Jul 15 2009
I Think Our President Has Lost His Mind
We have witnessed since January how liberal naiveté has applied the wrong government medicine and treatments to an ailing job market, making things worse than anyone would have expected. Obama and his liberal allies in Congress claimed they wanted to ‘stimulate’ the economy to create jobs and this had to be done right away. But they implemented a federal pork spending program which had no ability to spend money right away. It was smoke and mirrors which has now been cleared from our sight, since everyone in DC now admits there never was meant to be any near term stimulus.
They lied and now claim it was us who misunderstood. Fool me once, shame on you.
In fact, the only thing the Obama-Pelosi-Ried stimulus experiment did do was create a mind boggling $1.84 trillion national deficit this year (projected from the $1.086 trillion we hit in June).Â
The Treasury Department said Monday that the deficit in June totaled $94.3 billion, pushing the total since the budget year started in October to $1.09 trillion. The administration forecasts that the deficit for the entire year will hit $1.84 trillion in October.
That is some amazing skill there, to bankrupt this nation and have nothing to show for it. Now the liberals in DC, sensing they are already running out of time on their agenda as their support begins to slip, have decided to destroy our health care system and replace it with one that has a simple premise: cheaper is better.
As many have noted elsewhere, the ideal liberal health care system is one of rationed, government-run care where it can take months to be seen and have your medical condition addressed. In the UK people have died waiting for treatment and Canada ships many of its tougher cases to the US every year. They are the model for the DC liberals.
The Obamacare approach was summed up by Obama himself when he noted this:
President Obama suggested at a town hall event Wednesday night that one way to shave medical costs is to stop expensive and ultimately futile procedures performed on people who are about to die and don’t stand to gain from the extra care.
Under Obamacare, only the strong and rich will survive. But it will be cheaper!Â
How does Obama rationalize the incredibly expensive take over of private health care insurance by putting up a tax payer funded, government run system to drive out the private companies during a time of massive deficits, low revenues and economic hell? By promising more deficits, lower revenues and more economic hell:
Obama issued a statement praising the House plan. At a time when health-care costs are “crushing businesses and families and placing an unsustainable burden on governments,” he said, “key committees in the House of Representatives have engaged in unprecedented cooperation to produce a health-care proposal that will lower costs, provide better care for patients and ensure fair treatment of consumers by the health-care industry.”
Who is this guy kidding? Does he think Americans are really that dumb? Let’s take the first part of this pretzel logic: “At a time when health-care costs are “crushing businesses and families and placing an unsustainable burden on governments ..” Â Health care costs are what they are. They are not going to go downward out of some magical wand waving. The way to reduce costs is to reduce what we pay people in the medical industries and professions to do their jobs.
We would need to pay them less to make heart valves, pay them less to make defibrillators, pay them less to be nurses, pay them less to process insurance claims, pay them less to be doctors, ay them less to create new drugs. People are paid to provide health care – from the doctors and nurses to the creators of all the amazing life saving devices and treatments to the people who manage the paperwork and clean the buildings. Medicine is an expensive necessity. It does not come in a fast-food option. But the liberals in DC are offering just that – a fast food (read cheap) health care system!
The only way to reduce costs is to cut them, which means lowering the money we pay people, which means lowering the skill levels and/or number of jobs:
About half of the costs of the legislation will be paid for through reforms and savings in Medicare and Medicaid, including eliminating $156 billion in overpayments to private Medicaid Advantage plans over 10 years.
Brilliant – cut the what the payment on services, which means rationed or fewer services. Obama and the Dems think they can wave their magic liberal fairy wands and all of sudden Medicare and Medicaid will be cheaper? Not likely. What will happen is fewer people will offer services under these plans, leaving the people high and dry.
Right now the government pays a fraction of the costs required under government plans like Medicare and Medicaid. The only way for companies to offset their losses on government plans is to raise the price of the non-government plans. Basically, one big reason medical insurance premiums are so high on Americans now is we are covering the dead beats in DC who promised all this cheap healthcare, but would not fund it.Â
If the government has to actually pay full value for healthcare it means putting a burden on companies and individuals in the form of taxes, or rationing care. The new Democrat plan is to impose a surtax on small businesses and sole proprietors – calling them ‘rich’ as the dems always do. All this does is pull money out of the one sector of the economy that is key to creating jobs. It has the obvious result – no new jobs. But that is not enough.
