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.
Donald Berwick is no household name, but President Obama just handed him immense power to shape what kind of health care will be available to every American man, woman and child.
Berwick is the president’s newly appointed administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the federal agency that is ground zero for Obamacare’s politicization of American medicine. Obama installed Berwick with a recess appointment, a rarely exercised authority given to the president by the Constitution to use when the Senate is out of session for long periods. Berwick will have the job until the end of 2011. He assumes his duties without a Senate confirmation hearing or a Senate vote on his nomination.
Here’s another name few Americans are likely to recognize: Linda O’Boyle. According to the London Sunday Times, O’Boyle died in 2008 after British National Health Service officials cut off her “free” treatment by government doctors. Her sin was that she used her life savings to pay for an unapproved cancer drug earlier in the year. Her doctors had told her the drug, cetuximab, was markedly more effective in combating bowel cancer than the NHS-approved chemotherapy. Unfortunately, cetuximab was rejected by NHS officials as “not cost-effective.” O’Boyle, an NHS occupational therapist, was dead within a few months, a victim of rationed health care. She was also one of the tragic human beings behind a statistic Obama and Berwick likely hope you never hear about: Britain’s cancer survival rate ranges between 40.2 percent and 48.1 percent for men and between 48 percent with 54.1 percent for women, compared with 66 percent for U.S. men and 63 percent for U.S. women.
Now consider this quote from Berwick: “Cynics beware, I am romantic about the National Health Service, I love it.” Here’s another Berwick quote: “The decision is not whether or not we will ration care, the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open.” It is bad enough that Obama would nominate an individual who holds such views to head Medicare and Medicaid. To install him under a recess appointment with no Senate hearing and no Senate confirmation vote is an arbitrary act of an imperial presidency so outrageous as to embarrass even Richard Nixon. Since Berwick can only occupy the position for approximately 17 months, the question inevitably arises: What does Obama want Berwick to do that is so important that it justifies circumventing the Senate’s constitutional duty to advise and consent on presidential appointments?
All you need to know about Dr. Donald Berwick, President Obama’s choice to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, is summed up in the nominee’s own words. At the 60thanniversary celebration of Britain’s socialized National Health System, Berwick praised NHS, which he clearly views as superior to America’s private medical system: “You could have had the American plan … Britain, you chose well.”
The families of 1,200 patients who died prematurely in recent years while in the care of NHS doctors and nurses might beg to differ.A shocking 2010 report by Queen’s Counsel Robert Francis found that NHS patients were left unattended “for unacceptable amounts of time” in urine- and feces-soaked beds. At one NHS hospital, four members of the same family — including a newborn girl — died within 18 months of each other because of medical blunders. “There can no longer be any excuse for denying the enormity of what occurred,” Francis noted, harshly criticizing “a lack of care and mistreatment which have no place in any civilized and well-run health service.”
Yet Berwick has called NHS a “global treasure,” saying he is “a romantic about NHS. I love it.” It’s no coincidence that this centrally planned, government-run health care system appeals to a Harvard-educated pediatrician who views patients not as individuals, but as members of collective “units of concern” defined by age, disease or socioeconomic status. Berwick has criticized the use of new life-saving technologies and wants non-physician “primary care providers” to ration care by controlling access to specialists and diagnostic tests to reduce each “unit’s” per-capita costs. He has also characterized aggressive interventions in terminally ill patients as “assaults,” not heroic attempts to extend their lives.
This is a radical departure from the focus on individual patients and their private relationship with doctors of their choice that have made American medicine the best in the world. And while Berwick was among the first to introduce industrial-style quality controls in 3,000 American hospitals, which by all accounts has been a huge success in improving patient care, his rigidly ideological view that America’s health system should mimic Britain’s NHS is inimical to the preservation of individual freedom and high-quality care. His nomination should be decisively rejected by the Senate. Americans live longer, healthier lives than Brits precisely because government bureaucrats have not been in charge of their health care for the past 60 years. If confirmed by the Senate, Berwick will define that quality down to British standards. That would not be choosing well.
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]
MOUNT DORA — A doctor who considers the national health-care overhaul to be bad medicine for the country posted a sign on his office door telling patients who voted for President Barack Obama to seek care “elsewhere.”
“I’m not turning anybody away — that would be unethical,” Dr. Jack Cassell, 56, a Mount Dora urologist and a registered Republican opposed to the health plan, told the Orlando Sentinel on Thursday. “But if they read the sign and turn the other way, so be it.”
