Posted from The Moderate Voice

One of the perpetual bones of contention in the ongoing health care reform debate is the precise number of people in serious need of help in this area. All too frequently we encounter various, exaggerated estimates, including some fact challenged quotes right here at TMV, which put the number as high as 50 million. Well, that’s certainly a troubling statistic for anyone to contemplate. In fact, the New York Times had a heartfelt opinion piece this weekend which recognizes a number of serious problems with the math on these figures, but then essentially bats them away, saying we shouldn’t dwell on the numbers.

But how many Americans are we really talking about here? And what mitigating factors need to be considered? A good place to start would be the most recent edition of the U.S. Census Bureau’s report on Income, Poverty and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States. (Follow the link, please, for the full PDF of the report.) It’s the same one cited in the Times piece. Turning to page 27 we find that the total number of people put in the category of not having health insurance during the previous year starts at 45.7 million (not fifty) which is down from 47 million in the previous reporting period. But that’s still a lot of people, isn’t it? We’ll need to do some more digging, obviously, and we will.

But first, here’s one more item which generally goes unmentioned when it comes to the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey results, linked above. If you turn to appendix C, buried back on page 67, you will find that the Bureau doesn’t even have faith in its own numbers on this score.

National surveys and health insurance coverage

Health insurance coverage is likely to be underreported on the Current Population Survey (CPS). While underreporting affects most, if not all, surveys, underreporting of health insurance coverage in the Annual Social and Economic Supplement (ASEC) appears to be a larger problem than in other national surveys that ask about insurance. Some reasons for the disparity may include the fact that income, not health insurance, is the main focus of the ASEC questionnaire. In addition, the ASEC collects health insurance information by asking in February through April about the previous year’s coverage… Compared with other national surveys, the CPS estimate of the number of people without health insurance more closely approximates the number of people who are uninsured at a specific point in time during the year than the number of people uninsured for the entire year.

The report then refers you to the CBO’s report on How Many People are Uninsured and for How Long. This fascinating report informs us that, of the large numbers cited, roughly 45% of the people included in that statistic are not the chronically uninsured, but rather people who are in transition between jobs and are likely to have health insurance again within 120 days.

Next, we need to go back to the Census Bureau report and turn to page 31 where we are informed that their total number includes the category of those who are listed as “non-citizens” (which are carefully broken out from naturalized citizens vs. native born citizens.) The non-citizen rate of uninsured individuals clocked in at 43.8%, or roughly 9.4 million non-Americans. Since these people are not here legally and not paying into the system, that portion of the crisis is better addressed in a debate on immigration issues, but taxpaying Americans don’t need to be on the hook for that segment of the total.

While the number continues to drop, it’s also worth noting that we’re not talking exclusively about the abject poor who can’t afford insurance. As this Business and Media report informs us, that same Census Bureau summary includes the following:

But according to the same Census report, there are 8.3 million uninsured people who make between $50,000 and $74,999 per year and 8.74 million who make more than $75,000 a year. That’s roughly 17 million people who ought to be able to “afford” health insurance because they make substantially more than the median household income of $46,326.

Once you do some fairly basic math, you come up with the same figure that the Kaiser Family Foundation arrived at.

The liberal Kaiser Family Foundation puts the number of uninsured Americans who don’t qualify for government programs and make less than $50,000 a year between 8.2 million and 13.9 million.

Let’s say we take the high end figure and round up to 14 million. Yes, that’s still a lot of people in need of help, but the figure is becoming manageable at this point. If you look at the GOP’s health care bill, currently buried in Ways and Means, you realize that we could approve means testing for people in that category and issue them advancements and/or vouchers for five thousand dollars in coverage and you’d have accomplished the largest goal which most ObamaCare proponents claim to want to achieve. The price tag would not be chicken feed, coming in at 70 billion dollars, (and that figure assumes that every single person in that category would sign up) but after staring H.R. 3200 in the face at a cost of either 800 billion or two trillion (depending which CBO scoring method you go by) I can assure you that you’d have members from both parties doing back flips in their eagerness to sign on. And you could do it without driving a major American private industry into the ground and overloading public programs which we still don’t know how we’re going to finance in years to come.

Obviously there are other problems and they should be addressed as well. Those transitional people mentioned above should be able to move on to their next job without getting hit with preexisting condition clauses or major increases in premiums. Constantly increasing health care costs should be intelligently driven down, mostly by allowing interstate competition between private companies. But these are things where I believe the Republicans and Democrats can already find common ground. First, we’ll need to get the big issues put to bed, and a good place to start would be by being honest about how many people we need to insure and how we can most reasonably, efficiently and economically do it.

Posted from World Net Daily

By Chuck Norris – Ever heard the saying, “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”?

That’s true for any of the 1,000+ page versions of Obamacare.

Having informed you in previous columns of “Dirty secret No. 1” and “Dirty secret No. 2” in Obamacare, dirty secret No. 3 is the sin of omission. It’s what the health care bill doesn’t say that will bite you in the end.

If you were writing 1,000+ pages on a subject, don’t you think you’d have enough space to cover the essentials? But what if some of the issues were political hotbeds? And, if you were trying to sell the package, are there issues you’d intentionally leave out? If you were a Washington bureaucrat, I know you would!

In 1,000+ pages, there’s surprisingly sparse coverage or complete avoidance of a host of necessary issues. I would cite pages in the bill as I’ve done in my other articles, but there aren’t any covering them. These are questions that need specific answers by the Obama administration as well each of our representatives.

• What are the child developmental methods and values used in training parents in home visitations?
• To whom or what is the national committee, which oversees the entire health care system, accountable?
• What are the extents of power and limitations or boundaries of the national committee?
• Will the national and regional health care committees eventually run with the power of the Federal Reserve system, as Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the health care adviser to the Obama administration, proposes in his book “Guaranteed Healthcare”?
• Will Medicare be “phased out” as Dr. Emanuel proposes in his book?
• Will employee-provided health insurance eventually cease, as Dr. Emanuel proposes in his book?
• Specifically, how will the nation provide and pay for the expansion of needed medical and administrative personnel to cover roughly 50 million more people?
• Specifically, how will the nation provide and pay for the expansion of medical facilities and equipment to equip those new medical and administrative personnel?
• What are the specific cost projections for such extensive and extra medical personnel, practices, offices and equipment?
• What about the maldistribution of physicians?
• What about tort reform?
• What about class-action lawsuits?
• Will illegal immigrants be covered under this program?
• What about the specifics of abortion services, and will taxpayer funds finance them?
• What types and limitations of end-of-life counsel will be offered?
• Any guarantees that the middle class won’t eventually be paying for Obamacare?
• Have you investigated or read any other options and alternatives to health care reform besides the recent version of Obamacare? If not, why not? If so, what are the pros and cons of each?
• And most important, will you write or sign amendments that guarantee the restrictions or explanations of the above points into law before passing any form of Obamacare?

Now read that list slower one more time and ask yourself: Is it a complete coincidence that all those specifics aren’t already mentioned in Obamacare legislation? Would you want your representative to sign off on a bill that doesn’t specify them? (Would you sign a contract to buy a car that didn’t discuss financing or even the specifics of the car you were buying?)

