Obama Appoints Health Care Rationing Czar

Wait a minute! What did that title read? “Rationing Czar?” But Obama and the Democrats promised us that there wouldn’t be any rationing and that anyone who made such a claim was guilty of “fear-mongering.”

Well, let’s meet Obama’s new Rationing Czar, Donald Berwick, and see whether we were “fear-mongering” or we simply called out the Democrats’ lie earlier than they expected:

From an article by Terry Jeffrey at TownHall:

“The decision is not whether or not we will ration care,” Berwick told Biotechnology Healthcare, “the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open.” President Obama has nominated Berwick to be administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, the federal agency that runs these two massive proto-socialist health care programs. If confirmed, he will oversee the massive cuts that Obamacare mandated in Medicare.

“Fear-mongering?” That is the term the Dems use when they want to silence critics who have correctly identified a Democrat lie.

You can access the complete article on-line here:

Obama Names Rationing Czar To Run Medicare
Terry Jeffrey
TownHall.com
May 25, 2010

AARP Loses Members Over Health Care Stance

I’ve been away at the beach for the past few days, but now I’ve returned and am ready to jump back into the fray.

This article in USA Today caught my eye for a couple of reasons. First, it demonstrates how the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) is more of a lobbying firm than it is a representative organization. Second, it highlights an aspect of the failures of the American public education system ever since the libs took control of it back in the 60′s and 70′s.

Let’s look at the first point. From the Associated Press:

About 60,000 senior citizens have quit AARP since July 1 due to the group’s support for a health care overhaul, a spokesman for the organization said Monday. The membership loss suggests dissatisfaction on the part of AARP members at a time when many senior citizens are concerned about proposed cuts to Medicare providers to help pay for making health care available for all.

And it is not just the cuts in Medicare that are of concern. Seniors are also concerned about the “end of life” provisions in Section 1233 of HR3200 and about the “outcome-based measures” of Section 1162 of HR3200 which could be used as justifications for denying health care to seniors based on their “productivity” as citizens.

Although AARP has said they will not support a plan that reduces Medicare benefits, they have yet to come out and point to any specific language in any bill as a reason for refusing support. Further, they have refused to threaten witholding of support as a means to pressure any lawmakers.

So, let’s look at my second point above. You may have noticed that at many of the Town Hall meetings across the United States that a great many of those voicing their opposition to socialized health care are, in fact, seniors. I was discussing this with a friend of mine and he noted that the older crowd seemed to know the legal mechanism better than the younger crowd.

This made sense to me. I began learning about the Constituion in the 4th grade and learned how bills were passed by Congress and signed into law by the President. These laws were then tested in the courts to make sure they didn’t violate the Constitution. This was back in the early 70′s.

Ever since the left has taken over the education system here in the U.S., such lessons are becoming more and more scarce. That is one of the reasons you see such an age disparity at the Town Halls and probably a good reason why Arlen Specter scolded his own constituents saying, “I am not required to be here!” only to have the crowd angrily boo at him. Apparently, Specter was expecting his crowd to be of the younger set who was not as well-educated about the Constitution. He was wrong.

I hope this debate continues for several more months. It is the best thing to happen to America since the end of World War II.

You can access the original article on-line here:

AARP Loses Members Over Health Care Stance
Associated Press via Usa Today
August 18, 2009

House Panel Passes Socialized Health Care Bill In Friday Night Vote

Why did the vote have to happen after hours on a Friday night? What were the members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee afraid that people might see?

From Fox News:

The House Energy and Commerce Committee, which voted Friday, was the last of three panels to approve a health bill. The vote, 31-28, was made possible by a deal brokered earlier this week between Democratic leaders and conservative “Blue Dog” Democrats, though health reform legislation still is being held up in one Senate committee. The Blue Dogs wanted to dial back a “public option” where the government offers health care for Americans. They also sought protections for small business owners and significant cost reductions.

Watered down or not, this bill is going to be nothing short of a disaster. Just look at Medicare and Medicaid. The costs (and budgets) for both of these programs have been going up, but the benefits doled out by each have been consistently cut over the years. And now, the libs want to further expand this?

More:

All but five Democrats on the committee voted for the plan. The other Democrats, Reps. Charlie Melancon of Louisiana, Bart Stupak of Michigan, Rick Boucher of Virginia, Jim Matheson of Utah and John Barrow of Georgia joined all Republicans in opposing the legislation.

When socialized medicine wrecks the health care industry in the United States, just as it wrecked the health care industries of Great Britain, Canada and every other country it has been tried in, we will know exactly who is to blame.

We need to begin educating people on exactly what is in this bill.

You can access the complete article on-line here:

Final House Panel Approves Health Reform Bill
Chad Pergram
Fox News
July 31, 2009

10 Questions For Supporters Of ObamaCare

I am actually going to write these into a letter and send them to my two Senators, Jim Webb and Mark Warner.

