From the New York Post

By Dick Morris and Eileen McGann  — WASHINGTON is all atwit ter about “death panels”: President Obama derides the idea that his health-care reform calls for them; the Senate is stripping “end of life” counseling language from its bill — and last Friday the voice of the liberal establishment, The New York Times, ran a Page One story “rebutting” the rumor that ObamaCare would create such boards to decide when to pull the plug on elderly patients.

But all those protests miss the fundamental truth of the “death panel” charge.

Even without a federal board voting on whom to kill, ObamaCare will ration care extensively, leading to the same result. This follows inevitably from central features of the president’s plan.

Specifically, his decisions to (1) pay for reform with vast cuts in the Medicare budget and (2) grant insurance coverage to 50 million new people, vastly boosting demand without increasing the supply of doctors, nurses or other care providers.

Whether or not he admits it even to himself, Obama’s talk of cutting “inefficiencies” and reducing costs translates to less care, of lower quality, for the elderly. Every existing national health system finds ways to deny state-of-the-art medications and necessary surgical procedures to countless patients, and ObamaCare has the nascent mechanisms to do the same. With the limited options that Obama’s vision would leave them, many will find that “end of life counseling” necessary and even welcome.

“Reform” would cut care to the elderly in several ways:

* Slash hundreds of billions from Medicare spending, largely by lowering reimbursement rates to doctors and hospitals for patient care.

If a hospital gets less money for each MRI, it will do fewer of them. If a surgeon gets paid less for a heart bypass on a Medicare patient, he’ll perform them more rarely. These facts of the marketplace are not only inevitable consequences of Obama’s cuts but are also its intended consequence. Without them, his savings will prove illusory.

* Expanding the patient load by extending full coverage to 50 million Americans (including such “Americans” as illegal immigrants) without boosting the supply of care will force rationing decisions on harried and overworked doctors and hospitals.

People with insurance use a lot more health-care resources — so today’s facilities and personnel will have to cope with the increased workload. Busy surgeons will have to decide who would benefit most from their treatment — de facto rationing. The elderly will, inevitably, be the losers.

Read the rest of the column at the New York Post

Posted from World Net Daily

By Chuck Norris — I’ve read on several blogs that if Chuck Norris’ tears can cure cancer, he should take care of universal health care. Cute.

The real fact is that neither I nor Obamacare (in its present form in any of the 1,000+ page versions like H.R. 3200) can provide the remedy.

In my last column I explained that dirty secret No. 1 in Obamacare is that the House bill grants government the authority to come into homes and usurp parental rights over child care development.

I have a few more secrets to share over these hot August political nights.

Dirty secret No. 2 in Obamacare is that Obama is not the leader of Obamacare. And neither is Congress. The one who has been spearheading the initiative behind the scenes is one who goes under the misnomer “adviser” to the Obama administration, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, a bioethicist and breast oncologist and brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. And “his bible” for health care reform is his book, “Healthcare Guaranteed.”

Dr. Emanuel has served as special adviser to the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget for health policy as far back as February, when he confessed to the Washington bureau chief for the Chicago Sun-Times that he was “working on (the) health care reform effort.” The first draft of Obamacare?

If you want to know the future of America’s universal health care, then you must understand the health care principles and plans of Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel. I find it far more than coincidence how much Dr. Emanuel’s book parallels Obamacare’s philosophy, strategy and legislation.

First, Dr. Emanuel rejects any attempts at incremental change or reform to our health care system (Page 185). What’s needed, he concludes in his book (p. 171), is an immediate and totally comprehensive reconstruction of health care as we know it. That of course describes the vision of Obamacare to a tee.

Second, in the chapter “Opening the door to comprehensive change” starting on p. 171 (which reads more like a political and mass-manipulating strategy than a health care manual), Emanuel drives home “a key political lesson: the need to rush the legislation through.” (Seen this methodology being used lately?!)

He then cites historical proof: “Within a few months, President Johnson rammed the four central elements of his Great Society program through,” and Medicare and Medicaid were born. Emanuel says that the reason the Clinton administration couldn’t pass a health care bill was because it waited too long (after his inauguration – the political honeymoon period) and it “established a large task force that worked in secret. … The delay and the secrecy were deadly” (p. 181). Sounds to me that Dr. Emanuel is as much a political strategist as he is a doctor.

You are bearing witness to these political principles at work at this very moment in Washington and across this nation with Obamacare. President Obama and Dr. Emanuel both know that if too much time elapses their legislation is likely to die (and their preferences with it) because Americans will actually have time to examine it and come up with better alternatives.

Third, as Obama crusades around the country pitching Obamacare, he continues to avoid giving virtually any specific details of the program. That too is a strategy of Dr. Emanuel: “Americans need to avoid the policy weeds. Focusing on details will only distract and create tangles and traps” (p. 183). So “details” of health care reform are “weeds”? That is why we continue to hear only warm-and-fuzzy generalities from Obama like,”If you’ve got health care, the only thing we’re going to do is we’re going to reform the insurance companies so that they can’t cheat you.”

Fourth, Dr. Emanuel describes a comprehensive government health care program that is completely run by a national health board with 12 regional health boards (“modeled on the Federal Reserve system” – p. 83).

Imagine a national health board with the power of the Federal Reserve?! Imagine them doing with medicine and health what the Fed does with interest rates and the financial system. An apolitical board like that sounds appealing at first, until it is immune in ways (like the Federal Reserve) to congressional protocol and oversight. Once these boards are in place, like the Federal Reserve system over our financial system, they will have absolute power over the ebbs and flows of the medical world.

Critics would say, “But that is not the national board as described in Obamacare or H.R. 3200.” Not yet anyway. Of course, Obamacare uses much softer language for describing a national board – they call it the “Health Benefits Advisory Committee” (there’s that “advisory” word again!), which would be under the executive branch (like the Federal Reserve).

Does anyone doubt that the duties and power of the Health Benefits Advisory Committee will morph and grow over time? And what liberties and controls will they have 10 years from now? I have a hunch they will be very reflective of the power of the Federal Reserve – I’ll let you guess why.

Fifth, Dr. Emanuel believes in the “phasing out of Medicare and Medicaid” (Pages 88-89, 94-95). Of course, no proposed legislative wording by the current administration is going to describe the eventual elimination of these programs, at least in these incipient stages – remember, this bill is a sales pitch, too. But what stops the “Health Benefits Advisory Committee” care from “phasing them out” down the road? Could their eventual termination be the reason this administration won’t merely reform those programs to accommodate their universal health care desires? But then again, maybe you believe Obama when he “avoids the policy weeds” by saying, “Nobody is talking about trying to change Medicare benefits. What we want to do is to eliminate some of the waste that is being paid for out of the Medicare trust fund.”

