The Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) is providing $160 million to the state of Pennsylvania to set up a new high-risk insurance pool program that pays for abortions, as part of a larger $5 billion commitment of taxpayer funds that will include abortion coverage for over 400,000 people nationwide.
“This is the boldest admission yet from the Obama administration that the President’s Executive Order on taxpayer-funded abortion was a sham. The fact that the high-risk pool insurance program in Pennsylvania will use federal taxpayer dollars to fund abortions is unconscionable,” said House Republican leader John Boehner.
Steven Ertelt reports on LifeNews.com that HHS has approved the program in Pennsylvania that will soon spread to other states paying abortions nationwide.
From the report:
[HHS] has quietly approved a plan submitted by an appointee of pro-abortion Governor Edward Rendell under which the new program will cover any abortion that is legal in Pennsylvania. … “The Obama Administration will give Pennsylvania $160 million in federal tax funds, which we’ve discovered will pay for insurance plans that cover any legal abortion,” said Douglas Johnson, legislative director for the National Right to Life Committee.
Johnson told LifeNews.com: “This is just the first proof of the phoniness of President Obama’s assurances that federal funds would not subsidize abortion — but it will not be the last.” … The pro-life community strongly opposed the executive order and said Rep. Bart Stupak and other House Democrats who voted for the pro-abortion health care bill in exchange for it were selling out their pro-life principles. This first case of forcing taxpayers to pay for abortions under the new law appears to prove them right that the bill language and executive order were ineffective.
Boehner has led the effort to require President Obama to keep his word that no tax dollars would be used to fund abortions. Holding the president to his word is a tall order.
“Just last month at the White House I asked President Obama to provide the American people with a progress report on the implementation of his Executive Order, which purports to ban taxpayer-funding of abortions. Unfortunately, the President provided no information, and the American people are still waiting for answers,” Boehner said.
Broken Pledge: An early draft of regulations written for the health care overhaul estimates that more than half of U.S. workers will see their medical insurance change. Funny, that’s not the promise we remember.
Late last week, reports surfaced that an 83-page White House document had been leaked from the White House. If the rules included in this draft are promulgated, the health plans of 51% of workers will be subject to change within three years.
In the new system, companies that modify employee coverage after Jan. 1, 2014, will lose their “grandfather” status and be forced to comply with ObamaCare rules. This means they will have no choice but to buy plans that will cost more because the law says they must include expanded coverage.
Changes in plans that would cause a company to lose its grandfather status can be as modest as a small shift in the co-payment amount or in the employees’ contribution to the coverage. By merely asking workers to share a bit more of the burden, companies will have to buy new plans.
Many Americans are likely to find the added coverage of the new plans unnecessary for their needs and the extra costs taxing to household budgets. How many who liked their plans will have new ones forced on them by a bureaucracy that’s not equipped to make decisions for people it doesn’t know?
According to the midrange estimate cited in the White House document, small businesses will be hit hardest. Two-thirds of them “will relinquish their grandfathered status by the end of 2013″ while 45% of large employer plans will be affected.
“In the worst-case scenario,” reported IBD’s Sean Higgins and David Hogberg on Monday, “69% of employers — 80% of smaller firms — would lose that status, exposing them to far more provisions under the new health law.”
Are the bureaucrats writing these regulations unfamiliar with the promise President Obama made repeatedly last year: “If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan”?
Did they know that Linda Douglass, the White House fixer who said it was her job to “keep track of all the disinformation out there about health insurance reform,” assured the public that Obama was sincere when he said that? The answer to both is an emphatic yes.
So why write regulations that break a presidential promise? Because that promise was never meant to be kept. Like all the misrepresentations about cost, it was meant to mislead the public and generate support for, or at least blunt opposition to, a government takeover of the health care sector.
By Senator Tom Coburn — President Obama and his allies kicked off an unusual, and perhaps unprecedented, taxpayer-subsidized political campaign this week to sell to the public a legislative program that has already been signed into law.
The obvious coordination between the White House and its allies outside government who are running a $125 million campaign raises troubling questions. But, first, I’ll address the substance of what the president talked about, and ignored.
