President Obama will be visiting the St. Louis area Wednesday to garner support for his health reform plan. As Washington prepares for a final bare-knuckled battle this month, the stakes could not be higher. With Republicans united in opposition, Democratic leaders are planning to enact a sweeping health overhaul that the American people continue to say in the every way possible that they don’t want.
While the president can make a compelling case for action, his assertions about his plan are not backed by facts. Based upon his most recent health reform statements, the president will continue to make arguments refuted by the facts and independent analyses when he visits Wednesday. Here are just a few examples:
President Obama said at the White House on March 3 that his plan will “bring down the cost of health care for millions – families, businesses, and the federal government.”
But the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says health insurance premiums will continue their steady upward climb under the Senate bill. Families purchasing insurance in the individual market would see an increase of $2,100 in the year 2016, over and above increases they already will be facing. That means those families would be paying $15,200 in 2016 for health insurance if the Senate bill passes, and $13,100 if it doesn’t.
His legislation will do nothing to slow the steady climb of health costs. Families who get health insurance through small businesses will be paying $19,200 in six years, and those working for large firms, $20,100, according to CBO.
And the Obama administration’s own Chief Medicare Actuary estimates that, under the Senate bill, “Federal expenditures would increase by a net total of $279 billion” between 2010 and 2019.
So it would cost families, businesses, and taxpayers more, not less, if his plan passes.
President Obama: “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan.”
He claims no one will have to change plans, but at the health reform summit, the president acknowledged that the Senate bill could take away the current health insurance coverage for eight to nine million Americans.
The steep cuts in Medicare Advantage that President Obama supports would mean at least one-third of seniors in Missouri, Illinois and 45 other states likely could lose their comprehensive Medicare Advantage coverage as their plans are forced to withdraw from the program, cut their benefits, or raise premiums (three states received sweetheart deals to protect their seniors from the cuts). In addition, about 10 million people with employer-sponsored insurance could lose their current coverage, according to the CBO.
President Obama says his plan “brings down our deficit.”
No one believes this to be true and for good reason. The president and congressional leaders employed trillion-dollar budget gimmicks to make this assertion. CBO, the budget scorekeeper, was cynically given a bill with ten years of tax hikes and Medicare cuts to pay for only six years of new entitlement subsidies. The IRS would throw ordinary Americans in jail if they used this type of accounting.
So just on these three examples – keeping your current coverage, lowering costs, and reducing the deficit – the president’s assertions are wrong. One hopes his St. Louis speech will not employ what we’ve seen from President Obama throughout this debate: using the same arguments that have been proven as inaccurate by independent studies and analyses, and hoping that maybe, just maybe, this time the speech will work.
It seems very likely that if Obamacare is going to be stopped, it will have to happen in the House. And that means turning some of supporters the deeply unpopular bill into opponents with at least enough spine to tell Nancy Pelosi and the president “No.”
Thus the two lists below. The first list is of all the so-called “Blue Dogs,” the alleged “moderate Democrats” in the House. Many refused to vote for Obamacare the first time around, and they need to be bucked up and made to understand that their hopes of re-election depend upon continuing to stand against the government takeover of American health care and the massive cuts to Medicare on which the takeover is premised.
The second list are the Democrats who voted for the bill in the fall but who hail from swing districts. These are the House members identified by the National Republican Congressional Committee’s ReverseTheVote.org effort. The last thing they want are phone calls and e-mails from voters pledging to throw time and money at their opponents if Obamacare passes.
The Congressional switchboard works for them all – 202-225-3121, but direct calls to their offices and especially their district offices are even more effective. E-mails work as well, but many of their number won’t accept e-mails unless a district zip code is used, which means a little work for the dedicated anti-Obamacare activist. (Just use the zip code of their district office address if you want to communicate despite their filter.)
What matters is a wall of calls between now and the last-ditch effort to push the bill through. Some of the pro-life Demcrats led by Bart Stupak will stay strong and refuse to support the Senate bill with its public funding of abortion, but some will fold. Perhaps a Member or two will vote no as well because there is no “public option” by that name and they realize if they don’t get it now they’ll never get it.