Sixth, Dr. Emanuel believes in ending employer-based health care (Pages 109-112). President Obama knows that to propose such a restriction on American freedoms and choice would mean certain death to this legislation, let alone likely his popularity as president. However, throughout all Obama’s rhetoric about how Americans will have the choice of health care insurance, they will have little choice in the matter, especially when employers are footing the bill. As any businessman knows, why would a company pay the exorbitant costs for employees’ private health care insurance when they can benefit big time from a free ticket for government health care coverage? Some have even proposed that provisions in the House’s health care legislation, under the titles “Limitation of New Enrollment” and “Limitation on Changes in Terms or Conditions” (p. 16), could essentially make individual private medical insurance illegal.

Seventh, Dr. Emanuel believes a universal health care program could be paid for by phasing out Medicare and Medicaid, adopting a value-added tax of at least 10 percent, etc., and then allowing Americans themselves to “pay extra with after-tax dollars” (p. 100) for additional medical benefits (beyond the norm of the government program). Ironically, Obamacare proposes cutting $500 billion from Medicare and proposing taxes upon the wealthy, as just a couple ways to pay for the $1 trillion it will cost to run the new national health care program over 10 years. But even the Congressional Budget Office says that won’t be near enough.

Just last week at a Montana town hall meeting, the president continued to struggle to explain how he would pay for Obamacare without taxing the middle class. Of course, three of his top advisers (Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, National Economic Council Director Lawrence Summers and White House senior adviser David Axlrod) have already gone on the record saying they will not rule out the need for a middle-class tax hike to pay for Obamacare.

The truth is, whether the money comes from higher corporate taxes, taxing employer-provided health insurance, eliminating health savings accounts or flexible spending accounts, limiting the deductibility of medical expenses, increasing taxes on selective consumptives, etc., or all the above, trust me, sooner or later, we all will pay.

Eighth, speaking of ethics, enough has been written lately about Dr. Emanuel’s end-of-life counsel and consultation, including his advice from The Hastings Center Report (1996) that medical care should be withheld from those “who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens. … An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.”

I find it striking that Obama’s ethics have similarly allowed him already to pass more laws increasing the terminations of life in the womb than any administration since Roe v. Wade. To add insult to injury, Congress has repeatedly rejected amendments to this universal health care bill that would prevent federal funds to be used for abortions.

Friends, if you don’t think Dr. Emanuel’s and President Obama’s “life ethics” will bear out in the practice of the policies within their future universal health care program, I have a London bridge to sell you in Lake Havasu City, Ariz. Obama was telling the truth about this campaign promise: His presidency would provide “the most sweeping ethics reform in history.” I guess more Americans should have been watching which way he was sweeping.

In short, whether in title or not, Dr. Emanuel is Obama’s health care czar. Obamacare is a junior version of Emanuel-care, or should I say the beginning stage of Emanuel-care. What’s almost eerie is how they both could be juxtaposed to intersect in full bloom sometime in America’s future.

One last thing: Someone once said to me, “If two people think so much alike, you can bet that one person is not thinking.” Think about it.

Read Dirty Secret #1

SASKATOON — The incoming president of the Canadian Medical Association says this country’s health-care system is sick and doctors need to develop a plan to cure it.

Dr. Anne Doig says patients are getting less than optimal care and she adds that physicians from across the country – who will gather in Saskatoon on Sunday for their annual meeting – recognize that changes must be made.

“We all agree that the system is imploding, we all agree that things are more precarious than perhaps Canadians realize,” Doing said in an interview with The Canadian Press.

“We know that there must be change,” she said. “We’re all running flat out, we’re all just trying to stay ahead of the immediate day-to-day demands.”

The pitch for change at the conference is to start with a presentation from Dr. Robert Ouellet, the current president of the CMA, who has said there’s a critical need to make Canada’s health-care system patient-centred. He will present details from his fact-finding trip to Europe in January, where he met with health groups in England, Denmark, Belgium, Netherlands and France.

His thoughts on the issue are already clear. Ouellet has been saying since his return that “a health-care revolution has passed us by,” that it’s possible to make wait lists disappear while maintaining universal coverage and “that competition should be welcomed, not feared.”

In other words, Ouellet believes there could be a role for private health-care delivery within the public system.

He has also said the Canadian system could be restructured to focus on patients if hospitals and other health-care institutions received funding based on the patients they treat, instead of an annual, lump-sum budget. This “activity-based funding” would be an incentive to provide more efficient care, he has said.

Doig says she doesn’t know what a proposed “blueprint” toward patient-centred care might look like when the meeting wraps up Wednesday. She’d like to emerge with clear directions about where the association should focus efforts to direct change over the next few years. She also wants to see short-term, medium-term and long-term goals laid out.

“A short-term achievable goal would be to accelerate the process of getting electronic medical records into physicians’ offices,” she said. “That’s one I think ought to be a priority and ought to be achievable.”

A long-term goal would be getting health systems “talking to each other,” so information can be quickly shared to help patients.

Doig, who has had a full-time family practice in Saskatoon for 30 years, acknowledges that when physicians have talked about changing the health-care system in the past, they’ve been accused of wanting an American-style structure. She insists that’s not the case.

“It’s not about choosing between an American system or a Canadian system,” said Doig. “The whole thing is about looking at what other people do.”

“That’s called looking at the evidence, looking at how care is delivered and how care is paid for all around us (and) then saying ‘Well, OK, that’s good information. How do we make all of that work in the Canadian context? What do the Canadian people want?’ ”

Doig says there are some “very good things” about Canada’s health-care system, but she points out that many people have stories about times when things didn’t go well for them or their family.

“(Canadians) have to understand that the system that we have right now – if it keeps on going without change – is not sustainable,” said Doig.

“They have to look at the evidence that’s being presented and will be presented at (the meeting) and realize what Canada’s doctors are trying to tell you, that you can get better care than what you’re getting and we all have to participate in the discussion around how do we do that and of course how do we pay for it.”

The League of American Voters has launched a new television advertising campaign to educated the public on the dangers of ObamaCare.  The organization says that  the health of millions of Americans is threatened by a planned government takeover of our health care system. This takeover will ration health care, limit important medicines and surgeries for seniors and end Medicare as we know it. It will add 50 million new patients — including up to 13 million illegal aliens — to an system that already doesn’t have enough doctors.

Posted from Rasmussen Reports

Thirty-two percent (32%) of voters nationwide favor a single-payer health care system where the federal government provides coverage for everyone. A Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 57% are opposed to a single-payer plan.

Fifty-two percent (52%) believe such a system would lead to a lower quality of care while 13% believe care would improve. Twenty-seven percent (27%) think that the quality of care would remain about the same.

Forty-five percent (45%) also say a single-payer system would lead to higher health care costs while 24% think lower costs would result. Nineteen percent (19%) think prices would remain about the same.

There’s wide political disagreement over the single-payer issue. Sixty-two percent (62%) of Democrats favor a single-payer system, but 87% of Republicans are opposed to one. As for those not affiliated with either major party, 22% favor a single-payer approach while 63% are opposed.

(Want a free daily e-mail update? If it’s in the news, it’s in our polls). Rasmussen Reports updates are also available on Twitter or Facebook.

Investors oppose a single-payer system by a three-to-one margin. However, a narrow plurality of non-investors favor such a plan.

