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The Catastrophe That Is Obamacare
Where The Leftist, Socialist President Is Taking The US
By HERB DENENBERG, The Bulletin
Editor’s note: This column is based on a speech to a town-hall style meeting on Obamacare sponsored by the Republican Committee of Tredyffrin Township, Chester County.
America is faced with the greatest danger in history. That’s because we not only face an external worldwide threat from barbaric, uncivilized Islamic terrorism, but we face an internal threat from our own president and his administration. President Barack Obama, the radical, is slowly wrecking our economy and dismantling our defenses in the war on terror. So we face twin enemies, both foreign and domestic. Here is a piece of that ongoing catastrophe.
To understand Obamacare, you have to see it in the full environment of what’s going on in Washington. Those goings on prove again that liberalism is a mental disorder. How do the liberals save money? After spending trillions on a series of bills including the $787 billion stimulus package, after running up a 10-year deficit of $9 trillion, the Obama administration wants to save more money by spending about $1.5 trillion on a healthcare bill that will add another 46 mill ion to the insured population, and give everyone richer benefits. And with that maneuver Mr. Obama claims to save money on health care and not add to the deficit. Of course, they do that by creating a larger Medicare, even while the existing Medicare is $38 trillion in the red and for all practical purposes bankrupt. They do this knowing that cost estimates on government medical programs are usually only a small fraction of the final costs, and real costs of these government programs may balloon by a factor of 10.
Consider some of their other moves. They want to start up the economy and create new jobs and investments. So what do they do? They try to demonize the investor class that creates jobs, and they put a tax increase on the timetable for them. They should be incentivizing the investor class to start creating jobs and investments; instead they tax and demonize them.
Consider a few other of the standard moves of the liberal Mr. Obama: He wants to investigate the CIA officers who interrogated terrorists, disbar the lawyers who put forward the legal framework for those interrogations, and possibly prosecute those agents and lawyers. While trying to destroy and intimidate our protectors, he wants to give unprecedented rights to terrorists. He is at war with the CIA and seems to embrace the terrorists, as if they were allies.
He bootlicks our enemies and comes down hard on our allies. He doesn’t want to meddle in the affairs of Iran to help the people overthrow their autocra tic, terror-sponsoring oppressors. But he is quick to meddle in the affairs of Israel and force it into a peace agreement with the Palestinians that is a suicide pact for Israel. He is more concerned about Jews building homes in Israel’s settlements than Iranians building nukes.
In order to sell his government takeover of healthcare, he cites the post office and its competition with UPS and FedEx. You would think he’d want to avoid reference to the bankrupt Post Office and its flawed service. But he makes the reference and even repeats it. This suggests he is incompetent, and the apparent fact that his advisors didn’t straighten him out on this matter before his second gaffe, suggests they are also incompetent.
The first stimulus bill failed to create jobs and jump start the economy, so there’s now talk of a second one. Freddie Mae and Fannie Mac almost wrecked the world economy, so we’re now offered a Fannie Mae for healthcare in the form of a public option. National health insurance, socialized medicine, government-controlled medicine, federally centralized medicine, or whatever you want to call it has failed wherever tried so now we seek to follow rather than avoid that approach.
Korea starts aiming missiles at Japan and Iranians have missiles that may soon be armed with nukes and pose a threat to the world. So what does Obama do? He cuts down on our missile defense appropriation. Obama finds money for porn and about every other silly project20you can imagine in the Stimulus bill, but doesn’t want to find money for missile defense and other national defense needs.
We want to be energy independent. So instead of drilling in our offshore oil resources and our mountain-west shale resources, we use taxpayer money to finance drilling offshore in … Brazil. Yes, Virginia, liberalism is a mental disorder.
We may now focus on Obamacare, but this is not just an issue involving Obamacare, because that is only one plank in a program that is running up bankrupting, unsustainable debt, unacceptable infringement on American freedom, dangerous expansion of the federal government, destruction of our Constitutional values, our health care delivery system, and our economy, and weakening our defenses to fight the war on terror and assure our national security.
We should know that when you run up trillions in deficits and debt, and then come forward with another trillion-dollar-plus government takeover of the healthcare system, you’re on a reckless and irresponsible course that will only lead to catastrophe.
