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The Health Care Thread: Why is Medical Care so Expensive?
Posted July 17th, 2009 by BLACK CELL
Mises Daily by Hans F. Sennholz | Posted on 8/22/2006 12:00:00 AM
Medical expenses are rising faster than the costs of any other service. They are climbing at rates that exceed not only those of inflation and dollar depreciation but even the Federal government itself. In fact, they are consuming an ever larger share of personal and national incomes.
Some 40 years ago American medical spending was estimated at 5 percent of national income; today it is calculated at some 16.5 percent and rising continually. Several reform proposals in Congress would boost the share ever higher.
Many observers offer lucid explanations of the medical-spending explosion. Some are convinced that the present generation of Americans, which enjoys a level of income and living standard higher than that of its forebears, is more mindful of health and wholesome living and, therefore, is spending a larger share of income on health care.
But critics prefer to point to the ever growing number of Americans who are overweight or even obese, which may breed physical disorders and afflictions and finally acquire medical attention. Other observers hold the endless stream of medical innovations responsible for rapidly rising health-care costs, such as new drugs and delicate tools for microsurgery. They lay most of the expense explosion at the feet of technology. But these writers never explain why new drugs and new tools should raise medical costs threefold and consume an ever larger share of national income. Technical innovations usually lower the costs of production.
A few writers believe that the primary reason for rapidly rising costs of health care is a massive expansion of medical insurance which foots doctors and hospital bills. They like to use an inordinate terminology that diverts the reader from the actual causes. They broaden the concept of insurance to encompass Medicare and Medicaid, which are government programs providing medical care for the aged and needy, and then hint at insurance as the driving cost factor.
In reality, the number of Americans with health insurance actually is declining; rising health-care costs and a declining number of employer-sponsored benefits are steadily reducing the number of insured Americans. At the present, some 47 million Americans are bereft of any coverage.
Few observers dare to state that spiraling health-care costs are the inevitable consequence of a 1965 Social Security amendment molding Medicare and Medicaid. It provided a basic welfare program that covers most persons aged 65 and older as well as all needy individuals. Soon after its passage some four million patients rushed to seek treatment and some 18 million Americans registered to have 80 percent of doctor and surgeon bills paid by the new system.
By now, in 2006, Medicare provides health benefits for 41 million elderly and disabled persons, and Medicaid, a joint federal-state program, serves some 50 million poor beneficiaries. It is the fastest-growing item in most state budgets and accounts for some 20 percent of total state spending.
The program undoubtedly has saved lives as it has enabled elderly and poor people to receive medical treatment they were not able to afford on their own. It has raised the quality of living for many. But its sponsors completely ignore some undesirable consequences such as the soaring costs and the rising number of people who therefore choose to forego any health insurance coverage.
Surely, it has saved some lives but also may have cost some. It has doubled, tripled, and quadrupled many phases of the health-care industry but also kept other service industries smaller than they would have been in a free service economy. It has helped administrators of hospitals and extended-care facilities to embark upon substantial expansion and has stimulated development of many home-care services. But there cannot be any doubt that the massive injection of political funds and the growing role of legislators and regulators have radically changed the very nature and structure of the health-care industry.
Medicare and Medicaid are political handiwork forged by legislators and regulators, fashioned by politicians who recast it in every national election. It is a very popular political issue passed and argued about without ever being settled. Politicians representing the beneficiaries are demanding ever more outlays, others speaking and acting for the people who are forced to cover the deficits are opposing the charges. Facing ever rising costs, some want to reduce the cost-of living increases in benefits, others plan to increase the wage subject to payroll taxation. In 2005 the benefit-politicians raised the maximum earnings subject to Social Security tax exactions to $90,000 with the tax rate at 12.4 percent, borne equally by employer and employee. In 2006 they raised the maximum to $94,200; in coming years they will boost it to $100,000 and more.
Medicare and Medicaid stand in the center of attention in every national election as both parties may seek to outbid each other in promising more benefits. In 2003 Congress was persuaded to add prescription drug coverage to Medicare, starting in 2006. Most of its costs, estimated at some $700 billion over the next 10 years, are to be paid by taxpayers. But soaring costs are the least portentous consequences of the transformation of the health-care industry.
Why people can't get work: $22
This academic observer is dismayed and disheartened by the role played by politics in such an important industry. In a free and unhampered economy businessmen always seek to adjust their production to anticipated consumer demand; the wishes and choices of consumers are paramount. When government takes special interest in an industry, political judgments and motives take preference to the people's choices.
When government on all its levels enters health care, the industry has to adjust to every dollar spent and every order given. Surely, there are pains of readjustment but no particular economic crises. People readily accommodate. While they are not free to choose in the market place, they may plead and supplicate in the halls of politics.
Some courageous observers may even point to needless expenditures and waste as every health-care administrator may want to expand and improve his facilities. After all, they no longer are limited by market orders but only by political considerations and favors.
Politics is likely to shape the future of medical care as far as the eye can see. It builds upon popular political ideas, on old habits and predispositions, even resentment and envy. It inflicts pain without end.
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A way to counter Faux's Repugs
If I am not mistaken Sean Insanity promoted the duped health care ad,so it makes sense to counter him by creating a counter ad using the victims of that ad, but specifically pay for time slots, for the counter ad, during his shows.
An ad like that should attempt to influence people by making the point that the viewer or listener should not trust those who are willing to promote that ad. But, I doubt the Democrats have thinkers are savvy enough to use the duped victims to their advantage.
People duped into appearing in health care ads
Aug. 17: Psycho talk: Msnbc's Ed Schultz reacts to the ad "British Health Care System," produced by Conservatives for Patients' Rights. They group told participants they were appearing in a documentary, not an anti-health care reform ad.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22425001/vp/32453317#3245331
What's Hot
Democrats fight for the public option
Aug. 18: Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y., talks about the need for a public option and why the Obama administration is "negotiating against themselves" in the compromise over reform.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22425001/vp/32459067#32459067
Black Cell: Getting blue dogs & Republicans together to talk about compromise is great politics.
Public option killed?
Aug. 17: Rep. Phil Gingrey, R-Ga., and Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tenn., debate whether President Obama's willingness to negotiate on a public option suggests that he is backing down in the battle over health care. Is he just executing the same reform he has endorsed all along?
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22425001/vp/32453041#32453041
Black Cell: The Ronald Reagan portion of this part should be repeated by all reformers in the media to point out how the right misinforms their supporters.
Maddow battles Armey on 'Meet the Press'
Aug. 17: The Huffington Post's Arianna Huffington weighs in on msnbc's Rachel Maddow's heated debate over health care reform with former House Majority Leader Dick Armey on Sund ay's edition of "Meet the Press."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22425001/vp/32454161#32454161
Black Cell: If we want to win this debate, we have to arm democrats who are going on faux news with talking points like these (All the what's hot).
Even though Faux is notorious for finding kiss ups like Juan Williams to tie one had around their backs to make their hosts look good, "We have to tap into their arena, because our rhetoric is superior than theirs."
Faux's style of fighting reminds me of when boxing consisted of one boxer verses a person that was blind folded, or watching a fighter wearing boxing gloves & the other fighter using his bare knuckles.
Faux News is like watching a fixed fight between a cat & a dog, a rooster vs. a hen, or a tall man vs. a disabled midget.
The only way to chance that is to let it be known, & the powers that be within Faux will go out of their way to change it, as long as you continue pointing out how their motive of operandi.
Many of you didn't realize that every time we argued the fairness doctrine in a debate, the Repugs like Hannity started taking calls from others with different perspective, & when the chatter stopped the fairness stopped.
Boehner To Drug Makers: Stop Appeasing Obama
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First Posted: 08-17-09 07:16 PM | Updated: 08-17-09 08:19 PM
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Read More: Health Care, Health Care Reform, John Boehner, Pharma, Politics News
House Republican Leader John Boehner launched an unusually harsh broadside at an estranged GOP ally Monday, ripping the drug industry for siding with President Obama's health care reform proposal.
PhRMA has agreed to trim $80 billion in costs over ten years and support the president in exchange for assurances the White House is not making public.
Republicans on Capitol Hill have been grumbling about the defection of the powerful lobby, which is running vague ads in support of reform. The letter is by leaps the most public stab at the group, which is run by a former top Republican congressman, Billy Tauzin.
"Dear Billy," begins the diatribe. "Appeasement rarely works as a conflict resolution strategy" - an interesting choice of words given the media focus on Nazi symbols at raucous townhall gathering.
Boehner goes on to compare the White House to a schoolyard bully in sympathizing with PhRMA's predicament. "When a bully asks for your lunch money, you may have no choice but to fork it over. But cutting a deal with the bully is a different story, particularly if the 'deal' means helping him steal others' money as the price of protecting your own."
The letter is perversely well timed for PhRMA; the deal with Obama has been the target of sharp criticism from progressives, who accuse the White House of getting snookered by PhRMA and doing so in secret. The attack from the right gives the PhRMA deal a measure of political cover.
But for Boehner, it's the drug makers who got scammed. "Now that the deal is publicly known and would be messy for you to reverse, Big Government is changing the terms. . .because it can," he laments.
Aides to Tauzin, Obama, and Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), who was a party to the deal, didn't immediately return requests for comment.
Story continues below
Elements of the deal with PhRMA have been emerging over the last several weeks. The Huffington Post reported details of a memo outlining the agreement on Thursday -- which the White House and PhRMA rejected as inaccurate -- and the Wall Street Journal advanced the story on Monday.
The Honorable Billy Tauzin
PhRMA
950 F Street NW, Suite 300
Washington, DC 20004
Dear Billy,
Appeasement rarely works as a conflict resolution strategy. This is as true in the arena of policymaking as it is in schoolyards across America. When a bully asks for your lunch money, you may have no choice but to fork it over. But cutting a deal with the bully is a different story, particularly if the "deal" means helping him steal others' money as the price of protecting your own.
The simple truth is, two wrongs don't make a right. And the short-sighted health care deal PhRMA struck with the Obama Administration at your urging provides confirmation of this time-tested maxim on an epic and tragic scale.
The "bully" in this case is Big Government. At your behest, PhRMA has chosen to accommodate a Washington takeover of health care at the expense of the American people in hopes of securing favorable treatment and future profits. It's a short-sighted bargain that leaves your own customers and employees behind. And it now has all the markings of a deal gone sour.
The Obama Administration tacitly acknowledged last week that the President will not be bound by the $80 billion limit PhRMA and its board of directors were led to believe had been secured in exchange for your organization's support of the Administration's health care takeover, and key Democrats in Congress, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Energy & Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA), have said explicitly they will not honor the agreement. In other words, now that the deal is publicly known and would be messy for you to reverse, Big Government is changing the terms. . .because it can. Consequently, the jobs of PhRMA workers are no more secure than they were before, the threat to PhRMA's groundbreaking medical research remains, and the American people - including PhRMA's customers and the families of PhRMA employees - face the prospect of higher costs and reduced quality in health care.
You will inevitably object to this letter and quarrel with its premise. You'll no doubt argue PhRMA has publicly opposed the version of the bill backed by Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). But the simple press release your organization issued objecting to the House bill is dwarfed by the $150 million advertising campaign your organization has launched in support of ObamaCare with the assistance of well-funded political organizations on the Left.
PhRMA would do well to halt this short-sighted, misguided campaign and listen to the American people, rather than continue to collaborate on an effort to spin them.
Republicans across the nation have listened, and here's what we've learned: Americans are frustrated with their government in Washington and skeptical of those who run it. They want health care reform that lowers costs and increases choice - not government-run health care that increases costs and limits options. They want legislation that helps families and small businesses with their problems, not legislation that adds to their problems while empowering an elite few. They're worried about the debt being piled on our children and grandchildren, and they want the spending and borrowing spree in Washington to stop. They want policies that support job creation and protect freedom, not bills that force responsible citizens to subsidize bad behavior from those who insist on being irresponsible.
The millions of American families who are PhRMA customers and the hard-working professionals who work for PhRMA companies deserve better than the government takeover of health care being forced upon them. I urge you to rethink your organization's stance, listen to the American people, and join the call for responsible bipartisan health care solutions that truly reflect their priorities.
Sincerely,
John Boehner
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President Obama's stepmother:
British health care system saved her life
BY JONATHAN LEMIRE
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/us_world/2009/08/17/2009-08-17_prezs_mam...
President Obama got a boost for his health care reform push Sunday from an ally across the pond - his beloved British "Mama."
Kezia Obama, the first wife of the President's father, credits the publicly funded British health care system for saving her life.
Kezia Obama, 66, was on a vacation in Britain seven years ago when her kidneys suddenly failed.
She spent two months recovering in a London hospital thanks to the country's National Heath Service (NHS), she told the News of the World.
"If it wasn't for the NHS," she told the paper, "I wouldn't have been alive to see our family's greatest moment: when Barack became President and was sworn in to the White House."
Kezia Obama, a native of Kenya, became ill while visiting her daughter Auma in England. She believes she would have died had she become sick in the United States because she didn't have the money for necessary medical care.
"I'm humbled to be part of the NHS success story," said Kezia Obama, who said she was compelled to speak out because of the criticism her stepson's health care plan has received.
The NHS provides health care to almost all British residents and the vast majority of services are free. Kezia Obama, who also had a double hip replacement courtesy of the NHS, married Barack Obama Sr.
The couple had four children before Barack Obama Sr. moved to Hawaii and later wed Ann Dunham, who gave birth to the future President.
Kezia Obama, who now lives in Bracknell, England, attended her stepson's inauguration in Washington in January.
jlemire@nydailynews.com
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/us_world/2009/08/17/2009-08-17_prezs_mam...
GOP is killing itself with bogus talk of death panels
Sunday, August 16th 2009, 4:00 AM
The health care reform bill's so-called "death panels" are, of course, nothing but a ridiculous fabrication by Republican fear mongers.
But that the GOP has a death wish is no fabrication; it is as real as it can be.
"I don't understand their tactic," Rep. José Serrano (D-Bronx) told a Spanish-language TV network on the same day Sonia Sotomayor was sworn in as the first Hispanic and the third woman Supreme Court justice.
The congressman was referring to the sorry spectacle of GOP senators who repeatedly shot themselves in the foot during the Sotomayor confirmation hearings.
Asked by the newscaster if he thought the Republicans' behavior during the hearings would be held against them by Latino voters, Serrano, looking puzzled, said: "It was as if they wanted to commit political suicide."
After last November's election, few would deny that many elections will be won or lost on the political strength of minority and immigrant voters.
The Republicans' shenanigans during the Sotomayor hearings - and, even worse, during the health reform debate - have not endeared them to new voters or would-be voters. As a result, they will pay a steep price at the polls.
If anybody has any doubts, newly released Census data underscoring the growing power of ethnic and minority voters, should go far to dispel them.
Last week, the Immigration Policy Center (IPC), the policy arm of the American Immigration Law Foundation, did some fact-checking of Census figures and released a report titled: "Latino and Asian Clout in the Voting Booth." It shows how much the electoral power of racial and ethnic minorities has grown in the last four years.
These are some of the findings:
The number of Latino voters increased by 28.4% (or 2.2million) from 7.6 million in 2004 to 9.8 million in 2008.
The number of Asian voters increased by 21.3% (or 589,000) from 2.8 million in 2004 to 3.4 million in 2008.
The number of black voters increased by 15.1% (or 2.1 million) from 14 million in 2004 to 16.1 million in 2008.
In contrast, the number of non-Latino white voters increased by 0.5%, or 475,000 - from 99.6 million in 2004 to 100 million in 2008.
"At a time when the U.S. has elected its first African-American President, appointed its first Latina Supreme Court justice, and started down the road to comprehensive reform of our broken immigration system, this data should serve as a demographic wakeup call to politicians," the IPC pointedly said in a written statement.
They should have awakened last November, though, when minority and immigrant voters went to the polls in record numbers.
In New York, 715,000 new voters registered between January and November of last year, 200,000 of them in the two weeks leading up to the national election. Many were African-Americans or Latinos.
"Immigrants account for nearly a quarter of the state's gross economic output, or $229 billion," said Chung-Wha Hong, executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition. "We also came out in force in the 2008 election, making up a significant segment of new voters revitalizing our democracy."
This trend is expected not only to continue but to gain momentum.
As the new Census figures make clear, alienating minority and immigrant voters - especially Hispanics - is not a very smart political strategy. Actually, it is a surefire way for the GOP to become the minority party for the foreseeable future.
Puzzling as it may be, the Republican death wish is as real as the health reform bill "death panels" are false.
aruiz@nydailynews.com
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2009/08/16/2009-08-16_gop_is_killing...
=)
Watch Republican Senator Richard Shelby get his hat handed to him on Faux News
http://www.foxnews.com/video/index.html?playerId=011008&streamingFormat=...
Glenn Beck and American Healthcare’s Amazing 16-month Comeback
by Joey deVilla on August 14, 2009
What a difference 16 months makes! (And wow, does the Daily Show have an amazing video archivist!)
Last night, the Daily Show did the public a great service by airing two clips. The first was from January 2008 featuring faux journalist Glenn Beck talking about how terrible the care he received at the hospital it was and how it reflected the sad state of the American healthcare system. In true Beck-ian fashion, his piece was called Beck from the Dead.
The second clip is from May 2009. Sixteen months later, the American healthcare system has become, in Beck’s own words, “the best in the world”. Now that the Socialist Kenyan Usurper is driving a movement to bring universal healthcare to the United States – the only industrialized nation in the world that doesn’t provide it to its citizens – it’s now the best system in the world, which the lefties are trying to dismantle. It’s quite impressive how it went from terrible to “best in the world” in so little time.
You really have to watch the clip to see Beck say one thing and then say the exact opposite thing afterwards, with the same fire and conviction. If you’re in Canada, you can watch the clip on the Comedy Network’s site; if you’re in the U.S. the Daily Show site has the clip.
It’s ironic that a show that purports to be a comedy show that just comments on current events is doing a better job of telling the truth than a network that purports to tell you the truth but ends up doing unintentional black humour.
Gawker sums up Glenn Beck perfectly in a couple of paragraphs:
This should serve as yet another bright, shining example of how much of an utter fraud Beck is. You gotta give the guy some credit though — he’s a charlatan’s charlatan, a near-perfect modern television bullshit artist who fully understands how the slightest glance, vocal inflection, or codeword can plant a seed deep down inside of a feeble mind and germinate.
But still, it’s hard not to watch this clip and come away feeling that he’s an even bigger piece of shit than you probably thought he was previously, because it’s just so goddamn obvious that the man will do or say anything to dig his hook even deeper into the sad dolts who tune into to his show each day seeking guidance.
Wanted
Wanted: Obama healthcare reform volunteers willing to be paid $15 an hour
Honey Cone - Want Ads 1970
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2cQ47VVzU0
Wanted: Obama healthcare reform volunteers willing to be paid $15 an hour
August 13, 2009 | 5:18 am
It seems that, despite all the media attention lavished on e-mail appeals to his supporters, not everyone pushing for President Obama's embattled healthcare reform plan these warm August days is an idealistic volunteer in it for the sake of helping move the country forward and gaining medical attention for millions of uninsured Americans.
The website's large-type headline announces: "Work to Pass Obama's Healthcare Plan and Get Paid to Do it! $10-15 hr!"
It's a web ad on Craigslist: "You can work for change. Join motivated staff around the country working to make change happen. You can make great friends and money along the way. Earn $400-$600 a week."
So both sides appear to have paid lobbyists in this colossal summertime struggle for public opinion and control of the multi-billions flowing into the nation's burdened healthcare system.
The ad links to the Boston-based Fund for the Public Interest, an umbrella organization that rounds up people to round up support, money and signatures for all kinds of campaigns, including healthcare reform and the environment.
It's hiring and assigning canvassers to work in at least 28 states, including California, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Oregon, Massachusetts, Minnesota and New Jersey.
"Now is our chance to make health care work," says the ad to recruit recruiters in support for the president's proposals. "America’s health care system is broken. Health care costs are spiraling out of control, throwing families, businesses and government into financial crisis.
"Families are worried their health coverage won’t be there when they need it. Our country can’t afford to wait for health reform that keeps costs down and protects consumers"
It sounds much like the president at one of his healthcare town halls; (next stops, Montana and Colorado). "We’re fighting for healthcare that will protect families’ financial health, lay out a clear path for all Americans to afford healthcare, and improve patient safety and quality care.
"Help make change happen," pleads the advertisement. "If you're good with people and feel passionately about the environment and human rights, you'll make money working for the Fund."