But it will be a very close thing either way. Never have your calls and e-mails mattered more.
Contact The Blue Dogs:
Alabama
Rep. Bobby Bright 2nd District
DC Phone: (202) 225-2901
District Phone: Dothan (334) 794-9680; Montgomery (334) 277-9113; Opp (334) 493-9253 Link to E-mail
Rep. Parker Griffith 5th District
DC Phone: (202) 225-4801
District Phone: Huntsville (256) 551-0190; Decatur (256) 355-9400; Shoals (256) 381-3450 Link to E-mail
Arkansas
Rep. Marion Berry 1st District
DC Phone: (202) 225-4076
District Phone: Jonesboro (870) 972-4600; Cabot (501) 843-4955; Mountain Home (870) 425-3510 Link to E-Mail
Rep. Mike Ross 4th District
DC Phone: 1-800-223-2220
District Phone: El Dorado (870) 881-0681; Hot Springs (501) 520-5892; Pine Bluff (870) 536-3376; Prescott (870) 887-6787 Link to E-mail
A conservative congresswoman is calling for an independent investigation to determine whether President Obama is attempting to trade a federal judgeship for a vote in favor of his healthcare reform plan.
President Obama hosted a closed reception at the White House Wednesday that included ten House Democrats who voted “no” on the healthcare reform bill. One of the ten was Congressman John Matheson (D-Utah), whose brother Scott Matheson, Jr., was nominated Wednesday by President Obama to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.
Representative Matheson contends that the president did not nominate his brother in exchange for a “yes” vote on healthcare reform. But some Republicans are not buying that claim. Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-Minnesota) told CNN’s Larry King that there needs to be an independent investigation into the Matheson matter.
“We’ve seen the Cornhusker kickback, the Louisiana Purchase, the union loophole, and now the big question is: Is the White House trading healthcare votes for judgeships?” she argued. “This is a pretty serious issue, Larry.”
White House officials label as “absurd” the notion that the Matheson judgeship would be tied to a healthcare vote.
So this is what it looks like when a mild-mannered, liberal community activist goes “nuclear.”
President Barack Obama didn’t use the “n” word – or even the “r” word, “reconciliation.” But he made it clear he’s ready to go to Democrat DefCon4, give the partisan launch codes and inflict Obamacare on the American people at any political cost.
In defending his decision to go nuclear, Obama talked about insurance company “abuses.” He talked about premium hikes in California. He talked about a sick mom in Wisconsin. He even talked (in extremely modest ways) about Republican ideas like tort reform and fighting Medicare fraud.
What Obama didn’t mention was Massachusetts.
In fact, despite having given (based on my calculations) some 57,432 speeches, press conferences, pep talks, pillow talks and interpretive dances on health care in the past 12 months, Obama somehow manages to leave us out of nearly every conversation.
This is telling, because we’re the one state already glowing in the radioactive haze of Romneycare, aka “ObamaCare: The Beta Version.”
Shouldn’t Obama have been bragging yesterday about bringing the benefits of Bay State reform to all of America?
As we prepare to wander into this coming nuclear winter of hyper-partisan politics – one in which we’re almost certain to see widespread political fatalities among congressional Democrats – I have to ask: If bringing Massachusetts-style “universal coverage” to America is worth this terrible price, why doesn’t Obama at least mention us once in awhile?
Maybe he thinks of us as the Manhattan Project of medical insurance reform. Too top secret to discuss. More likely, it has something to do with the nightmare results of this government-run debacle. Here are a few “highlights” of the current status of the Obamacare experiment in Massachusetts:
It’s exploding the budget: Our “universal” health insurance scheme is already $47 million over budget for 2010. Romneycare will cost taxpayers more than $900 million next year alone.