On Tuesday, the president trumpeted a provision in his plan that will give seniors a $250 rebate check if they reach the Medicare prescription drug benefit “doughnut hole” coverage gap in 2010. The president also spent a great deal of time repeating his talking points from last year’s health care debate. He claimed his plan would reduce the deficit and claimed the arguments of his critics were not “anchored in reality.”
As a practicing physician with more than 25 years of experience, and as a former business owner in the health care sector, I’d suggest this new PR campaign is grounded in politics rather than reality. The so-called experts behind this effort appear to be political hacks and career politicians who have zero real-world experience in the health care sector.
First, the president’s claims about the supposed benefits of a $250 rebate check for seniors are wildly out of proportion to both the reality of Medicare and his own program. Less than 10 percent of seniors enrolled in Medicare will receive a rebate check.
On the other hand, a greater percentage of seniors enrolled in Medicare – the 25 percent participating in Medicare Advantage – will see their benefits cut because the White House ultimately wants to kill the program for ideological reasons. Seniors are about to learn that if they like their plan, they can’t keep it. Medicare Advantage providers are already planning on cutting benefits and raising fees because of the law.
The president’s interest in the doughnut hole also suggests the PR campaign is willfully overlooking and exacerbating a much greater threat – Medicare’s $38 trillion unfunded liabilities. Our real national challenge is not the doughnut hole but our financial black hole of debt that is threatening to swallow not only Medicare but our entire economy.
During the most recent meeting of the president’s debt commission two esteemed economists, Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard and Carmen Reinhart of the University of Maryland, declared that our debt is already at 90 percent of our GDP, which they view as a tipping point at which economic growth slows considerably.
Borrowing from future generations and foreign governments to pay for rebate checks represents the kind of perverse short-term decision making that has brought our nation to the edge of a fiscal black hole. At best, throwing rebate checks at Medicare is an exercise in futility that will postpone real reform.
The president made a number of other claims that weren’t anchored in reality, such as his claim that his plan will reduce the deficit. When real-world accounting is applied to health care spending and necessary expenses like the doctor fix are included, all of the so-called savings evaporate.
Even the Congressional Budget Office, which the White House sites as its authoritative source, has contradicted the White House. CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf recently said, “The rising costs of health care will put tremendous pressure on the federal budget during the next few decades and beyond … In CBO’s judgment, the health legislation enacted earlier this year does not substantially diminish that pressure.”
Yet, perhaps the most important reality check in this debate is to acknowledge the obvious. This new PR campaign has nothing to do with improving the health of Americans and everything to do with improving the job security of politicians who voted for this bill against the wishes of their constituents. Turning federal agencies into de facto direct mail and political advertising branches of the Democratic political establishment will refill the swamp and remind voters why they loath Washington.
The American people have not only made up their minds about this bill, they are fatigued with this debate and the condescension of the Washington establishment who considers their objections to be based on fear, scare tactics and hysteria.
The American people have studied this law more intently the politicians and unelected staff who wrote it. They have made decisions based on information, not misinformation. The campaign’s rhetoric of victimization is not a comeback at Republicans but an insult to the millions of Americans who did their homework and made good faith, informed judgments about a bill that fixed the wrong problem.
The reality is Congress and the White House had a chance to do something bold and bipartisan to fix the real problem, and they blew it. This law represents a failure of content, not communication. Sooner or later, a nation that aspires to a future beyond a rendezvous with debt will insist that this misguided law be repealed and replaced.
Rick Foster is the Chief Actuary of Medicare, and his office has just released a devastating critique of the Administration’s health reform law.
Before getting to details, let me say there is nothing in the report that is surprising to independent health economists. The conclusions are consistent with everything The Lewin Group and other private estimates have been saying for months. What is surprising is that one of the most respected agencies of the U.S. government is completely undermining the Alice-in-Wonderland fables being spun by the White House, on Capitol Hill and in the mainstream media. To wit:
You cannot take close to one trillion dollars away from one group of people and spend it on another group of people and somehow leave those footing the bill better off.
You cannot give millions of people large increases in medical care without creating any new doctors, new nurses or other paramedical personnel.
