From the Washinton Examiner

Physicians at McBride Orthopedic Hospital had ambitious plans for their Oklahoma City hospital before Obamacare. Two new operating rooms and a four-bed intensive-care unit were part of a multimillion-dollar expansion project that promised to bring competition and more health care choices to the community.

But once President Obama’s signature was dry on the 2,409-page Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, so, too, was the McBride project. The recently enacted law imposed a series of new federal regulations on physician-owned hospitals, including an immediate ban on expansion.

“We pulled the plug when the law was signed,” McBride Chief Executive Mark Galliart said. “We were ready to break ground. We had everything approved by the state. We had the construction agreement in place. We were going to meet our timeline until the legislation passed.”

Within days of enactment of the new law, developers across the country nixed plans for 24 new physician-owned hospitals under construction. It will be a struggle for an additional 47 new such hospitals under construction to meet an Obamacare-imposed deadline of Dec. 31 to be finished and have their Medicare certification.

Galliart is now preparing McBride for other onerous requirements imposed by Obamacare on the nation’s 260 physician-owned hospitals. In addition to limits on expansion and new construction, the law restricts new investments, requires new annual reports to the government and sets fines for hospitals that fail to abide by transparency rules.

Imagine if the government owned General Motors and the Congress passed a bill that barred Ford from producing “any new cars and couldn’t expand on its existing cars,” Galliart said. “What other industry would put up with this? If we were spending money recklessly and harming people, that’s one thing. But physician-owned hospitals are doing it better and more efficiently.”

Read the rest of the story.

From Investor’s Business Daily

By BETSY McCAUGHEY. By Demagogue — a word of Greek origin — means a person who uses falsehoods, prejudices and emotional appeals to gain power. Huey Long, governor of Louisiana from 1928 to 1932, U.S. senator from 1932 to 1935 and creator of the Share Our Wealth Program, fit that definition.

Long stirred crowds with fiery denunciations of corporate greed. Ultimately, even fellow Democrats grew alarmed and backed away from his legislation.

Demagogue also describes how President Obama revved up crowds as he crisscrossed the country selling his health legislation.

“A big part of our campaign,” he told audiences in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Missouri, “was about changing the way Washington works — including the responsibility to live within its means. Over the last year, we’ve gone through the budget line-by-line looking for places to trim the fat out of government.”

The truth is, as soon as he took office, the president signed bills that flooded the nation with new spending, resulting in a fiscal 2009 budget 19% above the previous year.

He also promised audiences that “for the first time, uninsured individuals and small businesses will have the same kind of choice of private health insurance that members of Congress get.”

That’s not true. According to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, members of Congress “enjoy the widest selection of health plans in the country and can choose from health savings accounts, catastrophic plans with high deductibles, fee-for-service plans, preferred provider plans and HMOs.”

Read the rest of the column.

By David M. Herszenhorn and Robert Pear

After a long day of acid, partisan debate, Senate Democrats held ranks early Monday in a dead-of-night procedural vote that proved they had locked in the decisive margin needed to pass a far-reaching overhaul of the nation’s health care system.

The roll was called shortly after 1 a.m., with Washington still snowbound after a weekend blizzard, and the Senate voted on party lines to cut off a Republican filibuster of a package of changes to the health care bill by the majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada.

The vote was 60 to 40 — a tally that is expected to be repeated four times as further procedural hurdles are cleared in the days ahead, and then once more in a dramatic, if predictable, finale tentatively scheduled for 7 p.m. on Christmas Eve.

Both parties hailed the vote as seismic.

Democrats said it showed them poised to reshape the health system after decades of failed attempts.

“Health care in America ought to be a right, not a privilege,” said Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut. “Since the time of Harry Truman, every Congress, Republican and Democrat, every president, Democrat and Republican, have at least thought about doing this. Some actually tried.”

Republicans said that the bill was fatally flawed and that voters would retaliate against Democrats at the polls in November.

“It’s obvious why the majority has cooked up this amendment in secret, has introduced it in the middle of a snowstorm, has scheduled the Senate to come in session at midnight, has scheduled a vote for 1 a.m., is insisting that it be passed before Christmas — because they don’t want the American people to know what’s in it,” said Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee.

Mr. Alexander added, “Our friends on the Democratic side seem determined to pursue a political kamikaze mission toward a historic mistake.”

Each side blamed the other for the extraordinary series of votes — at dawn Saturday, after midnight Monday, at dawn again on Tuesday, at 1 p.m. on Wednesday and finally on Christmas Eve, when most Americans will be sequestered for the holiday.

The Democrats charged the Republicans with obstinately throwing every procedural obstacle in their way, including filibusters and the full 30 hours of debate allowed under the rules after each filibuster is broken by a vote of 60 senators.

The Republicans charged the Democrats with recklessly rushing to adopt a dizzyingly complex 2,700-page bill that would affect virtually every American, and would reshape one-sixth of the nation’s economy at a cost of $871 billion over 10 years.