Friends, of critical concern to me is not merely what the health-care bill is today, but what that implemented program will look like when a national board (like the Federal Reserve, according to Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel) has all power and jurisdiction, without checks and balances by other powers. If a national medical board is given the power of the Federal Reserve, a “death panel” will be only one facet of its monstrous head. But is a Supreme Court of universal medical counsel and decisions what we want presiding over the future generations of America? Our kids and grandkids?

Isn’t this just the same ol’ doubletalk and dirty politics we’ve seen in Washington? What ever happened to Obama’s campaign promise about the “most sweeping ethics reform” or “unprecedented transparency”? Why doesn’t Washington start telling us the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help them God?

If Obama is concerned about the “moral obligation” of universal health care, maybe he should begin by not “bearing false witness” or giving complete witness to the entirety of his health care plans and program?

Obama repeatedly promises that universal health care will not increase the deficit, but he is not only bearing witness in contradiction to the Congressional Budget Office, but without knowing the specifics of the program or what it may morph into in years to come.

Similarly, Obama promises that the middle class will not pay for the program, yet Obamacare legislation shifts progressive onus (beginning on p. 846, line 16) for aspects of ongoing health care onto state and local communities – which will in turn pay for those services how? It doesn’t say. And if the state doesn’t meet other eligible reimbursement federal criteria, do we assume they’re going to write it all off, or will we the taxpayers foot that bill, too? It doesn’t say. Generalities like “the State share of the cost” (p. 847) should cause your pocketbook to tremble.

What ever happened to the America just a few months ago that was, according to Obama, on the verge of an economic Armageddon? Do Americans actually believe the president when he says that universal health care is “central” to economic recovery? Are people really buying this shtick? Is this really the year to tack another trillion onto our oppressive national debt?

So here’s what the specific implementation plan of Obamacare comes down to: “trust government.” I’d rather do what a California highway patrolman friend of mine says, “In God we trust – all others we search.” And that includes government.

According to recent Rasmussen poll, 51 percent of Americans fear government more than private insurance companies. And we’re going to blindly trust government with the details of universal health care and allow it practice nationalized medicine on us and our posterity?

Before so-called universal health care turns into universal hell-care, write or call your representatives today and protest their rushing and voting Obamacare into law. Remind them that 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.

Watch your back, America! As the adage goes, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Read Dirty Secret #1, Dirty Secret #2

Posted from Boston Globe

Massachusetts has the most expensive family health insurance premiums in the country, according to a new analysis that highlights the state’s challenge in trying to rein in medical costs after passage of a landmark 2006 law that mandated coverage for nearly everyone.

The report by the Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit health care foundation, showed that the average family premium for plans offered by employers in Massachusetts was $13,788 in 2008, 40 percent higher than in 2003. Over the same period, premiums nationwide rose an average of 33 percent.

The report did not break out how much premiums have increased in Massachusetts since the 2006 changes went into effect, so it does not show whether the law affected the rate of price increases. Still, with the state’s law often cited as a model for a national health care overhaul, advocates on various sides of the issue said the report underscores the urgency of including cost controls in any large-scale federal or state overhaul.

“While expanding coverage was the logical first step in Massachusetts, cost control is equally as important,’’ said Andrew Dreyfus, an executive vice president at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, the state’s largest private insurer with 3 million members. “And if you don’t face the cost issue directly, then you can jeopardize the progress you’ve made in expanding coverage.’’

President Obama has championed a national health care overhaul that includes cost controls, as well as coverage expansion to nearly every American. But critics have questioned some of his administration’s projected savings, and his proposal for a public insurance plan to compete with private insurers is faltering in Congress.

In Massachusetts, brokering the 2006 overhaul was such a delicate and years-long undertaking that the disparate interest groups – insurers, businesses, consumers, hospital and doctors organizations – all agreed to first tackle health coverage expansion and leave the cost question for a later date.

Now, the Commonwealth Fund report projects that without significant cost reforms, an annual family premium in Massachusetts will soar to $26,730 by 2020.

While Massachusetts residents face the highest premiums in the country, the costs do not eat as big a hole in the typical family budget as in most other states, the report said. That’s because household income in Massachusetts is much higher than the national average. For middle class families that make too much to qualify for state insurance subsidies, however, the premiums can be a significant burden.

One of the first steps to control costs was taken last year, when the Legislature passed a sweeping bill sponsored by Senate President Therese Murray, Democrat of Plymouth. Among other provisions, it restricted some payments and gifts to doctors from pharmaceutical and medical device companies and created a commission to recommend changes in how providers are paid.

Last month, the commission suggested that private and public insurers scrap their method of paying doctors and hospitals negotiated fees for individual visits or procedures, and instead put providers on a “global budget,’’ paying a set amount intended to cover a patient’s medical care for an entire year.

The idea is so controversial and the suggested fix so time-consuming to achieve that the commission recommended phasing it in over five years.

But other efforts to control health spending are already moving ahead.

Blue Cross, for instance, is already signing up providers to participate in an insurance plan similar to the commission’s recommended “global budget,’’ and it now covers nearly 20 percent of its patients in health maintenance organizations.

Health Care for All, a Boston-based consumer group, is pushing interim steps that include reducing payments to hospitals for patients who have to be readmitted because of preventable complications.

“This report heightens the urgency of doing these short-term steps now,’’ said Health Care for All’s research director, Brian Rosman.

Another panel, created by the 2006 law, is poised to release a report in September that will probably detail specific interim measures that can be taken to rein in costs.

Anya Rader Wallack, a council member, said one of the big cost drivers in the state’s health insurance system is that Massachusetts residents like their big, brand-name hospitals, perhaps too much.

“We tend to use more academic medical centers, which are expensive and are, in general, more expensive than community hospitals or nonhospital settings,’’ Wallack said.

In many other states, she said, patients tend to have more medical tests and procedures done in nonhospital settings. She would not disclose the remedies being considered by her group, but the panel has posted price-comparison data for Massachusetts hospitals on its website.

Bottom line, said Dr. Marylou Buyse, president of the insurers’ trade group, the Massachusetts Association of Health Plans, is that the high cost of health insurance is not necessarily the insurer’s fault.

“The increase [in Massachusetts premiums] is attributed to an increase in charges by physicians and hospitals,’’ Buyse said, referring to a 2008 state report that tracked the trend from 2002 to 2006.

The Commonwealth Fund report concluded that a number of changes, including limits on insurance companies’ administrative costs and profits, as well as changes in the way doctors and hospitals are paid, could bring better-quality patient care and could reduce national costs by an average of 1 to 1.5 percentage points per year over the next decade. That translates to a savings of $2 trillion to $3 trillion nationally, the report said.

Posted from the Wall Street Journal

From LifeSiteNews.com

Last Wednesday, President Barack Obama responded to claims that his health care legislation would institute government funding of abortion by calling those claims “fabrications.”  In an article released on Friday, however, FactCheck.org, an organization that analyzes the accuracy of statements made by American political leaders, confirmed the assertion of pro-life organizations that the legislation would indeed open the door to government-funded abortion.

In the article, “Abortion: Which Side Is Fabricating?,” FactCheck director Brooks Jackson carefully distinguishes how abortion is included in the bill.  “The truth is that bills now before Congress don’t require federal money to be used for supporting abortion coverage,” he says.  “So the president is right to that limited extent. But it’s equally true that House and Senate legislation would allow a new ‘public’ insurance plan to cover abortions, despite language added to the House bill that technically forbids using public funds to pay for them.”