From Dennis Prager at Town Hall:

1. President Barack Obama repeatedly tells us that one reason national health care is needed is that we can no longer afford to pay for Medicare and Medicaid. But if Medicare and Medicaid are fiscally insolvent and gradually bankrupting our society, why is a government takeover of medical care for the rest of society a good idea? 2. President Obama reiterated this past week that “no insurance company will be allowed to deny you coverage because of a pre-existing medical condition.” This is an oft-repeated goal of the president’s and the Democrats’ health care plan. But if any individual can buy health insurance at any time, why would anyone buy health insurance while healthy? Why would I not simply wait until I got sick or injured to buy the insurance? 3. Why do supporters of nationalized medicine so often substitute the word “care” for the word “insurance?” 4. No one denies that in order to come close to staying within its budget health care will be rationed. But what is the moral justification of having the state decide what medical care to ration? 5. According to Dr. David Gratzer, health care specialist at the Manhattan Institute, “While 20 years ago pharmaceuticals were largely developed in Europe, European price controls made drug development an American enterprise. Fifteen of the 20 top-selling drugs worldwide this year were birthed in the United States.” Given how many lives — in America and throughout the world – American pharmaceutical companies save, and given how expensive it is to develop any new drug, will the price controls on drugs envisaged in the Democrats’ bill improve or impair Americans’ health? 6. Do you really believe that private insurance could survive a “public option”? Or is this really a cover for the ideal of single-payer medical care? How could a private insurance company survive a “public option” given that private companies have to show a profit and government agencies do not have to – and given that a private enterprise must raise its own money to be solvent and a government option has access to others’ money — i.e., taxes? 7. Why will hospitals, doctors, and pharmaceutical companies do nearly as superb a job as they now do if their reimbursement from the government will be severely cut? 8. Given how many needless procedures are ordered to avoid medical lawsuits and how much money doctors spend on medical malpractice insurance, shouldn’t any meaningful “reform” of health care provide some remedy for frivolous malpractice lawsuits? 9. Given how weak the U.S. economy is, given how weak the U.S. dollar is, and given how much in debt the U.S. is in, why would anyone seek to have the U.S. spend another trillion dollars? 10. Contrary to the assertion of President Obama — “we spend much more on health care than any other nation but aren’t any healthier for it” — we are healthier. We wait far less time for procedures and surgeries. Our life expectancy with virtually any major disease is longer. And if you do not count deaths from violent crime and automobile accidents, we also have the longest life expectancy. Do you think a government takeover of American medicine will enable this medical excellence to continue?

Question #2 is a great one.

I would ask one further question: If this socialized medicine package is so great, then why is Congress exempting itself from it? Shouldn’t Congress limit itself to only those choices that Joe and Jane Average American will have?

You can access the complete column on-line here:

10 Questions For Supporters Of ‘ObamaCare’
Dennis Prager
TownHall.com
July 28, 2009

Health Care Lies From The Obama White House

It’s no secret that Barack Obama is getting desperate to pass a nationalized health care bill. With many Blue-Dog Democrats lining up against the measure, time is clearly running out for Obama, Pelosi and Reid. But what time-frame are we talking about?

We are talking about the time-frame in which Congress and the President can pass this disastrous bill before too many more Americans read what is in it and discover what it is really all about.

Writing for Town Hall, David Limbaugh notes several inaccuracies and outright lies in the arguments made for this socialized medicine package:

–Despite White House-generated hysteria about the urgency of reform, the only urgency is in preventing this fiasco because it would destroy America’s economy and liberty. Doing nothing — even given the many problems that exist under the present system — is far preferable to adopting this monster. –Proponents claim the present system leaves 47 million people without insurance and unable to get it. Bull. Almost half of these uninsured could afford coverage but choose not to obtain it; almost half only remain uninsured for four months; and millions are noncitizens. Moreover, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that 17 million would remain uninsured after the plan is implemented. –Obama says his plan is not socialized medicine because he’s just providing a “public option” to make the private insurers more competitive. Well, he’s stacking the deck with mandated coverage — which, by definition, reduces competition — and subsidizing the public option. He would provide incentives to businesses to move employees to the public plan. Also, once you lose your insurance, your coverage choices would no longer be grandfathered, and you’d be forced to buy a plan that includes Big Brother’s mandates — meaning most would gravitate toward the government plan. A single-payer system is virtually inevitable. –The plan is being sold as a necessary element of reviving the economy. No one, including the Congressional Budget Office, believes this bill would improve our economy, and most believe it would exacerbate our problems. The bill, with its taxes on successful small businesses and its Draconian regulations, would destroy job creation, as would increases to the deficit and debt the bill would cause. –Health care costs would not be reduced, but increased — and shifted. Studies show that preventive care measures would not reduce costs. More importantly, the CBO says that even with the planned confiscatory taxes on higher-income earners (which no one can deny constitute real costs to them) and the penalties on employers who don’t provide coverage, the plan would fall $239 billion short of covering its initial cost estimates of $1 trillion. And that’s assuming everything goes well. But cost estimates for government programs are always understated. The actual costs for Medicare Part A were $67 billion, seven times higher than the government’s 1965 projections of $9 billion. Even worse, the Medicaid special hospitals subsidy was $11 billion, more than 100 times the government’s projection of $100 million in 1987, just years earlier. The only efforts at cost containment would come from artificial price controls, which would result in rationing — most likely for the elderly. –The quality of socialized health care would not be improved as promised, but would necessarily deteriorate, as it has in all countries that have tried it and in our own government-run experiments of veterans care, Medicaid and Medicare. It’s inescapably true — as noted by Dr. Thomas Sowell — that price controls would reduce quality care because they would reduce the incentive to provide quality. –Health care choices would not be expanded, but essentially eliminated, by government mandate. The White House isn’t even denying it would force taxpayer-subsidized abortions.