You cannot arbitrarily reduce what you are paying providers by billions of dollars and still expect to get the same quantity and quality of care.
You cannot give millions of patients and thousands of doctors new incentives to waste medical resources and then expect health care spending to go down.
In other words, the Chief Actuary is simply saying reality is reality. Economics is economics. A is A.
Health care costs will go up, not down. National health expenditures will increase from 17 percent of GDP now to 21 percent under the new law and will be higher than without the legislation. [Page 4] Net federal spending on health care will also increase.
Health care shortages are “plausible and even probable.” Because of the increased demand for health care, “supply constraints might initially interfere with providing the services desired by the additional 34 million insured persons.” [Page 20]
14 million employees will lose their employer coverage. Employees of small firms are especially at risk (despite small employer tax credit subsidies). [Page 7]
2 million employees who lose coverage will have to enroll in Medicaid. [Page 3]
A Medicaid insurance card is not a guarantee of care. An estimated 18 million people will be added to Medicaid. [Page 3] However, because there is no corresponding increase in the supply of caregivers, “it is reasonable to expect that a significant portion of the increased demand for Medicaid would be difficult to meet, particularly over the first few years.” [Page 20]
One in ten insured workers will see their health benefits taxed. By 2019, more than 10% of insured workers will “be in employer plans with benefit values in excess of the thresholds (before changes to reduce benefits) and this percentage would increase rapidly thereafter.” [Page 13]
Higher taxes will lead to higher premiums. The new taxes on medical devices, prescription drugs, and insurance plans “would generally be passed on through to health consumers in the form of higher drug and device prices and higher insurance premiums.” [Page 17]
There are more than one-half trillion in Medicare cuts. The new health law cuts “$575 billion” from Medicare. [Page 4]
Medicare cuts would threaten almost one in every seven hospitals. About “15 percent of Part A providers would become unprofitable within the 10-year projection period.” [Page 10]
Overall access to care for seniors would go down. Because of the law’s payment reductions, “providers for whom Medicare constitutes a substantive portion of their business could find it difficult to remain profitable and, absent legislative intervention, might end their participation in the program. [Page 10]
7.4 million people will lose access to Medicare Advantage plans. Enrollment in MA plans will be cut in half (from its projected level of 14.8 million under the current law to 7.4 million under the new law). [Page 11]
False advertising: The new “Medicare Tax” doesn’t go to Medicare. “Despite the title of this tax, this provision is unrelated to Medicare; in particular, the revenues generated by the tax on unearned income are not allocated to the Medicare trust funds.” [Page 9]
False advertising:Budgetary double-counting does not improve Medicare’s solvency. Medicare cuts “cannot be simultaneously used to finance other federal outlays (such as the coverage expansions) and to extend the [life of the Medicare] trust fund, despite the appearance of this result from the respective accounting conventions.” [Page 9]
The new long-term care insurance plan (CLASS Act) is unsound. The program faces “a significant risk of failure” because the high costs will attract sicker people and lead to low participation. [Page 15]
The promise to those with pre-existing conditions is unfunded. “By 2011 and 2012 the initial $5 billion in Federal funding for [high risk pools] would be exhausted, resulting in substantial premium increases to sustain the program.” [Page 16]
Well, that didn’t take long. After Democratic supermajorities rammed through their health care bill, Republicans were full of sound and fury about how this injustice will not stand. Even John McCain was on board, telling a television interviewer, “Outside the Beltway the American people are very angry and they don’t like it and we are going to try to repeal this.”
But in the GOP, cooler heads always prevail. What these Republican heads want to cool down is the campaign to repeal the health care takeover. Reports the Associated Press: “Top Republicans are increasingly worried that GOP candidates this fall might be burned by a fire that’s roaring through the conservative base: demand for the repeal of President Barack Obama’s new health care law.”
One of the Republican leadership’s volunteer firefighters is none other than Sen. John Cornyn, the Texas Republican who chairs the committee responsible for getting GOP candidates elected to the Senate this fall. Cornyn initially unfurled the “repeal and replace” banner, only to quickly make an exception for the “non-controversial stuff,” such as the ban on preexisting conditions which is unfortunately exactly what necessitates the “controversial stuff” like the individual mandate.