The economy and the nation have already been subjected to irreparable damage by the legislation backed by the Democratic Congress and the Democratic President. But as damaging as what’s already happened, Obamacare would even be more damaging, and what’s more and what’s worse, it would be virtually irreversible.
So here are some points to help understand Obamacare and Mr. Obama:
Point One
You’d think Mr. Ob ama would be able to explain Obamacare. But he still deals in generalities and stands on the mush of fancy oratory rather than concrete ideas or legislation. He is selling us a legislative proposal that is just fancy rhetoric floating in the pie in the sky. For example, when he was asked by a student about how Obamacare would maintain a level playing field between the public and private insurance market, Mr. Obama did not point to a specific legislative provision or bill such as HR 3200. That’s because the bills do not guarantee a level playing field (although they use that language, but without specific provisions to back it up). No, in answering, Mr. Obama went into a general discussion of some of the factors that would have to be in a bill to maintain market parity. Consider the significance of that. Here’s a guy who wanted the bill passed before Congress recessed in August. But after Congress recessed, he’s still admitting key parts of the bill are still up in the air floating around in oratorical flourishes, not legislative proposals ripe for action. He’s been selling a bill that doesn’t exist. And like the Democratic Congress, he hasn’t even read the bills that do exist.
Point Two
You’d think Mr. Obama would display understanding of the heath-care system. But his comments in interviews and at town-hall meetings show he doesn’t have the foggiest idea of how the system works. When discussing tonsillectomies and foot amputations, his explanation indicates he th inks the family doctor or family pediatrician (primary doctors) does the surgery, and therefore doesn’t recommend the lowest cost alternative in order to collect a fee for surgery. In fact, such primary care doctors refer patients to surgeons and do not profit from surgery. What’s even more worrisome is that after making the tonsillectomy mistake, he repeated it again in the case of a foot amputation. This shows again he’s not learning from his mistakes and his advisors aren’t competent enough to pick them up.
Point Three
There’s another reason not to listen to Mr. Obama on Obamacare. He is willing to tell any lies that are necessary to sell it. Here are a few of the noteworthy of a long stream of lies. He said he would guarantee (yes, he used the word “guarantee”) that you can keep your own doctors and insurance company if you like them. At the same time, he says he is going to abolish Medicare Advantage to save money. So there are ten million people and policyholders that carry Medicare Advantage policies for starters that can’t keep their insurance. There’s no way he can make that guarantee in the face of a total restructuring of the healthcare delivery system. Furthermore, even supporters of the bill (such as the New York Times) admit there would be a flight from private insurance companies to the public option. And one often-cited Lewin study found 83 million would lose their private insurers. Another lie is that AARP is backing the bill. And then there’s the harping on the sad plight of 46 million uninsured. But that figure includes over 30 million who can afford insurance but don’t want to buy it, who are eligible for programs like Medicaid but simply haven’t gotten around to it, who are young and don’t think they need insurance, or who are illegal immigrants. We could provide the truly uninsured for as little as $28 billion and fix that problem without disrupting the entire system and spending trillions.
My early conclusion is that you can’t believe Obama because he already demonstrated he is a world-class liar. Exhibit One: He sat in the church of the Rev. Jeremiah “God Damn America” Wright for 20 years, closely associated with him, wrote a book with the title taken from one of his sermons, and then with a straight face he claimed he really had no idea Wright was a racist, a bigot, an anti-Semite, and an America-hater.
Of course, it is virtually impossible to pin Obama down. He doesn’t cite specific proposals such as H.R. 3200. He just says we’re not providing taxpayer-financed abortion. But the bills so provide. He spouts off, either telling lies or unaware of the contents of the bill, with little regard to facts. He has the talking disease. He thinks he can say anything and get away with it.
Point Four
Mr. Obama and the Democratic Congress have already demonstrated they can’t be trusted to pass legislation such as the heathcare bills in question. They passed a $787 billion stimulus bill without even reading it. They were out advocating the healthcare bill without even understanding it or for that matter reading it. That is proof enough of reckless irresponsibility that should convince America that this crew can’t be trusted to pass a bill … on anything.
Point Five
The pitch for Obamacare is based on a fallacy, often stated by the president: It’s expensive to fix the health-care system, but inaction is even more expensive. That’s not the issue. The issue is what is the best fix. And it doesn’t make sense to fix what ain’t broken. Fix what is broken. Take care of the low or no-income people who can’t afford insurance. Make insurance policies dependable. But don’t rebuild the skyscraper when only a few floors need remodeling.