It is “likely,” the article says, that Obama would implement abortion coverage once it is allowed.  “Obama has said in the past that ‘reproductive services’ would be covered by his public plan, so it’s likely that any new federal insurance plan would cover abortion unless Congress expressly prohibits that,” Jackson writes.  “Low- and moderate-income persons who would choose the ‘public plan’ would qualify for federal subsidies to purchase it. Private plans that cover abortion also could be purchased with the help of federal subsidies.

“Therefore, we judge that the president goes too far when he calls the statements that government would be funding abortions ‘fabrications’,” Jackson concludes.

Responding to Obama’s “fabrications” remark, the National Right to Life Committee’s legislative director Douglas Johnson said, “the bill backed by the White House (H.R. 3200) explicitly authorizes the government plan to cover all elective abortions.”  Jackson, indicating that FactCheck does not take a position on whether abortion should be covered or not, nevertheless confirms Johnson’s statement, saying, “our analysis shows that Johnson’s statement is correct. … The House bill does just that.”

Jackson says it is the July 30th Capps amendment – which was billed as a “common ground” initiative – (http://energycommerce.house.gov/Press_111/20090730/hr3200_capps_1.pdf) that has opened the door to publicly funded abortion.  The amendment explicitly includes abortion funding in the government plan, namely those covered by Medicaid, such as cases of rape or incest.  But it also allows other types of abortions to be covered, according to the judgment of the Secretary of Health and Human Services.

The current Secretary of the HHS, Kathleen Sebelius, is a well-known abortion supporter.

“The Capps Amendment MANDATES that the public plan cover any Medicaid-fundable abortions, and AUTHORIZES the secretary to cover all other abortions,” said NRLC’s Johnson, quoted by Jackson.  “From day one, she [Secretary Kathleen Sebelius] is authorized to pay for them all. And, she will.”

“We can’t say what anyone will do in the future,” writes Factcheck.org’s Jackson, but then points to Obama’s 2007 comments to Planned Parenthood, where he indicated that “reproductive services” would be “essential care” in his health plan.  “Obama did not use the word ‘abortion,’” Jackson says, “but a spokesman for the campaign said later that abortion would be included, according to the Chicago Tribune.”

Under the Capps amendment, Jackson says, the public health plan could fund all abortions.  While, “the Capps amendment does contain a statement … that prohibits the use of public money to pay for abortions, except in cases of rape, incest, and to save the life of the mother,” the plan could cover all abortions, “so long as the plans took in enough private money in the form of premiums paid by individuals or their employers.”

“The Capps language also would allow private plans purchased with federal subsidies (‘affordability credits’ for low-income families and workers) to cover abortion,” he says.

Jackson mentions the defeated Stupak amendment, which would have overruled the Capps amendment, that “prohibited government funding of ‘any part of the costs of any health plan that includes coverage of abortion,’ except in cases of rape, incest or to save the life of the mother.”

But, he concludes, “as for the House bill as it stands now, it’s a matter of fact that it would allow both a ‘public plan’ and newly subsidized private plans to cover all abortions.”

Posted from Associated Content

The American Seniors Association bills itself as a conservative alternative to the AARP. The American Seniors Association, while dwarfed by its larger, more liberal rival, now seems to be benefiting from the health care debate at the expense of the AARP.

The American Seniors Association has traditionally been unable to compete with the AARP, due to the AARP/s media clout and its ability to provide its members with benefits, such as insurance and discounts for travel and other services. Now, though, the American Seniors Association is making a bid for AARP members.

“The American Seniors Association (ASA) invites any American Association of Retired Persons member to mail us your torn AARP card and receive a 2 year- for- 1 year membership with ASA. Our organization representing hundreds of thousands of members believes we need health care reform, but we want what is best for seniors. ASA wants to cut wasteful spending in Medicare. ASA wants to see the Congress work to curb frivolous lawsuits that drive up the costs of doctor’s malpractice insurance. Our system needs an overhaul, but we do not need expensive Obamacare or anything resembling it.”

So far sixty thousand AARP members have quit that organization citing what they believe is that organization’s stance on the Obama health care reform proposal. It is unclear how many of these former AARP members have taken up the American Seniors Association on its two for one offer.

The American Seniors Association claims a membership “in the hundreds of thousands.” The AARP claims a member ship of about forty million. The AARP claims that while three hundred thousand seniors leave the AARP in a typical month, four hundred thousand join and a million and a half members renew their membership.

The irony is that the AARP has yet to actually articulate an official position on Obamacare. Still, the American Seniors Association has a point. While the AARP has not officially supported Obamacare, it has not actually opposed it either. The prospect of health care rationing, especially for senior citizens, has disturbed a great many people, especially seniors who, naturally, feel vulnerable. The AARP has not been shy about opposing efforts to reform social security or to cut the growth of spending in Medicare. Obamacare has, as a feature, a plan to cut five hundred billion dollars from Medicare. The AARP, which usually erupts at such a proposal, has been strangely silent.

The AARP is one of the most powerful political organizations in the country, second perhaps only to the National Rifle Association. It has achieved that power by amassing a huge membership and using it to wield political clout in Washington.

But if the AARP is perceived as working against the interests of its members, the trickle of people leaving it may become a flood. That would bring with it a weakening of political power, perhaps with other organizations such as the American Seniors Associations gaining it. That might be an unintended consequence of the drive for socialized medicine.

Posted from the Wall Street Journal

By MICHAEL O. LEAVITT

Responding to a building wave of opposition to the “public option,” the Obama administration is now signaling that it may dress up government health care in yet another set of clothes. This time, it will be called a health insurance “co-op.” Sen. Kent Conrad (D., N.D.) is floating the idea, Sen. Max Baucus (D., Mont.) has offered his initial support, and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) has listed three conditions it needs to meet.

Mr. Schumer’s conditions are a national structure, federal financing, and a ban on federal appointees who have ties to the insurance industry. This “co-op” would be federally controlled, federally funded, and federally staffed. Expressing his opposition to smaller organizations and his demand for a national “co-op,” Mr. Schumer says, “It has to have clout; it has to be large.” He adds, “There would at least be one national model that could go all over the country,” which would require “a large infusion of federal dollars.”

I’m quite familiar with real co-ops. As a teenager, I filled my family’s tractor with fuel purchased at a farmer’s co-op, which was organized by local people to solve a common problem. My family got its electricity from a rural electric co-op. I was later a director of an “insurance reciprocal,” a form of a co-op. Co-ops are a part of American culture: people uniting to solve common problems. What the Democrats are proposing bears little resemblance to this.

The Democrats are insisting that their version of a “co-op” wouldn’t be government-run health care, but I ran Medicare and Medicaid as secretary of Health and Human Services, and I know this isn’t true. When Washington provides the money, names the directors and ultimately pays the bills, government controls health care. Lobbyists will lobby, Congress will respond, and bureaucrats will decide who gets care, what drugs are prescribed, what procedures are covered, and how much money providers can charge. This is true for Medicare, it’s true for Medicaid, and it would be true of Mr. Conrad’s “co-ops.”