Sounds like an ideal kind of idealism, the profitable kind.
Political Chess: Defeating The Tea Baggers
“A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes”
Mark Twain
Now that President Obama has the bull by the horns, all he & his team has to do is use the boxing technique that I have been describing to undermine the strategy to scare the elderly that I first herd come from Bill Morris.If applied properly, this is strategy will also defeat phony centrists like chuck grassly in the next election.
Unconventional guest at human rights celebration
Aug. 14: Ms. Information: Rachel Maddow reports how the Republicans voted for what they call "death panels" in the 2003 Medicare Proscription Drug Bill.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22425001/vp/32424553#32424553
It is time for Pres.Obama to use his bully pulpit to launch an even agressive offensive in support of a public option, like he did in his town hall in Montana Friday. We should also use the Tea Party protestors, who don't support moderate Republicans, to create chaos for our cause.
Lets start with the latter, the Tea Party movement. The base to that movement consist of disgruntled conservatives who still buy into the old weak federal government rhetoric that many of the founders. Here, let Wiki Answers make my point:
Q:Why did Americans want a weak federal government?
A:What were the positive and negative consequences of a weak national government?
First of all, the states did not originally intend to create one nation as is apparent when they called themselves a "league of friendship". By having a weak national government they could remain separate states while maintaining good relations with each other and the rest of the world. Some form of central government was also necessary to win the war, but that did not mean it needed to be a strong one that could turn around and abuse the powers it was given. A weak government cannot abuse powers not given, and thus there would be no repeat of the colonist's experience with British rule. Also the colonists feared that some states would dominate in a national government and majority tyranny would result through representation, expenses, and territorial claims. The supporters of such a weak government thought that, theoretically, if most power was left to the states, classical republican society could continue to flourish throughout the nation because governmental communities would remain smaller and more personalized.
Many of the founders realized that government will eventually corrupt and end ( Greece, Britain). Perhaps by having a weak central government they would prevent great corruption and if the government did become corrupt it could only affect the states and the people to a small extent. However this did not turn out as planned.
By taking it to such an extreme they found that the national government could not perform even the simplest of tasks. They could not tax; thus, they could not look out for national finances and debt. They also had neither money nor authority to create a national defense system. Without the money it required, it also could not pay soldiers for their time in the Revolutionary War, leading to debt for many soldiers and eventually to Shays' Rebellion.
A weak national government may be able to make agreements with foreign nations but in the case of the Article of Confederation, it could not force the states to comply, causing other nations to refuse to trade. A weak national government practically cannot regulate anything of importance, including trade or laws made.
This creates conflict throughout the states over import/export taxes, ruins the economy, and prevents important national laws from being obeyed. This weak government also gave state governments too much power to do what they wanted. In the case of the Articles of Confederation the government was nothing more than a thin farce designed to make the states look like a legitimate government while actually doing no good to unite them in the least.
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Why_did_Americans_want_a_weak_federal_governme...
The leaders of today's Tea Party should be given a platform to market their hypocritical propaganda so they can be challenged & their power margenalized, or they will be successful at uniting the Republican base to defeat "ALL DEMOCRATIC PARTY LEGISLATURES," that means you too Blue Dogs.
"The Blue Dogs agenda should be fiscal responsibility in order to garner moderate Republican voters support; not pandering to conservative Republicans who will NEVER vote for a Democrats."
They, as well as, we know that the American people want the two political parties to work together to solve Americans problems, but it wont work if one party is diametrically apposed to the federal government being used to solve problems, & that is the message we should be using to defeat the conservative protesters rhetoric. Let's not ignore their voices on cable TV, or they will be just as successful as the Net-roots has been in the next election.
We have already defined their movement, now we have to allow their leaders make our point by forcing them to answer the tough questions without allowing them spin like a certain host from the This Week & CNN.
If the Tea Party leaders are afraid to defend their perspectives on national TV, they will have earned the right to be completely discredited.
There are many ways to accomplish that goal; here is one example:
Did Republicans flip flop on health care?
Aug. 14: Rep. John Culberson, R-Texas, joins Hardball guest host Lawrence O'Donnell to talk about Republicans such as Sarah Palin who supported end of life counseling before opposing it as "death panels."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22425001/vp/32422533#32422533
Q: Why is it important to confront & defeat the Tea Party leaders?
A: They are the reason why the two political parties can't work together, & they will eventually unite & give the U.S. more of what we despised about G.W. Bu$h, because a movement that despises the federal government will run run the government inefficient.
We are now taking back control of the debate, & if they continue forcing the conservatives to defend their voting records on health care reform & keep the Tea Party leaders to defend their extremist & their out dated philosophies, their base will start getting frustrated with their leaders & centrist supporters will consider them too radical.
What they don't want to do is allow the Republicans to water down a health care reform bill & then make up any excuse to vote against the bill, because that is their agenda.
I can easily tell that the Repugs have been verbally wounded because they are now trying to convince their base that the U.S. needs some form of health care reform.
Our side has been wounded as well, becuase we are being forced to compromise & accept the co-opts. But, we should not compromise on what the Repubs are calling death panels, because we should be using that lie to further discredit their candidates up coming campaign, & Faux News' wrong wingers, "Never let the voters forget that lie.
Finally, I hear that the President will be getting together with some religious leaders to garner support for his cuase; I believe he should market / advertise that meeting like Faux News advertised the original Tea Party protes.
The build up to that gathering should create a debate that will allow us to positition ourselves in ways that will clear up many of the lies, "I don't believe that an honest paster would promote the right-wing lies, because most of their churches are filled voters from both parties." I aslo believe Jesus was an advocate for the poor, so I dare the white-wing suppose to be Christ-likers to attempt to undermine Him in the public square.
Here's one:
Proverbs 22: 8-27
8 He that asoweth iniquity shall breap vanity: and the rod of his anger shall fail.
9 He that hath a bountiful eye shall be blessed; for he giveth of his abread to the bpoor.
10 Cast out the scorner, and acontention shall go out; yea, bstrife and reproach shall cease.
11 He that loveth pureness of heart, for the grace of his lips the king shall be his friend.
12 The eyes of the Lord preserve knowledge, and he overthroweth the words of the transgressor.
13 The slothful man saith, There is a lion without, I shall be slain in the streets.
14 The mouth of astrange women is a deep pit: he that is abhorred of the Lord shall fall therein.
15 Foolishness is bound in the heart of a child; but the rod of correction shall drive it far from him.
16 He that aoppresseth the poor to increase his briches, and he that giveth to the rich, shall surely come to want.
17 Bow down thine ear, and hear the words of the wise, and apply thine heart unto my knowledge.
18 For it is a pleasant thing if thou keep them within thee; they shall withal be fitted in thy lips.
19 That thy trust may be in the Lord, I have made known to thee this day, even to thee.
20 Have not I written to thee excellent things in counsels and knowledge,
21 That I might make thee know the certainty of the awords of truth; that thou mightest answer the words of truth to them that send unto thee?
22 Rob not the apoor, because he is poor: neither oppress the afflicted in the gate:
23 For the Lord will aplead their bcause, and spoil the soul of those that spoiled them.
24 Make no afriendship with an bangry man; and with a furious man thou shalt not go:
25 Lest thou learn his ways, and get a snare to thy soul.
26 Be not thou one of them that astrike hands, or of them that are bsureties for debts.
27 If thou hast nothing to pay, why should he take away thy bed from under thee?
What's Hot
Remember the boxer anology.
Even they don't believe what they're saying
Aug. 13: Rachel Maddow talks about the prominent Republicans have suddenly sudden reversed their positions on the role of the government in end-of-life matters from what they argued in the case of Teri Schiavo.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22425001/vp/32411068#32411068
What would Jesus do about health care?
Aug. 13: Msnbc's Ed Schultz talks with Bishop Harry Jackson and Rev. Derrick Harkins about how Christian leaders are viewing the debate about health care and a public option.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22425001/vp/32409460#32409460
Hannity town hall
Here is a panel of 14 repubs & 15 Dems. This panel explains why Dems are falling in the polls, "It's because you are cowering to Repugs."
There is old saying where I from, "A scared man can't win." It is the American way
http://www.foxnews.com/video/index.html?playerId=011008&streamingFormat=...
Republican Death Trip
Removing the phony death panels give legitimacy to the claim, thus takes away our ability to use the health care debate to our advantage in the next election. It also makes it more difficult for us to discredit Faux News; they will take credit for removing death panels from a good health care bill.
With that said, the Blue dogs are undermining their own reelection by following the lead of their puppet masters in the insurance industry, they are using you to unite the conservative base against you.
If they don't like the moderate John McCain, what makes you think the will vote for a moderate Democrat.
The role that their health ins. Donors played in getting them elected doesn't compare to the roles that we played,so don't fool yourselves blue dogs.
*********************************
August 14, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Republican Death Trip
By PAUL KRUGMAN
“I am in this race because I don’t want to see us spend the next year re-fighting the Washington battles of the 1990s. I don’t want to pit Blue America against Red America; I want to lead a United States of America.” So declared Barack Obama in November 2007, making the case that Democrats should nominate him, rather than one of his rivals, because he could free the nation from the bitter partisanship of the past.
Some of us were skeptical. A couple of months after Mr. Obama gave that speech, I warned that his vision of a “different kind of politics” was a vain hope, that any Democrat who made it to the White House would face “an unending procession of wild charges and fake scandals, dutifully given credence by major media organizations that somehow can’t bring themselves to declare the accusations unequivocally false.”
So, how’s it going?
Sure enough, President Obama is now facing the same kind of opposition that President Bill Clinton had to deal with: an enraged right that denies the legitimacy of his presidency, that eagerly seizes on every wild rumor manufactured by the right-wing media complex.
This opposition cannot be appeased. Some pundits claim that Mr. Obama has polarized the country by following too liberal an agenda. But the truth is that the attacks on the president have no relationship to anything he is actually doing or proposing.
Right now, the charge that’s gaining the most traction is the claim that health care reform will create “death panels” (in Sarah Palin’s words) that will shuffle the elderly and others off to an early grave. It’s a complete fabrication, of course. The provision requiring that Medicare pay for voluntary end-of-life counseling was introduced by Senator Johnny Isakson, Republican — yes, Republican — of Georgia, who says that it’s “nuts” to claim that it has anything to do with euthanasia.
And not long ago, some of the most enthusiastic peddlers of the euthanasia smear, including Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, and Mrs. Palin herself, were all for “advance directives” for medical care in the event that you are incapacitated or comatose. That’s exactly what was being proposed — and has now, in the face of all the hysteria, been dropped from the bill.
Yet the smear continues to spread. And as the example of Mr. Gingrich shows, it’s not a fringe phenomenon: Senior G.O.P. figures, including so-called moderates, have endorsed the lie.
Senator Chuck Grassley, Republican of Iowa, is one of these supposed moderates. I’m not sure where his centrist reputation comes from — he did, after all, compare critics of the Bush tax cuts to Hitler. But in any case, his role in the health care debate has been flat-out despicable.
Last week, Mr. Grassley claimed that his colleague Ted Kennedy’s brain tumor wouldn’t have been treated properly in other countries because they prefer to “spend money on people who can contribute more to the economy.” This week, he told an audience that “you have every right to fear,” that we “should not have a government-run plan to decide when to pull the plug on grandma.”
Again, that’s what a supposedly centrist Republican, a member of the Gang of Six trying to devise a bipartisan health plan, sounds like.
So much, then, for Mr. Obama’s dream of moving beyond divisive politics. The truth is that the factors that made politics so ugly in the Clinton years — the paranoia of a significant minority of Americans and the cynical willingness of leading Republicans to cater to that paranoia — are as strong as ever. In fact, the situation may be even worse than it was in the 1990s because the collapse of the Bush administration has left the G.O.P. with no real leaders other than Rush Limbaugh.
The question now is how Mr. Obama will deal with the death of his postpartisan dream.
So far, at least, the Obama administration’s response to the outpouring of hate on the right has had a deer-in-the-headlights quality. It’s as if officials still can’t wrap their minds around the fact that things like this can happen to people who aren’t named Clinton, as if they keep expecting the nonsense to just go away.
What, then, should Mr. Obama do? It would certainly help if he gave clearer and more concise explanations of his health care plan. To be fair, he’s gotten much better at that over the past couple of weeks.
What’s still missing, however, is a sense of passion and outrage — passion for the goal of ensuring that every American gets the health care he or she needs, outrage at the lies and fear-mongering that are being used to block that goal.
So can Mr. Obama, who can be so eloquent when delivering a message of uplift, rise to the challenge of unreasoning, unappeasable opposition? Only time will tell.
David Brooks is off today.
Playing Offense: Redefine Rationed Health Care
If you ever watched a boxing match you will notice that if a boxer hits his opponent in the eye, cut & swell it up, that boxer will continue trying to expand that wound.
Some one drew blood when he said that we already have rationed health care when insurance companies refuse to pay for certain medication or refuse cover people because of pre existing health problems.
We have to fight like that boxer who cuts & swell his opponents eye by aggressively attempting to end the fight by forcing the Repugs & their supporters to defend Deans blow.
"I dare a Repub to claim that health insurance providers are not giving rationed health care with limits on their costumers."
Boom!! More offesnse
http://abcnews.go.com/video/playerIndex?id=8287268
DEAN: Well, look, this is something Newt and I agree on. I don't want somebody in between the doctor and the patient. I don't want the possibility of losing your health insurance. I don't want people setting standards or denying care. That's all what we have now under the private health insurance system. That's what happens.
Look, I've practiced -- I've practiced for 10 years. My wife is still practicing. Never once did I have a Medicare bureaucrat tell me what I could or couldn't do for a patient, but all the time we have bureaucrats from the insurance companies calling up and saying, "We're not going to cover this, and we're not going to pay for that, and we're denying coverage of that."
The system we have right now is broken. We need to fix it. I think giving the American people some choices about how to fix it makes sense.
Here is another one:
If you don't like the Dems plan then what?
That question shoud be asked, with consistancy to all of the Repubs & their supporter.
Playing Offense: Redefine Rationed Health Care
If you ever watched a boxing match you will notice that if a boxer hits his opponent in the eye, cut & swell it up, that boxer will continue trying to expand that wound.
Howard Dean drew blood when he said that we already have rationed health care when insurance companies refuse to pay for certain medication or refuse cover people because of pre existing health problems.
We have to fight like that boxer who cuts & swell his opponents eye by aggressively attempting to end the fight by forcing the Repugs & their supporters to defend Deans blow.
"I dare a Repub to claim that health insurance providers are not giving rationed health care with limits on their costumers.
Whaaaat!! Free health care will create more jobs.
Is there gold in the medical hills?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRLGya_tzkg
Who will invest in the new hospitals?
Will recruitment for students in the medical field go up?
Will health care providers get more customers when it is mandated that all businesses to purchase health care?
We already know that change is always met with resistance; meet the resistance movement.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xa35q9_dnc-web-ad-enough-of-the-mob_new...
REAL WORLD: Fascinating piece from The New York Times’ Jennifer Steinhauer about what happens when doctors offer up free health care: “They came for new teeth mostly, but also for blood pressure checks, mammograms, immunizations and acupuncture for pain. Neighboring South Los Angeles is a place where health care is scarce, and so when it was offered nearby, word got around. For the second day in a row, thousands of people lined up on Wednesday — starting after midnight and snaking into the early hours — for free dental, medical and vision services, courtesy of a nonprofit group that more typically provides mobile health care for the rural poor.
Remember this
My Response to Kyle-Anne Shiver
On May 12th, 2009 BLACK CELL said:
What I have learned from years of studying the conseravative movement is that they use this type of propaganda to cnvince their supporters to fight fire with fire.
This is how it works:
They say the civil rights movement is a small group of people that uses its power to control the media on issues concerning racism. Their supporters believe they should beat them at their own game. So, when their leaders (Rush & cronies) see something they don't like in, for example the MSM, they talk about it on their shows, & their core supporters harass the news paper editor like the supporters of Jessie Jackson & the NAACP use to do when they recognize social injustices.
******************************************
Defeating Political Ridicule
On May 17th, 2009 BLACK CELL said:
By Kyle-Anne Shiver
May 15, 2009
The fourth rule of tactics: Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules. You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.
The fourth rule carries within it the fifth rule: Ridicule is man's most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.
- Saul Alinsky; Rules for Radicals; 1971; p. 128
Now, I'm not certain whether Bill O'Reilly is pulling our leg here, as he ruminates over whether the politics of ridicule being employed nearly nonstop by our new President's administration is intentional or not. O'Reilly seems way too smart to think that a whole staff of folks just somehow have Alinsky-styled ridicule down pat, polished to a perfect t, with every "i" dotted, as though they all popped yesterday from a political Big Bang.
Nevertheless, I've been working for the past year on solid methods to defeat this politics of ridicule - the tactics advocated by Saul Alinsky to every 60s radical that ever burned a draft card or a bra, or vowed to smash monogamy or made a nail bomb. These are the tactics that laid the foundation for the vast Alinsky-originated community organizations from coast to coast. Although some may think of Obama's movement and his victorious administration in terms of a political Big Bang, there is a much more design paradigm, which I prefer.
I'm of the old skeptic school myself, generally believing that whenever something looks too good to be true, it most likely is. And that whenever something appears orchestrated and perfected among many, there is a plan at work behind the scenes.
It was Barack Obama himself, not I, nor anyone else, who claimed -- often -- that his community organizing with the Alinsky-designed DCP in Chicago was the "best education" he ever had. It was Barack Obama who touted his work with ACORN's Project Vote. It was Barack Obama himself who taught Alinsky Power Tactics at the University of Chicago. And it has been Barack Obama himself, who adopted whole-hog Alinsky's "Ideology of Change" and all of its slogans.
When Michelle Obama gave her speech at the Democratic National Convention last August, she used a direct Alinsky quote, saying that hearing Barack speak of changing "the world as it is" into the "world as it should be," were the magic words that so endeared him to her.
"What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be."
- Saul Alinsky; Rules for Radicals; p. 3.
Case closed. The politics of ridicule, which have infected our national discourse for the past 40 years were designed by admirer of Lucifer, hijacker of Christian jargon for power purpose, ends-justify-all-means father of community organizing, Saul Alinsky. Barack Obama's best education came from him, not Harvard. And this Administration daily employs Alinsky Ridicule on steroids.
Day in, day out, 24/7, the American people are treated to bully, gang-style ridicule. Most of it aimed at conservatives and the GOP, of course, for now.
But make no mistake: anyone who stands in defiance of this Administration's policies will be ridiculed without mercy.
How Ridicule Works
"Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me."
Saying taught by wise mothers to kindergartners
Yes, it's a pretty darned sad sight when grown men and women indulge in playground bully tactics that are as old as the hills. That's all ridicule is. It's the thing a bully and his little gang of half-witted followers use to get their way without ever having to actually pull a real punch. And wise mothers have been teaching their smart kids how to defeat this low-blow tactic for eons.
But to defeat the tactic of ridicule, it's helpful to remember how it works.
The bully's intention, of course, is to get a rise or a bucket of tears out of his victim. The bully's intention, whether on a playground or in an older gang, is always the same. Taunt the victim until he finally cracks and explodes with anger or throws the first punch, and then sit back and watch the self-destruction. Goad the target with taunts, which are intentionally aimed at the victim's soft spots.
The bully listens and watches carefully. He's trained himself to spot weakness, to search out his victim's vulnerabilities.
At the playground age, vulnerabilities tend to be physical anomalies. In adolescence, bullies move towards picking out weaknesses in sexual appeal. In adulthood, they move towards the things Alinsky talks about in his books, a person's moral code or a group's racial makeup or the age-old standby, a group's religion.
But as Alinsky notes himself, ridicule alone is a losing game. It isn't the ridicule that rises victorious in a political war. No, that's just the temptation put out on the table, exactly the way tempters have done it since that little episode in the ancient Garden.
The key to defeating any tempter, whether on a playground or on a political stage, is simple. Do not take the bait. No matter how much one is goaded and bullied and laughed at and ridiculed, the only answer to the temptation is to refuse it.
Alinsky made a living off his own background as an unattractive, smaller-than-average child, forced to bear the brunt of neighborhood bullies. Sanford D. Horwitt, Alinsky's biographer, spends dozens of pages describing young Saul's difficult childhood, where he was a veritable outcast. What made his own shortcomings even more potent fodder for the bully class was the fact that his father had left his mother and wasn't there to help the little boy figure out how to be a man of strong character. Even worse than this was the fact that his mother was an in-your-face, overbearing shrew of a woman that struck fear into the hearts of everyone in her vicinity.