Data released earlier today shows that 51% of voters fear the federal government more than private insurance companies when it comes to health care decisions. Forty-one percent (41%) have the opposite fear.

Recent polling has shown that the public is fairly evenly divided about the health insurance proposals being made by the president and congressional leaders of his party, but most remain convinced that the plans will raise costs and hurt the quality of the care they receive. Those who feel strongly about the issue are more likely to oppose the reform effort.

As Congress has debated potential reforms, confidence in U.S. health care system has increased. Just 19% of Americans now rate the overall system as poor while 48% say it’s good or excellent.

Voters are fairly evenly divided in their views of those protesting the health care reform plans at congressional town hall meetings, but 49% believe they are genuinely expressing the views of their neighbors. Thirty-seven percent (37%) believe the protests are phony, encouraged by special interest groups and lobbyists.

Most voters believe that middle class tax cuts are more important than new spending on health care.

Posted from Fox News

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi turned the health care debate up a notch Monday, penning a column along with her top deputy that questioned the patriotism of those disrupting town hall meetings to air their complaints. 

Pelosi and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer claimed such behavior is “simply un-American.” 

It’s hardly the first time Pelosi, who earlier this year accused the CIA of lying to Congress and repeatedly has called Republicans unpatriotic, has employed some serious name-calling to characterize her opponents’ views. 

The jab Monday drew swift scorn from Republicans and critics who say the health care demonstrations are as American as apple pie. 

“I, like most Americans, would find that kind of characterization of citizens exercising their First Amendment rights to be offensive,” Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., told FOX News. “There’s nothing more American than letting your elected representatives know how you feel about important issues facing the nation.” 

House Republican Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, released a statement calling the charge “outrageous and reprehensible.” 

Pelosi and Hoyer made the accusation as part of a lengthy column in USA Today stressing the need for action on health care reform. The piece was published as lawmakers return to their districts for summer recess, a period that could imperil the legislation if health care critics cause moderate Democrats to lose their stomachs for sweeping reform. 

Critics have confronted lawmakers about the bills, sometimes shouting at them, at a number of town halls in the past week alone. 

On Monday, Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill tried a new tack in rebutting the protesters while also minimizing their complaints. She got several hands when she asked audience members at a town hall meeting to raise their hands if they’re so scared about the federal government running health care that they “can’t think straight.”

For Pelosi and Hoyer, they charged that an “ugly campaign” is afoot to misrepresent the legislation, “disrupt” the public meetings and prevent members of Congress from “conducting a civil dialogue” on the topic. 

“Let the facts be heard,” they wrote. “These disruptions are occurring because opponents are afraid not just of differing views — but of the facts themselves. Drowning out opposing views is simply un-American. Drowning out the facts is how we failed at this task for decades.” 

The “un-American” dig was a sign the debate is heating up. In a tight spot, Pelosi is known for employing tough rhetoric and accusations to muscle her way out. 

Back in September 2008, Pelosi used similar language to complain about Republicans who weren’t showing up to talks on a Wall Street bailout package. 

“I thought it was very unpatriotic of them not to show up, not to show up, in some ways, boycott the meetings earlier in the week,” she said. 

She also reportedly called the GOP budget in 2006 “unpatriotic” because it drove up the national debt. 

This past May, she accused the CIA of lying to Congress, as she was facing questions about how much she knew early on about the Bush administration’s interrogation policies. 

Then last week, with the health care debate growing more heated, she invoked Nazi Germany, accusing protesters of “carrying swastikas and symbols like that” to meetings. A spokesman for Pelosi later said the speaker was referencing a photo taken at a town hall meeting hosted by Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., which showed a protester holding a sign of a swastika crossed out over President Obama’s name and a question mark. 

Yet the language Pelosi is using for health care critics is nothing like the language she used to describe anti-war protesters criticized by war supporters as unpatriotic. 

Pelosi, who led efforts to withdraw from Iraq before troops had finished the job, tolerated anti-war hecklers on several occasions. 

“It’s always exciting,” she said of protesters who interrupted a meeting in January 2006, according to an account in the San Francisco Chronicle. “This is democracy in action. I’m energized by it, frankly.” 

At an event in June 2007, she told anti-war protesters “just go for it, I respect your enthusiasm,” according to another account. 

The claims of “un-American” behavior by critics is not something made by President Obama, who on Monday withheld criticism of his health care detractors. 

“We are having a vigorous debate in the United States and I think that’s a healthy thing,” he said, speaking at a North American summit in Mexico.

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said there’s not really any “substantive difference” between the anti-war protests of MoveOn and Code Pink then and the health care reform criticism today — other than the subject being addressed. 

Cornyn told FOX News he thinks the latest charge of being “un-American” is a “pretty harsh statement” about Americans who have serious concerns about the health care legislation.

Posted from WorldNetDaily

By Chuck Norris — Health care reforms are turning into health care revolts. Americans are turning up the heat on congressmen in town hall meetings across the U.S., who apparently hoped that citizens would simply swallow the hook of Obamacare.

It’s unfortunate that rather than respecting and welcoming citizens’ questions and grievances, many of our national leaders are belittling, demonizing and marginalizing them as extremists. They refuse to believe these groups represent any real grass roots resistance. Instead, they concoct conspiracy theories that they are conservatives who are secretly mobilizing these irrational marches.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said that protesters of Obamacare are “un-American” and “carrying Swastikas.” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., accused the protesters of trying to “sabotage” the democratic process. And Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., responded that “well-dressed” protesters are out to “hurt our president.”

So who are the real extremists – citizens who voice their First Amendment grievances or politicians who through their rhetoric try socially to quarantine citizens and impede democratic debate?

While watching these political hot August nights, I decided to research the reasons why so many are so opposed to Obamacare – to separate facts from fantasy. What I discovered was that there are indeed dirty little secrets buried deep within the 1,000-plus page proposed health care bill.

Having already given “Six reasons Obamacare is bad medicine” for America in a previous column, I thought through August I’d expose the political syringes through which it will be injected into the veins of America if Obamacare passes.

Dirty secret No. 1 in Obamacare is about the government coming into homes and usurping parental rights over child care development.

It’s outlined in passages like Section 440 and Section 1904 of the House bill (page 838) under the heading: “Home visitation programs for families with young children and families expecting children,” which would provide (via grants to states) for home visitation programs to educate parents on child behavior and parenting skills.

Home visitation programs? Sounds so quaint!? You mean, for parents endangering their children or for those who want to better their parenting skills? If it’s for those who endanger their children, we already have a government agency for that – Child Protective Services. And if it’s merely for family education, most communities have a plethora of help there through local and state agencies and schools, outside of that other government vassal – Planned Parenthood. So do we need another federal bureaucracy for training parents and families? Or is there a hidden agenda in that vague outline?

The bill says that the government agents, the “well-trained and competent staff,” will “provide parents with knowledge of age-appropriate child development in cognitive language, social, emotional and motor domains … modeling, consulting, and coaching on parenting practices, skills to interact with their child to enhance age-appropriate development.”