Sen. Chuck Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, is from Iowa farm country. He knows co-ops, and hopefully he also knows a plan for a government takeover when he sees it. He’s said he’s against a “public option,” no matter what it’s called. Yet Senate Finance Committee Chairman Baucus, describing what he wants out of “co-op” legislation, spoke plainly, as reported by Politico earlier this summer, when he said, “It’s got to be written in a way that accomplishes the objective of the public option.”

Our health-care system needs real reform. We need to abolish the unfair tax that favors employer-sponsored insurance over self-purchased insurance. We need to foster a more vibrant private market with greater competition and choice. We need to make prices transparent and give consumers more freedom to pursue health-care value.

Every American needs to have access to affordable health insurance. But we don’t need a “public option” that would jeopardize the employer-provided insurance of millions—an option that employers would be able to choose at their employees’ expense. And we don’t need the government running a bunch of so-called “co-ops,” rationing care at taxpayers’ expense.

The Democrats are getting worried that the Trojan Horse they have offered in the form of a “public option” has been spotted for what it is. So now they are looking for a new way to get government-run health care through the gates.

Let none of us be co-opted by their latest ploy.

Mr. Leavitt, former secretary of Health and Human Services (2005-2009), has served as the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and as governor of Utah (1993-2003).

The amendment process surrounding the health care ‘reform’ bills in Congress exposes the fact that President Obama and his allies are not being honest with the American people regarding their plans for ObamaCare.  While the supporters of ObamaCare are making statements like “you can keep your plan”, “the plan will be deficit-neutral”, and “there’s no coverage for abortion or illegal aliens”, the actions of Congressional Democrats show this simply is not the case.  The following list of amendments and their associated votes exposes the real truth about ObamaCare (source – FactReal).

OBAMACARE WON’T LET YOU KEEP THE PLAN YOU LIKE

Government will determine what is “acceptable” health insurance coverage and benefits.

Amendments to protect freedom to choose a plan you like: BLOCKED

OBAMACARE WON’T ALLOW YOU TO ENROLL IN PRIVATE INSURANCE

Americans would be prohibited by law from enrolling in a private individual health insurance plan and would be forced by the federal government to buy a different health plan in the national Health Insurance Exchange. The Democrats’ bill says that beginning in 2013 the health plans that provide coverage for Americans enrolled in individual market health plans could no longer enroll new members.

Amendment to allow Americans to choose private coverage: BLOCKED

OBAMACARE TO DENY DOCTORS & HOSPITALS THE RIGHT TO CHOOSE IN WHICH PLANS TO PARTICIPATE

Government could force anyone to offer services in ObamaCare that will underpay doctors and hospitals

Amendment to allow doctors & hospital to choose plans they want: BLOCKED

Presently, all government-subsidized health care plans (SCHIP, DOD, Medicaid, etc.) prohibit abortion coverage. In HR3200 & Senate bills, there are no provisions that would prevent federal officials from mandating that health insurance plans include abortion services. There is nothing to prevent the Secretary of HHS from including abortion coverage since the decisions over benefits are left to the Secretary of HHS and to a newly created Health Care Benefits Advisory Committee. Based on the failure of anti-abortion amendments, taxpayers would end up financing abortion since the federal government could mandate that abortions be covered by health insurance plans available through the national health insurance exchange.

Amendments to prevent taxpayer-financed abortion: BLOCKED

● Amendment from Rep. Lois Capps (D-CA) to require at least one insurance plan to cover abortion in each geographical region, to cover ALL abortion services, and allow affordability credits (taxpayer-funded subsidies) to be used for health insurance plans that cover abortions.

OBAMACARE NOT DEFICIT NEUTRAL

ObamaCare will increase the deficit: According to the CBO’s and JCT’s assessment enacting H.R. 3200 would result in a net increase in the federal budget deficit of $239 billion over the 2010-2019 period.  What’s wrong with high deficits? The CBO director explains: “Large budget deficits would reduce national saving, leading to more borrowing from abroad and less domestic investment, which in turn would depress economic growth in the United States. Over time, accumulating debt would cause substantial harm to the economy.”

Amendment to keep ObamaCare deficit neutral: BLOCKED
To help Obama keep his promise that his health care reform will not add to the deficit, these Congressmen proposed these amendments:

The House bill has an employer “pay-or-play” mandate, which include a tax on employers of up to 8 percent if they do not offer a federally approved benefits package to their workers. Taxes on employers are generally passed on to employees in reduced wages or other compensation, including job loss.

Amendments to protect jobs: BLOCKED

The House bill calls for increased Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER) to gather data & determine which treatments are the most cost-effective. Government officials may be able to use CER to make payment, treatment, and coverage decisions.

Amendment against government making medical decisions; government rationing & control: BLOCKED

Amendment for government to set prices: PASSED  

OBAMACARE = LONG WAITS

 Federal officials may resort to rationing care and controlling access to physicians to save money. Based on the experience of other countries, this process would result in long wait times for patients. The Brady amendment failed on a straight party-line vote.

Amendment to protect Americans from long wait times: BLOCKED

● Amendment from Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX) to eliminate the public plan if its enrollees experienced longer wait times than in private health plans. These people would then be able to enroll in private health plans offered on the Health Insurance Exchange.

 OBAMACARE WILL COVER ILLEGALS

The House bill does not offer clear guidelines to ensure that illegal immigrants cannot access taxpayer-funded health care benefits.
It will be unsustainable to give benefit to millions of illegals already in the U.S. and the many millions to come if Obama passes his open-border immigration reform.
The Heller amendment failed on a straight party-line vote.

Amendment to keep illegals out of ObamaCare: BLOCKED 

SENIORS TO FINANCE OBAMACARE

Bill proposes reductions to Medicare Advantage (MA)

Amendment to stop the payment reductions to Medicare Advantage (MA) plans: BLOCKED

 Amendment for government to set prices in Medicare: PASSED   

MEMBERS OF CONGRESS WON’T ENROLL IN OBAMACARE 

If ObamaCare is so good, why members of Congress, Senate & Obama Administration will be exempted from getting ObamaCare?
This Heller amendment failed, with 21 Democrats voting no.

Amendment to require Congress to enroll in ObamaCare: BLOCKED  

Here is how easy it will be for Obamacare to lead to single-payer (a.k.a state-run, government-run health care, universal, co-op….whatever name they give to it, it’s about government control)

Amendment to adopt a state-based system of socialized medicine: PASSED  

Democrats side with trial lawyers instead of lowering health care costs.

Amendment to reduce health costs: BLOCKED

● Amendment from Rep. John Linder (R-GA) to limit participation to states with meaningful medical malpractice reforms to reduce frivolous lawsuits (Democrats defeated it: 26-15)

OTHER REPUBLICAN AMENDMENTS BLOCKED BY DEMOCRATS
Democrats block common-sense changes to Health Care bill

SOURCES – THE HOUSE BILL H.R.3200:

The three House committees (Education and Labor, Ways and Means, Energy and Commerce) which have been working together on health insurance reform, have now each approved health care legislation. H.R.3200 is expected to be considered by the full House in September.
● House Committee on Education and Labor: markup, and here, members (Democrat majority), roll call: passed 26-22
● House Committee on Ways and Means: markup, members (Democrat majority)
● House Committee on Energy and Commerce: markup, and here, members (Democrat majority), roll call: passed 31-28
● Democratic Leaders Block 31 Common-Sense Changes to Health Care Bill
● The House Education and Labor Markup: Making a Bad Bill Worse
● The House Health Bill: The House Ways and Means Amendments
● The House Health Bill: Energy and Commerce Amendments

SOURCES – THE SENATE BILL:

● Senate HELP (Health, Education, Labor and Pensions) Committee: passed a health care overhaul along party lines, No transparency
● The Senate Health Bill: Chock-Full of Bad Health Policy

 

Posted from LifeSiteNews.com

Although President Obama and liberal Congressional Democrats have denounced claims that the health care reform establishes “death panels,” it does not help reassure the American public that the nation’s foremost pro-euthanasia group is actively pushing “end-of-life counseling” as a centerpiece of health-care reforms.