Cornyn was later seen pouring cold water on the idea entirely. Asked by the AP whether he was going to advise Republican senatorial nominees to run on repeal, he said, “Candidates are going to test the winds in their own states… In some places, the health care bill is more popular than others.” Meanwhile, Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee doesn’t need a weatherman to tell him where the wind blows: “It’s just not going to happen.”
Republican candidates seeking to join Cornyn and Corker in the club have gotten the memo. Shortly before Obamacare passed, Congressman Mark Kirk — the Republican running to fill Barack Obama’s old Senate seat in Illinois — bravely vowed to “lead the effort” to repeal the bill. Now he glumly tells a local newspaper, “Well, we lost.”
Not only is it the case that Republicans “do not have the votes,” but Kirk noted “a sliver of good things in the bill which Republicans agreed with.” Judging from the similarities between the new national health care regime and the Massachusetts bill Republican Sen. Scott Brown voted for and GOP presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney signed into law, for some Republicans it is more than a sliver.
Republicans against repeal have found an amen corner in the cooler heads among conservative commentators. One Oliver Garland even counseled that repeal was fundamentally unconservative: “True conservatives are not radicals; they respect tradition and work for stable reform to fix institutions.”
By Mark Styen: So there was President Obama, giving his bazillionth speech on health care, droning yet again that “now is the hour when we must seize the moment,” the same moment he’s been seizing every day of the week for the past year, only this time his genius photo-op guys thought it would look good to have him surrounded by men in white coats.
Why is he doing this? Why let “health care reform” stagger on like the rotting husk in a low-grade creature feature who refuses to stay dead no matter how many stakes you pound through his chest?
Because it’s worth it. Big time. I’ve been saying in this space for two years that the governmentalization of health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture. It redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state in fundamental ways that make limited government all but impossible. In most of the rest of the Western world, there are still nominally “conservative” parties, and they even win elections occasionally, but not to any great effect. (Let’s not forget that Jacques Chirac was, in French terms, a “conservative.”) The result is a kind of two-party-one-party state: Right-of-center parties once in a while will be in office, but never in power, merely presiding over vast leftist bureaucracies that cruise on regardless.
On March 10th David Plouffe, President Obama’s former campaign manager and current White House advisor, sent out an email with a set of facts on behalf of Organizing for America about the “President’s Proposal” for health reform – which is, in actuality, a proposal for the House to pass the same bill that the Senate passed on Christmas Eve, and then for the Senate to pass a “fixer” bill using the nuclear option, budget reconciliation, with 51 votes. The email (and this page) contain a number of claims about this proposal, many of which are questionable at best. Below is our analysis:
Organizing for America Claim:“If you have health insurance through your employer and like your plan, you can keep it.”
Fact Check:False
Explanation: This was debatably true in the Senate bill, but the President’s own proposal document lays out on page 3 why this is false in the section labeled “Extend Consumer Protections against Health Insurer Practices.” The proposal would effectively end the ability to “grandfather” plans and keep them in operation after the bill is enacted, instead forcing an exhaustive and onerous list of new mandates on all plans, including employer and “grandfathered” plans. These include forcing all plans to cover “children” up to the age of 26, prohibiting rescissions (withdrawing coverage when customers mislead an insurer on their enrollment forms), mandating a new appeals process, mandatory state and federal annual rate reviews, banning annual and lifetime limits, banning all pre-existing condition exclusions, banning plan differences for highly compensated employees, and forcing all plans to cover government-designatedpreventative services with no cost-sharing. While most group health plans do not practice rescissions or have preexisting condition exclusions, the new government mandates will lead to reduced plan flexibility and higher costs. All of these policies will increase the costs of a plan, and while some of these changes may have merit, it is undeniable that forcing these changes will cause many plans to change, and some to cease operation.
Organizing for America Claim:“If you’re a small business owner, you’ll receive new tax credits that make it easier for you to provide coverage for employees if you choose to do so.”
Fact Check:False.