Horwitt relates how young Saul's mother would keep an eye on her little boy -- the chubby, not-great-to-look-at kid without a Dad in residence -- as he played with neighborhood kids in the street. Whenever the group would light into Saul, his mother would raise the window and scream at the other children, always rushing to his defense, and inevitably crushing his own power to save himself. Alinsky's mother had such a vicious mouth that she struck fear in the hearts of even the adults in the neighborhood.
And Saul absorbed these awful childhood lessons, quite to America's detriment. Powerless to protect himself from ridicule, seeing his mother's inflamed response, which only served to heighten his tormenters' resolve, he internalized what he later described in Rules for Radicals as "man's most potent weapon," ridicule.
What is the key to ridicule's success, according to Alinsky?
"...it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage."
As he witnessed his mother's infuriated response to the bullies attacking him, he became the observant bystander. What did he see?
Act I: Bullies gang up on Saul and taunt him for being short, chubby, not athletic, whatever.
Act II: Mother takes the bait and gets into the game, screaming at the boys for hurting little Saul.
Act III: The boys react to Mother from the safety of the street and the protection of their numbers, by intensifying the bully tactics.
Act IV: Mother becomes so infuriated and out of control that she finally screams threats and near-obscenities at the little boys, who have just magnificently played the adult for a real fool. Mother is in complete disarray; the boys stroll off down the street laughing victoriously.
Saul Alinsky later used this very play for the foundation of his politics of ridicule, specifying that the strength is not in the ridicule. The strength of ridicule is always, every single time, the "enemy's reaction."
In his childhood play, Mother was the enemy engaged by the ridiculing youth. As soon as the children gathered and began taunting little Saul, Mother appeared at the window like clockwork. Mother's reaction emboldened and added great worth to the bullies. They got to see her emotional meltdown every single time.
"The enemy properly goaded and guided in his reaction will be your major strength," wrote Saul Alinsky in his own middle-age.
Defeating Ridicule Is As Simple as 2 + 2
When the Democratic Party is employing an age-old playground tactic, perfected in adolescence, the key to stopping it is easy as pie.
This ain't hard, folks. Every real grown-up learned this in grade school.
Whether dressed in Armani or playground garb, ridicule is child's play.
I suppose that when overgrown adolescents, who're all in adult bodies, use it, though, it does throw the normal adult a curve. It's the kind of behavior with which adults have grown rusty at coping. Nevertheless, ridicule in adult politics should never, ever be allowed to triumph, as it is now.
The temptation to jump into the fray with both feet in one's mouth is certainly understandable, but is not advisable.
Here is my 3-step formula for stopping ridicule in its tracks. I have tried this with great success with every over-grown adolescent I've encountered. It works especially well with my liberal friends, most of whom are now conservative converts.
Step One: Properly recognize the ridicule tactic when it is employed.
The most easily-spotted ridicule tactic is name calling. "You're a disgusting homophobe." "You're a racist." "You're an idiot." "You're a poor-people-hating rich person." "You're a homophobe."
The second most easily-spotted ridicule tactic is what psychologists call, "projection." The ridiculer assumes that you, his rhetorical enemy, possess the same moral code as he and that you have the same defects as he does. Since human nature never changes, and there simply are no new sins, some of what the projecting opponent spouts may ring true, and this is the bait. If a person says something like, "Your side lies," odds are that he is right, at least to a certain extent. I've yet to meet a person who would swear that he has never told a single lie.
But this is a potent trap. It's a generality without specifics and it distracts from the real issue at hand. The intended victim, recognizing a grain of truth in the projector's argument, becomes defensive, which delights the ridiculer.
Step Two: No matter how sweet-sounding, how cutesy humorous or how viciously personal the ridicule, the intended victim's victory is in refusing to take the bait.
Ridicule is stopped in its tracks by the strong-willed, wise person, who simply ignores it and moves the debate to the higher ground where real adults discuss matters of importance. Reason trumps ridicule every single time.
If the ridicule is especially deleterious, then it is possible to retort, "Now, why do you want to be this vicious? Why can't we talk about this like real grown-ups?"
It helps to sound especially sweet when saying this; think Scarlet O'Hara.
Actually, though, I can see John Wayne saying something similar without the batting eyelashes.
Real strength has no need to stoop to nastiness. Ever.
Step 3: In political debate, the expert ridiculer is constantly attempting to draw his opponent into a defensive posture on the ridiculer's ground. It's a rhetorical trick, a sleight of hand performed with one's mouth.
And the way to defeat it lies not in defensive statements that attempt to argue the point raised by the ridiculer. Defensive statements, trying to refute the ridiculer's taunt, simply reinforce his claim.
Ridicule should disgrace its perpetrator, not you. And the object is to do exactly that. Do not take the bait. Ignore it completely, give a knowing little laugh if you like, but move back up to your own ground of reason immediately.
At all costs, remain calm; ridicule is an emotional tactic aimed at causing you to replace reason with uncontrolled passion. But use powerful language of courage. There is absolutely nothing to be gained by giving the proverbial inch in your argument as you prepare to give up the mile, which will be goaded out of you next.
It's possible to deflect ridicule with a reverse taunt, perfectly aimed, such as, "Now, you know that's a pile of poppycock." But reverse taunts must be delivered with delicate care to diffuse emotions with geniality, not enflame them.
Every single time a conservative takes any of this intentionally inflammatory bait and attempts to defend against it, the ridicule simply becomes more intense. Why? Because as the father of political ridicule Saul Alinsky explained himself, the strength lies not in the ridicule, but in "the enemy's reaction." The goal is to make you lose your cool and self-destruct.
Of course, these are the same kinds of tactics employed by the precocious child against his parents, whenever he wants something they will not give him. If that thing is the $500 pair of Wacky-brand-of-the-month athletic shoes, then the parent is assailed as a stingy tightwad who does not love his own child as much as all the other parents love their children. If that thing is a later curfew, then the parent is assailed as the most old-fashioned, untrusting, stick-in-the-mud tyrant that ever gave birth to offspring.
These tacky little tricks are as old as the hills and twice as predictable.
And the adult who gives airtime to adolescent ridicule is the fool that tops all others.
The keys to victory:
Refuse the temptation to defend yourself; defense takes the bait.
Remain calm and in control of all emotions.
Laugh-off the ridiculer's attempt at goading.
Speak the truth of your own convictions with courage, boldness and forthright frankness.
If, and when, you do change your mind about some issue, then put it out there in candid fashion, outlining the precise reasons behind your change in position.
But never, ever, ever, ever, ever give an inch to the devilish lure of ridicule.
As Democrats have become the Party of Pernicious Ridicule, the GOP must be the ever-stalwart Party of Reason.
Reason resonates in the minds of men and women; ridicule is child's play
Bingo
Fun for all ages, you can play at home
Health Care Bingo
http://i297.photobucket.com/albums/mm206/WayneinWAState/THBingo.jpg?t=12...
Brain washed
I just called my father to tell him a fact check report was on ABC news. My father is a senior on medicare. I said "Dad, it's on ABC-it's kind of a "normal" report". He says "Oh no, Hannity is having a fact check on tonight, I'm going to watch that for the REAL report." I think I should just give up now. You would not believe the crap he forwards me from other seniors all caught up on the dysinformation highway--it's sad and pathetc at the same time----and it makes me angry that the big boys would deceive this old folks like they do. Any suggestions?
There are some old sayings applicable here.
Hi Gail. Consider these old chestnuts.
There are none so blind as those who refuse to see.
or
Why bother discovering the facts when you already know the truth.
Ask your father why he doesn't get rid of his socialistic medicare. It is intruding upon his freedom even though he is able to go to any doctor he likes. Or is he so stupid and hypocritical that he likes his own government run health care program but just wants to deny it to others in need?
See if you can just get him to stop watching wingnut TV and listening to wingnut talk radio for a while until his brain cells can recover from all of the poison they have been subjected to for all of these years.
InsHannity indeed.
Hi Gailwind
There is an old saying: If your opponent is making a fool out of his or herself, get out of the way & let them.
"If the Dems pass a good health care reform bill, keep a record of all the major repugs & the lies that they told, we can affectively use the info to discredit them starting next summer as a campaign strategy."
Ask your dad. "Will he continue to trust Hannity once we prove him wrong like we have already done with the bailouts & stimulus?"
Democrats tend to get so happy when things work out for the best that they seem to not use the repugs proven misinformation to discredit them.
The Repug leaders & media gave us Bu$h, yet they have more credibility than the so called liberal media, because they know the power of being redundant. "We tend to allow our best ideas to play out with the news cycle."
Remember when we forced Bu$h to change the course in Iraq back in 2006? NO, because won that election.
***********************************************
October 24, 2006
Bush Abandons Phrase ‘Stay the Course’ on Iraq
By JIM RUTENBERG and DAVID S. CLOUD
WASHINGTON, Oct. 23 — The White House said Monday that President Bush was no longer using the phrase “stay the course” when speaking about the Iraq war, in a new effort to emphasize flexibility in the face of some of the bloodiest violence there since the 2003 invasion.
“He stopped using it,” said Tony Snow, the White House press secretary. “It left the wrong impression about what was going on and it allowed critics to say, ‘Well, here’s an administration that’s just embarked upon a policy and not looking at what the situation is,’ when, in fact, it is the opposite.”
Mr. Bush used the slogan in a stump speech on Aug. 31, but has not repeated it for some time. Still, Mr. Snow’s pronouncement was a stark example of the complicated line the White House is walking this election year in trying to tag Democrats as wanting to “cut and run” from Iraq, without itself appearing wedded to unsuccessful tactics there.
Democrats have increasingly pressed a case this fall contending that Republicans are stubbornly proposing to “stay the course” in a failing effort to stanch violence in Iraq. Strategists in both parties consider the Democrats’ approach to have been fairly successful, especially as violence has continued to mount in Baghdad.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/24/world/middleeast/24policy.html?pagewan...
...YEAH, HUH, WHAT ???
Laden-"Time to shine
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzJsriEQY8w
Glenn Beck
The horror of eugenics happened; what can we learn from that mistake? Take a look in this extended length video from the Tuesday, Aug 11 airing of Glenn Beck on Fox News...
http://www.foxnews.com/video/index.html?playerId=011008&streamingFormat=...
The Best of Both Worlds
The Rebubs want their cake & eat it while they do everything they can to undermine health care reform.
They should be forced to defend their amendments to the health care bills, & I am not talking about bipartisanship; this is about them trying to have the best of both worlds.
****************************************************
From NBC's Domenico Montanaro
Sen. Johnny Isakson isn't taking too kindly to being mentioned by President Obama at his town hall today.
Isakson's office sent out a hot press release with the screaming headline: "Isakson Denounces White House Comments Connecting Him To Terribly Flawed House Health Care Bill."
Isakson, in an interview with the Washington Post's Ezra Klein, denounced Palin's assertion that there was a provision on "death panels," as "nuts."
So what gives?
Isakson takes issue, it appears, with Obama connecting him to the HOUSE version. He pushed for a similar amendment in the SENATE. He said in his release "he strongly opposed the House bill language calling for doctors to follow a government-mandated list of topics to discuss with patients during the counseling sessions."
That's certainly a difference in tone than what he told Klein.
Here's what he told Klein, followed by his press release and Obama's comments at the town hall:
How did this become a question of euthanasia?
I have no idea. I understand -- and you have to check this out -- I just had a phone call where someone said Sarah Palin's web site had talked about the House bill having death panels on it where people would be euthanized. How someone could take an end of life directive or a living will as that is nuts. You're putting the authority in the individual rather than the government. I don't know how that got so mixed up.
You're saying that this is not a question of government. It's for individuals.
It empowers you to be able to make decisions at a difficult time rather than having the government making them for you.
The policy here as I understand it is that Medicare would cover a counseling session with your doctor on end-of-life options.
Correct. And it's a voluntary deal.
Isakson's release:
U.S. Senator Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., today denounced comments made by President Obama and his spokesman regarding Isakson’s alleged connection to language contained in the House health care bill on “end-of-life counseling.”
Isakson vehemently opposes the House and Senate health care bills and he played no role in drafting language added to the House bill by House Democrats calling for the government to incentivize doctors by offering them money to conduct “end-of-life counseling” with Medicare patients every five years. Isakson also strongly opposed the House bill language calling for doctors to follow a government-mandated list of topics to discuss with patients during the counseling sessions.
By contrast, Isakson took a very different approach in July during the Senate HELP Committee hearings on the Senate version of the health care bill. Isakson’s amendment to the Senate bill says that anyone who participates in the long-term care benefit provided in the bill – if they so choose – may use that benefit to obtain assistance in formulating their own living will and durable power of attorney.
Isakson’s amendment, which was accepted unanimously by all Republicans and Democrats on the Senate HELP Committee, empowers the individual to make their own choices on these critical issues, rather than the government incentivizing doctors to conduct counseling on government-mandated topics. Isakson ultimately voted against the Senate health care bill.
“This is what happens when the President and members of Congress don’t read the bills. The White House and others are merely attempting to deflect attention from the intense negativity caused by their unpopular policies. I never consulted with the White House in this process and had no role whatsoever in the House Democrats’ bill. I categorically oppose the House bill and find it incredulous that the White House and others would use my amendment as a scapegoat for their misguided policies,” Isakson said. “My Senate amendment simply puts health care choices back in the hands of the individual and allows them to consider if they so choose a living will or durable power of attorney. The House provision is merely another ill-advised attempt at more government mandates, more government intrusion, and more government involvement in what should be an individual choice.”
Here's what Obama said today:
It turns out that I guess this arose out of a provision in one of the House bills that allowed Medicare to reimburse people for consultations about end-of-life care, setting up living wills, the availability of hospice, et cetera. So the intention of the members of Congress was to give people more information so that they could handle issues of end-of-life care when they're ready, on their own terms. It wasn't forcing anybody to do anything. This is I guess where the rumor came from.
The irony is that actually one of the chief sponsors of this bill originally was a Republican -- then House member, now senator, named Johnny Isakson from Georgia -- who very sensibly thought this is something that would expand people's options. And somehow it's gotten spun into this idea of "death panels." I am not in favor of that. So just I want to -- (applause.) I want to clear the air here.
Now, in fairness, the underlying argument I think has to be addressed, and that is people's concern that if we are reforming the health care system to make it more efficient, which I think we have to do, the concern is that somehow that will mean rationing of care, right? -- that somehow some government bureaucrat out there will be saying, well, you can't have this test or you can't have this procedure because some bean-counter decides that this is not a good way to use our health care dollars. And this is a legitimate concern, so I just want to address this.
Sen. Chuck Grassley isn't
Sen. Chuck Grassley isn't the only Repub that is playing the phony bipartisan game in Washington & on national TV.
Since it is their political strategy to be like the camel's nose under the tent, we should use them to our advantage by marketing their support for the bills & then force them to respond in their typical ways by playing both sides of the fence.
Once the repug fall into the trap, consistently challenge them by questioning their intent.
If president Obama continue to market their support or amendments to our bills, the repug base will continue to whip them. All we have to do is use it to our advantage.
To be continued
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At town halls, Grassley retreats
By: Lisa Lerer
August 12, 2009 11:18 PM EST
West Des Moines–In a series of tough town hall meetings on Wednesday, Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley defended his work drafting a controversial health care bill, but also seemed to distance himself from the legislation.
“I weren’t doing that the last four or five months I could sit around with my feet up on my desk,” he told a packed meeting in Winterset, Iowa. “You hire me to keep on top of things and I guess I’m a person that believes you are going to be on top of things if you are in the room instead of outside the room.”
Grassley, one of a handful of Republicans working with Democrats to draft a health care proposal, stressed that he would oppose any bill with a government-run plan in it, describing the government as a “predator.”
“Maybe you think well Chuck Grassley is up with that too,” he said. “so let me tell you right out I would not vote for the Kennedy bill [and] I would not vote for the Pelosi bill.”
Later in the afternoon, Grassley highlighted votes against government funds for the auto companies, the nearly $800 billion stimulus bill, and the budget.
“I’d sure hate to be holding these town meetings if I hadn’t voted that way,” he told a crowd gathered in an Afton, Iowa church.
Although Grassley’s meetings were tame compared to the outrage faced by some of his colleagues like Pennsylvania Democrat Arlen Specter, the moderate Republican faced some sharp opposition to the health care proposals.
“I’m a dumb Southern Iowan redneck,” said Patricia Nicolas. “I see nowhere in the Constitution where health care is a right.”
The shouts of the crowd quickly quieted down after someone in the audience shouted “Be polite!”
Grassley attributed the civil tone to Iowans' familiarity with town hall meetings. He’s held 2,846 town hall meetings since coming to Congress in 1981, but he noted that the four he held on Wednesday drew unusually large crowds – particularly for a day when temperatures soared well into the 90s.
“There’s three times as many people coming to my town hall meetings than came in the last ten years on average,” said Grassley.
“Wait until 2010,” shouted a member of the audience.
A later afternoon meeting in Adel, Iowa had to be moved outside to accommodate a crowd of roughly 500 voters.
Unlike some other prominent Republicans, Grassley refused to refute claims that the legislation includes a provision allowing the government to determine when older Americans end their lives. The rumor, often mentioned in town halls across the country, gained momentum after former Alaska GOP Gov. Sarah Palin warned the Democratic plan would create bureaucratic "death panels."
“There are some people who think it is a terrible problem that grandma is laying in a bed with tubes in her, and that the government should intervene,” he said. “I think that’s a family or religious thing that needs to be dealt with.”
Cheri Heiland, a questioner at a town hall in Panora, Iowa asked Grassley to "denounce the tactics that are getting thrown at the Democrats."
"You know there is nothing in the House bill that will require any elderly person to stand before a committee and decide whether or not they are going to live or die," she chided, as the roughly 200-person crowded booed.
Grassley's answer sidestepped the issue, adding fire to already raging rumors.
"With all the other fears people have and what they do in England then you get the idea that somebody is going to decide grandma lived too long," said Grassley. "You understand why you get it."
What's Hot
Health care reform opponent plays Hardball
Aug. 12: Katy Abrams, a questioner who voiced strong concerns about America's future at Sen. Arlen Specter's Tuesday town hall meeting, discusses her bold questions with Hardball guest host Lawrence O'Donnell.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22425001/vp/32393616#32393616
'Death panel' rumors refuse to die
Sen. Linda Murkowski respond to death panel rumors.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22425001/vp/32395454#32395454
Democratic Congressman David Scott Displays The Racist Hate Mail He Has Received
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeWUTP6Uhko
An Al Bore Awards Winner
Linda Douglass, the Director of Communications, should make the rounds on Faux News.
IMHO, she has been doing such a great job of playing defense that I believe she can go into the Repug snake pits & win the debate.
Democracy vs. Representative Republic
Bill O'Silly is claiming that their \ Faux news' high ratings is because they are giving their viewers honest & balanced reporting...LIE!!
YOU DON'T WANT TO ALLOW THEIR MISINFORMATION CAMPAIGN TO PREVIAL OR...
If the Dems DON'T pass a health care reform bill, "They wont win the next election." But, if they pass a bill that proves the wing nuts wrong, it will further discredit the Faux types.
If the Dems pay for & expand Medicare & Medicaid to cover the people who they seek to cover, along with reforming private health insurance to benifit the consumers & the investers, "You will prevail."
A great health care reform bill should also create more jobs in the medical profession.
Victory will only come when you do what is fair for all the concerned factions ... forget about the repugs, because they are done.
P.S .... Creating all sorts of new jobs surrounding health care is the equivalence of Pres. Bill Clinton creating new jobs around the tech industry.
P.S.S. Just say no to adware, spyware & trojans.
The photo opt.
Pres. Obama should sit down with the leaders in the health insurance industry & talk with them about how he can help them provide health insurance at a lower rate & make a profit.
Once the private meeting is successful, he should schedule a round table with the same leaders for the world to watch.
GREED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
and more greed!!
Town Hall Sabotage
Right-Wing Harassment Strategy Against Dems Detailed In Memo: ‘Yell,’ ‘Stand Up And Shout Out,’ ‘Rattle Him’
http://thinkprogress.org/2009/07/31/recess-harassment-m... /
This morning, Politico reported that Democratic members of Congress are increasingly being harassed by “angry, sign-carrying mobs and disruptive behavior” at local town halls. For example, in one incident, right-wing protesters surrounded Rep. Tim Bishop (D-NY) and forced police officers to have to escort him to his car for safety.