Are you kidding me?! And with whose parental principles and values? Their own? Certain experts? Who? From what field and theory of childhood development? As if there are one-size-fits-all parenting techniques? Do we really believe they will contextualize and personalize every form of parenting in their education or merely universally indoctrinate with their own?

Are we to assume the State’s mediators will understand every parent’s social or religious core values on parenting? Or will they teach some secular-progressive and religiously neutered version of parental values and wisdom? And when they “consult and coach” those who are expecting babies, will they ever decide circumstances are not beneficial for the child and encourage abortion? 

One government rebuttal is that this program is “voluntary.” Is that right? Does that infer that this agency will just sit back passively until some parent says, “I need parenting skills. I don’t think I’ll call my parents, priest or friends, or read a plethora of books, but I’ll go down to the local government offices”? Not according to the specific targeted groups and problems, as identified on page 840 of the bill: the State “shall identify and prioritize serving communities that are in high need of such services, especially communities with a high proportion of low-income families. …”

Are we further to conclude by those words that low-income families know less about parenting? Are middle and upper-class parents really better parents? Less neglectful of their children? Less needful of parental help and training? Is this “prioritized” parental care giving not a biased, discriminatory and even prejudicial stereotype and generalization that has no place in federal government, law or practice?

Bottom line, is all this what you want or expected in a universal health care bill being rushed through Congress: government agents coming into your home and telling you how to parent your children? When did government health care turn into government child care?

Or as Glenn Beck asked, “When did we go from being a nation that believed in hard work and picking yourself up by the bootstraps, to a nation that wants government to control everything from our light bulbs to our parenting techniques?”

Government needs less of a role in running our children’s lives and more of a role in supporting parents’ decisions for their children. Children belong to their parents, not the government. And the parents ought to have the right, and government support, to parent them without the fed’s mandates, education or intervention in our homes.

Kids are very important to me and my wife. That’s why we’ve spent the last 17 years developing our non-profit KICKSTART program in public schools in Texas. It builds up their self-esteem and teaches them respect and discipline. Of course, whether or not they participate in the program is theirs and their parents’ choice.

How contrary is Obamacare’s home intrusion and indoctrination family services, in which state agents prioritize houses to enter and enforce their universal values and principles upon the hearts and minds of families across America?

Government’s real motives and rationale is quite simple, though rarely if ever stated. If one wants to control the future ebbs and flows of a country, one must have command over future generations. This is done by seizing parental and educational power, legislating preferred educational methods and materials, and limiting private educational options. It is so simple any socialist can understand it. As Joseph Stalin once stated, “Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.”

When will Washington learn there are millions of us Americans who aren’t just going to sit back and swallow the hook of this candy-coated Obamacare (child care) legislation? We’re tired of it! Tired of America going into trillions of dollars of debt. Tired of government over-reaching its arms into our lives. Tired of government refusing to hear our grievances. Tired of government turning our opposing voices into battering rams of its rhetoric. Tired of government making us feel guilty (and as if we don’t care) unless we accept and support its rushed decisions. After all, who is working for whom?

Before so-called universal health care turns into universal hell care, write or call your representatives today and protest their 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 a compromise health care law that doesn’t raise taxes (for anyone), regulate personal medical choices, ration health care or restrict American citizens.

By the way, if you think “Dirty secret No. 1 in Obamacare” is oppressive, just wait until you see “Dirty secret No. 2″ next week.

Posted from the Washington Examiner

Posted from the American Thinker

By Pamela Geller
America has been sucker punched. The unifier, the great post-racial, post-American President, has adopted the street tactics of Chicago thug politics. His ACORN/SEIU/Union goons are beating up decent American citizens at town hall meetings. And with the violence comes vilification: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has claimed that protesters are “carrying swastikas and symbols like that to a town meeting on healthcare.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted from the Wall Street Journal

In the last few years, I have had the opportunity to compare the human and veterinary health services of Great Britain, and on the whole it is better to be a dog.

As a British dog, you get to choose (through an intermediary, I admit) your veterinarian. If you don’t like him, you can pick up your leash and go elsewhere, that very day if necessary. Any vet will see you straight away, there is no delay in such investigations as you may need, and treatment is immediate. There are no waiting lists for dogs, no operations postponed because something more important has come up, no appalling stories of dogs being made to wait for years because other dogs—or hamsters—come first.

The conditions in which you receive your treatment are much more pleasant than British humans have to endure. For one thing, there is no bureaucracy to be negotiated with the skill of a white-water canoeist; above all, the atmosphere is different. There is no tension, no feeling that one more patient will bring the whole system to the point of collapse, and all the staff go off with nervous breakdowns. In the waiting rooms, a perfect calm reigns; the patients’ relatives are not on the verge of hysteria, and do not suspect that the system is cheating their loved one, for economic reasons, of the treatment which he needs. The relatives are united by their concern for the welfare of each other’s loved one. They are not terrified that someone is getting more out of the system than they.

The latter is the fear that also haunts Americans, at least those Americans who think of justice as equality in actual, tangible benefits. That is the ideological driving force of health-care reform in America. Without manifest and undeniable inequalities, the whole question would generate no passion, only dull technical proposals and counterproposals, reported sporadically on the inside pages of newspapers. I have never seen an article on the way veterinary services are arranged in Britain: it is simply not a question.

Nevertheless, there is one drawback to the superior care British dogs receive by comparison with that of British humans: they have to pay for it, there and then. By contrast, British humans receive health care that is free at the point of delivery. Of course, some dogs have had the foresight to take out insurance, but others have to pay out of their savings. Nevertheless, the iron principle holds: cash on delivery.

But what, I hear social philosophers and the shade of the late John Rawls cry, of British dogs that have no savings and cannot afford insurance? What happens to them? Are not British streets littered with canines expiring from preventable and treatable diseases, as American streets are said by Europeans to be littered with the corpses of the uninsured?

Honesty compels me to admit that the atmosphere in the PDSA rather resembles that in the National Health Service for British humans, and no dog would go there if he had the choice to go elsewhere. He has to wait and accept what he’s given; the attendants may be nice, or they may also be nasty, he has to take pot luck; and the other dogs who go there tend to be of a different type or breed, often of the fighting variety whose jaws once closed on, say, a human calf cannot be prised open except by decapitation. There is no denying that the PDSA is not as pleasant as private veterinary services; but even the most ferocious opponents of the National Health Service have not alleged that it fails to be better than nothing.

What is the solution to the problem of some dogs receiving so much better, or at least more pleasant, care than others? Is it not a great injustice that, through no fault of their own, some dogs are treated in Spartan conditions while others, no better or more talented than they, are pampered with all the comforts that commerce can afford?

One solution to the problem of the injustice in the treatment of dogs would be for the government to set up an equalizing fund from which money would be dispensed, when necessary, to sick dogs, purely on the basis of need rather than by their ability to pay, though contributions to the fund would be assessed strictly on ability to pay.

