appearing to be compassionate, will not be very detailed,” warned Kennedy. “Unfortunately, the details will be filled in by government bureaucrats in close consultation with Compassion & Choices – the former Hemlock Society. It is true, the devil is in the details.”

“Hopefully, the American people have grown weary of buying on faith what the government has been selling.”

The latest polls reveal that just may be the case. According to a recent Rasmussen poll, 54 percent now say that no health care reform this year would be preferable to the current legislation working its way through Congress.

Posted from the National Center for Policy Analysis

Medical care in the United States is derided as miserable compared to health care systems in the rest of the developed world.  Economists, government officials, insurers and academics alike are beating the drum for a far larger government rôle in health care.  Much of the public assumes their arguments are sound because the calls for change are so ubiquitous and the topic so complex.  However, before turning to government as the solution, some unheralded facts about America’s health care system should be considered.

Fact No. 1:  Americans have better survival rates than Europeans for common cancers.[1]  Breast cancer mortality is 52 percent higher in Germany than in the United States, and 88 percent higher in the United Kingdom.  Prostate cancer mortality is 604 percent higher in the U.K. and 457 percent higher in Norway.  The mortality rate for colorectal cancer among British men and women is about 40 percent higher.

Fact No. 2:  Americans have lower cancer mortality rates than Canadians.[2]  Breast cancer mortality is 9 percent higher, prostate cancer is 184 percent higher and colon cancer mortality among men is about 10 percent higher than in the United States.

Fact No. 3:  Americans have better access to treatment for chronic diseases than patients in other developed countries.[3]  Some 56 percent of Americans who could benefit are taking statins, which reduce cholesterol and protect against heart disease.  By comparison, of those patients who could benefit from these drugs, only 36 percent of the Dutch, 29 percent of the Swiss, 26 percent of Germans, 23 percent of Britons and 17 percent of Italians receive them. 

 Fact No. 4:  Americans have better access to preventive cancer screening than Canadians.[4]  Take the proportion of the appropriate-age population groups who have received recommended tests for breast, cervical, prostate and colon cancer:

• Nine of 10 middle-aged American women (89 percent) have had a mammogram, compared to less than three-fourths of Canadians (72 percent).
• Nearly all American women (96 percent) have had a pap smear, compared to less than 90 percent of Canadians.
• More than half of American men (54 percent) have had a PSA test, compared to less than 1 in 6 Canadians (16 percent).
• Nearly one-third of Americans (30 percent) have had a colonoscopy, compared with less than 1 in 20 Canadians (5 percent).

Fact No. 5:  Lower income Americans are in better health than comparable Canadians.  Twice as many American seniors with below-median incomes self-report “excellent” health compared to Canadian seniors (11.7 percent versus 5.8 percent).  Conversely, white Canadian young adults with below-median incomes are 20 percent more likely than lower income Americans to describe their health as “fair or poor.”[5]

Fact No. 6:  Americans spend less time waiting for care than patients in Canada and the U.K.  Canadian and British patients wait about twice as long – sometimes more than a year – to see a specialist, to have elective surgery like hip replacements or to get radiation treatment for cancer.[6]  All told, 827,429 people are waiting for some type of procedure in Canada.[7]  In England, nearly 1.8 million people are waiting for a hospital admission or outpatient treatment.[8]

Fact No. 7:  People in countries with more government control of health care are highly dissatisfied and believe reform is needed.   More than 70 percent of German, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand and British adults say their health system needs either “fundamental change” or “complete rebuilding.”[9]

Fact No. 8:  Americans are more satisfied with the care they receive than Canadians.  When asked about their own health care instead of the “health care system,” more than half of Americans (51.3 percent) are very satisfied with their health care services, compared to only 41.5 percent of Canadians; a lower proportion of Americans are dissatisfied (6.8 percent) than Canadians (8.5 percent).[10]

Fact No. 9:  Americans have much better access to important new technologies like medical imaging than patients in Canada or the U.K.  Maligned as a waste by economists and policymakers naïve to actual medical practice, an overwhelming majority of leading American physicians identified computerized tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) as the most important medical innovations for improving patient care during the previous decade.[11]  [See the table.]  The United States has 34 CT scanners per million Americans, compared to 12 in Canada and eight in Britain.  The United States has nearly 27 MRI machines per million compared to about 6 per million in Canada and Britain.[12] 

Fact No. 10:  Americans are responsible for the vast majority of all health care innovations.[13]  The top five U.S. hospitals conduct more clinical trials than all the hospitals in any other single developed country.[14]  Since the mid-1970s, the Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology has gone to American residents more often than recipients from all other countries combined.[15]  In only five of the past 34 years did a scientist living in America not win or share in the prize.   Most important recent medical innovations were developed in the United States.[16]  [See the table.]