Point Six
The healthcare bills are even worse news than you might expect. Take HR 3200, the most discussed House bill, as an example. It is poorly drafted, so it is likely to lead to paralyzing uncertainty and endless litigation. In addition, the bill is bad enough but it provides all kinds of decision-making and rule making in the hands of various commissions, agencies and committees. And you can be sure that under an Obama administration those decisions and rules will be made to reflect the radical leftist views of the Obama administration and its appointees. So there are three levels of uncertainty -- the meaning of the bill, the nature of the litigation that wil l ensue, and the decisions and rules provided for by the bill itself.
Point Seven
The bill is so long and complicated and so poorly drafted that it doesn’t even make sense. Greta van Sustern, an experienced lawyer, who hosts on Fox News, has been reading statutory language during her long and distinguished career. But she says she simply can’t understand the bill.
Point Eight
Beware of advocates on important legislation who want to change the subject or who want to demonize their critics. Obama and the Democratic Party have done both. They want to debate the Town Hall meetings instead of the specifics of the bill. They also want to demonize the critics of Obamacare. They’ve called them mobsters, Nazis, Brown Shirts, wee-weers, Timothy McVeigh (the Oklahoma City federal building bomber) and all the rest. Their Congressional allies are now making demands of information on insurance companies to blackjack and bully them into supporting the bill. Of course, Obama and his people have a long history of improperly trying to silence critics. For example, during the campaign, an Obama critic was to appear on a Chicago radio station. The Obama campaign organized their supporters to flood the station with calls to tie up its phones and to intimidate the station into not airing the critic.
If we’re going to repel this threat to American survival, we need citizens to put pressure on their Congressmen to stop Obamacare and to stop the rest of his radical agenda. We need citizens to take control of Congress away from the radical Democratic Congress and replace it with responsible Republicans. We better wake up, as it is later than you think. The next election may be your last chance. Write you Senator and member of Congress. Call a talk show. And attend tea parties and Town Halls. Americans for Prosperity is sponsoring an anti-Obamacare rally at Independence Hall on Wednesday from 4:30 to 6:30 pm. That was the site of the great July 4, 2009 tea party of the Independence Hall Tea Party Association.
Herb Denenberg can be reached at advocate@thebulletin.us
America is faced with the greatest danger in history. That’s because we not only face an external worldwide threat from barbaric, uncivilized Islamic terrorism, but we face an internal threat from our own president and his administration. President Barack Obama, the radical, is slowly wrecking our economy and dismantling our defenses in the war on terror. So we face twin enemies, both foreign and domestic. Here is a piece of that ongoing catastrophe.
To understand Obamacare, you have to see it in the full environment of what’s going on in Washington. Those goings on prove again that liberalism is a mental disorder. How do the liberals save money? After spending trillions on a series of bills including the $787 billion stimulus package, after running up a 10-year deficit of $9 trillion, the Obama administration wants to save more money by spending about $1.5 trillion on a healthcare bill that will add another 46 mill ion to the insured population, and give everyone richer benefits. And with that maneuver Mr. Obama claims to save money on health care and not add to the deficit. Of course, they do that by creating a larger Medicare, even while the existing Medicare is $38 trillion in the red and for all practical purposes bankrupt. They do this knowing that cost estimates on government medical programs are usually only a small fraction of the final costs, and real costs of these government programs may balloon by a factor of 10.
Consider some of their other moves. They want to start up the economy and create new jobs and investments. So what do they do? They try to demonize the investor class that creates jobs, and they put a tax increase on the timetable for them. They should be incentivizing the investor class to start creating jobs and investments; instead they tax and demonize them.
Consider a few other of the standard moves of the liberal Mr. Obama: He wants to investigate the CIA officers who interrogated terrorists, disbar the lawyers who put forward the legal framework for those interrogations, and possibly prosecute those agents and lawyers. While trying to destroy and intimidate our protectors, he wants to give unprecedented rights to terrorists. He is at war with the CIA and seems to embrace the terrorists, as if they were allies.
He bootlicks our enemies and comes down hard on our allies. He doesn’t want to meddle in the affairs of Iran to help the people overthrow their autocra tic, terror-sponsoring oppressors. But he is quick to meddle in the affairs of Israel and force it into a peace agreement with the Palestinians that is a suicide pact for Israel. He is more concerned about Jews building homes in Israel’s settlements than Iranians building nukes.