It’s killing us on costs: Average Massachusetts premiums are the highest in the nation and rising. We also spend 27 percent more on health care services, per capita, than the national average. Those costs, contrary to what we were promised, have been going up faster here than nearly everywhere else.
It’s creating bizarre marketplace mutations: In Massachusetts, ObamaCare 1.0 is such a mess our governor is talking about imposing draconian price controls. He’s even suggested going to “capitation,” a system where doctors get a fixed amount of money per patient – and then that’s it. Which means it would become in your doctor’s financial interest never to see you again.
All this damage to the taxpayers, the insured and the responsible business owners . . . and for what?
The percentage of uninsured Bay State residents has gone from around 6 percent to around 3 percent.
President Obama declared the health care debate over on Wednesday and urged congressional Democrats to take the politically risky step of pushing his newly written compromise reform bill through using a controversial tactic to circumvent a Republican filibuster.
Calling for an “up-or-down” vote, Mr. Obama offered to add a few Republican ideas to the $1 trillion bill, but made clear that the time for talk was over.
“Every idea has been put on the table; every argument has been made,” Mr. Obama said in a speech before an audience of health care professionals in the East Room of the White House. “So now is the time to make a decision about how to finally reform health care so that it works, not just for the insurance companies, but for America’s families and businesses.”
Republicans scoffed at Mr. Obama’s tough talk, vowing to fight the effort at every turn and to tap the American public’s distaste for the measure in the midterm elections.
“They’re making a vigorous effort to try to jam this down the throats of the American people, who don’t want it,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Republican.
“We think that’s a policy mistake, and we think resorting to these kinds of tactics, to thumb your nose at the American people, is something that ought to be resisted,” Mr. McConnell added.
At stake is the biggest policy initiative of the year-old Obama presidency, a rewrite of the nation’s health care system that would trim hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicare, expand Medicaid, mandate that every American join a plan and rewrite rules telling insurance companies how they can operate.
The House and Senate have passed their own versions of bills, but the debate has been stalled for nearly two months after Democrats lost their filibuster-proof majority in the Senate in January.
Now, Democrats are looking to turn to a complex budget procedure known as “reconciliation,” under which legislation can pass the Senate with 51 votes rather than 60.
As Washington prepares to revisit the subject of health-care reform, perhaps some fresh experience from Middle America would be of value.
When I was elected governor of Indiana five years ago, I asked that a consumer-directed health insurance option, or Health Savings Account (HSA), be added to the conventional plans then available to state employees. I thought this additional choice might work well for at least a few of my co-workers, and in the first year some 4% of us signed up for it.
In Indiana’s HSA, the state deposits $2,750 per year into an account controlled by the employee, out of which he pays all his health bills. Indiana covers the premium for the plan. The intent is that participants will become more cost-conscious and careful about overpayment or overutilization.
Unused funds in the account—to date some $30 million or about $2,000 per employee and growing fast—are the worker’s permanent property. For the very small number of employees (about 6% last year) who use their entire account balance, the state shares further health costs up to an out-of-pocket maximum of $8,000, after which the employee is completely protected.
The HSA option has proven highly popular. This year, over 70% of our 30,000 Indiana state workers chose it, by far the highest in public-sector America. Due to the rejection of these plans by government unions, the average use of HSAs in the public sector across the country is just 2%.
What we, and independent health-care experts at Mercer Consulting, have found is that individually owned and directed health-care coverage has a startlingly positive effect on costs for both employees and the state. What follows is a summary of our experience:
State employees enrolled in the consumer-driven plan will save more than $8 million in 2010 compared to their coworkers in the old-fashioned preferred provider organization (PPO) alternative. In the second straight year in which we’ve been forced to skip salary increases, workers switching to the HSA are adding thousands of dollars to their take-home pay. (Even if an employee had health issues and incurred the maximum out-of-pocket expenses, he would still be hundreds of dollars ahead.) HSA customers seem highly satisfied; only 3% have opted to switch back to the PPO.
President Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid are embarked on a radical plan to fundamentally change American health care.