Compassion & Choices, a rebranding of the former Hemlock Society, aggressively lobbies to legalize euthanasia as a “human right” by means of legislation and the judicial system. But the group has revealed that it is a major player behind incorporating a measure (sec. 1233) of the “American Affordable Choices Act of 2009″ (HR 3200) that would pay doctors and medical professionals to offer “end-of-life” consultations every five years with elderly patients or those suffering from chronic or terminal illnesses.

“As Congress debates health insurance reform, Compassion & Choices is leading the charge to make end-of-life choice a centerpiece of any program that emerges,” the euthanasia society declares on its website. “We are working hard to reach our goal to make end-of-life choice a centerpiece of national health insurance reform.”

An e-mail alert sent by the organization’s president Barbara Lee Coombs asked members to join in a telephone call-in with President Obama and faith-based groups asking them to “please encourage him to be vocal and steadfast in his support of the voluntary end-of-life consultation provision for Medicare patients” if they had the opportunity to ask the President a question.   

“Compassion & Choices was the number one organization behind pushing for assisted suicide in Washington State.  They’ve made no secret that this is something they would like to replicate on a national scale,” said Dan Kennedy, CEO of Human Life Washington in an e-mail to LifeSiteNews.com. 

Since Oregon passed laws legalizing physician assisted suicide in 1997, two other states have also legalized assisted suicide: Washington and Montana through the efforts of Compassion & Choices. In Montana, the euthanasia-promoting group had assisted suicide foisted on the state through the edict of a district court; however Montana physicians and the Montana Medical Association refused to participate, saying killing their patients violated physician ethics rooted in the Hippocratic Oath.

Although the White House and its allies in Congress have insisted that talk about sec. 1233 of HR 3200 would lead to “death panels” – a term coined by former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to frame how involving government bureaucracy in health care would lead to low-quality care or denied care – has no foundation in fact; but the reality is that euthanasia advocate Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) had a powerful impact upon shaping the legislation, which Compassion & Choices has aggressively promoted.

“I’m certain that they see themselves as the go-to community organization that would partner with the Federal government in end of life counseling,” said Kennedy. “Given that the President has made some disturbing statements on end of life economics, and has listened to their input on health care legislation, we can’t pretend we don’t know what the end-game is.”

Rep. Earl Blumenauer, an advocate of Oregon’s assisted suicide law, wrote the “Life Sustaining Treatment Preferences Act of 2009″ (HR 1898), which is considered the primary source of the “advance care planning” sec. 1233 of the health-care reform bill, HR 3200. Both bills incorporate what the euthanasia-promoting Compassion & Choices calls a “Physician Order for Life Sustaining Treatment” (POLST) and pay physicians to initiate conversations with their patients about “the reasons why the development of such an order is beneficial to the individual and the individual’s family and the reasons why such an order should be updated periodically as the health of the individual changes.”

Such advance orders not only include the establishment of living wills, and health-care proxies, but they also delineate for medical professionals under what conditions a patient would wish to refuse treatment, including cardiac or pulmonary resuscitation, going to the hospital, using anti-biotics, and even when to continue “the use of artificially administered nutrition and hydration.”

A number of analysts, and not all conservative, have expressed concern that sec. 1233 could lead to senior citizens being pressured into accepting lower quality care from a doctor who is reimbursed to talk with a patient about refusing treatment.

In fact Obama himself has emphasized cutting medical costs through end-of-life counseling. In an April New York Times interview, Obama mentioned how the “chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill out here.” Obama stated that the nation must have “a very difficult democratic conversation” about dealing with those costs and advocated the creation of “some independent group that can give you guidance” on the matter.

Such an independent group under HR 3200 would be a board for “Comparative Effectiveness Research” established under the executive branch, and independent of Congressional oversight. But the White House is pushing for the creation of an Independent Medical Advisory Committee, also under the sole direction of the President, that would have the power to completely rewrite Medicare reimbursements without input from Congress.

According to a new NBC News poll, Americans have become increasingly alarmed about the proposed government involvement in the health-care of their loved ones. About 45 percent believe that the government will likely decide when to stop care for the elderly, while 50 percent say it is not likely. 54 percent of respondents also believe the government reforms will lead to a government takeover of health care, while 39 percent disagree.

However, Americans could have a greater cause for alarm to know that not only are euthanasia groups promoting this aspect of health-care reform, but that the Obama Administration has already included them as a resource for “end-of-life counseling” in its Veterans Affairs Department.

Posted from USA Today

About 60,000 senior citizens have quit AARP since July 1 due to the group’s support for a health care overhaul, a spokesman for the organization said Monday.The membership loss suggests dissatisfaction on the part of AARP members at a time when many senior citizens are concerned about proposed cuts to Medicare providers to help pay for making health care available for all. But spokesman Drew Nannis said it wasn’t unusual for the powerful, 40 million-strong senior citizens’ lobby to shed members in droves when it’s advocating on a controversial issue.

 AARP is strongly backing a health care overhaul, running ads to support it and hosting President Obama at an online forum recently to promote his agenda to AARP members. However, the group has not endorsed a specific bill and says it won’t support a plan that reduces Medicare benefits.

“We take stands on issues that are contentious, it’s part of what we do,” Nannis said. “And because we have so many members we’ll always have a small percentage that disagree with us so strongly they feel they need to cancel membership.”

The approximately 60,000 number represents members who specifically cited AARP’s stance on the health overhaul debate in canceling their membership between July 1 and mid-August, Nannis said. He said that on average AARP loses some 300,000 members a month, but he couldn’t say how many more members had quit for other reasons in that time period.

He said AARP gained some 400,000 new members during the same period and that 1.5 million members renewed their membership.

Posted from the National Center for Policy Analysis

All across the country, Members of Congress are facing very angry constituents over the issue of health care. So ferocious has been the response that an estimated two-thirds of the Members are not even going to hold town hall meetings. Reportedly, our elected representatives are shocked.

I don’t know why. At least a month earlier, my colleagues and I at the National Center for Policy Analysis became aware of their anger as we collected more than 1.1 million signatures on the petition http://www.freeourhealthcarenow.com/ and read all their e-mail responses. Where, you wonder, were the politicians as this anger was boiling over? Don’t they have staffers who answer their telephones and open their mail?

Anyway, a great disconnect has emerged. It may be serious enough to cause the Democrats to lose control of the Congress in the next election. How did this happen? I think there are three causes.