“If the Republicans want to exercise every single right they have under the rules, they can keep us here until Christmas Eve, no doubt about it,” said Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa. “But to what end, I ask? To what end? We’re going to have the vote at 1 a.m. that requires 60 votes, and then why stay here until Christmas Eve to do what they know we’re going to do?”

Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, said he and his colleagues had a duty to fight until the last minute.

“There is nothing inevitable about this,” Mr. Cornyn said. “The only thing I think inevitable about it is in the light of the unpopularity of what is being jammed down the throats of the American people, there will be a day of accounting. We don’t know when that day of accounting will be. Perhaps the first day of accounting will be Election Day 2010.”

Adoption of the legislation is not a certainty.

The Senate bill, once completed, must be reconciled with the bill adopted by the House last month, and there are substantial differences between the two. The House measure, for instance, includes a government-run health insurance plan, or public option, that was dropped from the Senate bill.

The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, has said the House would not just accept the Senate bill. And some Senate Democrats have warned that they could turn against the bill if changes made during negotiations with the House are not to their liking.

Read the rest at New York Times.

From the New York Post

By BETSY MCCAUGHEY

Forget the public option, abortion and all the other divisive questions in the health-care debate: The most important issue for patients and their doctors is the transfer of decision-making power from bedside to the federal government.

The bill that Sen. Harry Reid aims to pass in the Senate would mandate that every American enroll in a “qualified” insurance plan. And page 149 states that “qualified” health plans can do business only with a doctor who “implements such mechanisms to improve health-care quality as the secretary [of Health and Human Services] may by regulation require.”

But “mechanisms to improve health-care quality” covers everything in medicine.

Never before has the federal government intruded into medical decisions made by doctors for privately insured patients, except on such narrow issues as drug safety. Now, in the name of quality, the secretary of Health and Human Services would be empowered to regulate your MD’s decisions on everything from cardiac and cancer care to childbirth.

The delegation of power is so broad, it’s conceivable that Washington will be telling your cardiologist when it’s appropriate to use stents or imaging tests — and directing your gynecologist about the use of pelvic sonograms.

What makes this especially troubling is that government will be imposing its regulations with an eye on reducing the cost of your care, even if you’re paying for it yourself: The explicit purpose of “reform” is to reduce what everyone consumes and to discourage some from getting more care than others.

That’s one reason the Senate bill puts a 40 percent tax on “Cadillac” plans — a category that will cover the top 20 percent of plans, according to the Congressional Budget Office. In its Nov. 30 report, the CBO predicts that many employers will downgrade what they provide their workforce to avoid the tax, while others will pass the cost along in the form of lower take-home pay. If you think this bill won’t hurt you because your employer provides a generous health plan, think again.

Despite President Obama’s promises, the Senate bill expressly reduces the care under Medicare. Baby boomers retiring soon will get less than seniors get now. Page 1189 gives the secretary of Health and Human Services “authority to modify or eliminate coverage of certain preventive services,” based on what the US Preventive Services Task Force recommends. This is the same group that just called for cutting back on mammograms.

Whatever your age, and whether you’re in a public program or the richest “Cadillac” plan, you’ll also lose out if you need to be hospitalized — you’ll find fewer nurses on the floor, less diagnostic equipment, longer waits for tests and an overall environment of scarcity.

Why? Because the Reid bill forces hospitals into financial distress.

Read the rest of the column.

By Ed Morrissey

How desperate has the White House become to get anything passed under the name of health-care reform?  According to Michael Goldfarb’s source on Capitol Hill, the Obama administration has targeted the last remaining Democratic holdout, at least among moderates — and they’re willing to damage national security to extort his support.  The White House has threatened Ben Nelson (D-NE) with the closure of Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska if he opposes Reid’s latest version, despite its status as the headquarters of US Strategic Command:

According to a Senate aide, the White House is now threatening to put Nebraska’s Offutt Air Force Base on the BRAC list if Nelson doesn’t fall into line.

Offutt Air Force Base employs some 10,000 military and federal employees in Southeastern Nebraska. As our source put it, this is a “naked effort by Rahm Emanuel and the White House to extort Nelson’s vote.” They are “threatening to close a base vital to national security for what?” asked the Senate staffer.

Indeed, Offutt is the headquarters for US Strategic Command, the successor to Strategic Air Command, and not by accident. STRATCOM was located in the middle of the country for strategic reasons. Its closure would be a massive blow to the economy of the state of Nebraska, but it would also be another example of this administration playing politics with our national security.

The Obama administration has little left to use for leverage.  Why not national security?  After all, if we’re going to bring terrorists into Illinois, what does it matter if we put the US Strategic Command on wheels for a few years?

Read the rest of this story at Hot Air.

From Gallup

For the first time this decade, more Americans (50%) say providing healthcare for all is not the government’s responsibility than say it is (47%).

From CNS News

The House Republican Conference has compiled a list of all the new boards, bureaucracies, commissions, and programs created in the House health care bill.

The Republican conference describes H.R. 3962 as “Speaker Pelosi’s government takeover of health care.”

The list of 111 new bureaucracies is reprinted here.