This growing phenomenon is often marked by violence and absurdity. Recently, right-wing demonstrators hung Rep. Frank Kratovil (D-MD) in effigy outside of his office. Missing from the reporting of these stories is the fact that much of these protests are coordinated by public relations firms and lobbyists who have a stake in opposing President Obama’s reforms.
The lobbyist-run groups Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks, which orchestrated the anti-Obama tea parties earlier this year, are now pursuing an aggressive strategy to create an image of mass public opposition to health care and clean energy reform. A leaked memo from Bob MacGuffie, a volunteer with the FreedomWorks website Tea Party Patriots, details how members should be infiltrating town halls and harassing Democratic members of Congress:
– Artificially Inflate Your Numbers: “Spread out in the hall and try to be in the front half. The objective is to put the Rep on the defensive with your questions and follow-up. The Rep should be made to feel that a majority, and if not, a significant portion of at least the audience, opposes the socialist agenda of Washington.”
– Be Disruptive Early And Often: “You need to rock-the-boat early in the Rep’s presentation, Watch for an opportunity to yell out and challenge the Rep’s statements early.”
– Try To “Rattle Him,” Not Have An Intelligent Debate: “The goal is to rattle him, get him off his prepared script and agenda. If he says something outrageous, stand up and shout out and sit right back down. Look for these opportunities before he even takes questions.”
The memo above also resembles the talking points being distributed by FreedomWorks for pushing an anti-health reform assault all summer. Patients United, a front group maintained by Americans for Prosperity, is currently busing people all over the country for more protests against Democratic members. Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX), chairman of the NRCC, has endorsed the strategy, telling the Politico the days of civil town halls are now “over.”
Meanwhile, AHIP, the trade group and lobbying juggernaut representing the health insurance industry is sending staffers to monitor town halls and other right-wing front groups are stepping up their ad campaign to smear reform efforts. The strategy for defeating reform — recently outlined by an influential lobbyist to the Hill newspaper as “delay” then “kill” — is becoming apparent. By delaying a vote until after the August recess, lobbyists are now seizing upon recess town halls as opportunities to ambush lawmakers and fool them into believing there is wide opposition to reform.
Your roots are showing
Are Liberal Netroots Groups Helping Obama Fail?
I've started deleting them as spam.
I'm not talking about the enlarge-your-penis emails or "You've Won the Lottery" notices. I'm talking about the increasingly urgent emails coming for weeks from liberal netroots groups calling for a "public option" for health care - a government insurance plan citizens could choose to PAY FOR instead of private insurance.
Never has so much passion been so misdirected. If what these liberal groups ultimately wanted out of President Obama and corporate-funded Democrats in Congress was a topnotch public plan to compete with the first-rate private plans, the wrong way to get it was to make that THE demand. Especially of a president whose instinct is toward conciliation and splitting the difference with big business and the right wing.
Sure, Obama was a community organizer once. That was decades ago when Russia was still our mortal enemy, Nelson Mandela was still an official State Department terrorist threat and the White House was still funding Islamist fanatics in Afghanistan.
For the last dozen years Obama has been a politician - and a consummate compromiser at that. Have we failed to notice?
Activists must recognize the surest way to get a strong public option that could compete with the Cadillac of health plans. We needed to mobilize millions of netroots people, almost every union and 150 members of Congress to endorse a maximum demand: National health insurance ... enhanced Medicare for All. In other words, a cost-effective, single-payer system of publicly financed, privately delivered health care that ends private health insurance (and its waste, bureaucracy, ads, sales commissions, lavish executive salaries, profiteering).
Had liberal groups sent out millions of emails building a movement that posed an existential threat to the health insurance industry, Senator Baucus and Blue Dog Democrats and their corporate health care patrons might well be on their knees begging for a comprehensive public option - to avert the threat of full-blown Medicare for All.
As things stand now, as writers like Bob Kuttner and Norman Solomon have warned, a weak public option would institutionalize a two-tiered system with healthier, wealthier citizens getting the best (private) plans, and sicker, harder-to-treat people getting an inferior (public) plan. Newt Gingrich couldn't dream up a better scenario to discredit an enhanced government role in health care.
To win serous reforms, we need activist leaders who are tough-minded progressives making maximum demands for reforms that truly address our nation's problems. Leave the inside-the-Beltway deal-making to the politicians, properly frightened and moved by the roar of mass movements.
We need activist leaders who have a clearer idea of who Obama is. He's not one of us. He's one of them - a politician bent on placating corporate interests. We knew all we needed to know about his current world view from all the corporatists he put in top jobs. And from the fact that he felt the need - six weeks into his administration, after the middle-class bailed out Wall Street - to call up The New York Times and assure the world that his policies were NOT socialist but were "entirely consistent with free market principles." At a time the corporate greedsters and free-market ideologues had been exposed as having threatened the economic well-being of the world, they weren't the ones on the defensive. They weren't doing the apologizing. Obama was on the defensive; he was apologizing to them!
When Democratic leaders start borrowing right-wing rhetoric, we know our activism has not been strong or progressive enough. At the AARP town hall on Tuesday, Obama described a public option as "controversial, I understand people are worried about that." He went on to assure his audience that "nobody is talking about ... government-run health care" or "a Canadian-style plan." At one point, he further assured seniors that no "bureaucratic law in Washington" would interfere in their health care decisions - seeming to adopt the faux populism of anti-government rightists. Yet, he seems incapable of anti-corporate populism, even with despised industries like Wall Street and health insurance.
I have huge respect for the smart young activists who built up the netroots, unleashing all sorts of progressive possibilities for our country. But I'm bothered by their often ineffectual, Beltway-originated, halfway demands.
I became active during the Vietnam War. We might still have troops in Vietnam if - instead of militantly demanding "All Troops Home Now" - we'd organized behind polite Beltway initiatives like: "Let's begin negotiations" or "Let's set a timeline for phased withdrawal."
I fear that netroots leaders are doing the same dance with Obama today that they did with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid in 2007 to 2008. Instead of demanding that Democrats in Congress bring our troops home by using the power of the purse to defund the war, netroots leaders rallied behind weak, nonbinding timelines and other halfway measures cooked up with Congressional leaders.
Without a loud, clear demand for "troops home" from the huge online, out-of-Iraq forces, Democratic leaders started retreating and succumbing to Republican rhetoric. Reid proclaimed: "We will never abandon our troops in a time of war." Pelosi declared, "We will have legislation to fund the troops!"
And the corpses kept piling up.
Great social reforms have occurred in our country not when social movements took their lead from what the White House deemed possible, but when the White House was pushed by powerful movements demanding reforms bolder than what the president was comfortable with. Leading abolitionists pushed Lincoln toward ending slavery by demanding immediate abolition. Socialists' and workers' movements in the '30s sufficiently scared elites so that FDR could pass New Deal reforms far short of socialism. Martin Luther King and civil rights activists continuously pushed and prodded JFK and later LBJ.
And these movements didn't have the Internet.
In 1993, a National Health Insurance bill gained 100 co-sponsors in the Democrat-led House, plus endorsements from many unions, even Consumers Union. There was, unfortunately, no Internet then when the Clinton White House undermined this growing movement by proposing an incredibly complex plan that left big insurers dominating the system. Clinton's plan inspired few and confused many. After it went down in flames, talk radio host Jim Hightower asked President Clinton why he didn't back an easily-explained Medicare for All approach that had so much support in Congress. Clinton said he'd thought it was politically too difficult, but now wondered about that judgment.
Here we are 16 years later. Neglected by large netroots groups, John Conyers today has 85 House co-sponsors for HR 676, the Expanded Medicare for All Act , as well as the endorsement of many unions and Obama's longtime personal physician. If all those emails I've received lately had been about building the HR 676 movement and a public system instead of a "public option," the bill would have many more co-sponsors and could be pressuring Democrats to stand tough today.
For Obama to feel secure about reform and standing up to the right, he needs to feel that he's in the center pushed by noisy forces to his left. He's admitted as much. The way to help him succeed is to mobilize seriously to his left.
The way to help Obama fail is for netroots and liberal groups to collapse toward him from the get-go.
And if Obama does fail, we can quit laughing at a Republican Party in disarray due to Bush, religious extremism, hypocrisy and anti-intellectualism.
Because, in this period of crisis and fear, unless a progressively-prodded White House delivers reforms that actually improve lives soon, right-wing reaction could rebound more dangerous than ever in 2010 and/or 2012.
http://www.truthout.org/073009A
Rush Limbaugh
This is Rush Limbaugh looking desperate in an interview on Fox News.
http://www.foxnews.com/video/index.html?playerId=videolandingpage&stream...
THE RIGHT WING LIES
Our Lies, Half-Truth and Contradictions B.S. detector returnswith an installment to coincide with President Obama's prime time news conference Wednesday. And there's plenty in the rhetoric around health care to trip our LHC trigger.
We'll start with a Republican National Committee online ad released Wednesday called "Reforma." Pretty funny spoof of a Viagra-type, soft-focus ad for "Reforma," aka the health-care plan.
But the LHC are in the post-script (mocking the list of "Not recommended" contraindications at the end of one of those dude drug commercials.) But this litany of "Not recommended's" are full of GOP talking points designed to scare folks out of supporting a health care measure. Like:
"Not recommended if you like your own doctor, want to keep your own doctor, or want to avoid the government prescribing your medical treatments."
Not true. While Congress is still working through the health care legislation, there is general agreement that if you want to keep your own insurance, you can. Private insurance will not be outlawed.
The ad says "You should not support President Obama's Reforma if you're worried about the $1.6 trillion cost or the $219 billion dollar deficit."
Again, not true. The bill is expensive -- but not THAT expensive. It would cost a little over $1 trillion, according to the Congressional Budget Office estimate.
Here's a nonpartisan, side-by-side analysis of the plans out there from the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Here's the RNC ad:
Reforma
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CyZhOirPTU&feature
Posted By: Joe Garofoli (Email) | July 22 2009 at 05:48 PM
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/nov05election/detail?blogid=14&entry...
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Achieving comprehensive health reform has emerged as a leading priority of the President and Congress. President Obama has outlined eight principles for health reform, seeking to address not only the 45 million people who lack health insurance, but also rising health care costs and lack of quality. In Congress, a number of comprehensive reform proposals have been announced as the debate begins over how to overhaul the health care system.
This interactive side-by-side compares the leading comprehensive reform proposals across a number of key characteristics and plan components. Included in this side-by-side are proposals for moving toward universal coverage that have been put forward by the President and Members of Congress. In an effort to capture the most important proposals, we have included those that have been formally introduced as legislation as well as those that have been offered as principles or in White Paper form. This side-by-side will be regularly updated to reflect changes in the proposals and to incorporate major new proposals as they are announced.
Information updated 7/17/09
http://www.kff.org/healthreform/sidebyside.cfm
Canadians happy with primary health care, study says
A large-scale survey finds that most Canadians have high praise for their family doctor
Marina Jiménez
Thursday, Jul. 23, 2009 06:47PM EDT
The largest survey on primary health care ever conducted in Canada found that most people have high praise for their family doctor, and a staggering 92 per cent would recommend their physician to a relative or friend.
Canadians – except those living in Nunavut – have excellent access to primary health care: 85 per cent of people aged 12 and older have a regular doctor, and two thirds have been seeing the same doctor for five years or more, according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) study, released yesterday.
“I feel darn good that 92 per cent of Canadians would recommend their family doctor to a friend. That is the litmus test,” said Sharon Johnston, a family physician and University of Ottawa professor.
Very few Canadians complained about not having a family doctor – despite the oft-repeated grievance about a shortage of physicians in some parts of the country.
The report is being released just as the Canadian health-care system is coming under increased scrutiny south of the border. President Barack Obama is attempting to reform the U.S. system with a $1-trillion initiative that would bring health care to 47 million Americans who lack coverage. His opponents have complained about the spiralling cost of his proposed overhaul, and pointed to alleged shortcomings in Canada's health-care system.
Trish McAlaster/The Globe and Mail
However, the CIHI report identifies only one area for improvement in primary health care, which otherwise receives high marks for its accessibility and quality.
The report found small gaps in the management of the 40 per cent of Canadians who have chronic health conditions, including diabetes, heart disease, arthritis, emphysema and cancer.
Forty per cent of those with chronic illnesses reported they have no long-term treatment plan. Fewer than one quarter of these patients receive written instructions from their family doctor about how to manage their disease. Though this is not a clinical requirement, it is increasingly recognized as an important part of care.
The study also found that while most of these patients get the clinically recommended annual checks for blood pressure, blood sugar, weight and cholesterol, a small number said they do not.
This gap in care may lead to unnecessary hospitalizations and emergency-ward visits as people's diseases progress more rapidly than they need to.
“There are a lot of positive findings in this study,” noted Greg Webster, CIHI's director of primary health-care information. “But gaps in primary health-care access, continuity and quality can lead to poorer health for patients and increased demand for hospital-based services.”
Studies show that a treatment plan, including written instructions about medications, diet and exercise, may help patients manage a chronic disease, he added.
The study is based on 11,000 respondents to a 2008 household-based survey and excludes those living on first nations reserves. It is important to note that it is based on patients' memories, which aren't always 100 per cent accurate.
Primary-care physicians deal with everything from chronic disease to mental health, maternity and child care, end-of-life care and common ailments such as flu.
The study found that 95 per cent of Canadians with chronic health conditions had a regular place of care, either a family doctor, or community health centre.
Two thirds of Canadians said their doctor allows them enough time to discuss their fears and concerns about their health.
More than 54 per cent of those surveyed required ongoing medical care within the past year. Of those, only 13 per cent experienced difficulties getting an appointment or contacting a doctor. Most were able to see a doctor within seven days.
Of the patients with diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure or history of stroke, 25 per cent said they didn't have their weight checked on an annual basis. One fifth said their cholesterol or blood sugar wasn't monitored, while 8 per cent reported not having their blood pressure measured.
“Even a small gap translates into complications,” noted Mr. Webster. “We also have an aging population so a lot of people are affected by chronic disease.” Diabetics, for example, have an elevated risk of developing heart and kidney disease, so monitoring their condition is key.
The concept of patient self-management is relatively new, say experts, and will take time to be fully implemented. Not all doctors feel comfortable raising lifestyle changes the day they diagnose a patient with diabetes or heart disease. And not all patients are prepared to check their blood sugar level, or change their diet and start exercising.
“Supporting patients to manage their own health is a paradigm shift. It requires a change in training and in the patient-doctor understanding,” said Dr. Johnston. “We are working at it slowly.”
Studies show that involving patients in their own care can save the system money, and lead to better outcomes. People with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease who are taught how to manage their illness have fewer hospital admissions, for example. Counselling patients about risky behaviours, including smoking cessation, can also stop premature death and illness.
Dr. Johnston said she was heartened by the study's many optimistic findings, including the relatively short wait times. Eighty-five per cent of adults requiring immediate care for a minor problem were seen within a day.
This is the first national study of its kind to analyze patients' expectations of primary care. It found that Canadians identified continuity, co-ordination, patient-centred care, satisfaction, outcomes and interpersonal communication as important features of the primary health-care system.
Canadian Straw Man
July 17, 2009
More ads claim that Congress is pushing a Canadian-style health care bill.
Summary
Two ads from related independent groups make claims about an overhaul of the health care system, saying Congress wants a government-run health care system:
One ad claims that “Washington wants to bring Canadian-style health care to the U.S.” But the health care bills moving through Congress don’t call for a single-payer system like Canada’s, and legislation that does support a purely government-run system is quietly dying in committee. Obama, too, has said repeatedly that he doesn’t back a conversion to a single-payer system.
Another ad, targeting specific members of the Senate, similarly claims that “Congress is rushing to take over health care.” It says that a government health insurance option would cause “tens of millions” to move from their current insurance to a government plan. That claim is on the mark, according to one study, which found that millions would move from private insurance to a much cheaper government option.
Analysis
We've written before about conservatives claiming that Congress, or Obama, or Washington, or Democrats in general want the U.S. to have a Canadian-style, government-run health care system. The truth of the matter is that the president has repeatedly said he doesn't. In fact, since being sworn in as president, Obama has riled advocates of such single-payer systems by largely excluding them from the health care debate. He has answered several questions from members of the public who asked at town hall events: "why not" have such a system. Sen. Max Baucus of Montana, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and one of the leaders in drafting legislation, has said bluntly: "single-payer is not going to get even to first base in Congress." Yet, the Canada claims continue.
In an ad airing (for the third time this year) on national cable channels, a group called Patients United Now says that "Washington wants to bring Canadian-style health care to the U.S." The group's back-up for the claim? An opinion piece that we previously found to be riddled with errors; an article from CQ.com that says the National Institutes of Health will fund comparative effectiveness research studies that examine cost – which, the article notes, the NIH already does; and another news article in the San Francisco Chronicle that reported conservatives have criticized such research, saying it leads to "rationing," while proponents have said it will improve health care and reduce costs.
Patients United Now: "Survived"
Shona Holmes: I survived a brain tumor. But if I’d relied on my government, I’d be dead. I’m a Canadian citizen. As my brain tumor got worse, my government health care system told me I had to wait six months to see a specialist. In six months, I would have died.
Announcer: Government runs health care in Canada. Care is delayed – or denied. Some patients wait a year for vital surgeries – delays that can be deadly. Many drugs and treatments aren’t available– because government says patients aren’t worth it.
Holmes: I’m here today because I was able to travel to the US, where I received world-class treatment. Government health care isn’t the answer. And it sure isn’t free.
Announcer: Now, Washington wants to bring Canadian-style health care to the US. Government should never come between your family and your doctor. Learn more at PatientsUnitedNow.org.
Holmes: My advice to Americans?
As patients, it’s your care. Don’t give up your rights.
As we've said before, the stimulus legislation, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, called for the creation of a council that would coordinate and support comparative effectiveness research, which examines which medical drugs and treatments are most effective, and in some cases, most cost-effective. The government has funded such studies since the late '70s. In this chart of research funding, the NIH estimates it will have spent $50 million on "cost effectiveness research" each year from 2007 to 2010.
To be sure, the cost factor prompts critics to say the research will lead to the government, or perhaps insurance companies, denying certain medical procedures based on cost alone. Proponents say such research provides valuable information to the public and physicians on which procedures work best and whether more costly treatments are actually more effective. Patients United Now, a 501(c)3 project of Americans for Prosperity Foundation, says in its back-up that funding comparative studies is "a critical step toward rationing," but ARRA specifically forbids the council coordinating such research from issuing any restrictions or even guidelines on care:
American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009: Nothing in this section shall be construed to permit the Council to mandate coverage, reimbursement, or other policies for any public or private payer. ... None of the reports submitted under this section or recommendations made by the Council shall be construed as mandates or clinical guidelines for payment, coverage, or treatment.
Patients United Now also points to Rep. John Conyers' "Medicare for all" legislation, a single-payer health care bill that the Michigan congressman has introduced for several years running. This year, Conyer's bill, H.R. 676, was introduced in January and hasn't moved from committee since. It quietly died in committee in the last Congress and in previous attempts.
Shona's Story
The ad begins with an emotional story from Shona Holmes, a Canadian who says she would have had to wait six months to see a specialist about a brain tumor. Instead, she traveled to the United States – the Mayo Clinic in Arizona – to pay for faster treatment that restored her deteriorating vision. Holmes' story has appeared in several newspaper articles, and she has spoken to the House Energy and Commerce Committee. An article on Shona's case on the Mayo Clinic's Web site quotes her neurosurgeon as saying, "We needed to remove the cyst to save her vision."
Her case and another, of Lindsay McCreith, who traveled to Buffalo, N.Y., to have surgery on a brain tumor, are well known. Both filed suit in Ontario to overturn laws that effectively ban citizens from having private insurance or paying for care themselves. (Similar provisions in a Quebec statute were struck down by Canada's Supreme Court in June).
The ad goes on to claim that "[s]ome patients wait a year for vital surgeries." We can't say how many "some" are, but the back-up for the ad points to one case in Ontario in which a man waited nearly a year for skull replacement surgery. Another article in the Globe and Mail in January 2008 cited a study conducted for the Canadian Medical Association that found while most Canadians get treatment within recommended wait times, some don't. "The average Canadian patient who was not treated within the medically acceptable period in 2007 waited a year for a hip or knee replacement and seven months for cataract surgery," the Globe and Mail reported.