In order to sell his government takeover of healthcare, he cites the post office and its competition with UPS and FedEx. You would think he’d want to avoid reference to the bankrupt Post Office and its flawed service. But he makes the reference and even repeats it. This suggests he is incompetent, and the apparent fact that his advisors didn’t straighten him out on this matter before his second gaffe, suggests they are also incompetent.
The first stimulus bill failed to create jobs and jump start the economy, so there’s now talk of a second one. Freddie Mae and Fannie Mac almost wrecked the world economy, so we’re now offered a Fannie Mae for healthcare in the form of a public option. National health insurance, socialized medicine, government-controlled medicine, federally centralized medicine, or whatever you want to call it has failed wherever tried so now we seek to follow rather than avoid that approach.
Korea starts aiming missiles at Japan and Iranians have missiles that may soon be armed with nukes and pose a threat to the world. So what does Obama do? He cuts down on our missile defense appropriation. Obama finds money for porn and about every other silly project20you can imagine in the Stimulus bill, but doesn’t want to find money for missile defense and other national defense needs.
We want to be energy independent. So instead of drilling in our offshore oil resources and our mountain-west shale resources, we use taxpayer money to finance drilling offshore in … Brazil. Yes, Virginia, liberalism is a mental disorder.
We may now focus on Obamacare, but this is not just an issue involving Obamacare, because that is only one plank in a program that is running up bankrupting, unsustainable debt, unacceptable infringement on American freedom, dangerous expansion of the federal government, destruction of our Constitutional values, our health care delivery system, and our economy, and weakening our defenses to fight the war on terror and assure our national security.
We should know that when you run up trillions in deficits and debt, and then come forward with another trillion-dollar-plus government takeover of the healthcare system, you’re on a reckless and irresponsible course that will only lead to catastrophe.
The economy and the nation have already been subjected to irreparable damage by the legislation backed by the Democratic Congress and the Democratic President. But as damaging as what’s already happened, Obamacare would even be more damaging, and what’s more and what’s worse, it would be virtually irreversible.
So here are some points to help understand Obamacare and Mr. Obama:
Point One
You’d think Mr. Ob ama would be able to explain Obamacare. But he still deals in generalities and stands on the mush of fancy oratory rather than concrete ideas or legislation. He is selling us a legislative proposal that is just fancy rhetoric floating in the pie in the sky. For example, when he was asked by a student about how Obamacare would maintain a level playing field between the public and private insurance market, Mr. Obama did not point to a specific legislative provision or bill such as HR 3200. That’s because the bills do not guarantee a level playing field (although they use that language, but without specific provisions to back it up). No, in answering, Mr. Obama went into a general discussion of some of the factors that would have to be in a bill to maintain market parity. Consider the significance of that. Here’s a guy who wanted the bill passed before Congress recessed in August. But after Congress recessed, he’s still admitting key parts of the bill are still up in the air floating around in oratorical flourishes, not legislative proposals ripe for action. He’s been selling a bill that doesn’t exist. And like the Democratic Congress, he hasn’t even read the bills that do exist.
Point Two
You’d think Mr. Obama would display understanding of the heath-care system. But his comments in interviews and at town-hall meetings show he doesn’t have the foggiest idea of how the system works. When discussing tonsillectomies and foot amputations, his explanation indicates he th inks the family doctor or family pediatrician (primary doctors) does the surgery, and therefore doesn’t recommend the lowest cost alternative in order to collect a fee for surgery. In fact, such primary care doctors refer patients to surgeons and do not profit from surgery. What’s even more worrisome is that after making the tonsillectomy mistake, he repeated it again in the case of a foot amputation. This shows again he’s not learning from his mistakes and his advisors aren’t competent enough to pick them up.