Of course, from the point of view of social justice as equality, it wouldn’t really matter whether the treatment meted out to dogs was good or bad, so long as it was equal. And, oddly enough, one of the things about the British National Health Service for human beings that has persuaded the British over its 60 years of existence that it is socially just is the difficulty and unpleasantness it throws in the way of patients, rich and poor alike: for equality has the connotation not only of justice, but of hardship and suffering. And, as everyone knows, it is easier to spread hardship equally than to disseminate blessings equally.

I hope I shall not be accused of undue asperity towards human nature when I suggest that the comparative efficiency and pleasantness of services for dogs by comparison with those for humans has something, indeed a great deal, to do with the exchange of money. This is not to say that it is only the commercial aspect of veterinary practice that makes it satisfactory: most vets genuinely like dogs at least as much as most doctors like people, and moreover they have a pride in professional standards that is independent of any monetary gain they might secure by maintaining them. But the fact that the money they receive might go elsewhere if they fail to satisfy surely gives a fillip to their resolve to satisfy.

And I mean no disrespect to the proper function of government when I say that government control, especially when highly centralized, can sap the will even of highly motivated people to do their best. No one, therefore, would seriously expect the condition of dogs in Britain to improve if the government took over veterinary care, and laid down what treatment dogs could and could not receive.

It might be objected, however, that Man, pace Professor Singer, is not a dog, and that therefore the veterinary analogy is not strictly a correct or relevant one. Health economics, after all, is an important and very complex science, if a somewhat dull one, indeed the most dismal branch of the dismal science. Who opens the pages of the New England Journal of Medicine to read, with a song in his heart, papers with titles such as ‘Collective Accountability for Medical Care—Toward Bundled Medicare Payments,’ or ‘Universal Coverage One Head at a Time—the Risks and Benefits of Individual Insurance Mandates’? On the whole, I’d as soon settle down to read the 110,000 pages of Medicare rules.

A few simple facts seem established, however, even in this contentious field. The United States spends a greater proportion of its gross domestic product on health care than any other advanced nation, yet the results, as measured by the health of the population overall, are mediocre. Even within the United States, there is no correlation between the amount spent on health care per capita and the actual health of the population upon which it is spent.

The explanation usually given for this is that physicians have perverse incentives: they are paid by service or procedure rather than by results. As Bernard Shaw said, if you pay a man to cut off your leg, he will.

But the same is true in France, which not only spends a lesser proportion of its GDP on health care than the U.S. but has better results, as measured by life expectancy, and is in the unusual situation of allaying most of its citizens’ anxieties about health care. However, the French government is not so happy: chronically in deficit, the health-care system can be sustained only by continued government borrowing, which is already at a dangerously high level. The French government is in the situation, uncomfortable for that of any democracy, of having to reform, and even destroy, a system that everyone likes.

Across the Channel, there is very little that can be said in favor of a health system which is the most ideologically egalitarian in the western world. It supposedly allots health care independently of the ability to pay, and solely on the basis of clinical need; but not only are differences in the health of the rich and poor in Britain among the greatest in the western world, they are as great as they were in 1948, when health care was de facto nationalized precisely to bring about equalization. There are parts of Glasgow that have almost Russian levels of premature male death. Britain’s hospitals have vastly higher rates of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (a measurement of the cleanliness of hospitals) than those of any other European country; and survival rates from cancer and cardiovascular disease are the lowest in the western world, and lower even than among the worst-off Americans.

Even here, though, there is a slight paradox. About three quarters of people die of cardiovascular diseases and cancer, and therefore seriously inferior rates of survival ought to affect life expectancy overall. And yet Britons do not have a lower life expectancy than all other Europeans; their life expectancy is very slightly higher than that of Americans, and higher than that of Danes, for example, who might be expected to have a very superior health-care system. Certainly, I would much rather be ill in Denmark than in Britain, whatever the life expectancy statistics.

Perhaps this suggests that there is less at stake in the way health-care systems are organized and funded, at least as far as life expectancy is concerned (not an unimportant measure, after all), than is sometimes supposed. Or perhaps it suggests that the relationship of the health-care system to the actual health of people in societies numbering many millions is so complex that it is difficult to identify factors with any degree of certainty.

In the New England Journal of Medicine for July 3, 2008, we read the bald statement that ‘Medicare’s projected spending growth is unsustainable.’ But in the same journal on Jan. 24, 2008, under the title ‘The Amazing Noncollapsing U.S. Health Care System’ we had read that ‘For roughly 40 years, health care professionals, policy-makers, politicians, and the public have concurred that the system is careening towards collapse because it is indefensible and unsustainable, a study in crisis and chaos. This forecast appeared soon after Medicare and Medicaid were enacted and have never retreated. Such disquieting continuity amid changes raises an intriguing question: If the consensus was so incontestable, why has the system not already collapsed?’

The fact that collapse has not occurred in 40 years does not, of course, mean that it will not collapse tomorrow. The fact that a projection is not a prediction works in all directions: prolonged survival does not mean eternal survival, any more than a growth in the proportion of GDP devoted to health care means that, eventually, the entire GDP must be spent on health care.

Therefore I, who have no solution to my own health-care problems, let alone those of the United States, say only, beware of health-care economists bearing statistics that prove the inevitability of their own solutions. I mistrust the fact that, while those people who work for commercial companies (rightly) have to declare their interests in writing in medical journals, those who work for governmental agencies do not do so: as if government agencies had not interests of their own, and worked only for the common good.

The one kind of reform that America should avoid is one that is imposed uniformly upon the whole country, with a vast central bureaucracy. No nation in the world is more fortunate than America in its suitability for testing various possible solutions. The federal government should concern itself very little in health care arrangements, and leave it almost entirely to the states. I don’t want to provoke a new war of secession but surely this is a matter of states’ rights. All judgment, said Doctor Johnson, is comparative; and while comparisons of systems as complex as those of health care are never definitive or indisputable, it is possible to make reasonable global judgments: that the French system is better than the British or Dutch, for example. Only dictators insist they know all the answers in advance of experience. Let 100—or, in the case of the U.S., 50—flowers bloom.

Selfishly, no doubt, I continue to measure the health-care system where I live by what I want for myself and those about me.

And what I want, at least for that part of my time that I spend in England, is to be a dog. I also want, wherever I am, the Americans to go on paying for the great majority of the world’s progress in medical research and technological innovation by the preposterous expense of their system: for it is a truth universally acknowledged that American clinical research has long reigned supreme, so overall, the American health-care system must have been doing something right. The rest of the world soon adopts the progress, without the pain of having had to pay for it.

—Theodore Dalrymple is the pen name of Anthony Daniels, a British physician.

Posted from FrontPageMagazine.com

Guess who’s behind the “grassroots” movement for health care reform?