The sign reads: “If you voted for Obama … seek urologic care elsewhere. Changes to your healthcare begin right now, not in four years.”
Estella Chatman, 67, of Eustis, whose daughter snapped a photo of the typewritten sign, sent the picture to U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson, the Orlando Democrat who riled Republicans last year when he characterized the GOP’s idea of health care as, “If you get sick, America … Die quickly.”
Chatman said she heard about the sign from a friend referred to Cassell after his physician recently died. She said her friend did not want to speak to a reporter but was dismayed by Cassell’s sign.
“He’s going to find another doctor,” she said.
Cassell may be walking a thin line between his right to free speech and his professional obligation, said William Allen, professor of bioethics, law and medical professionalism at the University of Florida’s College of Medicine.
Allen said doctors cannot refuse patients on the basis of race, gender, religion, sexual orientation or disability, but political preference is not one of the legally protected categories specified in civil-rights law. By insisting he does not quiz his patients about their politics and has not turned away patients based on their vote, the doctor is “trying to hold onto the nub of his ethical obligation,” Allen said.
President Obama’s recently passed health-care reform legislation includes a surprise for many Americans – a beefing up of a U.S. Public Health Service reserve force and expectations that it respond on short notice to “routine public health and emergency response missions,” even involuntarily.
According to Section 5210 of HR 3590, titled “Establishing a Ready Reserve Corps,” the force must be ready for “involuntary calls to active duty during national emergencies and public health crises.”
The health-care legislation adds millions of dollars for recruitment and amends Section 203 of the Public Health Service Act (42 U.S.C. 204), passed July 1, 1944, during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency. The U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps is one of the seven uniformed services in the U.S. However, Obama’s changes more than double the wording of the Section 203 and dub individuals who are currently classified as officers in the Reserve Corps commissioned officers of the Regular Corps.
The U.S. Public Health Service website describes its commissioned corps as “an elite team of more than 6,000 full-time, well-trained, highly qualified public health professionals dedicated to delivering the nation’s public health promotion and disease prevention programs and advancing public health science.”
According to its mission page, officers of the commissioned corps may:
Provide essential public health and health care services to underserved and disadvantaged populations
Prevent and control injury and the spread of disease
Ensure that the nation’s food supply, drinking water, drugs, medical devices and environment are safe
Conduct and support cutting-edge research for the prevention, treatment and elimination of disease, health disparities and injury
Work with other nations and international agencies to address global health challenges
Provide urgently needed public health and clinical expertise in response to large-scale local, regional and national public health emergencies and disasters
Members are trained to respond to public health situations and national emergency events, such as natural disasters, disease outbreaks and terrorist attacks.
U.S. Representative Michele Bachmann (MN-06) issued the following statement today after introducing legislation to repeal the Democrats’ government takeover of health care:
“It’s no secret, President Obama and Democrat leaders have ignored the will of the people and have chosen to ram through their trillion-dollar health care bill despite the American people’s overwhelming objection to it.
“It’s future generations, our children and grandchildren who will pay the price for our government’s arrogance and recklessness, and the American people won’t ever forget the irresponsible actions of this Administration and Democratic Majority. After all, government answers to the people, not the other way around. I’m asking my colleagues to join me in repealing this monstrosity of a bill.”
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.”
By Michael D. Tanner: The crystal ball is still far too cloudy to predict whether or not Obamacare will pass, but it is not too soon to make some predictions about what the future will look like if it does pass.
The bill will cost more than advertised. It won’t be long before Congress is shocked — shocked! — to discover that health-care reform is going to cost a lot more than expected. It’s not just the budgetary gimmicks that Democrats have been employing to hide the bill’s true cost. It’s also that government programs — and government health-care programs in particular — almost always end up exceeding their cost estimates.
For example, when Medicare was instituted in 1965, it was estimated that the cost of Medicare Part A would be $9 billion by 1990. In actuality, it was seven times higher — $67 billion. Similarly, in 1987, Medicaid’s special hospitals subsidy was projected to cost $100 million annually by 1992, just five years later; it actually cost $11 billion, more than 100 times as much. And in 1988, when Medicare’s home-care benefit was established, the projected cost for 1993 was $4 billion, but the actual cost in 1993 was $10 billion.