The operative term is “radical,” and the media should use that term in order to accurately convey the nature not just of the scope of the changes being pushed, or of the level of Medicare cuts on which those changes are premised, but also to accurately describe the process by which the radical Democrats propose to impose their vision.
The plan is to push Obamacare through the House on the promise of a subsequent “fix” that will use an arcane Senate procedure known as “reconciliation” to modify the health care legislation in order to bypass the Senate’s 60-vote requirement for substantive legislation.
No matter what rhetoric the Democrats employ, this is indeed a radical — there’s that word again — maneuver, one that will demolish forever the Senate’s long-standing tradition of requiring a supermajority to enact sweeping legislation that fundamentally alters an area of complex law. Reconciliation has indeed been used for tax rate changes, which go up and down, and on two occasions for very focused initiatives on welfare reform and continuance of health care coverage.
But reconciliation is a recent and rare exception to the rule of supermajority, and its use here will forever spell the end of the 60-vote requirement for major legislation. If the vast changes contemplated by Obamacare can be pushed through reconciliation, then there is no limiting principle for the future.
Expect both conservatives and liberals to insist that, if the process could be made to fit for Obamacare in 2010, then it surely must be able to accommodate any other fervently hoped for piece of legislation.
Thus in the space of 10 years the Senate Democrats will have re-engineered the supermajority tradition of the “Greatest Deliberative Body in the World” into one that is routinely applied to judicial nominees but waived for the most sweeping, most partisan legislative jam-downs.
With the exception of the bipartisan filibuster of President Johnson’s ethically compromised pick of Abe Fortas as chief justice of the Supreme Court in 1968, judicial filibusters were unheard of before 2003.
Though “blue slips” and “holds” did hobble many nominees in committee or on the floor, these procedures are distinct from the requirement of 60-plus votes to pass new laws. As rare as a judicial filibuster was in the last century, so, too, was the use of reconciliation to avoid the requirement of supermajority in law-making. Senate Democrats have trashed both traditions, and both were done in the service of ideology over basic traditions of governance.
Pelosi’s tired talking point about “majority rule” asks the public to dismiss as irrelevant the jettisoning of a long-standing approach to governance that limited the speed with which Congress could act.
This has been a virtue of the American republic since “The Federalist Papers” defended the Constitution’s original design as one intended to keep factions from moving too quickly to dominate politics for short times of abrupt change.
We are not a majority rule system, and never have been. Government’s ability to move quickly was cabined from the start and for the very good reason that sudden swings in law are not often to the advantage of freedom.
If Obamacare does indeed make it into law, the damage it will do to health care will be immense. But just as great a cost will be the injury done to the Senate and to the measured approach to legislation that has marked America as a deliberate and deliberating republic.
Natural experiments are rare in politics, but few are as instructive as the prototype for ObamaCare that Massachusetts set in motion in 2006. The bills for “universal coverage” are now coming due, and it appears the state political class is prepared to do lasting damage to one of America’s top-flight health-care systems.
Last month, Democratic Governor Deval Patrick landed a neutron bomb, proposing hard price controls across almost all Massachusetts health care. State regulators already have the power to cap insurance premiums, which Mr. Patrick is activating. He also filed a bill that would give state regulators the power to review the rates of hospitals, physician groups and some specialty providers. Those that are deemed too high “shall be presumptively disapproved.”
Mr. Patrick ad-libbed that he had “a whole bunch of pals here who are in the health-care field, and I saw the color drain out of their faces.” Little wonder. The administered prices of Medicare and Medicaid already shift costs to private patients while below-cost reimbursement creates balance-sheet havoc among providers. Now the governor wants to import these distortions to save the state’s heavily subsidized insurance program as costs explode.
It doesn’t even count as an irony that former Governor Mitt Romney (like President Obama) sold this plan as a way to control spending. As with all new entitlements, the rolling cost crisis began almost immediately. For fiscal 2010 taxpayer costs are $47 million over budget, in part due to the recession, and while the $913 million Mr. Patrick requested for 2011 is a 5% increase over 2010, spending has grown on average 6.7% per year.