A rising chorus of discontent – more a citizens uprising – shows Middle America’s deep suspicion of President Obama’s health care reform proposal. Average citizens have voiced their disapproval at townhall meetings hosted by Sen. Arlen Specter and HHS Director Kathleen Sebelius, Rep. Lloyd Doggett, Rep. Tim Bishop, and staffers of Sen. Claire McCaskill. In a burst of passion-envy, Chris Matthews asked on Monday night’s Hardball, “Where the Hell are the people who want health care, the poor people out there…the union people? Where are they? I haven’t seen one placard, let alone one protest demonstration, for health care.”

In fact, tens of thousands of people have rallied in the nation’s capital supporting the president’s health care reform plan, including the controversial public option. However, national momentum is not with them, because they are, to use Nancy Pelosi’s phrase, “Astroturf.” These demonstrations were organized by Health Care for America Now! (HCAN), a new “national grassroots campaign of more than 1,000 organizations in 46 states representing 30 million people dedicated to winning quality, affordable health care.” Most of its component organizations have two things in common: they have no experience or expertise in health care, and virtually all received large, tax-exempt grants from far-Left billionaires like George Soros and Teresa Heinz Kerry. Like the “grassroots” movement for campaign finance reform a decade ago, the public demonstrations for health care reform are largely a Soros-financed operation.

Former Governor Howard Dean announced HCAN’s mission on the first night of the annual “America’s Future Now!” conference (formerly the “Take Back America” conference), hosted by the Campaign for America’s Future in June. Dean pledged to spend up to $82 million to advance socialized medicine. HCAN rallied 15,000 people in D.C. in April, 10,000 more in June, and with state affiliates like the Maine People’s Alliance, hundreds more in state capitals in July. A searchable database of upcoming spontaneous demonstrations can be found here.

However, a closer look at its members shows it is less a “grassroots” organization than a series of interconnected left-wing pressure groups united by a collectivist ideology and, for most, a common donor.

Among the 21 members of its steering committee are ACORN, MoveOn.org, and the Center for American Progress. CAP, headed by former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta, was created with Soros’ money as a counterweight to the Heritage Foundation. In 2007 alone, Soros’ charity, the Open Society Institute (OSI), gave CAP $1.75 million in 2007 and approved additional grants totaling $1.25 million. Soros personally gave millions to MoveOn.org before the 2004 elections, and he has funded ACORN, the most notorious practitioner of election fraud in the nation.

Dean announced HCAN’s mobilization before the Campaign for America’s Future, another institution that has received funding from George Soros and the Rockefeller Family Fund. CAF, an HCAN steering committee member, pushes for national health care as one means to transform the United States into a European social welfare state. Co-founder Robert Borosage previously served as director of the overtly Marxist Institute for Policy Studies, while co-founder Roger Hickey also co-founded the Economic Policy Institute. Other CAF co-founders include socialist columnist Harold Meyerson, Sixties radical Tom Hayden, socialist feminist Barbara Ehrenreich, Service Employees International Union president Andrew Stern, AFL-CIO president John J. Sweeney, Jesse Jackson, and Julian Bond. CAF is best known for hosting its annual “Take Back America” conferences, a gathering of D.C. “progressives” and far-Left community organizers. Code Pink activists famously booed Hillary Clinton after a tour-de-force leftist speech in 2006. An up-and-comer named Barack Obama also spoke at the ’06 event.

Advancing the welfare state by ruse is old hat to the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF). The CDF Action Council is a member of the HCAN steering committee. CDF founder Marian Wright Edelman once admitted she got nowhere pushing a left-wing message until “I got the idea that children might be a very effective way to broaden the base for change.” Hiding behind “the children,” her undisguised Sixties radicalism still shines through. In her 1987 book Families in Peril, she wrote, “We must curb the fanatical military weasel.” At the time, the CDF was chaired by one Hillary Rodham Clinton. In addition to Hillary’s patronage, the CDF received a grant of more than $700,000 from the Carnegie Corporation of New York while Teresa Heinz Kerry sat on its board of trustees, and Edelman received the Heinz Award for the “Human Condition” in 1995.

Labor unions are heavily represented on the HCAN steering committee. Members include the SEIU, AFL-CIO, AFSCME, Change to Win (James Hoffa’s breakaway group of seven powerful unions, which includes the SEIU’s Andrew Stern), UAW, the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, Communication Workers of America, and the United Food and Commercial Workers union. Even with the power of compulsory union dues, SEIU received $75,000 from the Open Society Institute in 2007, and AFT was approved for a $150,000 OSI grant.

Other members, such as USAction, are more overtly radical. Its profile on DiscoverTheNetworks.org notes, “The President of USAction is longtime radical activist William McNary, who has written for and supported the official newspaper of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), the People’s Weekly World.” McNary spoke at the June 25^th HCAN rally. USAction receives also funding from Soros’ Open Society Institute.

The radicalism and overlapping nature of the “coalition” is perhaps best illustrated by the Center for Community Change (CCC), an organization founded in 1968 to advance Saul Alinsky-style confrontational politics. The CCC board includes a founder of Students for a Democratic Society; former Congressman and current mayor of Oakland, California, Ron Dellums, an admirer of Fidel Castro; Marian Wright Edelman’s husband, Peter Edelman; La Raza Vice President Cecelia Munoz; and Heather Booth, who founded the Midwest Academy, where the SEIU’s Andrew Stern learned about union organizing. The CCC is financed in part by George Soros’ Open Society Institute, with OSI awarding the group $2.9 million in grants in 2007 alone. Other funding sources include the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Fannie Mae Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation.

 

Other members of the HCAN “grassroots” include:

* Democracy for America, the organization Howard Dean founded to drive the Democratic Party to the Left following his 2004 primary loss to John Kerry. Dean was heavily favored by MoveOn.org;

* Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR). In 2007 alone, OSI approved 11 grants to LCCR totaling nearly $1.8 million;

* Progressive States Network was awarded $800,000 in OSI grants in 2007;

* The Gamaliel Foundation pocketed $150,000 from OSI in 2007;

* National Congress of American Indians, received $125,000 from OSI in 2007;

* True Majority, a far-Left organization founded by Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream fame;

* USPIRG, the group of former “Nader’s Raiders” funded by OSI, Ben & Jerry’s Foundation, and the Carnegie Corporation of New York under Teresa Heinz’s board tenure. Its new study asserts health care reform “could allow the creation of 2.5 million jobs over a five year period.”

Aside from socialist radicals, HCAN’s membership includes two odd constituencies: clergy and abortionists.

Soros-funded clergy have been in the forefront of the universal health care mobilization, often in consultation with Senate Democrats. Mark D. Tooley reported a group of religious leftists met with Senator Ted Kennedy’s chief advisor on health care reform in April, which culminated in the June 24 “Interfaith Service of Witness and Prayer for Health Care Reform.” Among the event’s organizers is Jim Wallis’ Sojourners, which George Soros gave $100,000 in 2007. Concurrently, People Improving Communities Through Organizing (PICO) (which is funded by Citigroup Foundation and William Randolph Hearst Foundation among others) is rallying the Religious Left for ObamaCare alongside Sojourners and the National Council of Churches (NCC). The NCC, seeing mainline church membership dwindle over the last 40 years, is increasingly funded by an array of leftist “charities,” including the Open Society Institute, ACORN, MoveOn.org, TrueMajority, People For the American Way, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Tides Foundation, and the Ford Foundation. Soros is nothing if not ecumenical; his Open Society Institute blessed Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, an HCAN member, with a $300,000 in 2007. The Catholics are joined by a Protestant counterpart, Clergy Strategic Allegiances, LLC, and the National Council of Jewish Women.