Insurance premiums will keep rising. The president has tried to convince people that health-care reform will cut their insurance costs. They are in for a surprise. According to the Congressional Budget Office, insurance premiums will double in the next few years. The bill will do nothing to diminish that increase. In fact, for the millions of Americans who get their insurance through the individual market, rather than from an employer, this bill will raise premiums by 10–13 percent more than if we do nothing. Young and healthy people can expect their premiums to go up even more.
The quality of care will be worse. Doctors’ reimbursements for providing care will be squeezed, making it harder to find a doctor. A new survey in the New England Journal of Medicine reports that 46 percent of doctors may give up their practice in the wake of this bill. While that is probably exaggerated, many doctors will likely decide to reduce their patient loads or retire. At the same time, increased demand will create additional problems.
In Massachusetts, after the passage of Romneycare, the wait to see a primary-care physician increased from 33 to 52 days. Research and development will also be cut back, meaning there will be fewer new drugs and other medical breakthroughs. And the government will increasingly intervene in medical decision making, micromanaging medical decisions and deciding what treatments are most effective or, frighteningly, most cost-effective.
The Left will keep pushing for more. Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s inner censor was clearly on the fritz this week when she said, “Once we kick through this door, there’ll be more legislation to follow.” Faced with rising costs and higher premiums, not to mention millions still uninsured, Democrats will blame the “evil” insurance companies and demand further reform. They will argue that we tried “moderate” reform and failed. Pelosi could no longer keep a lid on what the hard Left has been restraining itself from saying all along: It sees this legislation as the perfect first step in the long march to universal single-payer health care.
Republicans won’t really try to repeal it. Republicans will run this fall on a promise to repeal this deeply unpopular bill, and will likely reap the political advantages of that promise. But in reality there is little chance of their following through. Even if Republicans were to take both houses of Congress, they would still face a presidential veto and a Democratic filibuster.
But more important, once an entitlement is in place, it becomes virtually impossible to take away. The fact that Republicans have been criticizing Obamacare for cutting Medicare shows that they are not really willing to take the heat for cutting people’s benefits once they have them — no matter how unaffordable those benefits are. Paul Ryan put forth a serious plan for entitlement reform — and attracted just six co-sponsors at last count. Enough said.
As Scrooge asked in A Christmas Carol, “Are these the shadows of the things that will be, or are they shadows of things that may be?” By Sunday night, we should know.
While America is distracted by Democrats’ attempts to unconstitutionally ram government-run healthcare down the throats of the American people, the Obama administration began preparing to resume funding to President Obama’s favorite community organizing group.
The fiscal floodgates are opening for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), the president’s former employer and legal client, despite a congressional ban on funding the activist group that has long been a practitioner of election fraud.
In a March 16 memo Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director Peter Orszag quietly ordered federal agencies to resume funding the group whose employees were caught on hidden camera videos last year condoning a variety of crimes including child prostitution and tax evasion.
The memo came a week after renegade federal judge Nina Gershon of the Eastern District of New York made permanent her temporary injunction prohibiting Congress from cutting off funding for ACORN.
The memo also came despite the fact that the Department of Justice is planning to appeal Gershon’s ruling and seek a stay pending appeal.
It’s unclear why the Obama administration isn’t doing the responsible thing and waiting for the case to work its way through the judicial system.
Could the OMB be moving at lightning speed to restore funding for ACORN, which is under indictment in Nevada for election fraud, because ACORN is in dire financial straits? Perhaps it’s a reward for ACORN’s loyal support in the ObamaCare battle.
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.
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 
MOUNT DORA — A doctor who considers the national health-care overhaul to be bad medicine for the country posted a sign on his office door telling patients who voted for 
President Obama’s recently passed health-care reform legislation includes a surprise for many Americans – a beefing up of a U.S. Public Health Service reserve force and expectations that it respond on short notice to “routine public health and emergency response missions,” even involuntarily.
U.S. Representative Michele Bachmann (MN-06) issued the following statement today after introducing legislation to repeal the Democrats’ government takeover of health care:
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.
By Michael D. Tanner: The crystal ball is still far too cloudy to predict whether or not Obamacare will pass, but it is not too soon to make some predictions about what the future will look like if it does pass.
While America is distracted by Democrats’ attempts to unconstitutionally ram government-run healthcare down the throats of the American people, the Obama administration began preparing to resume funding to President Obama’s favorite community organizing group.
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 
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