To pay for this we also need to reduce the salaries of people in the health care industries, we need to choke off job creation from small businesses. Remember, the Dems promise it will all cost less. But even this will not cover the full costs by any stretch of the imagination. So to top it all off we as a nation will be going further and further into never-before-seen levels of debt. Either that or ration the health care dollars.
So let’s summarize the liberal plan, shall we? Those in the health care industries will see their salaries or jobs shrunk, small businesses will not be hiring because of the surtaxes, health care will be rationed and the best care will be only available to the richest few, and we will sink into deeper debt. But there will be reduced burden on families because our health care will be cheaper.Â
Seems to be a plan just like that whacky job stimulus bill the liberals sold this country in January. All big promises which have no chance of coming true. Fool me twice? Not likely.
Update: I want to note some insightful comments from Michael Barone:
Obama was also content to let Waxman and Edward Markey write the House cap-and-trade bill. To get needed votes, they gave away carbon credits to politically connected businesses rather than sell them by auctions whose revenues Obama planned to use to finance health care. And they included potentially embarrassing provisions, like one regulating the efficiency of candelabra base lamps. Better be prepared to face the federal candelabra inspectors.
Such are the people whom we are asked to trust to reshape the provision of health care. They are struggling to amass the votes to establish a government health insurance plan whose transparent purpose is to drive private insurers out of business and impose one-size-fits-all health care on the bulk of Americans. They already inserted into the stimulus package a provision funding “comparative effectiveness research,” which purports to show what treatments are medically effective and cost-effective.
But comparative effectiveness research is, if not junk science, not a fully developed intellectual enterprise. Medicine is an art as well as a science, and comparative effectiveness research may too often compare apples and oranges. Meanwhile, as Europeans know, the most effective way to squeeze out costs, as Obama promises, is denial of care. Hip replacement at 60? Hey, that’s expensive, and you’re too old.
Do we really want to let the Dems do to the Health Care industry what they did to Chrysler and GM Dealerships?
Update: At least the Dems have brought back the genius of Rube Goldberg devices. The GOP have charted the Democrat plan, and it looks on paper even worse than it sounds.
I think it is perfectly sane: Once they pass health care, they will have a new means by which they can buy votes, just like they have used other social programs throughout the years.
It is easy to find the money needed, ask Europe. Keep an eye on the Defense budget.
Is it still unpatriotic to hope that Obama fails in what he’s trying to do?
I find it absolutely obscene that a very few are called upon over and over again to support the wants of the many. My animosity towards this government is growing by the day. One good president that Obama and his minions has opened the door for is sweeping change. So I’m thinking the sweeping change can go the other way as well, to undo things.
Am I the only one who finds it ironic, in a kind of sick way, that liberals who hate Wal Mart are trying to turn our healthcare system into one big Wal Mart? Less pay, cheaper products, etc. What, are they going to build a gigantic hospital on the battlefield at Manassas next?
Just stick with the phrase … placing an unsustainable burden on governments.
What kind of idiot then says government should do more ?
I agree with HCH … he hasn’t lost his mind. He is actively trying to destroy our country and build a different one.
“Who is this guy kidding? Does he think Americans are really that dumb?”
You bet he does – in fact he knows it.
Unfortunately, I can’t remember to whom to attribute this:
I have a story to tell my new fellow Republicans and conservatives (new, as I’m a recent convert) that illustrates how the arguments we find compelling are likely to be perceived differently by the public they — oops, we — wish to persuade.
The story comes from my father, Hubert Yockey, who has despised Communism all his life and who was educated at Berkeley in the 1930s. He had sufficient exposure to draw his conclusions at a tender age.
Soviet Communists — in the 1930s, I believe — wished to convince their workers of how downtrodden the U.S. worker was by capitalism and democracy. The Communists showed the workers newsreel footage of picketing union members and police, thinking their people would be outraged by the cops beating their fellow proles.
But they weren’t. Apparently people who live in a police state accept getting beaten up by the police for any reason and no reason as ordinary, and this did not draw their attention at all.
Instead, the Communist workers saw the capitalist workers and instantly cried out: “The shoes! The shoes!†The Commies did not have shoes, or at least not shoes of the same sturdy quality that the capitalist workers wore.