These religious figures march alongside HCAN’s abortion advocates. Chief among these are the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the National Abortion Federation, Physicians for Reproductive Choice and Health, and the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice. Planned Parenthood already gets one-third of its billion dollar annual budget from the government, and the Capps Amendment in the current health care bill opens the spigots of federal funding for abortion through fungible payments and accounting transfers. The Alan Guttmacher Institute concluded public funding of abortion increases the number of abortions – and thus, pads Planned Parenthood’s bottom line.

Soros-funded feminists are a constituency in the new “grassroots” coalition. The National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) pushes for enhanced welfare state funding and abortion on demand. DTN notes NWLC’s “major benefactors” include AFSCME, the NEA; the Fannie Mae Foundation; the Ford Foundation; the Rockefeller Family Fund; and the Open Society Institute, which approved $400,000 in grants for NWLC in 2007. HCAN also includes the more overtly political Women’s Voices, Women’s Vote. WVWV was awarded $400,000 in grants from OSI in 2007 and has long been supported by Teresa Heinz Kerry, who steered a $50,000 grant through the Teresa & John H. Heinz III Fund of Heinz Family Foundation. The WVWV website insists its constituents, which consist almost entirely of unmarried women, “take a more progressive viewpoint than their male counterparts and see a larger role for government in helping to solve the challenges they face.” Similarly, Nine to Five, National Association of Working Women is funded by the Ben and Jerry’s Foundation and the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations.

Minority groups also have a seat at this table. The NAACP and the National Council of La Raza, which supports giving drivers licenses, voting rights, and in-state tuition to illegal immigrants, are HCAN members. OSI also doled out more than half-a-million dollars to La Raza in 2007. Illegal aliens make up one of the largest blocks of uninsured, nearly one-sixth of all uninsured by some estimates – and no reform legislation can change their status.

Some endorsers are less obviously connected to the issue of health care yet chose to take to the streets. Brave New Films, a “progressive” movie organization run by Robert Greenwald, is often in the vanguard of leftist groups. BNF’s current productions include MoveOn: The Movie and Rethinking Afghanistan, which assures Americans that Afghanistan “is not a military problem and cannot be resolved by military means.” The International Federation of Black Prides, Inc., a black homosexual organization, is an HCAN member. The National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance seems particularly at odds with the president’s focus on “preventative” medicine.

Any organizations that show promise, however, can expect George Soros to use his money to do what the Left does best: create a permanent infrastructure for radical activism. ACORN, CAP, and MoveOn.org are living testaments to this proclivity. It appears Soros has found another promising start-up:the Roosevelt Institution, which names the Open Society Institute as a benefactor. Part of Soros’s grant, $47, 100 according to documents filed in 2007, facilitated “the transition from a student organization to a professional and sustain [sic.] corp.” This institutionalization of radicalism is perhaps best embodied by League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), which Ford Foundation grants transformed from a local, moderate advocacy organization for Hispanics to a full-throated supporter of balkanization. George Soros turned MoveOn.org from a moribund website dedicated to averting the Clinton impeachment into the driving force of the 2004 Democratic elections. MoveOn, in turn, elevated little-known Vermont Governor Howard Dean to frontrunner status. Dean consolidated his campaign by forming Democracy for America and ultimately chairing the Democratic National Committee. And he is now leading the charge for socialized medicine with a band of fellow Soros-funded leftists.

Despite its financial heft, HCAN has tried to amplify its numbers by double-counting many of its organizations. For instance, the historically left-wing Americans for Democratic Action sits on its board alongside Working Families Win, “a project of Americans for Democratic Action and the ADA Education Fund.” So, too, does USAction with True Majority, “a project of USAction.” HCAN’s membership list includes both the AFL-CIO and Working America, which describes itself as a “community affiliate of the AFL-CIO.” CAP and its campus affiliate, Campus Progress Action, are both listed. Other organizations’ membership is largely interchangeable, e.g., MoveOn and Democracy for America. One can see how double- or triple-counting its overlapping memberships can quickly add up to “more than 30 million people.”

It is right, though, that the whole organization be considered one entity, given the constituent members’ long-standing history of coordinating their actions. In 2004, the Democratic Party admitted it was working with CAF, MoveOn.org, People for the American Way, and “dozens” of other groups “to organize a massive public mobilization” against the ’04 Bush tax cuts. (One left-wing poster on Democratic Underground asked if the 527 arrangement was “Our Dirty Little Secret?”) The Campaign for America’s Future partnered with MoveOn.org, Rock the Vote, ACORN, La Raza, the Women’s Voices Women Vote Action Fund, and the AFL-CIO in a voter drive effort in 2008 to help elect Barack Obama. Just this April, SEIU, MoveOn.org, the CCC, True Majority, USAction, WVWV, Brave New Films, and the Working Families Party conducted a mass protest against the Bank of America.

If these coalition members are largely interchangeable, they overlap with the Obama White House and the Democratic Party with increasing frequency, as well. The HCAN Steering Committee includes Americans United for Change. DTN notes, “In 2009, AUFC President Brad Woodhouse became the communications director for the Democratic National Committee under President Obama.” This summer, Obama nominated SEIU general counsel Craig Becker for a seat on the five-member National Labor Relations Board, the highest court of appeals in labor disputes. Becker’s appointment is but one measure of Andy Stern’s tremendous influence with Obama. Another HCAN member, Clergy Strategic Allegiances, LLC, records on its website that its “Services have been provided to…Democratic National Committee…North Carolina Democratic Party, Sojourners and Call to Renewal, Maryland Democratic Party.”

Promoting his new book, former DNC chair Howard Dean has told audiences, “America has had ‘socialized’ medicine since 1964. It’s called Medicare; it covers every American over 65, and they are very happy with the program.” However, as common men and women are proving at Congressional townhall meetings, on radio talk shows, and in diners across the country, those not on George Soros’s payroll are distinctly unhappy with this proposal.

Posted from Fox News

The White House strategy of turning supporters into snitches when they see “fishy” information about the health care debate may run afoul of the law, legal experts say.

“The White House is in bit of a conundrum because of this privacy statute that prohibits the White House from collecting data and storing it on people who disagree with it,” Judge Andrew Napolitano, a FOX News analyst, said Friday. 

“There’s also a statute that requires the White House to retain all communications that it receives. It can’t try to rewrite history by pretending it didn’t receive anything,” he said.

“If the White House deletes anything, it violates one statute. If the White House collects data on the free speech, it violates another statute.”

Napolitano was referring to the Privacy Act of 1974, which was passed after the Nixon administration used federal agencies to illegally investigate individuals for political purposes. Enacted after Richard Nixon’s resignation in the Watergate scandal, the statute generally prohibits any federal agency from maintaining records on individuals exercising their right to free speech.