We certainly won't argue with anyone's desire to get surgery – particularly for a brain tumor – sooner rather than later. But as we've said about other ads, all this sets up a straw man argument, criticizing Canada's health care system despite the fact that a purely government-run system isn't what's being seriously considered in Congress or being proposed by the president.
Government Running Health Care?
Another group, a 501c(4) called Patients First and backed by Americans for Prosperity, has another ad on the airwaves, this one targeting 12 senators. The one-week, $1.3 million ad buy was announced by the group July 8.
AFP Patients First Ad
Announcer: Washington now runs your banks, insurance and car companies. But do you trust Washington with your life? Congress is rushing to take over healthcare too, paid for by $600 billion in new taxes, and cutting $400 billion from Medicare. Plus, tens of millions will lose their current insurance, and wind up on the government health plan. What will happen to your family's healthcare if Washington runs it? Tell Senator Warner to vote no on government run healthcare.
The ad asks, "[D]o you trust Washington with your life?" and claims that "Congress is rushing to take over healthcare too."
As we've said, not so much. But the ad also refers to a public health insurance option, like Medicare, that some in Congress want to see as part of an overhaul of the health care system. The numbers on taxes and cuts (others would say "savings") to Medicare refer to draft legislation being written by legislators in the House, who, according to the Bloomberg News article cited in the ad, were still negotiating on the inclusion of a government insurance option. Since then, a House bill has been released, and it does contain such a provision.
The Patients First ad says that "tens of millions will lose their current insurance, and wind up on the government health plan." That's based on an analysis by the Lewin Group, which says it operates independently as part of UnitedHealth Group, owner of the insurer United Healthcare. Comparing the House bill to Lewin's findings, the government plan, which would be significantly cheaper than private plans, would attract about 43 million people, 32 million coming off of private coverage. That's "tens of millions," as the ad says, and we'll note again that the ad was released before the details of the House bill were announced. According to the study, there also would be a reduction in the number of the uninsured of 27 million. Those numbers are based on enrollment in the public plan being only open to small firms and individuals, and payments to doctors and hospitals being similar to Medicare rates. The House plan would pay doctors Medicare rates plus 5 percent. A Senate bill that passed the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee also proposes a public option open to individual and small businesses; reimbursement rates would be negotiated, however, which could well lead to fewer people moving to a government plan. (For more on the Lewin Group study, see our previous article about a health care ad that wasn't so careful in its wording.)
Lewin's estimate is just that, however, and the Congressional Budget Office projected different numbers in an analysis of these two bills. The CBO estimated that fewer people would take up the public option under the House bill, finding that "total enrollment in the public plan would equal about 11 million or 12 million, counting both individually purchased policies and employer-sponsored enrollees." As for the Senate bill from the HELP committee, the CBO said its public option "did not have a substantial effect on the cost or enrollment projections, largely because the public plan would pay providers of health care at rates comparable to privately negotiated rates."
Different versions of this ad are aimed at 12 Democratic senators: Mark Warner of Virginia, Evan Bayh of Indiana, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Tim Johnson of South Dakota, Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, Max Baucus of Montana, Kent Conrad of North Dakota, Harry Reid of Nevada, Mark Begich of Alaska, Michael Bennet of Colorado and Thomas Carper of Delaware.
– by Lori Robertson
Correction, July 20: We originally wrote that one version of the ad was aimed at Sen. John Warner of Virginia. He's a former senator; the ad targets Sen. Mark Warner.
Sources
Galloway, Gloria. “Wait for surgery savages economy, doctors say.” The Globe and Mail, 15 Jan 2008.
Congressional Budget Office. Letter to Rep. Charles B. Rangel. 14 Jul 2009.
Sheils, John and Randy Haught. “The Cost and Coverage Impacts of a Public Plan: Alternative Design Options.” Lewin Group. 6 Apr 2009.
American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Pub. L. 111-5. 17 Feb 2009.
U.S. National Institutes of Health. Estimates of Funding for Various Research, Condition, and Disease Categories. NIH.gov. 15 Jan 2009, accessed 16 Jul 2009.
Mayo Clinic. Profile: Shona Holmes. Mayo Clinic Web site. Summer 2007.
Reichard, John. "NIH Chief Doesn’t Rule Out Cost Component to Comparative Studies." CQ Healthbeat News. 26 Mar 2009.
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Government-Run Health Care?
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Copyright © 2003 - 2009, Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania
FactCheck.org's staff, not the Annenberg Center, is responsible for this material.
Ten things we know about the health care battle
by David Sarasohn, The Oregonian
Thursday July 23, 2009, 5:36 PM
1) Republicans will have virtually nothing to do with this, except maybe for the two ladies from Maine. (As goes Maine .¤.¤.) Dreaming of 1994, and the GOP victory following the Clinton health care collapse, just about all congressional Republicans are betting on a party comeback through an Obama failure -- as Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., likes to put it, his "Waterloo."
This is not a promising negotiating position.
2) Blue Dog Democrats, despite their denunciations by the blogosphere, are in a different situation. First, some of their concerns -- the lack of clear savings in the program, the need to protect rural health care -- make sense.
Second, the 1994 Democratic disaster wasn't because Congress passed a bad bill, but because it couldn't pass anything. This would not be a promising outcome for Blue Dogs, often in swing districts.
3) As Nate Silver recently pointed out on FiveThirtyEight.com, of 36 Democratic congressmen defeated for re-election in 1994, only four have ever made their way back to Congress.
4) This drive has already gotten way beyond any previous health care reform effort, going through three congressional committees and being endorsed by the American Medical Association. The Clinton bill never got voted on by any committee, which was not a good symptom.
5) But in a 24-hour news cycle, momentum comes and goes very quickly. (In about two days, reporters get tired of any story.) A good news conference means that momentum is back; a day when nothing happens means that we're back in 1994.
So while it wouldn't be fatal if the House and Senate went home without passing bills, they probably do need another momentum changer. For the Senate Finance Committee to produce a bill before leaving, as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid just promised, would work.
Or, they could stay in D.C. into August.
The districts wouldn't miss them.
6) When health care costs are rising at twice the level of inflation, when 14,000 Americans a day are losing their health coverage, when we're spending twice as much per person as other countries and getting worse results, declaiming that the United States has the greatest health care system in the world and should be very slow to change anything might not be just what the doctor ordered.
7) The Republican hope is that if members of Congress go home in August without a bill, voter anger will scare them out of doing anything when they get back. But this August, a number of large, organized groups support an overhaul of health care. Town halls might feature people without coverage because of pre-existing conditions; those who have had their employers drop coverage; and people who've gone bankrupt because of medical bills -- a considerable part of the bankrupt population.
Or unemployed (and now uninsured) people, who these days have lots of time.
8) The inspiration for the campaign against health care, it seems, is drawn from "South Park: The Movie" (1997), with its big hit, "Blame Canada." ("It seems that everything's gone wrong, Since Canada came along.") Canada, it seems, has a medical system consisting of rubbing walrus fat on ailments, and has a long waiting list even for that.
Of course, that was before Americans started taking buses to Canada to buy prescription medicines.
9) Harry and Louise haven't learned much at all. Their ads against the Clinton effort ended with Louise saying, "There has to be a better way." This time, she finishes cheerfully, "A little more cooperation, a little less politics, and it can happen."
Not much more helpful.
And there's no reason to think their employer, Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America -- now run by Billy Tauzin, hired for $2 million a year in 2004 after the House committee he chaired produced a bill forbidding Medicare to negotiate drug prices -- has gotten any more selfless.
10) Sure, it's true that if we were building a health care system from scratch, it wouldn't look like this one. But we're not. We are where we are, and many Americans cling desperately to elements of the health care system that they have.
So the question isn't whether we start over.
The question is where we go from here.
Go Blue Dogs!!
http://www.sandiegoinjurylawyerblog.com/Pit%20Bull.bmp
House Blue Dogs flex new muscle on health care
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3fpbsr6kUo&feature=PlayList&p=7296DC5765...
By LAURIE KELLMAN (AP)
WASHINGTON — Conservative-leaning Blue Dog Democrats are enjoying a power surge like no other in their 15 years, forcing President Barack Obama and their own party leaders to deal with their demands for cost cuts and tax restraints in overhauling health care.
The evidence is everywhere these days: Polls show the public shares their concerns about the cost of Obama's plan to insure all Americans who seek health coverage. Obama himself has spent valuable presidential time in private talks with these Democrats and in near-daily appeals for the public to prod Congress into action. And the group's political fund raising is peaking.
All the while, Obama and Democratic leaders have issued shout-outs to the faction of 52 House members, a sign of the clout Blue Dogs wield over some of the president's top priorities — none more than his plan to provide health care to virtually all Americans.
"I think, rightly, a number of these so-called Blue Dog Democrats — more conservative Democrats — were concerned that not enough had been done on reducing costs," Obama said Tuesday in an interview with CBS News.
That's a measure of validation for a group that spent its first decade being ignored by Republicans and tolerated by more left-leaning Democrats.
There was more.
On Wednesday, the Blue Dogs saw their organizing principle, a pay-as-you-go fiscal spending policy, pass the House by a 99-vote margin. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called a news conference to praise the group. Her second-in-command, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, thanked them from the well of the House chamber and called the group "real Democrats" at a time when they are less popular with the party's liberal flank.
"How sweet it is," said Budget Committee Chairman John Spratt, D-S.C.
The Blue Dogs' political action committee raised $1.1 million in the first six months of this year, more than it raised for the entire 2003-04 fundraising cycle, according to the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity.
Established when Republicans took control of Congress in 1994, the mostly Southern Blue Dogs named themselves for an old saying: Southerners would vote for a yellow dog if it were on the Democratic ballot. A blue dog, they reasoned, would represent a moderate or conservative who had been "choked blue" by their more liberal Democratic colleagues in the years leading up to 1994.
Political descendants of the Boll Weevils who supported President Ronald Reagan's tax cuts and the states' rights Democrats before that, the Blue Dogs can now count members who represent districts as far from the South as California, Utah, Iowa and New York.
Nowadays, their power stems from the plain math in a House controlled 256-178 by Democrats. If the 52
Blue Dogs stick together and vote no on health care or any other bill Republicans oppose, the president's party doesn't have a majority.
Still, it's not yet clear whether Obama, Pelosi & Co. are merely flattering the Blue Dogs with attention and a salute to the group's top priority, fiscal discipline - or truly willing to accommodate their concerns on health care.
Pelosi says House Democrats have the votes to pass health care reform, the Blue Dogs' concerns notwithstanding.
"I'm more confident than ever," Pelosi told reporters Thursday. "The momentum is there. When the bill is ready we'll go to the floor. And we will win."
To some ears, those comments undercut the Blue Dogs' leverage in the negotiations.
Yet the Blue Dogs apparently have succeeded in shaping the legislation's development.
Their list of 10 changes they wanted made to the bill inspired Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., to postpone a committee vote on it.
"I've been meeting to death, so if that has been for naught until they counted votes and just to occupy our time, I'm sorry," said Rep. Charlie Melancon, D-La. "I thought we were legitimately having
conversations about writing a good health care bill for America."
Health care is Obama's top legislative priority, an overhaul that could affect every American voter and employer and ranks in recent polls as the public's top concern.
But only half of Americans approve of the president's handling of the issue, slightly lower than his rating in April, according to an Associated Press-GfK poll released Tuesday.
More telling: The number who disapprove jumped from 28 percent in April to 43 percent, with Obama losing support from independents. And those who have confidence in Obama's ability to reform the nation's health care system dropped from 63 percent before his inauguration in January to 56 percent now.
The AP-GfK Poll, conducted July 16-20 by GfK Roper Public Affairs & Media, interviewed 1,006 adults nationwide and had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.
Obama's "yes we can" rallying cry is qualified somewhat by his ability to keep his party together. And that means a working alliance with the Blue Dogs even as liberals in the president's party pillory the group for holding up what they say is badly needed change.
\House passage Wednesday of the founding centerpiece of the Blue Dogs' agenda, the "pay-go" policy designed to keep new laws from adding to the deficit, may be just a coincidence. But it also could be a carrot that Obama and Democratic leaders hope will attract some Blue Dog votes for the health care overhaul.
That bill appeared to be on track until last week, when Douglas Elmendorf, the director of the Congressional Budget Office, said it lacked steps to control the costs of health care in the future, one of the Blue Dogs' biggest concerns.
Meetings on the health care bill between the Blue Dogs, Democratic leaders and the White House are continuing. Rep. Mike Ross, D-Ark., said he spent much of Wednesday in closed-door negotiations with Waxman and planned to resume them Thursday.
"We didn't get an agreement," Ross said after Wednesday's meeting, adding that Obama's goal to have a bill passed by mid-August wasn't part of the talks.
"I refused to discuss any artificial deadlines," Ross said. "That's not part of the talks."
On the Net:
Blue Dog Coalition: http://www.house.gov/melancon/BlueDogs/
Facts vs.Obama's Health Care News Conference
July 23, 2009
Facts vs. Obama
Summary
President Obama tried to sell his health care overhaul in prime time, mangling some facts in the process. He also strained to make the job sound easier to pay for than experts predict.
Obama promised once again that a health care overhaul “will be paid for.” But congressional budget experts say the bills they've seen so far would add hundreds of billions of dollars to the deficit over the next decade.
He said the plan "that I put forward" would cover at least 97 percent of all Americans. Actually, the plan he campaigned on would cover far less than that, and only one of the bills now being considered in Congress would do that.
He said the "average American family is paying thousands" as part of their premiums to cover uncompensated care for the uninsured, implying that expanded coverage will slash insurance costs. But the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation puts the cost per family figure at $200.
Obama claimed his budget "reduced federal spending over the next 10 years by $2.2 trillion" compared with where it was headed before. Not true. Even figures from his own budget experts don't support that. The Congressional Budget Office projects a $2.7 trillion increase, not a $2.2 trillion cut.
The president said that the United States spends $6,000 more on average than other countries on health care. Actually, U.S. per capita spending is about $2,500 more than the next highest-spending country. Obama's figure was a White House-calculated per-family estimate.
Analysis
With the health care debate on Capitol Hill raging on, President Barack Obama held a prime-time news conference July 22 to make his pitch for a health care bill once again to the American public. Among his facts and figures, we found some false and questionable statements.
Paying For It
Obama promised that a health care overhaul “will be paid for.” Thus far, that’s been a tall order.
The House bill doesn’t pay for itself, adding a net $239 billion over 10 years to the federal deficit, according to an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation. The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee bill is much further away from covering its costs. The CBO estimated that legislation would bring a net deficit increase of $597 billion over 10 years. The Senate bill, CBO said, only produced net savings of $48 billion (compared to current law), while the House came up with more money, saving $219 billion and bringing in $583 billion in federal revenue over that 2010-2019 period.
As the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a bipartisan group, said in a report released this month, it's tough to save money while greatly expanding health care coverage at the same time:
CRFB: More access and broader coverage do not save money, however. Greater coverage will increase health spending. Unless major changes are successfully implemented in health care delivery and payment systems, costs will continue to rise from a larger base at a rapid pace. Moreover, potential savings are speculative, while costs are far more certain. That imbalance suggests that unless there is broad popular support for the measures that will be required to achieve savings, the nation’s health care bill could become that much more unaffordable.
Obama went on to say that “the entire cost of that has to be paid for and it has got to be deficit-neutral. And we identified two-thirds of those costs to be paid for by tax dollars that are already being spent right now.”
“Identified” is the key word – the White House may have pinpointed ways it says can save that much, but whether the president can make these happen is an open question. Obama has spoken before about saving around $650 billion (about two-thirds of a cost of $1 trillion over 10 years) by cutting spending, largely in Medicare. But proposed cuts in payments to insurers and hospitals are likely to draw strong opposition from lobbyists and lawmakers. And Obama admitted last night that legislators hadn’t adopted his proposals: “Not all of the cost-saving measures I just mentioned were contained in Congress' draft legislation,” he said – but he remained optimistic, adding that “even though we still have a few issues to work out, what's remarkable at this point is not how far we have left to go, it's how far we've already come.”
Obama detailed a few of his Medicare savings proposals last night and went into greater detail in a speech June 15 at the American Medical Association conference. Some of the ideas are backed up by independent studies, at least in theory: Obama proposes introducing a competitive bidding process for Medicare Advantage, a program through which private insurers offer Medicare coverage and get higher payments from the government than standard Medicare reimbursements. Last night, he said it would save "over $100 billion of unwarranted subsidies that go to insurance companies"; he's said before that it would save $177 billion over 10 years. And the CBO has estimated such a proposal could save nearly that much, $159 billion over 10 years.
Other proposals are more vague: Obama has called for adjusting Medicare payments to "reflect new advances and productivity gains in our economy," which, he told the AMA, would "create incentives for providers to deliver care more efficiently," saving about $109 billion over 10 years.
As CBS News anchor Katie Couric recently asked Obama, “[A]ren't a lot of these cost savings, Mr. President, theoretical?. … [T]here are no guarantees these projected savings will really happen.”
The president dodged the question: “Well, here's what we know. Here is a guarantee: If we do nothing, then health care inflation is going to keep on going up at 8 percent, 9 percent, 10 percent a year. … If we take these actions, we are confident that we can actually see some serious reductions in health care inflation.”
Beyond paying for a health care bill, however, Obama has said an overhaul of the system will actually save money – or at least save money compared with what health care spending would have been without changes to the system. In his press conference, Obama said “the bill I sign must also slow the growth of health care costs in the long run.“ What Congress has proposed so far doesn’t do that, either.
CBO’s analysis of the House bill does recognize specific savings that the legislation will reap from changes to Medicare, but also highlights some increases the bill would make in Medicare spending as well. Overall, that bill and the Senate’s don’t control the rising costs of federal health programs, according to CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf, who told the Senate Budget Committee last week that the bills didn’t have “the sort of fundamental changes” that would change the cost curve. On the contrary, he said: “The curve is being raised.”
Near-Universal Coverage?
The president exaggerated the number of persons who would be covered by his health care plan.
Obama: So the plan that has been – that I put forward and that what we're seeing in Congress would cover – the estimates are – at least 97 percent to 98 percent of Americans.
That's true of the House health care bill, but it's far from the truth about Obama's plan proposed when he was running for president.
The CBO estimated that the bill working its way through the House would result in 97 percent of Americans (excluding illegal immigrants) having insurance by 2015. The figure would be only 94 percent of all those in the U.S., including those here illegally. However, Obama was careful to apply his 97 percent figure to "Americans," so he's right as far as the House bill is concerned. But that's the only proposal now being considered that would achieve such wide coverage.
The Senate HELP Committee bill wouldn't go as far. The CBO projected that legislation would cover 90 percent of Americans by 2015 (excluding illegal immigrants), and 88 percent of all those in the U.S. including those who aren't here legally. The Senate bill leaves twice as many people uninsured by 2019 (34 million) as the House bill (17 million).
The plan Obama campaigned on last year would have covered fewer than the House bill, according to analyses from two groups. The Lewin Group and the Tax Policy Center estimated last year that Obama's plan would leave 26.9 million and 25.2 million uninsured, respectively, in 2018.
Uncompensated Care
Obama repeated a claim about uncompensated care that we've already said was unjustified:
Obama: And, in fact, there's going to be a whole lot of savings that we obtain from that because, for example, the average American family is paying thousands of dollars in hidden costs in their insurance premiums to pay for what's called uncompensated care – people who show up at the emergency room because they don't have a primary care physician.
We wrote about this back in June, when Obama said that "the average family pays a thousand dollars in extra premiums to pay for people going to the emergency room who don't have health insurance." This came from a report by the health care advocacy group Families USA, which estimated that people with private family insurance paid an extra $1,017 in premiums to cover the cost of uncompensated care to the uninsured; individuals paid $368 extra. But the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation took issue with that estimate, saying that they were "highly skeptical" that the rising cost of insurance premiums had much to do with cost-shifting, because much of the uncompensated costs would not be passed on to premium payers. KFF's estimate of actual cost shifting amounted to more like $200 per family annually.
In his press conference, Obama added even more to families' premiums, saying they paid "thousands" more to cover uncompensated care. That's not what the Families USA study found, and even that group's $1,000 estimate has been disputed.
A $5 Trillion Whopper?
The president claimed he has cut federal spending by more than $2 trillion.
Obama: I am very worried about federal spending. And the steps that we've taken so far have reduced federal spending over the next 10 years by $2.2 trillion.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office doesn’t agree that Obama’s budget has “reduced federal spending” at all. Quite the opposite. His budget calls for vastly increased spending, according to CBO.