 1.       Politicians who don’t know anything about health care.

As I have written before at this blog, almost no one on Capitol Hill understands health care as a complex system. Not only that, but the left wing of the Democratic Party thinks that the answers are simple. After all, other countries appear to have solved a lot of these problems. Why can’t we just copy what they are doing? Like the Hollywood crowd, these politicians think you do not need to understand complex systems in general or economics in particular in order to have strongly held public policy beliefs. These attitudes served them well (they at least got them elected) until it came time to legislate. At this point, technicians at the Congressional Budget Office (who actually do understand something about complex systems) told them their pipe dreams were pipe dreams. So enter the policy wonks.

2.       Policy wonks who do not understand the voters.

Over the past two decades, I have probably participated in several hundred inside-the-Beltway meetings on ways to reform the health care system. One of the almost unquestioned assumptions in all these discussions is that it is right, proper and desirable for the federal government to tell everyone in America what kind of health insurance he/she should have. In fact, most health reform plans are designed so that they won’t work at all if you can’t force people to buy a government-prescribed insurance plan. In these discussions, wonks on the right are almost as bad as wonks on the left. And all are completely out of touch with what ordinary Americans think.

3.       A very deceptive presidential campaign.

During the last election, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and just about everyone else running for president in the Democratic primary made these promises:

a.  Universal coverage (which sounds like helping 47 million Americans
     afford to buy health insurance);

b.  Paid for by taxes on the rich (which means to most people,
     “not me”) and efficiencies gained through preventive care,
     electronic medical records, etc.  (which sounds like “all gain,
     no pain”); and

c.  If you like the health plan you’re in (which 87% of Americans
     do) you can keep it (which sounds like “we’ll leave you alone”).

Most voters liked these messages. At the same time, they didn’t like what Barack Obama said John McCain would do:

a.  Cause millions of Americans to lose their employer coverage
     and be thrown into the individual market where premiums
     would be unaffordably high and people with pre-existing
     conditions would be denied coverage altogether; and

b.  If you are lucky enough to keep your employer plan the
     federal government would tax you.

[Parenthetical note: That McCain responded so ineptly to all this helped Obama win the (election) battle, but caused so much over-confidence it may now cost him the (policy) war. Indeed, I think President Obama has been truly surprised by the strength of the arguments currently being made against his reform plan.]

Now comes the surprise from Capitol Hill: Forget everything we said during the election. We really didn’t mean it after all. In particular:

a.  Whereas the campaign mantra was universal coverage
     (“we’re the only developed country that doesn’t insure
     all its citizens”), that term is almost never heard any 
     more. The clear goal now is to nationalize the health care
     system (“we’re the only country in the world that doesn’t
     have a national system”).

b.  Far from being left alone if you like the plan you are in:

1.  You and your employer are going to be heavily taxed
     if your insurance doesn’t conform to the plan the
    federal government is designing.

2.  You, along with millions of other Americans, may lose
     the plan you like and be pushed into a health insurance
     exchange where the premiums are likely to be higher
     than what you now pay and health plans have
     perverse incentives to underprovide to the seriously
     ill.

3.  Costs cannot be controlled unless we all get less —
     fewer tests, fewer exams, fewer services — with
     Barack Obama’s grandmother’s hip replacement being
     Exhibit A.

c.  Far from escaping the financial burden of reform, it now
    appears that everyone will be burdened — from the
    elderly to the casual consumers of soda pops.

So, should people be angry? I report. You decide.

Posted from TownHall.com

(1) National health care will punish the insurance companies.

You want to punish insurance companies? Make them compete.

As Adam Smith observed, whenever two businessmen meet, “the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” That’s why we need a third, fourth and 45th competing insurance company that will undercut them by offering better service at a lower price.

Tiny little France and Germany have more competition among health insurers than the U.S. does right now. Amazingly, both of these socialist countries have less state regulation of health insurance than we do, and you can buy health insurance across regional lines — unlike in the U.S., where a federal law allows states to ban interstate commerce in health insurance.

U.S. health insurance companies are often imperious, unresponsive consumer hellholes because they’re a partial monopoly, protected from competition by government regulation. In some states, one big insurer will control 80 percent of the market. (Guess which party these big insurance companies favor? Big companies love big government.)

Liberals think they can improve the problem of a partial monopoly by turning it into a total monopoly. That’s what single-payer health care is: “Single payer” means “single provider.”

It’s the famous liberal two-step: First screw something up, then claim that it’s screwed up because there’s not enough government oversight (it’s the free market run wild!), and then step in and really screw it up in the name of “reform.”

You could fix 90 percent of the problems with health insurance by ending the federal law allowing states to ban health insurance sales across state lines. But when John McCain called for ending the ban during the 2008 presidential campaign, he was attacked by Joe Biden — another illustration of the ironclad Ann Coulter rule that the worst Republicans are still better than allegedly “conservative” Democrats.

(2) National health care will “increase competition and keep insurance companies honest” — as President Barack Obama has said.

Government-provided health care isn’t a competitor; it’s a monopoly product paid for by the taxpayer. Consumers may be able to “choose” whether they take the service — at least at first — but every single one of us will be forced to buy it, under penalty of prison for tax evasion. It’s like a new cable plan with a “yes” box, but no “no” box.

Obama himself compared national health care to the post office — immediately conjuring images of a highly efficient and consumer-friendly work force — which, like so many consumer-friendly shops, is closed by 2 p.m. on Saturdays, all Sundays and every conceivable holiday.

But what most people don’t know — including the president, apparently — with certain narrow exceptions, competing with the post office is prohibited by law.

Expect the same with national health care. Liberals won’t stop until they have total control. How else will they get you to pay for their sex-change operations?

(3) Insurance companies are denying legitimate claims because they are “villains.”

Obama denounced the insurance companies in last Sunday’s New York Times, saying: “A man lost his health coverage in the middle of chemotherapy because the insurance company discovered that he had gallstones, which he hadn’t known about when he applied for his policy. Because his treatment was delayed, he died.”

Well, yeah. That and the cancer.

Assuming this is true — which would distinguish it from every other story told by Democrats pushing national health care — in a free market, such an insurance company couldn’t stay in business. Other insurance companies would scream from the rooftops about their competitor’s shoddy business practices, and customers would leave in droves.

If only customers had a choice! But we don’t because of government regulation of health insurance.

Speaking of which, maybe if Mr. Gallstone’s insurance company weren’t required by law to cover early childhood development programs and sex-change operations, it wouldn’t be forced to cut corners in the few areas not regulated by the government, such as cancer treatments for patients with gallstones.

(4) National health care will give Americans “basic consumer protections that will finally hold insurance companies accountable” — as Barack Obama claimed in his op/ed in the Times.

You want to protect consumers? Do it the same way we protect consumers of dry cleaning, hamburgers and electricians: Give them the power to tell their insurance companies, “I’m taking my business elsewhere.”

(5) Government intervention is the only way to provide coverage for pre-existing conditions.

The only reason most “pre-existing” conditions aren’t already covered is because of government regulations that shrink the insurance market to a microscopic size, which leads to fewer options in health insurance and a lot more uninsured people than would exist in a free market.

The free market has produced a dizzying array of insurance products in areas other than health. (Ironically, array-associated dizziness is not covered by most health plans.) Even insurance companies have “reinsurance” policies to cover catastrophic events occurring on the properties they insure, such as nuclear accidents, earthquakes and Michael Moore dropping in for a visit and breaking the couch.