The White House has been under fire since it posted a blog on Tuesday that asked supporters to e-mail any “fishy” information seen on the Web or received electronically to flag@whitehouse.gov.

“There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there,” the blog said, adding that “since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help.”

The blog was posted partly in response to a video posted on the Web that claimed to show Obama explaining how his health care reform plans eventually will eliminate private insurance.

The video, featured on the Drudge Report, strung together selected Obama statements that the White House said were taken out of context.

The White House said it wanted to be made aware of “fishy” comments about its health care plan because it wants to set the record straight. But critics called White House move an Orwellian tactic designed to control the health care debate.

“This is a very troubling attempt to stifle the free speech of Americans who have the constitutional right to express their opinion and concerns about health care,” said Jay Sekulow, chief counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice. He called on Obama to repudiate his blog.

“This move is an attempt to intimidate those who have legitimate concerns about the health care plan,” Sekulow said. “And, worse, it turns the White House into some sort of self-appointed ‘speech police.’ This new White House reporting program strikes at the heart of the First Amendment and has no place in this important debate about health care.”

Sekulow said he imagines that opponents of mandatory abortion coverage are engaging in what the White House considers “fishy” speech and should be reported.

“What the White House is touting is absurd,” he said.

But Napolitano said  the White House probably cannot be sued because of sovereign immunity, unless someone was harmed by what the government did with the records. But that’s unlikely, he said, because the person would probably be unaware of the harm.

“That’s a silent violation of your right to privacy,” he said.

The ACLU said in a statement to FOXNews.com that the White House blog is a “bad idea that could send a troublesome message.”

But the organization added, “While it is unclear at this point what the government is doing with the information it is collecting, critics of the administration’s health care proposal should not fear that their names will end up in some government database that could be used to chill their right to free speech.”

The White House Thursday denied that it was playing “Big Brother.”

“Nobody is collecting names,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said. “We have seen, and as I’ve discussed from this podium, a lot of misinformation around health care reform, a lot of it spread, I think, purposefully.”

Texas Sen. John Cornyn, who has called on Obama to end the program, rejected the White House explanation.

“Of course the White House is collecting names,” he said, arguing that anyone with access to the e-mail account has access to private information.

“The question is not what the White House is doing, but how and why,” he said. “How are they purging names and e-mail addresses from this account to protect privacy? Why do they need the forwarded e-mails, names, and ‘casual conversations’ sent to them instead of just the arguments that they want to rebut?

Asked by FOX News whether the White House was using the blog post as a way to expand the e-mail list for the administration and Obama’s political arm, Organizing for America, Gibbs said the two are “not in any way connected” and repeated that the White House is not collecting names.

Pressed about the program’s goal, Gibbs said it was to clarify for everybody what the misinformation is, adding that’s not a new tactic.

“When you make a mistake in your report, sometimes I e-mail you,” Gibbs said to FOX News’ Major Garrett. “Occasionally, I call. Sometimes I just throw something against the wall. Occasionally, it’s all three.”

Garrett asked why it’s necessary to ask so many people to e-mail the White House.

“All we’re asking people to do is, if they’re confused about what health care reform is going to mean to them, we’re happy to help clear that up for them. Nobody’s keeping anybody’s names. I do have your e-mail. …Maybe that’s because I assume future mistakes. But I’m not going to say that,” Gibbs said, drawing laughter.

“But nobody’s collecting information,” he added. “Everybody is trying to give people only the facts around what we all understand is a very complicated issue.”

Posted from National Review Online

President Obama likes to pose as the tribune of the common people, but Americans who show up at town-hall meetings to object to Obama’s plans to nationalize health care are, in the words of Obama’s Democratic National Committee, “the mob,” a bunch of “extremist” yahoos who must be publicly denounced and ridiculed. It’s a remarkable piece of condescension and snobbery, but one that is indicative of how President Obama thinks and does business.

Except when he condescends to make the occasional offhanded jibe about cops policing “stupidly” in Boston or hapless Special Olympics competitors, Obama famously likes to strike a pose of being above it all — but what country does he think he is president of, anyway? We cannot recall a similar episode in recent history in which a group of Americans bringing their concerns about a public-policy question to their representatives were told to sit down and shut up. It’s true that democratic discourse should be respectful and dignified — but it also should be two-way: Politicians should expect to listen as much as they expect to be listened to.

The DNC’s ad, “Enough of the Mob,” abominates those Americans who show up to address their congressmen and to exercise their constitutional rights to speak freely, to assemble, and to petition their government for redress of grievances. You know, that old pre-hope-and-change, hopelessly retro, pre-messianic democratic stuff. The ad is deeply dishonest, even by the standards of Washington discourse: The beginning and ending images, and many of those in between, are not those of people protesting Obama’s health-care proposals, but rather of the wacko fringe “birthers” (about whom much has been written here and elsewhere), who have nothing to do with either the town-hall meetings in question or with the Republican party as such. This is pure chicanery: The people protesting Obamacare have not gone out and comported themselves like a gang of buffoons, so Obama’s partisans simply took video of different people comporting themselves like a gang of buffoons and substituted it. That’s a low, shoddy, and intellectually dishonest way to operate.

It’s also a little ironic: This smear job is being shepherded by the DNC’s Brad Woodhouse, who back in his Americans United days acted as a front for the union bosses working to defeat President Bush’s Social Security reforms, doing precisely what he now accuses Republicans of doing — packing town-hall meetings with political activists and party operatives posing as regular people, shunting lobbyists’ money into phony grassroots action, etc. We’ll take Mr. Woodhouse’s tender concerns for decorum with a grain or two of salt.

Sen. Barbara Boxer has added to the national mirth, as she often does, by arguing that these people cannot possibly be real American voters. Why? Because they’re too “well dressed.” Presentable, peaceable protesters? It’s a set-up!

The Obama gang is derided, often and justly, for practicing cheap racial politics, but even more poisonous, if less remarked upon, is its class politics. The entire intellectual infrastructure behind the stimulus, the bailouts, the auto-industry takeover, and the proposed health-care takeover rests on the assumption that the people who staff the Obama administration are smarter, better, more caring, and more decent than you yahoos out there in the general public, who simply cannot be trusted to make your own decisions about important matters, such as what sort of health insurance to purchase or whether to buy a car that gets 20 miles per gallon or 22 miles per gallon. Given that line of thinking, it’s easy to understand why Obama’s partisans would dismiss those citizens who dare to criticize his proposal as “the mob.”

The most mockery-inviting aspect of all this is that Obamacare-supporting Democrats are now ducking constituent meetings back in their home districts, afraid to face questions from the people they are paid to represent. Given the Obama team’s contempt for these people, and its utterly dismissive attitude toward their concerns, is it any wonder “the mob” doesn’t want Obama in charge of their health care? Obamacare will constitute an injury to Americans’ well-being — and the president now adds insult to it.