Meanwhile, average Massachusetts insurance premiums are now the highest in the nation. Since 2006, they’ve climbed at an annual rate of 30% in the individual market. Small business costs have increased by 5.8%. Per capita health spending in Massachusetts is now 27% higher than the national average, and 15% higher even after adjusting for local wages and academic research grants. The growth rate is faster too.
The following are remarks made by Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, about the cost of the House and Senate health-care bills at President Obama’s Blair House summit on health care, Feb. 25.
Look, we agree on the problem here. And the problem is health inflation is driving us off of a fiscal cliff.
Mr. President, you said health-care reform is budget reform. You’re right. We agree with that. Medicare, right now, has a $38 trillion unfunded liability. That’s $38 trillion in empty promises to my parents’ generation, our generation, our kids’ generation. Medicaid’s growing at 21 percent each year. It’s suffocating states’ budgets. It’s adding trillions in obligations that we have no means to pay for . . .
Now, you’re right to frame the debate on cost and health inflation. And in September, when you spoke to us in the well of the House, you basically said—and I totally agree with this—I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits either now or in the future.
Since the Congressional Budget Office can’t score your bill, because it doesn’t have sufficient detail, but it tracks very similar to the Senate bill, I want to unpack the Senate score a little bit.
And if you take a look at the CBO analysis—analysis from your chief actuary—I think it’s very revealing. This bill does not control costs. This bill does not reduce deficits. Instead, this bill adds a new health-care entitlement at a time when we have no idea how to pay for the entitlements we already have.
Now let me go through why I say that. The majority leader said the bill scores as reducing the deficit $131 billion over the next 10 years. First, a little bit about CBO. I work with them every single day—very good people, great professionals. They do their jobs well. But their job is to score what is placed in front of them. And what has been placed in front of them is a bill that is full of gimmicks and smoke-and-mirrors.
Now, what do I mean when I say that? Well, first off, the bill has 10 years of tax increases, about half a trillion dollars, with 10 years of Medicare cuts, about half a trillion dollars, to pay for six years of spending.
Now, what’s the true 10-year cost of this bill in 10 years? That’s $2.3 trillion.
[The Senate bill] does [a] couple of other things. It takes $52 billion in higher Social Security tax revenues and counts them as offsets. But that’s really reserved for Social Security. So either we’re double-counting them or we don’t intend on paying those Social Security benefits.
It takes $72 billion and claims money from the CLASS Act. That’s the long-term care insurance program. It takes the money from premiums that are designed for that benefit and instead counts them as offsets.
The Senate Budget Committee chairman [Kent Conrad] said that this is a Ponzi scheme that would make Bernie Madoff proud.
Now, when you take a look at the Medicare cuts, what this bill essentially does [is treat] Medicare like a piggy bank. It raids a half a trillion dollars out of Medicare, not to shore up Medicare solvency, but to spend on this new government program.
. . . [A]ccording to the chief actuary of Medicare . . . as much as 20 percent of Medicare’s providers will either go out of business or will have to stop seeing Medicare beneficiaries. Millions of seniors . . . who have chosen Medicare Advantage will lose the coverage that they now enjoy.
You can’t say that you’re using this money to either extend Medicare solvency and also offset the cost of this new program. That’s double counting.
And so when you take a look at all of this; when you strip out the double-counting and what I would call these gimmicks, the full 10-year cost of the bill has a $460 billion deficit. The second 10-year cost of this bill has a $1.4 trillion deficit.
. . . [P]robably the most cynical gimmick in this bill is something that we all probably agree on. We don’t think we should cut doctors [annual federal reimbursements] 21 percent next year. We’ve stopped those cuts from occurring every year for the last seven years.
We all call this, here in Washington, the doc fix. Well, the doc fix, according to your numbers, costs $371 billion. It was in the first iteration of all of these bills, but because it was a big price tag and it made the score look bad, made it look like a deficit . . . that provision was taken out, and it’s been going on in stand-alone legislation. But ignoring these costs does not remove them from the backs of taxpayers. Hiding spending does not reduce spending. And so when you take a look at all of this, it just doesn’t add up.