Explanation: Senate bill H.R. 3590 included a credit that would cover 50% of premiums for a business with 10 or fewer employees with average wages of $20,000, if that business provided highly comprehensive health benefits and if the business paid the vast majority of every employee’s premium. This credit phases out at a maximum of 25 employees and $40,000 annual compensation for employees. The credit is available for a few years, and then ends abruptly, with no transition period. This credit is highly unworkable for two reasons – first, its short and abrupt nature will dissuade employers from using it due to concern about a large spike in out-of-pocket expenses the day that the credit suddenly ends a few years later. Second is its extremely limited nature – according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the average firm with 10 or fewer employees has an average wage of $27,000, meaning the vast majority of small businesses will not even be eligible for half of the credit.
Organizing for America Claim: “If you have Medicare, the President’s plan guarantees that your benefits will not be cut, and the Medicare Trust Fund will be extended for more than 9 years.”
Fact Check:False.
Explanation: Both of these claims are demonstrably false. First, proponents of the bill claim that it will extend the Medicare Trust Fund – but the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has admitted that this is highly unlikely and the discrepancy is due to a number of arcane rules CBO was forced to follow in developing the legislation’s cost estimate. This includes double-counting the $500 billion in Medicare cuts, as if the money saved by those cuts could simultaneously be reinvested in the Trust Fund and used to fund a new $500 billion entitlement for families making up to $88,000 a year. It also assumes that the Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) formula will operate without interference, thus allowing, starting this year, an across-the-board 23% pay cut to Medicare providers. In their letter to Leader Reid on November 18th of 2009, the CBO expressed doubt that the Medicare provisions would really be enacted – especially a new global budgeting entity that would be charged with annually containing the costs of Medicare in the out years – an impossible task for a commission that cannot make systemic changes to the program, in essence forcing them to ratchet down provider reimbursement or ration care. The claim that benefits will not be cut is countered by an analysis by the Chief Actuary at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, who said in an analysis released December 10, 2009, that “20 percent of Part A providers would become unprofitable” and stop seeing Medicare patients. It is semantics to pretend that losing access to 20 percent of current providers would not result in service and benefit interruptions for Medicare enrollees.
Organizing for America Claim:“If you’re uninsured, you could receive a tax credit to help pay for coverage if needed—part of the largest middle class tax cut for health care in history.”
Fact Check:False.
Explanation: While the uninsured may be eligible for subsidies under the plan, this is in no way a tax cut. In all, the bill contains about $500,000,000,000.00 in new taxes. Money will be taxed from some people, and then given to others, or given back to the taxpayer. In fact, those same Americans will be facing one of the largest tax increases in history. According to Doug Elmendorf, Director of the CBO, in his testimony before a Senate committee, taxes on health insurance policies, prescription drugs, and medical devices, will all be passed on directly to consumers. Taxes on “Cadillac” high-value health insurance plans will result in benefit cuts or reduced wages. Small business owners who file taxes as individuals will pay massive new “Medicare” payroll and investment surtaxes.Worse, these taxes will rapidly expand like the Alternative Minimum Tax, because they are not properly indexed to inflation – the surtaxes are not indexed whatsoever. Small businesses will be burdened with a new paperwork tax. In addition, consumers will pay higher health care costs because of reduced government payments to providers – a practice called “cost-shifting” where, without overtly raising taxes, the government transfers costs to the private sector. All of this will result in a large series of “hidden taxes” that may not be direct income taxes, but will all result in higher costs – and less money in the pockets – of small businesses and middle class Americans. Calling this bill a tax cut is highly misleading.
Organizing for America Claim:“Even if you currently have health insurance, there will be new protections from insurance company abuses, and tax credits will make coverage more affordable.”
Fact Check:False.
Explanation: While for a small minority of people, who buy insurance individually, there may be some benefits from insurance market reforms, the vast majority of Americans receive health benefits through their employers, and the majority of them are beneficiaries of self-insured ERISA plans. These people will see no change in the new so-called “protections” other than higher costs resulting from a loss of plan flexibility and onerous new requirements and mandates on health insurance providers. Further, the President and White House staff have independently admitted that for many Americans, health insurance will become more expensive, but claimed that this is acceptable because Americans would be required to purchase more comprehensive plans. While the merit of forcing more comprehensive plans can be debated (the U.S. Chamber of Commerce supports allowing individuals to purchase high-deductible and more basic, affordable plans), the Administration has already conceded that health insurance will be more expensive for many Americans.