Conclusion.  Despite serious challenges, such as escalating costs and the uninsured, the U.S. health care system compares favorably to those in other developed countries.

Scott W. Atlas, M.D., is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a professor at the Stanford University Medical Center.  A version of this article appeared previously in the February 18, 2009, Washington Times.

Posted from NumbersUSA by James Edwards

Just about the time the Center for Immigration Studies was holding a press briefing at the National Press Club about the immigration and health reform connection, proponents from President Obama on down were denying that illegal aliens would receive taxpayer-funded health care under pending legislation.

I’m here to tell you, as I told the Press Club crowd, the legislation on the table does, honest to goodness, effectively extend coverage to illegal aliens.

Take the premium subsidy in the House bill, H.R. 3200. This lies in the part of the legislation (Division A, Title II) that creates a Health Choices Administration, adds the infamous “public option,” sets up and runs the “exchange” clearinghouse for getting insurance, and controls a graduated premium subsidy program through allocation of “individual affordability credits.”

The subsidy, found in Section 242, will give a voucher to people earning between 133 percent of the official poverty level and 400 percent of that income level (or, up to about $88,000 a year for a family of four).

Legal immigrants certainly qualify under H.R. 3200 for this subsidy. Section 242(a)(1) makes eligible “an individual who is lawfully present in a State in the United States (other than as a nonimmigrant described in a subparagraph (excluding subparagraphs (K), (T), (U), and (V)) of section 101(a)(15) of the Immigration and Nationality Act).”

A political fig leaf purports to keep illegal aliens from receiving the subsidy. Section 246 says, “Nothing in this subtitle shall allow Federal payments for affordability credits on behalf of individuals who are not lawfully present in the United States.”

However, reading the legislation as a whole, its glaring omission is any requirement to verify someone’s immigration or citizenship status. For instance, H.R. 3200 makes no reference to the verification system in current law that’s used for nearly all government welfare and other public programs. If lawmakers wanted enrolling agents, including bureaucrats at the new Health Choices Administration, to use the Systematic Alienage Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system, the bill should include a reference and authorize SAVE’s application to this government program.

In other words, the silence of H.R. 3200 regarding SAVE and mandatory verification makes Section 246 just empty words. In fact, the Ways and Means Committee outright voted down an amendment by Rep. Dean Heller to require eligibility verification before qualifying someone to receive a taxpayer subsidy. Also, “lawfully present” covers a lot of ground. Does it include someone here under Temporary Protected Status, for instance? Again, the absence of eligibility verification requirements leaves open a lot of room for waste, fraud, and abuse.

A similar situation of setting up blinders occurs in H.R. 3200’s Medicaid provisions. Division B’s Title VII, Section 1701 expands Medicaid eligibility to those with incomes a third above the federal poverty level. This provision dictates that “the State shall accept without further determination the enrollment under this title of an individual determined by the Commissioner to be a non-traditional Medicaid eligible individual.” In other words, the bill prohibits asking any further questions about new Medicaid enrollees.

Rather, the bill section promotes “presumptive eligibility” concerning Medicaid expansion. Read it for yourself, right from Section 1702(a):

(ii) PRESUMPTIVE ELIGIBILITY OPTION- Pursuant to such memorandum, insofar as the memorandum has selected the option described in section 205(e)(3)(B) of the America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009, the State shall provide for making medical assistance available during the presumptive eligibility period and shall, upon application of the individual for medical assistance under this title, promptly make a determination (and subsequent redeterminations) of eligibility in the same manner as if the individual had applied directly to the State for such assistance except that the State shall use the income-related information used by the Commissioner and provided to the State under the memorandum in making the presumptive eligibility determination to the maximum extent feasible. (emphasis added)

And, once again, the lack of any provision mentioning or requiring verification, mandatory use of the SAVE system under this part of the bill, or any other accountability requirement opens the process up to signing up illegal aliens for Medicaid.

In the Energy and Commerce Committee, a mandatory verification amendment was voted down when Rep. Nathan Deal offered it. A political figleaf amendment was added by voice vote, but the loopholes and potential for waste, fraud, and abuse remain wide open in the Medicaid provisions.

Whatever you think of health reform, a combination of things makes it certain that illegal aliens will receive government health coverage. The most obvious is the omission — heck, the outright rejection of corrective amendments — of eligibility verification requirements. The other factor is the designed ease of enrolling people in Medicaid, for “affordability credits,” and the like.

Bottom line, the health legislation Congress is considering establishes an “enroll now, don’t ask questions later” regime. That’s a recipe for covering more people, but many of whom may not actually qualify. A huge number are almost guaranteed to be illegal aliens or legal immigrants still in their first five years in the country who are supposed to turn to their visa sponsor for financial support. And having more people in a public program translates pretty quickly into higher costs. In this case, we’re talking on the order of tens and hundreds of billions of dollars.