It’s going to go that way in the debate over universal health care. Defenders of the current health care system, and proponents of the Republican plan, are telling stories of delays and rationing. They are crying “socialism,†believing that the uninsured and under insured will see things as conservatives do and reject government-run Obama care.
But I think the conservatives using this approach will be hearing a modern version of “The shoes! The shoes!â€
People who have no access to health care, and people struggling without sufficient health care, will be saying, “you mean soon I could have some?†Because when you can’t afford it, you already have delays and rationing. Practically any alternative doesn’t just look better, it is better.
And as a recent convert to fiscal conservatism after a lifetime as a liberal Democrat, I assure long time conservatives that the word “socialism†does not hold any dread for liberals. Most of them have no idea what the word means. Liberals have simply not done as much homework as conservatives have on economic theory! Worse than that, they don’t believe in themselves as individuals the way conservatives do! So enough of them are sufficiently desperate that they are willing to trade the greater opportunity of capitalism, with its very real risks, for the stagnation of socialism and its false promise of security.
And it doesn’t look like many liberals will realize in time how desperate Obama has made them by destroying the economy in as many different ways as he can. They will be frightened into believing “any port in a storm,†and go along with his plan to make the U.S. a socialist country.
Because if universal health care isn’t another one of Obama’s trademark bait-and-switch promises, then it’s one of his bait-and-hook plans.
And what about liberals who do understand what socialism means? They are the truly dangerous ones. They want the power that socialism gives to the few over the many, and they like the fact that in socialist systems it is difficult to break their grip on that power. Ironically, it seems that it is citizens of socialist countries who become truly conservative according to Obama’s definition, in the sense that they fear change and oppose it.
Being out of money, flabbergastingly in debt, poised for hyperinflation, at war in two countries, and being threatened by a third has not stopped Obama from going forward with his health care plans. The scare word of “socialism†holds no terror for the majority of this country because they don’t understand it. The scare scenarios of delays and rationing look pretty good to the tens of millions of people who now experience a much more deadly form of delays and rationing.
If fiscal conservatives are not able to explain to people who are barefoot — in terms of health care — how the free market that hasn’t gotten them shoes before will get them shoes under the Republican plan, I believe Obama and the Democrats will have very little trouble getting their plan passed.
Do you believe us now i.e. obama? He is implementing the Cloward Piven strategy(overwhelm government with giveaways)…with soros in the wings to head up the “World Governance”, to use Al Gore’s recent phrase. Just my opinion..
Well, the Dims might not be scared but I have been scared s***less from the time I started watching him in 2004.
Sure enough………………………he has delivered the nightmare.
We elect Voices. We elect people who are suppose to fight for the ones that sent them. I can not name you a dozen Pugs that I would keep if I had a choice. Why is that? If I could throw out those bums and replace with Plumbers, I would.
The dumb Pugs in Congress truly do not know how to fight dirty like their Dim buddies. Right this minute, they need to take anything they can get to stop the madness.
Why do they not DEMAND (the entire dumb group of them) the public records on Obama? Get on TV and say their voters are demanding to see that birth certificate. The passport. The whole smear. The Dims media could not ignore them if they do it as a group. They could call them bias. Yeah? They could call them Whatever. Yeah? So????????????????
So this does nothing for jobs, tax and trade and the healthcare suicide pact? So? What else are they doing about it? That’s right. Their hands are tied. They are the minority. They need to get off the pot and go home if they can’t find their Voice.
Obama scares me to death. The ineffective Pug Congress makes me puke.
The “stimulus” was never more than a welfare bonanza for leftist organizations and Hussein supporters. And the health care fraud/disaster is a cynical, criminal, ludicrous takeover of the rights and liberty of American citizens. What better path to dictatorship than control of the health/death of those you desire to enslave.
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I am sure that Obama is thinking he will create more dependents and more voters, but if this thing turns out as well the stimulus, he might also be creating some libertarians and conservatives.
I think that a lot of people think Obama is doing too much too fast. There is no debate. There is no understanding of what is being done and that scares people.
Obama is starting to scare people.
[…] to medical treatment. By socializing medicine Barack Obama takes over one 6th of our economy. He will ration pay to health care providers, and care. More people go on the welfare rolls, dependent upon the […]