Last month CBO estimated that total federal spending, without the changes Obama proposed in his budget, would be just under $39 trillion over the next 10 years. It also estimated that if Congress adopted the president's budget, spending would increase to more than $41.7 trillion over the same period. As a percentage of the economy, CBO figured that federal spending would rise from 22.1 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) under current law, to 23.7 percent under Obama's budget proposals.
CBO specifically estimated the "total effect on outlays" of Obama’s budget as an increase of $2.7 trillion compared with what's called for in current law. So by CBO’s figuring, spending would go up $2.7 trillion, not down $2.2 trillion. That would make Obama's claim a nearly $5 trillion whopper.
Even the administration's own projections don't suport Obama's extravagant claim of a $2.2 trillion spending cut. His Office of Management and Budget projected that Obama's budget would produce $42.2 trillion in total outlays over the next 10 years. That's only $431 billion more than CBO's later estimate. However, Obama's OMB comes up with a much higher prediction of where spending would be without the president's budget. OMB figures "baseline" spending of $43.4 trillion. Compared with that, OMB figures that Obama's budget would represent a reduction of more than $1.2 trillion. But that's still nearly $1 trillion short of the figure Obama claimed.
Obama may have confused his deficit figures with his spending figures. Earlier he said that the projected deficit is "$2.2 trillion less than it would have been if we had the same policies in place when we came in." But even that is disputed. It's true that OMB projected a $7.1 trillion, 10-year deficit under Obama's budget, and a $9.3 trillion deficit if current policies continued unchanged. That would amount to a $2.2 trillion improvement. But congressional budget experts don't agree with that. CBO projects a $9.1 trillion deficit under Obama's budget, and a $4.4 trillion deficit under current law. In other words, CBO figures Obama's budget would make the deficit $4.5 trillion worse, not $2.2 trillion better.
U.S. vs. The Rest of the World
Obama exaggerated the discrepancy between U.S. and foreign health care costs:
Obama: And we know that we're spending on average, we here in the United States are spending about $6,000 more than other advanced countries where they're just as healthy.
In fact, the U.S. spends nearly $7,000 per person total, or nearly $2,500 more than the next highest-spending country, according to the most recent completed data from the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development.
We contacted the Office of Management and Budget, where an official told us that Obama's figure represents costs per family, not per person. Obama didn't specify that, and the authoritative OECD figures on which he relied don't offer a per-family cost. The OMB official said the administration multiplied the per-capita spending by 3.3 to get a family figure (roughly the average number of persons living in family households). This yields closer to an $8,000 difference than $6,000, however, so we're still unsure of how Obama got his figure. In any case, using a per-family figure without identifying it as such is misleading, since millions of Americans live alone, and per-capita spending is the standard used for making such comparisons.
– by Lori Robertson, Brooks Jackson and Jess Henig
Sources
Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. "Health Care and The Federal Budget." Jul 2009.
Montgomery, Lori, and Shailagh Murray. "Budget Analyst Assails Cost of Congress's Health-Care Proposals." The Washington Post. 23 Jul 2009.
Congressional Budget Office. Letter to Rep. Charles B. Rangel. 17 Jul 2009.
Congressional Budget Office. Letter to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy. 2 Jul 2009.
Congressional Budget Office. Letter to Rep. Mike Crapo. 18 May 2009.
Congressional Budget Office. "Comparison of Projected Revenues, Outlays, and Deficits in CBO’s Baseline and CBO’s Estimate of the President’s Budget." Jun 2009.
Office of Management and Budget. "Updated Summary Tables; Budget of the U.S. Government, Fiscal Year 2010." May 2009.
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Health Data 2009 database. accessed 23 Jul 2009.
Hadley, Jack et al. "Covering the Uninsured in 2008: A Detailed Examination of Current Costs and Sources of Payment, and Incremental Costs of Expanding Coverage." Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured. Aug. 2008.
Families USA. "Hidden Health Tax: Americans Pay a Premium." May 2009.
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Health Care Reform and the American Character
By Congressman Paul Ryan on 7.23.09 @ 6:09AM
While it's important to analyze the relative financial costs and benefits of health care proposals which Congress is considering, our greatest challenge cannot be limited to the economics of the issue. Our transcending concerns are moral and political. The American character itself and the principles of free market democracy which protect and preserve it may be lost beyond recovery if Congress chooses the wrong path to health care reform -- the path down which the Obama Administration seems determined to lead our country.
How are health care and American character linked?
Public health has always been a government priority. The unquestioned power to quarantine for contagious sicknesses in order to protect the community's health has been used for centuries. Selling unwholesome food and drink, carrying on industrial trades that infect or pollute the air, as well as neglect, unskillful management, and experimentation by doctors and pharmacists have traditionally been treated as crimes and grounds for civil lawsuits. Immunization programs to protect populations against disease have long been accepted as a legitimate government service.
The Framers of our Constitution were deeply influenced by the thought of William Blackstone, England's greatest legal thinker. In his Commentaries, Blackstone explained that every individual has a "right of personal security" which includes protection against acts that may harm personal health. This right is part of the natural right to life, which means that it does not come from government but from "nature and nature's God." As the American Founders declared, the purpose of government is not to create new rights but to secure pre-existing natural rights of all persons, to life as well as liberty and pursuit of happiness. In other words, the priority of protecting people's health, which is implicit in our founding principles, no more requires government to provide health care programs than, say, the legitimate concern that people be housed requires the government to build public housing. Government has a duty to secure these rights, but this obligation is normally met most effectively by establishing the legal and economic conditions for free markets that expand the opportunity and prosperity of all. When markets apparently fail to meet these needs properly -- today's health care delivery is an example -- government should begin not by filling the need itself but by looking to and correcting its own interventions and making competitive free markets more effective.
The Founders' highest hope in declaring independence from Britain, fighting the Revolution, and writing the Constitution was to secure human freedom. They established a "new order of the ages" for Americans to govern themselves in freedom, as individuals and as citizens of communities, states, and nation. There were to be no classes such as kings or nobles, clerics or intellectuals like those who ruled in old Europe by a supposed higher right. Popular consent alone would grant the power to govern Americans, and then only for a limited time between democratic elections.
Under the Founders' model of "federalism," the central government had a few great powers while most areas of society (e.g., public health) were left to the states to regulate and the people to order in free markets. They encouraged America's citizens to take on the primary responsibility for controlling their lives: government's mission was limited to setting up legal conditions for men and women to act in freedom in order to achieve their potential. The pursuit of happiness requires the cultivation of good character traits. Free citizens must avoid seeing themselves as passive victims of a government over which they have no control. Persons who assume the burden of responsibility for their actions, successes, and failures develop traits such as courage, fairness, initiative, charity, self-restraint, industriousness, enterprise, and above all prudence, the wisdom which directs each toward the right means needed to flourish as a mature person.
A very short description of the American character would be: this ensemble of moral qualities that make it possible for persons to live under self-restraint, without dependency, in personal relationships with others in community under God.
As Tocqueville discerned in Democracy In America, a human being who fails to practice these fundamental habits, especially the key virtue of practical wisdom, will gradually lose the ability to sustain basic human qualities and sentiments. Lacking the habit of making prudent decisions every day about one's well-being and learning to accept the consequences of those decisions, one becomes a victim of necessity, passively serving unaccountable rulers who take it on themselves to define and satisfy the victims' needs, desires, and pleasures. Tocqueville's chief worry was something he described as a new kind of despotism. In generations to come, many citizens in democratic nations might be tempted to trade their liberty, which demands risk-taking, hard work, and self-restraint, for the easy security and benefits a "soft despotism" would bring. Tocqueville saw the path to this gray future in the growing centralization of government which had been at work in Europe for centuries. America's Founders, for their part, risked their whole experiment in free market democracy on preserving the character of citizens in order to resist every such design to turn Americans into European-style servants of the government.
Under the Constitution, health issues were left not to a distant central government but to states and individuals under the states' "police powers." Decentralization strengthened the people's close control over health issues and encouraged a diversity of medical practices and legal responses to health needs. Some were more successful than others. The states were in effect different laboratories applying varying approaches to public health concerns. Except for emergencies, public health was mostly advanced by free markets under local and state regulation, and spurred by federal patent and copyright incentives.
Congress in the early 20th century enacted laws to prevent interstate sales of unsafe medicines. The federal government also recognized a role in providing nationwide health-related information, establishing the Laboratory of Hygiene in 1887 and its successor, the National Institutes of Health, to carry out biomedical and health-related research, and in preparing for pandemics that don't respect state boundaries. Ultimately, under our system of federalism and free market democracy, the health of Americans has improved and flourished beyond the hopes and imagination of earlier generations.
Federal intervention in health care, with the best of intentions, has sometimes proven inapt and difficult to eliminate after it has become obsolete. For example, federal tax code changes appropriate to the World War II era have resulted in making employers the major providers of health insurance rather than the employees, thus distorting employment opportunities and other job decisions. Other federal laws and regulations in the 20th century resulted in excessive government intervention and health insurer overinvolvement in treatment issues that rightfully belong to health coverage buyers, patients, and doctors. Because of these interventions, along with Medicare and Medicaid, the U.S. today does not have an efficient and competitive free market in health care delivery.
The federal government entered the area of health care delivery most massively in 1965 with the enactment of Medicare and Medicaid. Real cost control quickly became a nightmare. Fraud proliferated despite all attempts to stop it. Program costs have continually been underestimated. When Medicare began in 1966, the cost to the taxpayers was about $3 billion. The House Ways and Means Committee estimated that Medicare would cost only about $12 billion by 1990 (including inflation), yet the actual cost by then was nearly nine times as much -- $107 billion. By 2006 Medicare reached $401 billion while Medicaid added another $309 billion for a total of $710 billion. The failure to control Medicare's costs demonstrates why the Constitution inherently leans toward solving society's problems by means of free market democracy and decentralized government.
* * * * *
America is now being pushed headlong into enacting a massive federal government-run health care program. The rush, of course, is the Congressional Democrats' chosen strategy prompted by the Obama Administration's hunger for a big victory. This strategy may be politically expedient, but it is extremely irresponsible, unwise, and unfair to the American people. Government-monopolized health service flatly contradicts both the moral principles of free market democracy the excellence of health care that still draws patients from socialist utopias to the capitalist United States for medical treatment. This untested experiment with our national health demands no less than responsible public debate and prudent judgment. Right now America is getting neither.
Right to our north, our neighbor Canada has a government health care system that should be an important part of our public debate. Liberals point to the Canadian system as a model for the U.S. The government is the single payer for health service, though most providers are in the private sector. In Canada the waiting list is up to more than 4 months between patient referrals and actual treatment for a dozen of the specialty procedures most needed. The average Canadian now has to wait over a month after getting a primary doctor's instruction just for a CT scan, and more than two months for an MRI. Canada's medical equipment is old, unreliable, and obsolete. Canadians notoriously travel to the U.S. if possible for treatments for everything from cancer and emergency care to hip surgery and childbirth. That nation has long suffered a professional "brain drain," its doctors fleeing the government-run health care program to practice in the U.S. Our government tried to make this more difficult, yet according to a 2007 report, one in nine doctors trained in Canada is now practicing medicine here. Has the Obama Administration explained to Americans the facts about Canada's "model" of government health care? Is this the kind of national health service the U.S. should imitate?
It is clear that the Democratic plan is prohibitively expensive and fiscally reckless. It will fail to control health care costs, exacerbate our growing debt, and require crushing taxes. Their approach would spend trillions more dollars, mandate that all employers provide health insurance, impose massive new tax burdens on workers and heath care practitioners, and exacerbate our entitlement crisis with the creation of another open-ended entitlement. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has informed the Senate that their health care plan would worsen the overall fiscal outlook, and its review so far of the House proposal draws the same conclusion. It makes the fiscal situation even worse.
That plan will undermine the excellence of American health care and displace those who are happy with their insurance coverage. (Surveys show that 80 percent or more are satisfied with their current arrangements.) It will stifle the energy and ingenuity which have given this nation's science and technology the edge in global medical research and innovation.
Their plan will insert the government between doctors and patients. This would constrain the freedom of medical providers, limit patient options, and restrict the right of patients to make personal health care decisions in consultation with their doctor.
Their plan will vastly expand the reach of government into the private lives of Americans and increase dependency on the state. Rather than help to expand people's choices, it would provide more direct benefits and establish more limitations, gatekeeping, and red tape.
The Democratic plan's bureaucratization of health care is not compassionate. Impersonal agencies, whether of governments or insurance providers, make decisions about how to heal patients not according to needs but according to budget-driven calculations. Bureaucratic indifference replaces compassionate caregiving by loved ones under a free market with a spectrum of health services. Today's bureaucratized market badly needs reform to make personalized health care possible. But their plan moves in the opposite direction.
Its logic requires government rationing of health care resources. The first step was taken back in February when the Economic Stimulus package's fine print set up a new agency (the Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research, or CCER) patterned on Britain's National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE). This agency's stated purpose is to identify medical practices that produce outcomes that work as opposed to those that don't work. As long as there is a competitive private health care market, CCER's impact will be limited. But under a national health care insurance plan, providers will not be paid out of the plan for health care which CCER disapproves of. Once competing plans have been driven out, the government's approval or disapproval will dictate the care providers may offer to beneficiaries, automatically denying treatments for certain categories of patients.
England's NICE operates as a rationing bureaucracy. NICE decisions for or against new medicines, surgeries, and other treatments are life-and-death matters. They determine whether patients under Britain's government health program will be allowed or denied access to preferred forms of care. NICE's determinations are pushed and pulled by two forces: national budgeting calculations and factional political pressures. Under NICE rationing, the government has capped the amount that may be spent on treatments to extend someone's life by six months. The amount is $22,000, an arbitrary number chosen by government accountants, not medical professionals.
The idea that the government should make decisions about how long people should live is deeply offensive to everything America stands for. It is no answer to say that health care resources are limited and will be rationed one way or another. Under systems of market freedom, the limited amount of all services and goods, including health care, are rationed by individuals and their personal caregivers as they allocate their own resources among many competing producers. But should government do this, based on financial spreadsheets and political pressure groups? I believe this is morally and politically abhorrent to all Americans because it denies our most basic personal rights. We should treat our sick, special needs patients, and elderly better than this.
President Obama denies that he wants to ration health care under his government-run program. Granting his sincerity and ability to stop Congress from mandating it, four or eight years from now there will be another President who will not be bound by Obama's anti-rationing rhetoric since national health care would be a fait accompli by then. Government rationing, like it or not, is the logical endpoint of government health care.
Any authentic solution to the problem of affordability should be consistent with our first principles of moral and political freedom, should respect doctor and patient privacy, restrain spending, and channel the energy of our free market system, not dry it up. There is no lack of sensible alternative solutions offered by Republicans to empower patients and health insurance buyers, not big government or insurance company bureaucrats. Senators Coburn and Burr, and Congressman Nunes and I co-authored The Patients' Choice Act which would eliminate government-driven market distortions that now exclude millions from affordable health care delivery. More uninsured Americans can be covered by spending current dollars more wisely and efficiently than by throwing trillions more dollars at the problem. Our health care delivery alternatives are based on principles that respect timeless American moral and political truths. We believe health care arrangements should reflect a commitment to compassion, family choice, and individual freedom, together with responsibility for the nation's economic well-being.
* * * * *
What is at stake in this battle goes far beyond health care. This debate may prove to be a surrogate for the defining issue of our generation. If we follow the path the Obama Administration wants, our nation will reach a tipping point where a majority of citizens pay little or no taxes and become dependent on federal welfare. Tax cuts would be politically unfeasible because more people will have a stake in government benefits than in free enterprise and personal initiative. The spirit of risk-taking will be smothered by an all-providing government. The American character, however, rests on the great experiment in individual freedom begun over 200 years ago. It cannot survive without it.
If this sounds hyperbolic, consider that America's private and public sectors now spend about $2.5 trillion a year on health care, more than twice what any other country spends per person, amounting to about 17 percent of our nation's GDP. If government is now to take over the whole cost burden as another entitlement, the tipping point will be inevitable. This democratic system under which each person bears the responsibility for working to fulfill his or her potential, maturely judging risks and rewards, will be replaced by a nation of passive subjects indebted only to their leaders for the welfare they receive to keep them alive.
If President Obama and his party are serious about establishing a radical new government-driven health care program, rather than force an untested program on the whole nation, why not follow federalism by encouraging one or two states to adopt such a plan as a pilot program? Former Governor Romney of Massachusetts, a Republican, led in the creation of a state universal health care program three years ago, and Jon Huntsman, Republican Governor of Utah, has spearheaded major market-based health care reforms in that state. The benefits, costs, and satisfaction in these state health care "labs" would be useful information before we decide on a federal role.
If the majority party truly wants more competition, as they say, why propose government insurance instead of enabling more non-profit insurance?
If they have no intention of transforming the system into Medicare for all, why do they tie all payments to Medicare?
And if the majority is so worried about our skyrocketing national debt and the burden on the next generation, why do they want to create an entirely new entitlement that would deal a staggering blow to our economy -- an entitlement that rivals the size and liabilities of Medicare?
The answer to these questions is that this is ultimately not about health care but about advancing an ideological crusade. Our nation, founded on the credo that unalienable rights were granted to all not by government but by "nature and nature's God," is to be remade into a "benevolent" social welfare state. Federal government health care is the first step down that path. Until now, people in other nations that have chosen that path might at least come to the United States. But where will Americans go when the U.S. also has socialized health care? There will be no place of freedom left to us.
The exceptional character of the American people is not free-floating. It lives, as one of our greatest Americans, Martin Luther King, once wrote, by "those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in the formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence." I do not believe our citizens want to trade the American character for socialist materialism supplied by European-style health bureaucrats. Yet this is really what the debate is about. Both sides agree that the current system is not working well. Both sides have proposed reforms, but they point to opposite paths. A government-run health care monopoly or a patient-centered reform that expands health care delivery while affirming free market democracy: the stakes in this debate could not be higher. If Americans understand this, I am confident they will insist that Congress reject social welfare medicine and enact reforms to restore real freedom in health care.
Congressman Paul Ryan represents Wisconsin's 1st Congressional District.
Roger Kress| 7.23.09 @ 10:58AM
I have been posting many of the words our forefathers have written about the
Constitution and government. Ironically, and to my surprise, Mr. Obama said in his 4th of July address that America needs to summon the "SPIRIT" that built a cluster of 13 colonies into the United States of America.
Well, on this one point I must say that I am 100% in agreement with him.
But, as with what now has become his modus operandi, he has said one thing, which he thinks will evoke some patriotic response, and is doing something totally the opposite. Another quote I recall from his campaign speeches was "JUST WORDS?"
No Sir, they are not "JUST WORDS"! So lets take a look at the "SPIRIT" of these words and see where it lead us.
WE THE PEOPLE
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
We must never forget the intent of those who built this country which gave us the very freedoms that some will now use to destroy her. -- Roger Kress
Spirit of the Constitution
"Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other." --John Quincy Adams
The Constitution only guarantees the American people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself. –Benjamin Franklin
The policy of the American government is to leave their citizens free, neither restraining nor aiding them in their pursuits. – Thomas Jefferson
"On every question of construction of the Constitution, let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed." -- Thomas Jefferson
The care of every man's soul belongs to himself. But what if he neglect the care of it? Well what if he neglect the care of his health or his estate, which would more nearly relate to the state. Will the magistrate make a law that he not be poor or sick? Laws provide against injury from others; but not from ourselves. God himself will not save men against their wills.
--Thomas Jefferson
Constitution and Government
The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people; it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government – lest it come to dominate our lives and interests. – Patrick Henry
A wise and frugal government which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.
– Thomas Jefferson
To maintain the ascendancy of the Constitution over the lawmaking majority is the great and essential point on which the success of the [American] system must depend; unless that ascendancy can be preserved, the necessary consequence must be that the laws will supersede the Constitution; and, finally, the will of the Executive, by influence of its patronage, will supersede the laws ...
-- John C. Calhoun
Do not separate text from historical background. If you do, you will have perverted and subverted the Constitution, which can only end in a distorted, bastardized form of illegitimate government.
– James Madison
Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters. – Daniel Webster
I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them. – Thomas Jefferson
I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive. – Thomas Jefferson
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasure. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's great civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, from dependency back to bondage."-- Alexander Tyler
An elective despotism (absolute power or control) was not the government we fought for. – Thomas Jefferson
"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation then by deflation, the banks and the corporations will grow up around them, will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs." -- Thomas Jefferson
The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases. – Thomas Jefferson
Tyranny is defined as that which is legal for the government but illegal for the citizenry. – Thomas Jefferson
The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not. – Thomas Jefferson
The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but a swindling futurity on a large scale. – Thomas Jefferson
"No generation has a right to contract debts greater than can be paid off during the course of its own existence." -- George Washington
If we were directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we would soon want for bread.