If we had a free market in health insurance, it would be inexpensive and easy to buy insurance for “pre-existing” conditions before they exist, for example, insurance on unborn — unconceived — children and health insurance even when you don’t have a job. The vast majority of “pre-existing” conditions that currently exist in a cramped, limited, heavily regulated insurance market would be “covered” conditions under a free market in health insurance.

I’ve hit my word limit on liberal lies about national health care without breaking a sweat. See this space next week for more lies in our continuing series.

Posted from National Review Online

Posted from The American Spectator

Last week, Barack Obama treated us to a traveling road show crusading for his heath care overhaul plan. But what he actually said at those staged, orchestrated, town halls packed with his fervent supporters was so unhinged from the reality of the Congressional legislation he is supporting that he must have consciously decided to challenge us all with the dare: “Catch me if you can.”

President Obama keeps repeating over and over that his plan does not include any cuts in Medicare. But the legislation he is supporting specifies $500 billion in reduced funding for Medicare, scored by CBO. When arguing that his health overhaul is paid for, he wants credit for these cuts. But when challenged, he wants to deny before the whole country in broad daylight that he is doing it. I can’t recall any precedent for such a Presidential disconnect from reality.

In trying to deny these Medicare cuts, President Obama said at one town hall that AARP had endorsed his plan. He said, “AARP would not be endorsing a bill if it was undermining Medicare, okay?” But just the night before, AARP was on national television denying that it had endorsed the Obama health plan. It issued a press release saying the same just after Obama’s town hall misstatement.

President Obama also repeats over and over in these town halls that his health plan will reduce health costs, thereby reducing federal spending and deficits. But CBO, which is now in complete control of the Democrat Congressional majorities, says just the opposite. It says the Obama health overhaul plan will increase federal spending by close to a trillion dollars or more, and increase the federal deficit by hundreds of billions. On health costs, CBO Director Doug Elmendorf told Congress,

In the legislation that has been reported we don’t see the sort of fundamental changes that would be necessary to reduce the trajectory of federal spending by a significant amount…[O]n the contrary, the legislation significantly expands the federal responsibility for health costs….[The government public option for health insurance] raises the amount of [spending] that is growing at this unsustainable rate.

And here’s a dirty little secret. The CBO surely underestimates the costs of the Obama health plan, just as it regularly does for new government programs, health programs in particular. The official government estimates for Medicare when it was adopted in 1965 projected that the program would cost only $12 billion by 1990. But the actual costs of the program by that year were $109.7 billion, nine times larger than the original estimate.

Independent private estimates have ranged far higher than what CBO projects. HSI Network used its proprietary ARCOLA simulation model to estimate that the House bill would cost $3.5 trillion in additional federal spending alone over 10 years. HSI estimates that the Senate bill would cost $4.1 trillion over 10 years. These estimates seem far more realistic than the CBO estimates. In my study of the Obama health plan for the Heartland Institute (www.heartland.org), I explain in thorough detail how and why the Obama health overhaul will raise rather than lower health costs. 

But in the town halls, President Obama just goes from bad to worse. In Colorado on Saturday, President Obama even suggested that his health overhaul scheme would “bend the cost curve,” reducing “health care inflation” so much that the enormous long-term deficit of Medicare (unfunded liability: $89 trillion) would be eliminated! He said that without his health overhaul plan, “We’ll either have to cut Medicare, in which case seniors then will bear the brunt of it, or we’ll have to raise taxes, which nobody likes.” But the CBO has never ever come anywhere near to confirming anything like this. This is just abusive.

Screwing Seniors on Medicare Advantage

Among the cuts in Medicare under the Obama health plan is $177 billion in cuts for what he misleadingly calls “subsidies” for health insurance companies, or “sweetheart deals for insurance companies that don’t make anybody any healthier.” Translating this into straight talk, what Obama is talking about here are the reimbursements Medicare pays to the private insurance companies operating the Medicare Advantage option. Seniors enjoy the freedom today to choose one of these Medicare Advantage insurance companies to provide their coverage and benefits under Medicare. Almost one-fourth of seniors have chosen this Medicare Advantage option because they believe they get better benefits from it than from standard Medicare.

But Obama thinks that what Medicare is paying to these insurance companies to provide Medicare coverage and benefits is somehow a “subsidy” or a “sweetheart deal.” So he is proposing to pay for his health care overhaul in part by slashing these payments by $177 billion. At a minimum, these cuts will force these plans to cut back on the benefits they provide to seniors. Or the Medicare Advantage plans may just go out of business altogether, dumping the almost one-fourth of seniors who have made this choice because they are getting a better deal from these plans.

President Obama continually promises over and over that if you like your health insurance, you can keep it. He said at the town hall in Colorado on Saturday, “I just want to be completely clear about this: I keep on saying this but somehow folks aren’t listening — if you like your health care plan, you keep your health care plan.” But this promise apparently doesn’t extend to seniors on Medicare Advantage, which he is slashing because he is ideologically opposed to private options for Medicare.

Nor can anyone else rely on this false promise either. If you have employer-provided health insurance, under the Obama health plan the decision as to whether you keep that insurance will not be up to you. It will be up to your employer, who Obama entices with incentives to dump you into the public option government health insurance plan so beloved by the Far Left. The employer can just dump your current health coverage and pay an 8% payroll tax instead. If you make $50,000, the payroll tax will cost $4,000 for you, which is probably less than the cost of your current coverage.

This is why the Lewin Group, an independent, expert, health care consulting firm, estimates that under the Obama health plan “about 88.1 million workers would shift from private employer insurance to the public plan” to start. That’s a lot of workers not keeping their current health coverage if they like it.

Even if you purchase health insurance directly on your own, you will not be able to keep that insurance if your insurer is driven out of business by the public option, government health plan. One big reason that will happen is that the government has the power to dictate what doctors and hospitals would be paid by the government plan. Medicare now pays doctors almost 20% below market rates, and hospitals more than 30% below market. Medicaid pays 30% to 40% less than Medicare. The health reform bills now pending in Congress authorize the public option to follow these payment practices.

Private health plans will not be able to compete with a public government plan that has lower costs because it dictates lower payment rates to doctors and hospitals. Indeed, the current experience with Medicaid and Medicare is that these government plans drive up the cost of private health plans, as doctors and hospitals underpaid by the government health plans try to recover the losses by charging more to privately insured patients. Private health plans trying to compete with the government public option would consequently be at even more of a competitive disadvantage.

Obama also repeatedly says that under his health plan if you like your doctor, you will be able to keep him, or her. But the question is whether under his plan, with the government so sharply underpaying the doctors, your doctor will be willing to keep you.

Government-Run Health Care

In the town hall meeting in New Hampshire last week, Obama said about his health care overhaul plan “This is not about putting the government in charge of your health insurance.”

Oh, really. Faithfully to the Obama plan, the bills before Congress create a government bureaucracy that will dictate to the insurance companies exactly what benefits and coverage they must provide. The bills also dictate who the insurers must cover, with guaranteed issue for whoever shows up regardless of health condition. The bills also specify in detail what the insurance companies can charge, with community rating for everyone who applies, regardless of health condition. The government will let the insurer vary premiums by age up to a ratio of 2 to 1. How flexible.