The longer it takes to get this abomination through Congress, the more time people have to study it and learn about the points Limbaugh made in the above excerpt.

Socialized health care has been a disaster in every single country it has ever been tried in. So much so that countries like Great Britain and Switzerland had to bring back privatized care in order to achieve the universal coverage that was so woefully missing from their nationalized systems.

You can access the complete column on-line here:

More Health Care Lies
David Limbaugh
TownHall.com
July 21, 2009

Star Parker: Government Health Care Plantation Looms

I love reading Star Parker’s columns. She seems to have a way of looking at things, not necessarily from an opposite direction, but just enough of a different direction that things tend to become clearer. Her latest column concerning socialized medicine does just that.

From Town Hall:

Rather than moving dysfunctional America off the welfare state, as we did with welfare reform in 1996, we are now moving the free, functioning, and once prosperous part of our nation onto the welfare state. Bills out of committees in both the House and the Senate contain all the elements of President Obama’s dream to get as many Americans onto the government health care plantation as possible.

That’s right. Instead of getting people off of a dependence on the government, socialized health care is an attempt to get people dependent on the government.

More:

We’ve got creation of the new government run insurance plan that supposedly will create new competition. We’ve got fines on employers who don’t provide insurance and fines on individuals who don’t buy it. And we’ve got the trillions of dollars in new spending to subsidize insurance purchases for low to middle income Americans and expand Medicaid to get more low income Americans into it. And, of course, we’ve got the massive new government bureaucracy to oversee it all.

You read that right. More fines and more taxes. Health care reform was supposed to make things less expensive but the fines and taxes are going to make it more expensive for us. And why is Obama so hell bent on fining someone who chooses not to buy health insurance?

Here’s some more insight you won’t read about in Old Media:

Obama continues to tell the many millions of Americans currently insured through their employer not to worry, that “If you like your health care plan you can keep that…” But we know this is a slight of hand. Many employers will gladly pay the fine and purge their employees into the government plan. And how will private plans possibly compete with the government plan when politicians can reach into taxpayer pockets anytime they want to keep on subsidizing it? The Lewin Group estimates that a hundred twenty million Americans may be driven into the government plan.

120 million Americans. (140 if you count the 20 million illegals who will be eligible for taxpayer-funded health care.) And how are we going to pay for health care for all of them? New taxes. If you are one of the top 5% earners who happens to live in the state of Maryland, then you will be paying over 50 cents on every dollar you work to earn if the new taxes to pay for other people’s health care goes through.

And about that promise to keep private insurance companies “honest?” Let’s look at the government’s track record on that:

Harvard’s Malcom Sparrow, a specialist in health-care fraud, estimates annual Medicare fraud at $85 billion. The Government Accountability Office estimates Medicaid fraud at around $33 billion annually. So that’s $120 billion a year in government health care fraud! This is who will keep private companies “honest?”

This socialized health care plan is a disaster waiting to happen, just as it happened in every other country it has been tried in.

We need to stop it before it wrecks the entire health system.

You can access the complete article on-line here:

Government Health Care Plantation Looms
Star Parker
TownHall.com
July 20, 2009

Star Parker is the author of Uncle Sam’s Plantation:

Uncle Sam’s Plantation on amazon.com

Democrats At The Trough: Your Taxpayer Dollars Feeding The Pigs

If only all journalists in the United States had as much integrity and courage as Cal Thomas does to write what is overwhelmingly obvious and write it with so much clarity. Take, for example, government spending, why it has become so bloated and what effect such spending has on you and I, the American taxpayers.