. . . I’ll finish with the cost curve. Are we bending the cost curve down or are we bending the cost curve up?
Well, if you look at your own chief actuary at Medicare, we’re bending it up. He’s claiming that we’re going up $222 billion, adding more to the unsustainable fiscal situation we have.
And so, when you take a look at this, it’s really deeper than the deficits or the budget gimmicks or the actuarial analysis. There really is a difference between us.
. . . [W]e’ve been talking about how much we agree on different issues, but there really is a difference between us. And it’s basically this. We don’t think the government should be in control of all of this. We want people to be in control. And that, at the end of the day, is the big difference.
Now, we’ve offered lots of ideas all last year, all this year. Because we agree the status quo is unsustainable. It’s got to get fixed.
It’s bankrupting families. It’s bankrupting our government. It’s hurting families with pre-existing conditions. We all want to fix this.
But we don’t think that this is the . . . the solution. And all of the analysis we get proves that point.
Now, I’ll just simply say this. . . . [W]e are all representatives of the American people. We all do town hall meetings. We all talk to our constituents. And I’ve got to tell you, the American people are engaged. And if you think they want a government takeover of health care, I would respectfully submit you’re not listening to them.
So what we simply want to do is start over, work on a clean-sheeted paper, move through these issues, step by step, and fix them, and bring down health-care costs and not raise them. And that’s basically the point.
President Obama’s new health care plan will all but guarantee the elimination of private insurance and lead to a single payer government-run health care system, says a new report, “White House Health Care Plan Contains Back Door to a Public Option” by policy analyst Matt Patterson of the National Center For Public Policy Research.
Among the findings:
* The President’s plan would create a new federal agency charged with monitoring health insurers to make sure that proposed premium increases are not “unreasonable” or “unjustified.” This agency could compel private insurers to lower premiums, offer rebates or “take other actions to make premiums affordable.”
* The President’s plan would also dictate that health insurers cover those with pre-existing conditions and saddle them with billion in new taxes and fees.
* Health insurance is one of the least profitable industries America. In terms of profit margin, in 2009 it ranked a dismal 87th out of 215 industries; their overall profit margin was a mere 3.4 percent.
* The President’s proposed combination of new taxes and price controls would cause a wave of health insurer bankruptcies, devastating the industry and reducing health insurance options for consumers.
* Eventually, the shrinking pool of private insurers would force the government to enact a single payer system to provide the insurance that Congress mandates that all Americans have.
Patterson calls Obama’s ploy “breathtakingly audacious,” noting, “Far from being able to keep the plan you like, the President’s health care plan seems designed to make sure you end up with only one option for your health care – the government.”
“White House Health Care Plan Contains Back Door to a Public Option,” by Matt Patterson is available on the National Center For Public Policy Research website at http://www.nationalcenter.org/NPA603.html.
The National Center For Public Policy Research is a conservative, Constitution-respecting, free-market non-profit think-tank established in 1982. It is supported by the voluntary gifts of over 100,000 individual recent supporters, and receives less than one percent of its revenue from corporate sources.
“There have been a lot of comments from every Republican about the polls,” President Obama said near the end of the mind-numbing White House summit on health care reform. “What’s interesting is when you poll people about the individual elements in each of these bills, they’re all for them.”
What Obama was addressing was a dilemma that drives Democrats crazy. Polls show the public supports some parts of the Democratic national health care reform plan, but adamantly opposes the comprehensive bill now dying a slow death on Capitol Hill.
Just look at the latest survey from CNN and Opinion Research. When asked if they support “preventing health insurance companies from dropping coverage for people who become seriously ill,” 62 percent say yes. When asked whether they support “requiring all large and midsized businesses to provide health insurance for their employees,” 72 percent say yes. And when asked if they support “preventing health insurance companies from denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions,” 58 percent say yes.