Point Three
There’s another reason not to listen to Mr. Obama on Obamacare. He is willing to tell any lies that are necessary to sell it. Here are a few of the noteworthy of a long stream of lies. He said he would guarantee (yes, he used the word “guarantee”) that you can keep your own doctors and insurance company if you like them. At the same time, he says he is going to abolish Medicare Advantage to save money. So there are ten million people and policyholders that carry Medicare Advantage policies for starters that can’t keep their insurance. There’s no way he can make that guarantee in the face of a total restructuring of the healthcare delivery system. Furthermore, even supporters of the bill (such as the New York Times) admit there would be a flight from private insurance companies to the public option. And one often-cited Lewin study found 83 million would lose their private insurers. Another lie is that AARP is backing the bill. And then there’s the harping on the sad plight of 46 million uninsured. But that figure includes over 30 million who can afford insurance but don’t want to buy it, who are eligible for programs like Medicaid but simply haven’t gotten around to it, who are young and don’t think they need insurance, or who are illegal immigrants. We could provide the truly uninsured for as little as $28 billion and fix that problem without disrupting the entire system and spending trillions.
My early conclusion is that you can’t believe Obama because he already demonstrated he is a world-class liar. Exhibit One: He sat in the church of the Rev. Jeremiah “God Damn America” Wright for 20 years, closely associated with him, wrote a book with the title taken from one of his sermons, and then with a straight face he claimed he really had no idea Wright was a racist, a bigot, an anti-Semite, and an America-hater.
Of course, it is virtually impossible to pin Obama down. He doesn’t cite specific proposals such as H.R. 3200. He just says we’re not providing taxpayer-financed abortion. But the bills so provide. He spouts off, either telling lies or unaware of the contents of the bill, with little regard to facts. He has the talking disease. He thinks he can say anything and get away with it.
Point Four
Mr. Obama and the Democratic Congress have already demonstrated they can’t be trusted to pass legislation such as the heathcare bills in question. They passed a $787 billion stimulus bill without even reading it. They were out advocating the healthcare bill without even understanding it or for that matter reading it. That is proof enough of reckless irresponsibility that should convince America that this crew can’t be trusted to pass a bill … on anything.
Point Five
The pitch for Obamacare is based on a fallacy, often stated by the president: It’s expensive to fix the health-care system, but inaction is even more expensive. That’s not the issue. The issue is what is the best fix. And it doesn’t make sense to fix what ain’t broken. Fix what is broken. Take care of the low or no-income people who can’t afford insurance. Make insurance policies dependable. But don’t rebuild the skyscraper when only a few floors need remodeling.
Point Six
The healthcare bills are even worse news than you might expect. Take HR 3200, the most discussed House bill, as an example. It is poorly drafted, so it is likely to lead to paralyzing uncertainty and endless litigation. In addition, the bill is bad enough but it provides all kinds of decision-making and rule making in the hands of various commissions, agencies and committees. And you can be sure that under an Obama administration those decisions and rules will be made to reflect the radical leftist views of the Obama administration and its appointees. So there are three levels of uncertainty -- the meaning of the bill, the nature of the litigation that wil l ensue, and the decisions and rules provided for by the bill itself.
Point Seven
The bill is so long and complicated and so poorly drafted that it doesn’t even make sense. Greta van Sustern, an experienced lawyer, who hosts on Fox News, has been reading statutory language during her long and distinguished career. But she says she simply can’t understand the bill.
Point Eight
Beware of advocates on important legislation who want to change the subject or who want to demonize their critics. Obama and the Democratic Party have done both. They want to debate the Town Hall meetings instead of the specifics of the bill. They also want to demonize the critics of Obamacare. They’ve called them mobsters, Nazis, Brown Shirts, wee-weers, Timothy McVeigh (the Oklahoma City federal building bomber) and all the rest. Their Congressional allies are now making demands of information on insurance companies to blackjack and bully them into supporting the bill. Of course, Obama and his people have a long history of improperly trying to silence critics. For example, during the campaign, an Obama critic was to appear on a Chicago radio station. The Obama campaign organized their supporters to flood the station with calls to tie up its phones and to intimidate the station into not airing the critic.
If we’re going to repel this threat to American survival, we need citizens to put pressure on their Congressmen to stop Obamacare and to stop the rest of his radical agenda. We need citizens to take control of Congress away from the radical Democratic Congress and replace it with responsible Republicans. We better wake up, as it is later than you think. The next election may be your last chance. Write you Senator and member of Congress. Call a talk show. And attend tea parties and Town Halls. Americans for Prosperity is sponsoring an anti-Obamacare rally at Independence Hall on Wednesday from 4:30 to 6:30 pm. That was the site of the great July 4, 2009 tea party of the Independence Hall Tea Party Association.
Herb Denenberg can be reached at advocate@thebulletin.us
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