The government will also dictate what deductibles, co-pays, and other out of pocket expenses the insurance company can offer. If you are one of the almost 12 million Americans with low cost Health Savings Account insurance plans or similar high deductible plans, and you like it, too bad, because Obama’s promise of allowing you to keep your plan does not apply to you.

The bills also provide for a government bureaucracy that will “risk adjust” premium income to insurance companies by redistributing funds from insurers whose covered customers are healthier and lower cost than average, to insurers whose covered customers are sicker and higher cost than average, as determined by the bureaucracy.

Oh, no. The Obama plan “is not about putting the government in charge of your health insurance.” No way.

Peddling Still More Falsehoods

Also in the New Hampshire town hall last week, President Obama said that under his health plan,

[I]nsurance companies…will not be able to drop your coverage if you get sick. They will not be able to water down your coverage when you need it. Your health insurance should be there for you when it counts — not just when you’re paying premiums, but when you actually get sick. And it will be when we pass this plan.

But dropping or watering down your health insurance coverage after you get sick has long been illegal in America, and well it should be. Health insurance that can be cut off after you get sick is like fire insurance that can be cut off after your house catches fire. That is not health insurance, it is fraud.

The prohibition against this fraud was nationalized by the Congressional Republican majorities in the landmark HIPAA legislation in 1996. That legislation even provided that if you lose employer provided health insurance coverage for any reason (changing jobs, layoffs, employer goes out of business, divorce) any private insurer you apply to within 2 months must take you, regardless of health condition. Even failing that, Republicans have long advocated uninsurable risk pools for every state, which would provide government subsidized coverage to anyone who couldn’t get coverage anywhere else. Such risk pools have long worked quite well in over 30 states.

There may still be some loopholes in the employer group market that should be closed. But in making this argument, President Obama is trying to take credit for solving a problem that has already been basically solved, and does not require the massive government takeover of health care that he is advocating.

Rationing and Denying You Health Care

Finally, President Obama and his left wing supporters laugh off the notion that there will be any government health care rationing under his plan. Again, my recent study on the Obama health plan for the Heartland Institute explains in full detail exactly how this rationing would be imposed under that plan. The talking heads who appear on TV or radio flatly denying that as misinformation either haven’t read the bills or don’t understand what they have read.

The legislation already provides for the establishment of government bureaucracies with the power to decide on “cost-effectiveness” in health care, which means the government will decide whether the benefits of your health care to you are worth the costs to the government or other payers. This is the grounds for the extensive government health care rationing we see in other countries with such systems such as Great Britain and Canada, or even in Oregon in the Medicaid program, where those needing life saving care have been told that such care is not cost effective, but the government will pay for physician assisted suicide instead.

The legislation already provides for bureaucracies with the power to decide “comparative effectiveness,” where the government is empowered to decide what health care “works” and what doesn’t. This is what your doctor is for, to decide what will work and what won’t for you. But now a government bureaucracy that doesn’t even know you will be involved, and if your doctor doesn’t follow its decisions, he will be penalized in his reimbursements for your care under “pay for performance.”

And when the steep underpayment of doctors and hospitals under the payment practices of Medicaid and Medicare is extended more generally through the public option government health plan, incentives to invest in health care will be obliterated. That means no investment in new, expanded clinics and hospitals, or even the maintenance of existing ones, no investment in the high tech medical equipment Americans have far greater access to than anywhere else in the world, no investment in the scientific breakthroughs that would provide for the next generation of high tech medical advances, no investment in development of new life saving and pain saving miracle drugs. It means the departure of doctors, specialists and surgeons from current practices, and far fewer new ones coming up. There’s your rationing, your long waiting lines we see in all these other countries, the people dying while waiting for care from their government. Even this is not the whole story, which again is discussed in my Heartland study. The bottom line is, as others have said, the whole Obama health plan is a death panel.

What all of the above means is that Obama is willing to say anything no matter how transparently ridiculous and absurd to pass his government takeover of health care. At this point, you can’t believe a word he says about it.

Posted from LifeSiteNews

The US Senate has sounded a hasty retreat on “death panels” in health-care reform by striking out the provision on “end-of-life counseling” from the bill.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), announced last week that the Senate Finance Committee has now expunged all “end-of-life” provisions from the Senate version of health-care reform in order “to avoid unintended consequences.”

Grassley admitted in a statement Wednesday that the storm of controversy surrounding the “end-of-life” provisions in detailed in section 1233 of the House version (H.R. 3200) expressed legitimate concerns that the elderly and infirm could end up pressured into lower-quality care or none at all.

“We dropped end-of-life provisions from consideration entirely,” said Grassley, “because of the way they could be misinterpreted and implemented incorrectly.”

The House version “pays physicians to advise patients about end of life care and rates physician quality of care based on the creation of and adherence to orders for end-of-life care,” said Grassley, “while at the same time creating a government-run program that is likely to lead to the rationing of care for everyone.”

Grassley said the House version of the “America’s Affordable Health Choices Act” in HR 3200 “leaves major issues open to interpretation” and that he could not support it as it went far beyond just “a simple educational campaign.”

However the “end-of-life” provisions could re-emerge, especially as the House may include them in any of the three versions it may pass, and the Senate could agree to them in a compromise bill that reconciles the discrepancies between their respective bills.

The Lady is the Champ: Palin v. Obama

The demise of “end-of-life” counseling has another aspect as it marks Sarah Palin’s first political victory over President Barack Obama since the 2008 election.

The former Alaska Governor’s famous characterization of the House bill as dangerous legislation, paving the way for a bureaucratic “death panel” that would ration care, ignited the firestorm that led to massive scrutiny of the provision. Palin posted her original remarks on Aug. 7th remarks on Facebook, and a week later Grassley announced that the provision was gone.

At a town-hall style gathering in New Hampshire last Wednesday, Obama tried to defuse the controversy over “death panels” with an attempt at humor saying a “rumor” had arisen that Congress wanted to “basically pull the plug on grandma because we’ve decided that we don’t–it’s too expensive to let her live anymore.”

However Obama failed to regain control of the debate, and by the end of the week, commentators such as the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto said, “it is clear that she has won the debate.” “One can hardly deny that Palin’s reference to ‘death panels’ was inflammatory,” opined Taranto in his “Best of the Web” column. “But another way of putting that is that it was vivid and attention-getting.”

Palin later blasted Obama for having Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel as his policy advisor on health-care reform. Emanuel outlined a policy for rationing health care called the “Complete Lives System,” which would divert care to individuals with “the potential to live a complete life.” (see coverage)

“Does [Obama] agree with the ‘Complete Lives System,’” asked Palin. “If not, then why is Dr. Emanuel his policy advisor? What is he advising the president on?”

Palin also noted that Emanuel had just told the Washington Times that his “thinking has evolved” on what she called “the question of rationing care to benefit the strong and deny the weak.”

“How convenient that he disavowed his own work only after the nature of his scholarship was revealed to the public at large,” said Palin in comments posted on her Facebook page . 

As of publication time, Palin has added nearly 100,000 more “supporters” on her Facebook profile since her August 7 post.

According to Monday’s Rasmussen presidential daily tracking poll, Fifty percent of voters disapprove of Obama’s performance, while just 49 percent say they at least somewhat approve.

But Americans have lost even more faith in Obama’s health-care reforms, with 54 percent now saying that no health care reform this year would be preferable to the current legislation working its way through Congress.