On the other hand, asked what Congress should do on health care — pass the current bill, start work on an entirely new bill, or stop working on the issue altogether — a huge majority opposes the Democratic proposal now on the table. Just 25 percent of those surveyed want to see the bill passed. Forty-eight percent want Congress to start over, and 25 percent want lawmakers to stop working on health care altogether. Put those last two together, and an overwhelming majority of 73 percent do not want Congress to pass the current bill.
The White House is cherry-picking the news it likes; that’s what Obama was doing when he said the public is “all for” elements of the bill. But bring up the polls showing people just don’t want the current bill, and the administration gets a little dodgy.
“Who knows what is in those polls, how they were taken, when they were taken?” White House health care spokeswoman Linda Douglass told Fox News during a break in the summit.
But why do people support some elements of the bill while opposing the bill overall? Some Democrats blame Republican misinformation. Some believe it’s because the bill isn’t yet a reality, and people would love it, if it were only passed. Others say the public is just stupid.
Few Democrats can accept the possibility that voters are telling them their whole approach is wrong. Big, comprehensive legislative proposals just make people nervous.
“We don’t do comprehensive well,” Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander said at the health summit. “We’ve watched the comprehensive, economywide, cap and trade. We’ve watched the comprehensive immigration bill … we’ve watched the comprehensive health care bill. And they fall of their own weight.”
That’s what’s happening now. And it’s something Democrats would know, if they had listened to one of their leading pollsters.
Back during the 2004 presidential race, there was a debate going on inside the John Kerry campaign. Should the Democratic candidate push bold, far-reaching proposals, or should he balance boldness with more modest initiatives?
Pollster Stanley Greenberg did some research. He found that, when considered individually, Kerry’s most sweeping plans were more popular with voters than his more modest ones. “Voters are ready to respond to new ideas, particularly bold ones,” Greenberg wrote.
To further test the idea, Greenberg put together a hypothetical Kerry agenda — he called it “Bold Kerry” — which included all of the candidate’s bold ideas.
Voters balked. They were uneasy with the big agenda, even though they liked some elements of it. “While voters are clearly open to bold initiatives to major problems, they may be less attracted to the candidate who wants to act boldly in every area, without exception,” Greenberg concluded. “All together, that may have suggested an expanding scope for government beyond what people felt they could trust.”
And that is what is happening now with health care. Ever since Inauguration Day, the White House has acted on the assumption that, because voters elected Barack Obama, they want “Bold Obama.” All the evidence suggests that is wrong.
At the end of the summit, Obama said that if he can’t reach an agreement with Republicans — and there’s no chance if the existing bill stays on the table — then “we’ve got to go ahead and make some decisions.” That means jamming the bill through Congress against the public’s wishes. And if there’s still dispute, Obama said, “that’s what elections are for.”
He’s right. This is an issue that won’t be fully settled until November.
Thursday’s much-hyped health “summit” seemed mainly designed to show the president telling Republicans, “Those are all legitimate points.” Democrats admit it was a setup to pass their $2 trillion plan.
Not long before the president assembled Democrats and Republicans at the Garden Room of Blair House for a health care powwow, Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y., let it all hang out on the House floor, roaring that “every single Republican I have ever met in my entire life is a wholly owned subsidiary of the insurance industry.”
Civility was the cool thing during the grand gathering, but the real purpose behind this televised event was cutthroat.
A Politico story by Mike Allen made that clear, reporting that according to a Democratic official the summit was meant to “give a face to gridlock, in the form of House and Senate Republicans.”
Democratic Party strategists told the Web-based publication that the push will begin early next week for “a massive, Democrats-only health care plan.” The official said of the summit’s purpose: “The point is to alter the political atmospherics.”
Clearly, while the public face with the C-SPAN cameras on is the president’s soft-spoken “those are all reasonable points,” the unseen reality is closer to the partisan rants of Rep. Weiner.