Organizing for America Claim:“You will never again be hit with arbitrary health insurance premium hikes.”
Fact Check:False.
Explanation: Proponents continue to vilify health insurance providers in an effort to distract from the public’s concerns about the proposal. While the health insurance industry has made an easy target, the allegation that they arbitrarily raise rates has been thoroughly discredited. In fact, the health insurance industry makes only a 2.2 percent profit, compared to 19.4 for the internet services industry and 20.4 percent for the communications equipment industry, among others. Overall, the primary drivers of health insurance cost increases are increases in the costs of health care services, products, and pharmaceuticals. The Administration chooses to overlook the fact that many insurers are currently being forced to increase their rates to build up cash reserves in anticipation of heavy losses if the President’s proposal is enacted. By enacting guaranteed issue and community rating, with an ineffective individual mandate, the plan will cause a death-spiral for health insurance pools when healthy people opt out and sick people opt in.
Organizing for America Claim:“If We Do Not Pass [the Senate Bill]… Up to 17 million more people will be uninsured by 2019.”
Fact Check:Misleading.
Explanation: The Senate bill and President’s proposal delay the enactment of their primary coverage provisions for four years – this was done in an effort to lower the visible costs of the legislation by gaming the CBO score with budget gimmicks and moving four years of spending beyond the 10-year budget window the CBO uses to estimate scores. Now, the Administration has also continued to claim that every day we do not act, 14,000 people lose their health insurance. In other words, the Senate bill’s budget gimmicks will cause 14,000 people, times 365 days, times 4 years, so 20,440,000 people to lose their health insurance. Further, in a letter from the CBO to Senator Reid on November 30th, 2009, they found that even after enactment of the Senate bill and spending almost $1 trillion over ten years, 24 million people would still be uninsured in 2019. The Chamber’s calculations, based on Census Bureau data, found that of the 46 million people the Administration claimed were uninsured last year, more than 10 mill ion were undocumented or illegal, 11 million were already eligible for free or subsidized health insurance, 15 million were in income brackets such that they could likely afford reform, and only around 10 million were chronically uninsured not necessarily by choice. All of this adds up to point to a very confusing picture of tens of millions with no coverage without the bill, yet tens of millions with no coverage if the bill is enacted. Claiming that the bill will somehow save 17 million people from being uninsured in 2019 is misleading at best.
Organizing for America Claim:“If We Do Not Pass [The Senate Bill]… The average family’s health care costs will nearly double by 2020, from $13,000 to $24,000.”
Fact Check:False.
Explanation: In the November 30th, 2009 analysis of the Senate bill, the CBO wrote that: “Average premiums per policy in the nongroup market in 2016 would be roughly $5,800 for single policies and $15,200 for family policies under the proposal, compared with roughly $5,500 for single policies and $13,100 for family policies under current law… [an increase] of 10 percent to 13 percent in the average premium per person.” In other words, health insurance will cost more if the President’s proposal (the Senate bill) is enacted, not less.
In the Weekly Republican Address, newly-elected Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts explains that the Democrats running Washington have their priorities all wrong. Sen. Brown says Americans “told me that they want their President and Congress to focus on creating jobs and reviving Americas economy. Instead, for more than a year now, we have seen a bitter, destructive, and endless drive to completely transform Americas health care system.”
“Somehow,” Sen. Brown notes, “the greater the public opposition to the health care bill, the more determined they seem to force it on us anyway. Their attitude shows Washington at its very worst the presumption that they know best, and theyre going to get their way whether the American people like it or not.”
Sen. Brown says, “I havent been here very long, but, I can tell you this much already: Nothing has distracted the attention and energy of the nations capital more than this disastrous detour. And, the surest way to return to the peoples business is to listen to the people themselves: We need to drop this whole scheme of federally controlled health care, start over, and work together on real reforms at the state level that will contain costs and wont leave America trillions of dollars deeper in debt.”