– Thomas Jefferson
America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves. -Abraham Lincoln
"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies." -- Thomas Jefferson
Duties of the Patriot
If a law is unjust, a man is not only right to disobey it, he is obligated to do so. – Thomas Jefferson
It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from its government. – Thomas Paine
God grants liberty only to those who love it, and are always ready to guard and defend it.
– Daniel Webster
Those who expect to reap the benefits of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.
– Thomas Paine
Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. – John Adams
Live free or die: Death is not the worst of evils.
--General John Stark
"The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing"
-- Edmund Burke
Take time to deliberate, but when the time for action arrives, stop thinking and go in. --Andrew Jackson
"The ultimate authority...resides in the people alone."
"It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment upon our liberties. We hold this prudent jealousy to be the first duty of citizens and one of the noblest characteristics of the late Revolution. The freemen of America did not wait till usurped power had strengthened itself by exercise and entangled the question in precedents. They saw all the consequences in the principle, and they avoided the consequences by denying the principle. We revere this lesson too much ...to forget it." -- James Madison
"God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion.
The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is
wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts
they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions,
it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. ...
And what country can preserve its liberties, if it's rulers are not
warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of
resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as
to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost
in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from
time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
It is its natural manure."-- Thomas Jefferson
"The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil Constitution, are worth defending at all hazards." -- Samuel Adams
To Those Who Still Don’t See
If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains set lightly upon you; and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen. – Samuel Adams
Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of Liberty. – Thomas Jefferson
They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty or safety. --Benjamin Franklin
If people let government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who live under tyranny. --Thomas Jefferson
"...There is no nation on earth powerful enough to accomplish our overthrow. ... Our destruction, should it come at all, will be from another quarter. From the inattention of the people to the concerns of their government, from their carelessness and negligence. I fear that they may place too implicit a confidence in their public servants, and fail properly to scrutinize their conduct; that in this way they may be made the dupes of designing men, and become the instruments of their own undoing."
–Daniel Webster
Well I'll just be!!!!!
It seems that the "SPIRIT" of the founding fathers more supports a Mission Statement for T.E.A.M. America that it does the actions of our government.
You see it is more than "JUST WORDS" Sir.
So, lets take this just a little further and see if we can do just that!!!!
Our Mission
“One man with courage is a majority”. –Thomas Jefferson
The time is now, and it's up to us! It’s up to You!
My fellow Patriots, Our forefathers have clearly defined what government is, what government should never be and what our role is in defending Liberty & Freedom. Their brave words have shown that it is our "Patriotic Duty" to oppose government when it even hints at laws that begin to tread upon our Freedoms lest it becomes too powerful and too tyrannical.
I believe these are more than “JUST WORDS”.
This is the “SPIRIT” and these are the “BELIEFS” that built this country.
This is the “SPIRIT” and these are the “BELIEFS” our forefathers died defending.
This is the “SPIRIT” and these are the “BELIEFS” that made this country great.
This is the “SPIRIT” and these are the “BELIEFS” that are no longer negotiable.
This is the “SPIRIT” and these are the “BELIEFS” that now fall upon us to defend.
It is up to us to heed these words and be ready and willing to act.
"The ultimate authority...resides in the people alone."-- James Madison
What will history’s memory say about us? Will we continued to follow the downward spiral of “complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, from dependency back to bondage." Or will we summon the courage, bravery and belief of our forefathers and continue defending the self-evident truths of Freedom and Liberty. The time to act is now, not with symbolic protests but with the same tenacity, fortitude, courage and bravery of our forefathers. A true call to action:
Our Constitutional Spirit
(mission)
We find these truths to be non-negotiable, and we will defend the true Spirit of Freedom & Liberty with a force equal to that, which is forced upon us by any “form of distorted, bastardized illegitimate government” which would try to “separate the text from historical background”, “pervert and subvert the Constitution”. “Create debts greater than can be paid off during the course of its own existence”. “Take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not”. Create “laws legal for the government but illegal for the citizenry”. Allow “private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation then by deflation”. “Waste the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them”. “Promises to govern well, but means to govern. Promises to be good masters, but means to be masters”. “Use the Constitution as an instrument for the government to restrain the people, rather than an instrument for the people to restrain the government”. “Take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned”.
“Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other”. “The Constitution only guarantees the American people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself”. “The policy of the American government is to leave their citizens free, neither restraining nor aiding them in their pursuits”. “On every question of construction of the Constitution, let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed”. “An elective despotism (absolute power or control) is no longer a government we will support”.
As you can see this was not written by my hand but instead gleaned from the very words our forefathers wrote. Not “JUST WORDS” but the very
“SPIRIT” by which they constructed our Constitution.
Please circulate this letter so we can continue to gather names of Patriots who are willing to join T.E.A.M. America and stand up for the beliefs our forefathers gave their lives defending.
For Freedom & Liberty! I am,
Very Truly Yours,
Roger Kress
T.E.A.M. America
Together Everyone Achieves More
P.S. Check out the “Small Business Call to Action” on Facebooks
(T.E.A.M. America) group site. If this speaks to you PLEASE join
GOP Health Care Talking Points
BLACK CELL: I KNOW WE ARE WINNING THE DEBATE, BECAUSE THEY ARE STARTING TO COMPROMISE.
SMASH MOUTH FOOTBALL=)
... "Le Bump!!"
LIMBAUGH, STEELE, & O'REILLY
http://i297.photobucket.com/albums/mm206/WayneinWAState/SmashMouthFootba...
Monday, July 20, 2009 5:31 PM
Editor's Note: The following is a memo that Republican message man Alex Castellanos sent to fellow GOP strategists this month.
To: GOP Health Care Advocates
Re: GOP Health Care Strategy
Fr: Alex Castellanos
July 7, 2009
The research Chairman Steele has conducted at the RNC on health care has produced some significant new insights allowing us to advance GOP interests in the health care debate.
Following are a few observations based on that work, understanding these views do not necessarily reflect those of the Republican National Committee.
Where We Start
We are fighting something bigger than policies or plans. The President and the Democrats are selling a cause. Never mind that their plans will actually increase costs for individuals and the country:
Their cause is reducing health care costs.
To the public, reducing health care costs is health care reform.
Quality: As Wes Anderson has noted, people are satisfied with the quality of their health care. Quality is not driving this debate.
Access: While everyone favors increasing access, access is only seen as a problem because of cost. Access alone, unrelated to cost, is not driving this debate.
Choice: Americans believe they have choice; so much so that it makes health care anarchic, confusing, and chaotic. Choice confusion, they tell us, allows the system to take advantage of them. Though more choice may be a solution, Americans do not perceive the lack of it as a problem. If anything, they perceive the abundance of choice as a problem. Choice is not driving this debate.
Cost is driving this debate.
We cannot compete with their cause v. our policies. We must compete with their cause v. our cause.
Our cause must be about what is driving this debate as well. Our cause must also be bringing down health care costs.
The good news is that reducing costs consistent with free-market principles is not only the GOP mission, it is also a different and better way of doing it than the Administration is proposing. We only need to congeal what have become our talking points into a cause. This cup needs a handle.
Language
We need to bring new language to this debate. If we paint the house the same color, no one will notice anything has changed:
We will still be the same, outdated Republicans who have no new ideas and oppose everything. We have to bring something new to the game.
We tested new language on the survey.
The GOP Cause
"Republicans are here today for a cause: We want to help families and businesses get a hold of health care costs and bring them down. Health care costs every family and every business too much. We all know that and we have to fix that. Republicans see a new and better way of doing it.
"That's why we are excited to join the growing number of Americans supporting the patient-centered health care reform movement.
"We believe the patient-centered health care movement offers the best way to reduce health care costs, bottom-up, with patients and doctors in control.
"The old, top-down Washington-centered system the Democrats propose will empower Washington to restrict the cures and treatments your doctor can prescribe for you.
"Their Washington-centered system will end up costing trillions more, not less, and bankrupting the country. This is what they do - a trillion here, a trillion there, pretty soon, our country ends up owing real money.
"It's time to look at health care reform in a new way.
"The President sees the problem. So do we. He talks of making health care more affordable. So do we. But we
have a completely different vision of how to fix it.
"They want a Washington-centered plan.
"We support patient-centered reforms.
"They want a big Washington Experiment with our health.
"We want common-sense simple fixes that will yield real results.
"They want to start building a closed health care system where Washington decides how much money will be saved on health care by controlling the doctors you can see and limiting the treatments and cures your doctor can prescribe.
"The patient-centered health care movement supports an open health-care system where patients and doctors make those decisions.
"They want a top-down system where bureaucrats far away end up deciding what health care is worth paying for and what isn't, and for whom.
"We want a bottom-up, patient-centered system where control remains with your doctor and with you.
"They want political and artificial cost-reductions from Washington.
"We want to get politics out of health care not put more politics in. We want common sense fixes not politically driven experiments.
"They want to empower a big Washington-run monopoly to control your health care.
"We say monopolies are just not natural. Big monopolies are bad no matter who runs them, whether it is big government or big insurance businesses.
"Ulimately, with their Washington-centered plan, you won't be able to keep the things you like about your health care:
"Obama's plan will put government in charge of the doctors you can see and the types of treatment you can receive.
"Obama's plan will cut hundreds of millions of dollars from seniors on Medicare.
"Obama's plan will further bankrupt the country with trillions more in deficit spending.
"Obama's plan will raise a lot of taxes on middle class families and businesses. Taxing insurance, taxing sodas, even taxing health care benefits. It doesn't matter if your insurance charges you more through the front door in higher premiums or President Obama charges you more through the back door in higher taxes. It's the same thing. You are going to pay a lot more.
"Obama's plan will tempt your employer to dump you into a cheaper, government-run health care program. End of the day, it doesn't matter who takes your private coverage away, whether it's your insurance company, the government or your employer: When it's gone it's gone. You are going to lose your health coverage, and then you will see a reduction in the quality of your health care.
"In a nutshell, getting government more involved is not going to reduce costs. It will extend wait times, limit what you can get, cost you coverage; raise your taxes and the deficit.
"They tell us more Washington will make health care cost less. Really? Can we stop for a second and ask when Washington has made anything cost less?
"The truth is the Obama-Pelosi plan doesn't save money. Their Washington-centered plan, from Day One, costs a trillion more dollars.
"Common sense tells us, something is wrong here: Saving money on health care shouldn't be more expensive."
Slow Down, Mr. President
"The Obama Experiment with our health could change everything we like about our health care -- and our economy.
"This big a risk, that risky an experiment is not something leaders on either side should rush through Congress in a few days or weeks.
"This is 20% of our economy. This is our health care and our future. If we screw this up, it could last for generations. And Congress is trying to do this in two months! This should scare the living daylights out of all of us.
"Slow down, Mr. President. We can't afford to get health care wrong.
"President Obama is experimenting with America, too much, too soon, and too fast."
Key Message Point:
Even voters who support a "public plan" think Obama and Congress are moving too fast, with reckless speed, risking a huge part of our economy and our health care, when they don't know what reform would really bring.
If we slow this sausage-making process down, we can defeat it, and advance real reform that will actually help.
Key Message Point: We've got to "SLOW DOWN the OBAMA EXPERIMENT WITH OUR HEALTH."
Reforms
The following is a menu of other bottom-up, common sense fixes (policy ideas) and new language that the patient-centered health care reform movement might support:
We support requiring/incentivizing doctors and hospitals to post pricing and outcomes. In this day and age, why aren't the cost of all tests, treatments, procedures and office visits -- as well as effectiveness of treatments posted openly on the Internet?
We believe health insurance companies should compete with each other with simple, one-page contracts/summaries so insurance is simpler, cheaper, and fairer. (Like many banks are doing w/ car or home loans). And how about incentivizing insurance companies to have simple, one page reimbursement forms?
We believe doctors should be protected from frivolous, expensive lawsuits so they can work together with other doctors and patients in their communities to reduce unnecessary and expensive tests and procedures.
We want to change the law so you can take your health insurance with you if you have to change jobs (eliminating expensive and unnecessary insurance turnover).
We want to change the law so insurance companies can't deny you coverage because of pre-existing conditions.
We want to cut out the "Washington health care middle-man," reducing expensive bureaucracy to produce big health care savings.
We support (tax incentives?) new paperless, computer-age health care IT systems to reduce the cost of health care management as well as reduce medical mistakes.
Every American should have equal opportunity to get the best value and buy the cheapest insurance no matter where he lives or whom he works for. We want to change the law so any American can buy the lowest cost insurance available nationwide, not just in their states -- whether from insurance companies, businesses, church groups, college alumni associations, or groups like the AARP, who often provide it less expensively.
The Wall-Mart way to bring costs down is better than the Washington way. So we want to use consumer-buying power, also called "group buying power," not Washington price-controls, to bring health care costs down.
We support effective prevention, wellness, and disease management programs because they will improve our health and save money.
We support bold new tax deductions for companies that develop new treatments and cures because that is smarter than paying for chronic long-term illnesses we can't cure today.
We believe in bottom-up health care savings: every American should get a tax deduction for their health insurance premiums.
We believe the working poor should get a refundable, advanceable tax credit to help them get health insurance.
We want to incentivize and expand practical, down-to-earth reforms that are already working and reducing health care costs all across America. Safeway's plan, which gives employees a stake in holding down health care costs, is a model. Instead of cutting care or shifting costs to employees, Safeway has held health care costs flat the last 4 years, while it's up 40% for the rest of corporate America.
We support special "too much paperwork" tax credits for small businesses, so they don't have to bear the intolerable costs of filling out insurance forms or meeting government mandates and regulations.
We want to give small businesses the same cost-saving breaks big businesses get by helping them form small business health plans and small business health co-ops.
And no lifetime health care benefits and insurance for Congressmen who leave their jobs -- unless and until everybody else in America has the same.
And From Here...
"... and as I said throughout the campaign, change never begins from the top down. It begins from the bottom up." President Obama, Feb. 9, 2009
Unfortunately, what President Obama promised during the campaign, he has abandoned as President. Instead of putting his faith in the American people and bringing change from the bottom up, he has put his trust in Washington and given us more, old, trickle-down big government. In health care and everywhere else, our President has given us nothing new. It's the same old thing, just bigger and more expensive: One federal pill for every ill.
Such old thinking from such a young President is a disappointment and it is time to put it behind us. The future belongs to those who really believe change comes from the bottom up -- from the American people and not Washington, DC.
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cabaretic:
Lost My Health Insurance, and What Needs to Change to Keep You from Losing Yours
by cabaretic
Tue Jul 21, 2009 at 08:00:06 AM PDT
In an irony that could not be more timely, I've now lost my Medicaid coverage. Due to a variety of circumstances too complex to repeat here, my coverage terminates at the end of the month. I am now in a rush to find a way to reinstate it, while knowing that even if I am put back on the program rolls it will be 90 to 120 days before my coverage resumes. Even if I file a request, there is absolutely no guarantee that I can even get it back. Even if I didn't have one of those dreaded pre-existing conditions/chronic illnesses requiring lifelong treatment, I would still be absolutely furious at what has transpired. My situation is neither unique, nor more timely, but it does illustrate how desperately we need real Health Care Reform and how dire is the need for millions of Americans. The reforms needed go beyond wonkery and require us to change our pre-set mentality regarding the nature of government-assistance and the too-often ephemeral reality of tax revenue.
In formulating a new system, we must use caution not to perpetuate the flaws and inequalities of the current system. What might be the most infuriating reality of many is that Medicaid, the only option now available for poor and/or low income residents adopts a sternly suspicious attitude that automatically treats everyone who uses its coverage as though they seek to cheat or otherwise misuse the system for their own selfish ends and, in doing so, waste taxpayer funds in the process. In many states, particularly red states, taxpayer dollars are allocated grudgingly at best so the system must be constantly careful not to run out of money. This creates ridiculous cost-cutting measures like eliminating basic dental care and only allowing visits to a psychologist for those under the age of twenty-one. The message, whether directly stated or implicit, is that children and teens can have good teeth and good emotional health, but adults cannot. When a particular state or district's Medicaid program advertises up front with a great degree of pride that it actually covers dentistry, one cannot be struck with how completely unfair and nonsensical are the rules and regulations that govern the system in every part of this country.
No military contractor, major banking conglomerate, large corporation, government agency, or recent receiver of bailout funds is, or has ever been monitored so closely or forced until quite recently to resort to draconian tactics in a desperate effort to keep from depleting its budget. We sit idly by while all of these dubiously necessary entities waste money by swelling to ridiculous, ungainly sizes, adding department upon department as well as important-sounding but ultimately meaningless management positions that cost thousands upon thousands of dollars each to maintain. They perpetuate their own existence by formulating field-specific jargon and loudly proclaim their supposedly essential role in the grand scheme of things but once bad decisions are made and enacted that threaten to topple not merely themselves, but every American, they are pronounced too big to fail and swiftly bailed out. I suppose I just don't understand.
Health bill a boon to doctors
The Associated Press
Tuesday, July 21, 2009 | 6:57 p.m.
House Democrats want to give doctors a $245 billion sweetener that helps ensure their critical support for a health care overhaul bill. Next up: Trying to explain how they could do it without breaking President Barack Obama's promise that health legislation won't increase the federal deficit.
Obama reiterated the pledge in a "CBS Evening News" interview Tuesday, saying: "It's got to be deficit neutral. It can't add to our deficits."
So what of the Congressional Budget Office's conclusion that the House bill does add to the deficit?
Democrats and the Obama administration argue that the $245 billion included for doctors _ the approximate 10-year cost of adjusting Medicare reimbursement rates so physicians don't face big annual pay cuts _ does not have to be counted in the overall cost of the health care bill.
Their only-in-Washington reasoning is that they already decided to exempt it from congressional "pay-as-you-go" rules that require new programs to be paid for. In other words, it doesn't have to be paid for because they decided it doesn't have to be paid for.
The administration also says that since Obama already included the so-called "doc fix" in his 10-year budget proposal, it doesn't have to be counted again in the health overhaul bill.
"It so happens they added that to this piece of legislation, but that's sort of already baked into our fiscal trajectory," White House budget director Peter Orszag said last weekend on "Fox News Sunday."
"We're looking at what's happening with regard to new policy," Orszag added. "And with regard to new policy, this is deficit neutral over the first decade."
Old policy or new, no one disputes that the "doc fix" does in fact add to the deficit. And the administration's position carried no weight with the CBO when it released its analysis of the House Democrats' bill.
The CBO, Congress' nonpartisan budget scorekeeper, said Friday that enacting the legislation "would result in a net increase to the federal budget deficit of $239 billion over the 2010-2019 period." The increase is mostly because of Democrats' failure to pay for the "doc fix," but CBO didn't even bother to entertain the notion that its cost should be excluded.
The response from House Democrats? A slough of triumphant press releases claiming _ misleadingly _ that CBO's estimates backed up their claims that their bill was deficit neutral.
The issue is providing ammunition for Republicans, who are accusing Obama of breaking his deficit-neutrality promise. And health experts scoff at the Democrats' fuzzy math.
"Of course it adds to the deficit," said Alex Vachon, a health policy analyst. But at the same time, Vachon and others give the Obama administration and congressional Democrats some credit for attempting to permanently fix the doctor payment issue.
Since its enactment in 1997 the so-called "sustainable growth rate" mechanism, which uses a complex formula to establishes annual target costs for physicians' services under Medicare, has not kept up with actual costs.
That's required Congress to step in almost annually with one-year fixes to prevent doctors from facing ever-bigger potential cuts in payment rates. The cut that loomed for doctors in 2010 was 21 percent. Without a permanent redo of the payment formula Congress would presumably have had to continue to do one-year fixes, something that would also have cost money and that doctors hated because of the uncertainty involved.
The "doc fix" has been a top priority for the American Medical Association, which cited its inclusion as a key reason in its endorsement of the House Democrats' sweeping health care bill.
In the Senate, Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., who is presiding over negotiations aimed at a bipartisan agreement on health care, said the issue of paying for the "doc fix" has not yet come up in the talks.
Robert Laszewski, a former insurance company executive who's now a consultant to industry, contended doctors were "paid off" to support the House bill.