Again and again, Democratic participants insisted that “we’re really not that far apart,” “we really are close” and “we basically agree” except for “semantic differences.” House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., whose trouble with numbers extends to his own tax returns and whose airtime was buried toward the end of the event, absurdly claimed that there was 70% agreement between Democrats and Republicans.
When Republicans respectfully objected, with factual backup, that the differences were actually basic, relating to government vs. individual control, they were curtly accused of rattling off political “talking points” by the president.
A perfect example of the trickery was the president’s seeming willingness to agree to let consumers buy health insurance across state lines — maybe after his national health insurance exchange is established. The continual theme: Let the federal government intrude, then we can talk.
President Obama pledged to “listen” at the outset of his much-ballyhooed bipartisan health care summit on Thursday. Turns out he meant he’d be listening to his own voice.
By the end of the televised event, Mr. Obama had spoken for 119 minutes – nine minutes more than the 110 minutes consumed by 17 Republicans. The 21 Democratic lawmakers used 114 minutes, giving the president and his supporters a whopping 233 minutes, according to a “talk clock” kept by GOP aides.
From the beginning, no one could agree on anything, even how much time each side had used. When a miffed Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, pointed out early on that Democrats had controlled 52 minutes to Republicans’ 24, Mr. Obama jumped in to dispute even that.
“I don’t think that’s quite right,” he said.
But then, with a twinkle in his eye, he added: “You’re right, there was an imbalance on the opening statements because – I’m the president.” Half the room laughed. “I didn’t count my time in terms of dividing it evenly.”
The two sides faced off in the Blair House’s Garden Room, with members of Congress, grouped by party, sitting across from one another in a large square. Throughout the six-hour bloviating blabfest, no fences appeared to be mended and no hatchets buried.
In fact, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi seemed so intractable that neither looked at Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee as he delivered the opening statement for the Republicans. Every time the C-SPAN 3 camera panned to the pair, they were looking straight ahead, expressionless.
Throughout the event, Mr. Obama, a former professor, looked, well, professorial. He listened attentively, his head cocked, his chin raised. He narrowed his eyes in attentiveness at a point here or there, blinking often; he jotted notes in a small book as Republicans spoke; he rested his head on his hand, giving full attention to the speaker.
But each time a Republican sought to break in to rebut a point made by the president or a fellow Democrat, Mr. Obama looked a bit frustrated and made clear who was in charge of the bipartisan discussion.
“Let me just finish, Lamar,” he said during his rebuttal to the senator’s opening statement. “No, no, no, no. Let me – and this is an example of where we’ve got to get our facts straight,” he said when Mr. Alexander sought to clarify a point.
President Obama will be visiting the St. Louis area Wednesday to garner support for his health reform plan. As Washington prepares for a final bare-knuckled battle this month, the stakes could not be higher. With Republicans united in opposition, Democratic leaders are planning to enact a sweeping health overhaul that the American people continue to say in the every way possible that they don’t want.
By Hugh Hewitt Friday, February 26, 2010
A conservative congresswoman is calling for an independent investigation to determine whether President Obama is attempting to trade a federal judgeship for a vote in favor of his healthcare reform plan.
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By Mitch Daniels
Look, we agree on the problem here. And the problem is health inflation is driving us off of a fiscal cliff.
President Obama’s new health care plan will all but guarantee the elimination of private insurance and lead to a single payer government-run health care system, says a new report, “White House Health Care Plan Contains Back Door to a Public Option” by policy analyst 
“There have been a lot of comments from every Republican about the polls,” President Obama said near the end of the mind-numbing White House summit on health care reform. “What’s interesting is when you poll people about the individual elements in each of these bills, they’re all for them.”
Thursday’s much-hyped health “summit” seemed mainly designed to show the president telling Republicans, “Those are all legitimate points.” Democrats admit it was a setup to pass their $2 trillion plan.
President Obama pledged to “listen” at the outset of his much-ballyhooed bipartisan health care summit on Thursday. Turns out he meant he’d be listening to his own voice.
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