Cal’s latest column is about overspending by governments: Federal, State and Local. And he explains clearly why such overspending occurred and what the (mostly Democrat) elected leaders in these governments want to do by way of a “solution.”

From his column:

Democratic governors from overspending states like New York, Wisconsin, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Ohio are among those seeking financial deliverance. The governors want Washington to pony up $1 trillion for their absolutely-essential-non-negotiable-if-we-don’t-get-the-money-people-will-starve programs.

But why should we, the taxpayers, fund this bailout? Who among us would not be held responsible, as individual citizens, for spending more than we take in?

Read on:

New York Governor David Paterson claims that, because tax revenues have plunged, 43 states now have budget deficits totaling around $100 billion. No, those states have deficits because when times were good and the money was rolling in they thought they could get away with endless new programs, while putting little or no money aside for the inevitable rainy day. Neither did they consider which programs were necessary and which ones were just politically beneficial. Or, maybe they did and they opted for politically beneficial, thus creating their problem, and ours. Notice the sleight of hand about to be perpetrated on hardworking taxpayers. In the end, it is we who pay for the plans of politicians who are unable, or unwilling, to control themselves when it comes to other peoples’ money. When Republicans cut taxes, Democrats scream about growing deficits. But Democrats never worry about the deficit when they spend more than what the government takes in. So it really isn’t about the deficit at all. It is about how much of our hard-earned money the Democrats, mostly, will allow us to keep.

Bingo! Look at that simplicity of comparison. Conservatives cut taxes and the libs complain about not enough money to spend. Libs spend more money than they have and then delude themselves into believing that our grand-children will be happy to pay for the libs non-sense appropriations. What would happen to you if you ran your household budget like this? You would, at the very least, recieve a very low credit rating and not be able to get new loans, or at worst, go to jail.

And what is even better is that the comparison between the libs and Conservatives is valid and absolutely true.

More:

The incoming Obama administration wants to spend gobs of money on “infrastructure,” creating government jobs that will end when the work is completed. Isn’t infrastructure primarily supposed to be the work of state and local governments? Isn’t the gasoline tax supposed to go to build and repair local roads and bridges? The federal responsibility should begin and end with the interstate highway system. The governors’ request for more money from Washington is also about unfunded mandates, the rising cost of Medicare and Medicaid and a lot of other “entitlement” programs that could have been made solvent during the Bush administration, which tried, but was unable to succeed due to opposition from Democrats who preferred to have an issue rather than a solution.

And there is the reason the Dems don’t want any real solutions to the overspending problem. They need wasteful programs in order to buy votes and they need a way to keep people dependent on the government for their livelihood.

This is a most excellent column and everyone should read it:

Pigs At The Trough
Cal Thomas
TownHall.com
January 6, 2009

Medicare Rife With Fraud: The Dems Model For Socialized Medicine

Socialized Medicine is a disaster. It is a disaster up in Canada where medical travel agencies help patients travel to the U.S. to get proper and sometimes life-saving care; it is a disaster over in Great Britain where patients wait up to 13 hours in ambulance lines before they get taken into an Emergeny Room to wait and additional 9 hours to receive care.

But we don’t need to go any further than the latest Medicare audit to see exactly how how much of a disaster it would be here in then Unted States. Even the New York Times gets it. From Charles Duhigg:

Medicare’s top officials said in 2006 that they had reduced the number of fraudulent and improper claims paid by the agency, keeping billions of dollars out of the hands of people trying to game the system. … In calculating the agency’s rate of improper payments, Medicare officials told outside auditors to ignore government policies that would have accurately measured fraud, according to the report. For example, auditors were told not to compare invoices from salespeople against doctors’ records, as required by law, to make sure that medical equipment went to actual patients.

The Medicare audit claimed a fraud rate of only 7.5%.

But the inspector general’s review indicated that the actual error rate was closer to 31.5 percent.

And how did this 31.5% rate come about? Like this:

Equipment sellers have submitted counterfeit documents, forged doctors’ signatures and filed claims on behalf of patients who were dead or had never been seen by the prescribing physician, according to many reports by government oversight agencies. For example, a Florida businessman was sentenced last year to 37 months in prison for submitting more than $5.5 million of fake claims to Medicare. The businessman operated for months, despite giving the agency an address that was actually a utility closet. On July 1, Medicare instituted a new competitive bidding system that officials said would reduce both fraud and costs for medical equipment. On July 15, however, Congress suspended the program, after equipment manufacturers and sellers began an aggressive lobbying campaign.

Lobbyists. That explains a great deal about why this fraud is occurring.

But the main thing to remember is that this fraud-laden program is what the Dems would have us all subscribe to under Socialized Medicine.

You can access the complete article on-line here:

Report Rejects Medicare Boast Of Paring Fraud
Charles Duhigg
The New York Times
August 20, 2008