From Redstate

By Senator Jim DeMint — A defining moment is coming in this year’s health care debate.

Yesterday, Democrat leaders announced they may soon bring Harry Reid’s new health care bill to the Senate floor in an effort to grant the President’s wish for a government takeover of our nation’s health care by Christmas. This is in spite of the fact that 99 senators have never seen Reid’s new bill that was written in secret. Reid even hinted he may rush to a vote before the bill’s been public for 72 hours, as even Democrats have demanded.

To begin debate on this new version of Obamacare, Reid will play a shell game. He needs 60 senators to “vote to proceed” to an unrelated piece of legislation, and once he clears that hurdle he will strike that bill’s text and insert his new health care bill. But don’t be fooled by senators that will say they oppose a government takeover but just wanted to allow debate on health care, they are not being honest.

The simple fact is this: Any senator that votes to proceed to the Reid-Obama bill is voting for a government takeover of health care.

Why? Because, President Obama and Harry Reid cannot pass a government takeover without clearing 60 vote procedural hurdles in the Senate — but they also know that vulnerable Democrats likely cannot win reelection if they vote for this unpopular bill. So they want all Democrats to stick together on the vote to proceed, then some Democrats will vote against final passage of the bill and claim they tried to stop it.

Senators who say they just want to allow for debate are trying to deceive their voters while giving President Obama the crucial votes he needs to pass a government takeover of health care.

Read the rest of the column

From Heritage

by Robert A. Book, Ph.D.

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.

Posted from the National Center for Policy Analysis

All across the country, Members of Congress are facing very angry constituents over the issue of health care. So ferocious has been the response that an estimated two-thirds of the Members are not even going to hold town hall meetings. Reportedly, our elected representatives are shocked.

I don’t know why. At least a month earlier, my colleagues and I at the National Center for Policy Analysis became aware of their anger as we collected more than 1.1 million signatures on the petition http://www.freeourhealthcarenow.com/ and read all their e-mail responses. Where, you wonder, were the politicians as this anger was boiling over? Don’t they have staffers who answer their telephones and open their mail?

Anyway, a great disconnect has emerged. It may be serious enough to cause the Democrats to lose control of the Congress in the next election. How did this happen? I think there are three causes.

 1.       Politicians who don’t know anything about health care.

As I have written before at this blog, almost no one on Capitol Hill understands health care as a complex system. Not only that, but the left wing of the Democratic Party thinks that the answers are simple. After all, other countries appear to have solved a lot of these problems. Why can’t we just copy what they are doing? Like the Hollywood crowd, these politicians think you do not need to understand complex systems in general or economics in particular in order to have strongly held public policy beliefs. These attitudes served them well (they at least got them elected) until it came time to legislate. At this point, technicians at the Congressional Budget Office (who actually do understand something about complex systems) told them their pipe dreams were pipe dreams. So enter the policy wonks.

2.       Policy wonks who do not understand the voters.

Over the past two decades, I have probably participated in several hundred inside-the-Beltway meetings on ways to reform the health care system. One of the almost unquestioned assumptions in all these discussions is that it is right, proper and desirable for the federal government to tell everyone in America what kind of health insurance he/she should have. In fact, most health reform plans are designed so that they won’t work at all if you can’t force people to buy a government-prescribed insurance plan. In these discussions, wonks on the right are almost as bad as wonks on the left. And all are completely out of touch with what ordinary Americans think.

3.       A very deceptive presidential campaign.

During the last election, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and just about everyone else running for president in the Democratic primary made these promises:

a.  Universal coverage (which sounds like helping 47 million Americans
     afford to buy health insurance);

b.  Paid for by taxes on the rich (which means to most people,
     “not me”) and efficiencies gained through preventive care,
     electronic medical records, etc.  (which sounds like “all gain,
     no pain”); and

c.  If you like the health plan you’re in (which 87% of Americans
     do) you can keep it (which sounds like “we’ll leave you alone”).

Most voters liked these messages. At the same time, they didn’t like what Barack Obama said John McCain would do:

a.  Cause millions of Americans to lose their employer coverage
     and be thrown into the individual market where premiums
     would be unaffordably high and people with pre-existing
     conditions would be denied coverage altogether; and

b.  If you are lucky enough to keep your employer plan the
     federal government would tax you.

[Parenthetical note: That McCain responded so ineptly to all this helped Obama win the (election) battle, but caused so much over-confidence it may now cost him the (policy) war. Indeed, I think President Obama has been truly surprised by the strength of the arguments currently being made against his reform plan.]

Now comes the surprise from Capitol Hill: Forget everything we said during the election. We really didn’t mean it after all. In particular:

a.  Whereas the campaign mantra was universal coverage
     (”we’re the only developed country that doesn’t insure
     all its citizens”), that term is almost never heard any 
     more. The clear goal now is to nationalize the health care
     system (”we’re the only country in the world that doesn’t
     have a national system”).

b.  Far from being left alone if you like the plan you are in:

1.  You and your employer are going to be heavily taxed
     if your insurance doesn’t conform to the plan the
    federal government is designing.

2.  You, along with millions of other Americans, may lose
     the plan you like and be pushed into a health insurance
     exchange where the premiums are likely to be higher
     than what you now pay and health plans have
     perverse incentives to underprovide to the seriously
     ill.

3.  Costs cannot be controlled unless we all get less —
     fewer tests, fewer exams, fewer services — with
     Barack Obama’s grandmother’s hip replacement being
     Exhibit A.

c.  Far from escaping the financial burden of reform, it now
    appears that everyone will be burdened — from the
    elderly to the casual consumers of soda pops.

So, should people be angry? I report. You decide.