"The AMA would not have endorsed the House bill without the doc fix," Laszewski said. "The fact that the CBO has said the doc fix would add hundreds of billions of dollars to the cost of the bill makes clear how much it is worth to the docs."
Asked to comment, the AMA provided a written statement from the group's president, Dr. James Rohack: "Expansion of health care coverage, elimination of denials for pre-existing conditions and repeal of the flawed Medicare physician payment formula are all reasons the AMA supports the House bill."
___
AP Special Correspondent David Espo contributed to this report.
I don't know if it real or
"Will all the repubs that agree that the heath care system is broke raise hands!!"
I don't know if that strategy is real or not, but I wish it were real. I think all the Repubs who agree that the health are system is broke or the cost are to high, because it helps further our agenda support Some sort of reform.
"Do any one agree that all debates should began & end with the point being made that, "THE HEALTH CARE SYSTEM IS BROKE, & IT SHOULD BE REFORMED?"
************
"Our cause must be about what is driving this debate as well. Our cause must also be bringing down health care costs."
"The good news is that reducing costs consistent with free-market principles is not only the GOP mission, it is also a different and better way of doing it than the Administration is proposing. We only need to congeal what have become our talking points into a cause. This cup needs a handle."
************'
"Will we go into over time?"
Health care dominating Congressional headlines
July 20: MSNBC's Ed Schultz and a political panel discuss why Congress needs to put together a health care reform bill before their August recess in three weeks.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22425001/vp/32014889#32014889
Bradley A. Blakeman, Republican strategist,
consultant, entrepreneur:
The President will not get healthcare legislation by the August congressional recess. This White House¹s modus operandi is to steam roll any and all legislative initiatives as being emergencies and that time is of the essence. They used this method to get the stimulus passed, they used it on cap and trade, the budget and now healthcare. Their cries that the sky will fall unless their legislation is passed is like the boy who cried wolf. The "Stimulus Bill" is a failure. The President promised that if it was passed, unemployment would be contained at no more than 8.5% and that the monies would be absorbed by our economy and millions of jobs would be created. We now know that unemployment nationally is at 9.5% and that many urban areas are at 14% and that 80% of the monies are still unused and we have a 100 million dollar a day interest obligation on that 700 billion dollar alone. Reduce...
The President and the Democrats are drunk with power. The railroading of the stimulus only embolden them to believe they could do what ever they wanted, since they control all branches of government with high majorities. They are learning that it isn't the Republicans that are their problem, it is conservative Democrats. They are not going to go along with generational changes to our national healthcare that creates uncertainty, increases the deficit, and adds to every Americans already burdensome tax obligations. In a time a generational economic decline, now is not the time to make generational changes to 18% of our national economy by nationalizing healthcare. Now is the time to get our economic house in order first and foremost. It should be all about the economy unless and until we see sure signs of a recovery.
Congress is Busy With Health Care and Spending Bills
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN
This week the pressure is on, as Democratic leaders in Congress seek to push forward with legislation to remake the health care system. And Judge Sonia Sotomayor is expected to move a step closer to the Supreme Court when the Senate Judiciary Committee meets on Tuesday to talk about her nomination.
Congress has rarely been busier.
The House this week will be working on two major spending bills — one for the departments of Labor, Health and Human Services and Education, and one for Transportation and Housing and Urban Development. The Senate will consider the annual defense authorization bill, highlighting deep disagreements over Pentagon cuts proposed by the Obama administration.
But as important as all of those bills are, the center of attention will be the push by Democratic leaders to advance the health care legislation.
Three of the five committees working on the health-care overhaul have approved bills, but high hurdles remain. The House Energy and Commerce Committee will continue voting on amendments to the bill this week, and the committee chairman, Henry Waxman of California, hopes to get the measure approved.
But Mr. Waxman’s panel includes a number of fiscally conservative Democrats who have expressed serious reservations about the health care bill, and who may not be ready to support it, especially after the Congressional Budget Office issued an analysis on Friday finding that the bill would add $239 billion to the national debt over 10 years.
Democratic leaders insist that the bill is actually deficit-neutral because the budget office analysis includes a $245 billion increase in Medicare spending to avert sharp cuts in payments to doctors that are set to take effect in January 2010. Without that cost, the Democrats say, the health care legislation would actually help reduce the debt.
But the mere fact that there is contention over the cost of the bill underscores the uneasiness among many Democrats concerning the size and scope of the health care measure, and particularly over the raft of tax increases that are needed to finance it.
The contention was on full display on “Fox News Sunday,” for instance, as the program’s host, Chris Wallace, pressed the White House budget director, Peter R. Orszag.
“If you actually look at the C.B.O. score that came out on Friday night and, again, take off the table just maintaining current payment rates for physicians under Medicare, that bill is deficit-neutral,” Mr. Orszag declared.
Mr. Wallace was not convinced. “But wait,” he said. “because there’s that little caveat in there. In fact, what the C.B.O. said on Friday is that the bill the House is now considering and rushing to pass in fact would add $240 billion to the deficit by 2019.”
The unease among House Democrats only adds to the pressure on Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, who has been working to develop a compromise health-care bill that he hopes will win the support of Republicans and conservative Democrats as well as President Obama.
The Senate health committee last week approved its version of the bill on a party-line vote, with Republicans unanimously opposed, and it is unclear that there would be enough Democratic support to approve that measure in the full Senate.
The Finance Committee is the only major panel working on the health care legislation that has not publicly unveiled a full draft of its bill. The White House and Congressional leaders have been growing increasingly impatient.
Mr. Baucus and his committee members have pleaded for time, saying the issues are too complex to rush, particularly the question of how to pay the 10-year cost of roughly $1 trillion for the bill, which would broadly expand health-care coverage to almost all Americans and try to slow the steep rise in government spending on health care.
But if Mr. Baucus cannot reach a deal sometime this week, the majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, will have to decide whether to try to push the health committee measure to the Senate floor. Mr. Reid has said he wants the health legislation on the floor by Monday, July 27.
Mr. Obama has urged both the House and Senate to adopt their health care bills before leaving for the August recess –- a timeline that for the Senate looks increasingly difficult to meet.
The slower pace in the Senate has caused some frustration among lawmakers like Representative Charles B. Rangel, Democrat of New York and chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, which has already approved its version of the health care bill.
“I don’t want to be negative about the other body,” Mr. Rangel said on “Face the Nation” on CBS on Sunday. “But quite frankly, they haven’t presented anything to the Senate, to the House or to the country. So, the president is doing his part. We in Ways and Means are doing our part. We have a deadline. We will meet it. The question is, what do we expect the other house to do? And God only has the answer to that.”
On the same show, Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, warned that the Democrats’ health proposals would be disastrous. “We’re talking about more government, more taxes, more spending,” he said.
On Tuesday, all eyes will briefly turn away from the health care debate to focus on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which meets again after last week’s four days of hearings. Senator Jeff Sessions, the ranking Republican, said on CNN on Sunday that Republicans would ask for an additional week before a committee vote is scheduled on the nomination of Judge Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. Her confirmation is expected to be completed before the Senate recesses on Aug. 8.
The House this week is also expected to consider a measure, championed by fiscal conservatives, that will make pay-as-you-go budgeting a requirement by law, and not just a function of House rules that can be circumvented rather easily.
Many Governors Against Health Care Bill, Label it Unfunded Manda
In a heated closed-door session, both Republican and Democratic governors criticized the bill that many said could turn into another unfunded mandate from Congress.
BILOXI, Miss. -- On the third day of their annual meeting, governors from both parties raised concerns over a health care bill being pushed by Democrats in Washington, D.C.
In a heated closed-door session, both Republican and Democratic governors criticized the bill that many said could turn into another unfunded mandate from Congress. The issue dominated the afternoon discussion.
"The governors are concerned about unfunded mandates, another situation where the Federal government says you must do X and you must pay for it. Well if they want to reform health care, they should figure out what the rules are and how they are going to pay for it," Democratic Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer told FOX News.
"Instead what they are proposing is -- they're figuring out the rules and forcing the states to pay for it," he said.
A major worry for many governors is potential cost increases that would fall on states in order to expand Medicaid programs.
"This huge expansion of Medicaid would be extremely expensive in my state. We anticipate that it would increase spending on Medicaid by 50 percent, and that's money we don't have. And other states don't have it either," Gov. Haley Barbour, R-Miss., head of the Republican governors, said after the mid-day meeting.
The new chairman of the National Governors Association, Vermont Democrat Jim Douglas said that while many governors want to re-vamp the health care system, they feel the bill's current structure unfairly burdens the states at a time when their budgets are already stretched thin.
"Our concern as governors is Congress not impose a cost that we can't absorb at a time when our budgets are under tremendous stress," Gov. Douglas told FOX News.
"I don't know what the pace might be but we're going to keep resisting an unfunded mandate from Washington," he said.
The governors conclude their meeting on Monday.
Medullan Marauder
I am proud of the fact that the President is asking for a deficit nutriul healthcare, yet you don't like the rout that we are taking to get there, "But we are going to get there."
It looks like it will be the hard way, "But we are going to get there."
=)
Obama: Deficit Neutral Health Care Plan
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzqwwfvwoIw
P.S. We can't play Smash Mouth Football or Political Chess without knowing how to use our opponents rhetoric to our advantage.
LOL
*********************************************************
CBO deals blow to House health plan
By: Patrick O'Connor
July 18, 2009 12:10 AM EST
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office dealt another blow to House Democrats on Friday night, saying their health care bill would increase the federal deficit by $239 billion over the next 10 years.
The projected shortfall means Democrats would need to find additional revenue or make deeper cuts to existing programs in order to meet their goal of paying for the $1 trillion bill.
But those projections don't account for a $245 billion reduction in the deficit this legislation would create, if Democrats can also approve new balanced budget rules that would permanently address an annual shortfall in Medicare payments to physicians Democrats may also defend the cost of their bill by pointing out that in the long run, under new accounting rules, the bill would generate a $6 billion surplus.
The CBO also found that the measure would provide health coverage to 37 million people, — meaning 97 percent of all U.S. citizens would be covered by some form of health care if these changes are enacted.
The plan would leave 17 million people within the U.S. uninsured — nearly half of whom would be illegal immigrants who are denied coverage under the bill.
The overall cost of the bill and its impact on the deficit both became major flashpoints for rank-and-file Democrats after party leaders introduced the legislation earlier this week.
Many Democrats are pushing their leaders to find additional savings and scale back some of the $583 billion in new tax revenue and small business fees the authors had planned to raise over the next 10 years.
The legislation introduced in the House makes changes to existing Medicare programs that would save the federal government $219 billion over the next 10 years, according to the CBO estimates.
But the biggest change would come from the enactment of new accounting rules — something CBO still can't account for because those new rules haven't become law.
In the bill, Democrats provide $245 billion to eliminate an annual shortfall in payments to doctors under Medicare. Democrats resolved this annual headache, in large part, to win crucial support for the bill from the American Medical Association. That money currently counts against the overall costs of the bill, but Democrats have introduced legislation that would remove remove this obligation from federal deficit. However, CBO won't recognize that change until those new pay-as-you-go rules become law.
In the meantime, the three chairmen who introduced the measure – Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller (D-Calif.), Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) and Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) – moved quickly to put a good face on the numbers after they were released Friday night.
“This fulfills the strong commitment of the President and House leadership to enact health reform on a deficit-neutral basis,” the three chairmen said in a joint release. “The reforms included in this legislation will help control health care costs and expand access to quality, affordable coverage to all Americans in a fiscally-responsible manner.”
Top Health-Insurance Scams
Maureen Farrell, 01.18.08, 6:15 PM ET
They're back. They're slimy. And they want your money. They are health care hucksters.
In recent months, insurance regulators have been wrestling with what looks like a new wave in health-care scams, perpetrated mainly against the weakest of the flock: individuals and small-business owners.
Many of these frauds are similar to those that siphoned millions of dollars from unsuspecting consumers in the early 2000s. A few new nettlesome flavors have popped up, too--such as discount cards promising savings on doctors' visits and hospital stays (often marketed as real insurance) and human-resource service providers who also peddle sham health insurance.
In Pictures: Seven Slimy Health-Care Scams
"We've seen far too many [health-insurance fraud] cases recently," says Nevada's commissioner of insurance, Alice Molasky-Arman. In the past six months, six cases have landed in Nevada's insurance department--twice what bubbled up last year during the same time period.
The Coalition Against Fraud--a trade group comprised of major insurers, consumer groups and government agencies--has also seen more fraud cases spring up in the past year, after a drop-off for several years. "It's hard to say right now whether it's a tsunami revival of these frauds or a handful of isolated warning flares, but clearly these scams don't die easily," says James Quiggle, director of communications for the Washington-based organization.
In the last U.S. scam wave, between 2001 and 2003, four fake insurers left consumers high and dry with approximately $85 million in unpaid medical bills, according to research by the Commonwealth Fund, a New York-based health-care research foundation and the Georgetown University Health Policy Institute.
There's a reason perps pick on the little guy. Individuals and small-business-sponsored health insurance is governed by state regulations, not federal, which are offer greater consumer protection. (The feds keep an eye on the large-group insurance market).
In many states, insurers can deny individuals with pre-existing medical conditions. And if they do offer coverage, it comes at steep rates. As for small businesses, many can't afford to offer much in the way of health benefits. Just 45% of companies with three to nine workers offer them, according to the 2007 annual survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation; overall, some 60% of companies now offer health benefits, down from 69% in 2000. Meanwhile, the total number of uninsured Americans clocks in at roughly 47 million, or 16% of the U.S. population.
Choking health-care costs have individuals and entrepreneurs desperately scrambling for any relief--even into the waiting arms of scammers.
"Anytime you have an insurance need that is not met by the industry, it provides an arena for crooks to get involved," says Robert Brace, partner at Hollister & Brace, a Santa Barbara, Calif.-based law firm, who represented prosecutors against Employers Mutual, an unauthorized health-insurance company that defrauded thousands of health policyholders out of $30 million in unpaid claims. Last February, James Graf, architect of the scam, was sentenced to 25 years in prison and ordered to pay $20 million in restitution.
The Employers Mutual debacle (and others) led to a crackdown on fraudsters. State insurance departments launched consumer-awareness campaigns. This paid off for awhile, but now the bad guys are back. One big reason: "It's really easy to do," says Brace. "I could sell phony insurance."
Sham insurers can take many forms, including phony associations (think the Scuba Divers Association of Nebraska) or even third-party human-resource administrators. Some look and sound very legitimate, with real offices and Web sites, says Brace. They go fishing with below-market rates and target buyers who don't qualify for regular health insurance. Some hucksters might even pay a few claims to build trust. Eventually, though, they cut and run.
Herewith, some common scams and how to beat them:
Dreaded Disease Policies
In this time-worn scheme, an insurance provider claims to offer coverage for medical expenses related directly to a so-called "dreaded" disease like cancer, heart attacks, strokes or just an unfortunate accident. But when the bills come, the sham company is long gone with your premiums in its pocket.
There are some legitimate versions of these policies, too, but they come with plenty of loopholes. Limitations include: time frames with no option to renew, fixed dollar amounts and quirky caps on care. (Examples: Cancer treatments may only be covered in an in-patient setting, or the policy may provide no coverage for other illnesses related to a disease.)
Bottom line: With the right health insurance, you don't need these policies. If you don't have insurance and want to take a flier, make sure both agent and insurer are licensed in your state. Check with your state's insurance department.
Discount Cards
The promise of 15% off doctors' visits and hospital stays may sound like a bargain, but often these offers aren't real--unlike the crooks that market them. Some legitimate insurers offer discounts for "up to" a certain percentage, when in fact most of the time the savings are far more modest. These savings may also apply only to very specific treatments.
"In the last several years, there's been lots of activity in the discount-card area," says Mila Kofman, assistant research professor at Georgetown University's Health Policy Institute and the author of several studies on insurance fraud.
To sniff these scams out, vet the list of providers and find out if those doctors indeed honor discounts. Double-check the prices. Also check with your state's insurance department to see if there have been any past complaints with regard to those discounts.
Stacked Policies
Imagine a bunch of "dreaded disease" policies piled on top of each other. At best, the policies are mis-marketed; at worst, the insurer is a fraud.
Swiss cheese has nothing on some of these policies, though they may not be fraudulent per se. Exceptions abound, and you may end up paying higher premiums while missing out on basic coverage. Call your state regulator and read the fine print before getting suckered. Actually, don't bother--just avoid these plans altogether.
Faith-Based Plans
These programs collect attractively priced monthly premiums from members of a local or national congregation. (Most require members to uphold certain standards, such as no smoking, alcohol or premarital sex.) While plan members take it on faith that their medical bills will be covered, many won't be. Worse, there is little recourse to extract the money because programs tend not to be regulated.
Given the lack of transparency, it's hard to know which faith-based plans are legit and which aren't. Still, check with your state insurance department to see if consumers have filed complaints. Sometimes financial statements are available to the congregation, and some programs may even have a board of directors you can investigate.
Sadly, battling health-care scammers is a lot like trying to plug holes in a dike. But that doesn't mean you have to make it easy on them. "The bottom line is that health insurance is expensive for a reason, mostly because medical care is expensive," says Kofman. "Health insurance isn't going to be a lot cheaper depending on how you sell it."
In other words, if it smells too good to be true, it probably is.
In Pictures: Seven Slimy Health-Care Scams
Public plan central to health care reform debate
July 17, 2009
By MAUREEN GROPPE
Gannett Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON - Whether to create a publicly run health insurance plan to compete with private insurance companies has emerged as a key question as Congress decides how to revamp the nation’s health care system. Here’s a look at what’s being discussed.
Question: What has the president proposed?
Answer: President Barack Obama wants Congress to create a government-run health insurance program that would compete with private insurers. Congress would have to decide which benefits the plan would cover, how much doctors and other health care providers would be paid, and who would be eligible to purchase a public plan. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama said the plan should be open to anyone without access to group coverage through an employer or to current programs. The benefits would be the same as those offered to federal employees.
bc-GAN-MI-INSURANCE-QA
Q: What are the arguments for and against a public plan?
A: The administration contends a public plan would keep private insurers “honest” and force them to compete on price and value.
Private insurers say the government would have unfair advantages and drive them out of business, leading to a government takeover of health care.
One potential advantage is that the government could use its purchasing power to pay health care providers less, and would not having to maintain reserves or pay taxes. But a government plan also could have the disadvantage of having to be in every market and carrying a higher-risk pool of patients.
Q: How could a public plan cost less?
A: The government could charge lower premiums if it reimburses providers at lower rates than private insurers do. The government also wouldn’t need to make a profit or pay brokers’ commissions or fees. In response to competition from a public plan, private companies might lower their prices.
Q: What would be the plan’s impact?
A: The Lewin Group, a consulting firm known for its health policy analyses, looked at the impact of different types of public plans. The main variables were the plan’s reimbursement rate and who would be eligible to participate.
If the plan reimbursed at Medicare rates, premiums would be $761 per month, compared with an average $970 per month for a private insurance family plan. The Lewin Group estimates that if that type of plan were open to everyone, the number of people getting private insurance would drop by about 70 percent, or 119.1 million people.
If the public plan reimbursed providers at the rate that private plans do, premiums would not drop as much but would still be less than private plans because of lower administrative costs. If that type of plan were open to anyone, the Lewin Group estimates the number of people covered by private insurers would drop by about 12.5 million people.
Different types of public plans also would have different impacts on hospitals, doctors and other health care providers. If a plan was open to anyone, the extra revenue providers would get from more people having coverage would be offset by lower reimbursement rates.
But if large employers were barred from using a public plan, the impact of the lower reimbursement rates would not be as widespread. Hospital revenues, for example, would increase overall under that scenario.
Q: Who’s arguing for and against a public plan?
A: Opponents include the insurance industry, some drug manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Supporters include Health Care for America Now, a coalition of unions, community activists, and civil rights and consumer groups.
Q: What’s the status of the debate?
A: The health care proposal Democratic House leaders unveiled Tuesday includes a public plan that would be available first to individuals and small employers through a new health insurance exchange that would allow them to compare plans. The exchange would later be open to other employers. Hospitals would be reimbursed at Medicare rates, and doctors would get higher rates.
The bill being worked on by a Senate committee includes a public plan run by the Health and Human Services Department that would negotiate payment rates and set premiums.
Another Senate panel working on its own bill may go with a nonprofit insurance cooperative instead of a government-run plan.
Q: How do I contact my lawmaker?
A: The Capitol Hill switchboard number is 202-224-3121