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.
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.
Highly informed sources on Capitol Hill have revealed to me details of the Democratic plan to sneak Obamacare through Congress, despite collapsing public approval for healthcare “reform” and disintegrating congressional support in the wake of Republican Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts.
President Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid all have agreed to the basic framework of the plan.
Their plan is clever but can be stopped if opponents of radical healthcare reform act quickly and focus on a core group of 23 Democratic Congressman. If just a few of these 23 Democrats are “flipped” and decide to oppose the bill, the whole Obama-Pelosi-Reid stratagem falls apart.
Here’s what I learned top Democrats are planning to implement.
Senate Democrats will go to the House with a two-part deal.
First, the House will pass the Senate’s Obamacare bill that passed the Senate in December. The House leadership will vote on the Senate bill, and Pelosi will allow no amendments or modifications to the Senate bill.
How will Pelosi’s deal fly with rambunctious liberal members of her majority who don’t like the Senate bill, especially its failure to include a public option, put heavy fines on those who don’t get insurance, and offering no income tax surcharge on the “rich”?
That’s where the second part of the Pelosi-deal comes in.
Behind closed doors, Reid and Pelosi have agreed in principle that changes to the Senate bill will be made to satisfy liberal House members — but only after the Senate bill is passed and signed into law by Obama.
This deal will be secured by a pledge from Reid and the Senate’s Democratic caucus that they will make “fixes” to the Senate bill after it becomes law with Obama’s John Hancock.
But you may ask what about the fact that, without Republican Scott Brown and independent Democrats such as Joe Lieberman, Reid simply doesn’t have the 60 votes in the Senate to overcome a Republican filibuster that typically can stop major legislation?
According to my source, Reid will provide to Pelosi a letter signed by 52 Democratic senators indicating they will pass the major changes, or “fixes,” the House Democrats are demanding. Again, these fixes will be approved by the Senate only after Obama signs the Senate bill into law.
Reid also has agreed to bypass Senate cloture and filibuster rules and claim that these modifications fall under “reconciliation” and don’t require 60 Senate votes.
To pass the fixes, he won’t need one Republican; he won’t even need Joe Lieberman or wavering Democrats such as Jim Webb of Virginia.
His 52 pledged senators give him a simple majority to pass any changes they want, which will later be rubberstamped by Pelosi’s House and signed by Obama.
This plan, of course, is a total subversion of the legislative process.
Typically, the Senate and House pass their own unique legislation and then both bills go to a conference committee. In conference, the leadership of both Democrat-dominated houses wheels and deals and irons out differences.
The final compromise bill is then sent back to the full Senate and full House for a vote and has to pass both to go to the president.
In the House, a simple majority passes the legislation. But under Senate rules, major legislation requires 60 votes to end a filibuster.
As it stands, the House bill and Senate bill have major discrepancies. Reid does not have 60 votes to pass a compromise bill that would no doubt include some of the radical provisions House members have been demanding.
But if the House passes the exact Senate bill that passed by a 60-39 Senate vote last month, there is no need for a conference on the bill. It will go directly to the president’s desk.
There is a rub to all of this.
This secret plan being hatched by Pelosi and Reid requires not only a pledge by 52 Democratic senators to vote later for the House modifications. House liberals must actually believe these Senators will live up to their pledge and pass the fixes at some future date.
President Obama repeatedly promised the American people that he planned to televise the health care reform negotiations on CSPAN. But the reality is that most of the most important negotiations that have taken place to date and are currently taking place in reconciling the House and Senate versions of the bills are occurring behind closed doors.
Sen. DeMint Exposes Draconian Measure in Health Care Bill
Senator Reid Proposes Restrictions on Self-Governance
Senator Harry Reid has slipped language into the heath care bill, via an amendment that would tie the hands of future Congresses with regard to repealing or amending it. The amendment makes substantial changes to the standing rules of the Senate, a move that normally requires a super-majority vote of at least 67 Senators. When questioned about this by Senator DeMint, The Senate president ruled that the bill changes Senate procedure, but not Senate rules, so the 67 vote threshold did not apply. The unasked question that begs to follow is, “what establishes Senate procedures?” Answer: The rules.
Section 3403 of Senator Harry Reid’s amendment (page 1020) states that “it shall not be in order in the Senate or the House of Representatives to consider any bill, resolution, amendment, or conference report that would repeal or otherwise change this subsection.” The subsection pertains to regulations imposed by the Medicare Advisory Board. The amendment goes on to require a vote of 3/5 the Senate (60 votes) to waive the paragraph.
This posturing, setting some provisions of the law above others, so as to make them untouchable sets a dangerous precedent. It is the Constitution that is established as the supreme law of the land. The threshold for changing it was set high by the founders. Senator Reid and his cohorts are now attempting to enshrine provisions of their health care bill as above normal laws, and not subject to the normal democratic processes to change or repeal them.
DeMint observed, “I don’t see why the majority party wouldn’t put this into every bill.”
Ed Morisey made the point well in his article: “The elected representatives of today should not have greater authority than those who will follow them. Any attempt to pass this into legislation aggrandizes the power of this Congress at the expense of those that follow.”
The proposed language of this health care amendment would, by simple majority vote, establish a requirement for a super majority to alter or repeal it. If this anti-democracy measure is allowed to stand, the implications for this and all future legislation are dire. Hundreds of years of established Congressional process will be subverted, the future will of the people, expressed by the election of their representatives, thwarted by unreasonable and unprecedented obstacles to our right of self-governance.
The debate over health-care reform has sparked all sorts of controversy over costs, regulations and choices. But one ‘feature’ seems to have escaped notice: the built-in lack of accountability of our elected leaders for what health care will be like after the plan is implemented.
Proponents claim we need reform now to solve an immediate health care “crisis.” “If we don’t act, 14,000 Americans will continue to lose their health insurance every single day,” President Obama claimed on July 22.
Yet the bills he urges us to support will not actually provide any health care until 2013 — by which time, if the president’s claim is correct, an additional 17 million Americans will have lost their insurance.
Why the delay? The best way the people have to hold their elected leaders accountable for results is by threatening to withhold their votes. But this bill seems expressly designed to eliminate that source of accountability. By the time Americans experience the effects of this health care bill (except for the tax increases), not only will President Obama have run for re-election, but so will two-thirds of the senators — and every House member will have been up for re-election twice. Their votes on health care reform will be old news. If it goes very badly, it will be too late to vote those responsible out of office.
Furthermore, the House bill leaves all the knotty details and controversial issues to the newly created “Health Choices Commissioner.”
That’s the person whose job it will be to make a lot of our health care choices for us. The Senate Finance Committee (Baucus) proposal gives that authority to the secretary of Health and Human Services. Issues such as whether to:
Permit people with Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) to retain the high-deductible health plans required by the HSA law.
Allow low-cost catastrophic plans.
Permit insurance companies to cover treatment of otherwise terminally ill patients.
Require (or prohibit) coverage of abortion.
Cover new cancer drugs or controversial procedures like (as the Center for American Progress has called for) transgender operations.
The Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) is providing $160 million to the state of Pennsylvania to set up a new high-risk insurance pool program that pays for abortions, as part of a larger $5 billion commitment of taxpayer funds that will include abortion coverage for over 400,000 people nationwide.
Broken Pledge: An early draft of regulations written for the health care overhaul estimates that more than half of U.S. workers will see their medical insurance change. Funny, that’s not the promise we remember.
By Senator Tom Coburn — President Obama and his allies kicked off an unusual, and perhaps unprecedented, taxpayer-subsidized political campaign this week to sell to the public a legislative program that has already been signed into law.
Rick Foster is the Chief Actuary of Medicare, and his office has just released a 
By Mark Styen: So there was President Obama, giving his bazillionth speech on health care, droning yet again that “now is the hour when we must seize the moment,” the same moment he’s been seizing every day of the week for the past year, only this time his genius photo-op guys thought it would look good to have him surrounded by men in white coats.
On March 10th David Plouffe, President Obama’s former campaign manager and current White House advisor, sent out an email with 
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 
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.
From 
by Robert A. Book, Ph.D.
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