Jul 23 2009
President Obama Failed To Calm The Nation’s Health Care Fears
It is clear President Obama’s presser last night failed to address the nation’s fears about what a liberal designed, government run, one-size-fits-all take over of health care in America. In fact I would wager he made those fears worse because his attempt to paste over the reality was so transparent and simple minded he actually confirmed a lot of fears.
Others are out explaining the results better than I could, so let’s sample a few good points. Starting with the AP which is completely flummoxed by the false claims our President tried to push on us:
President Barack Obama’s assertion Wednesday that government will stay out of health care decisions in an overhauled system is hard to square with the proposals coming out of Congress and with his own rhetoric.
Even now, nearly half the costs of health care in the U.S. are paid for by government at all levels. Federal authority would only grow under any proposal in play.
…
OBAMA: “We already have rough agreement” on some aspects of what a health care overhaul should involve, and one is: “It will keep government out of health care decisions, giving you the option to keep your insurance if you’re happy with it.”
THE FACTS: In House legislation, a commission appointed by the government would determine what is and isn’t covered by insurance plans offered in a new purchasing pool, including a plan sponsored by the government. The bill also holds out the possibility that, over time, those standards could be imposed on all private insurance plans, not just the ones in the pool.
Much more at the link. These blatant and obvious conflicting claims with the reality of the liberal bill in the House has completely destroyed the President’s credibility, as we can see from the Kaus Files:
I know I’d like universal health coverage. That’s been debated ad nauseam. What hasn’t been debated–what have been blessed mainly by pronouncements from on high couched in euphemisms and deception–are Orszag’s “delivery system” changes. I’m worried that they will result in denial of treatments that may be useful at saving and prolonging lives. Obama’s refusal at his press conference to declare that all covered treatments would still be covered is an example of what people worry about. And Obama knows–or even scarier, maybe he doesn’t–that the difficult decisions don’t involve cheap blue pills that are as good as red pills, but treatments that are the “best” but also the “most expensive”–including cancer drugs like Herceptin and Sutent. …
That is the staggering reality of Obamacare – only the strong will survive. In order to keep costs down we will need to stop trying to save the elderly and seriously ill. A reality that has people rightly concerned.
With his example of the red and blue pills, and another about whether a child’s hypothetical tonsils should be removed, President Obama unwittingly presents the real problem with his plan for reform. Here is a well-meaning government official who so fails to grasp the problem in health care that he can present such absurd oversimplifications and suggest that this sort of thing is the real problem — doctors simply lack the common sense to make obvious medical decisions. President Obama wants us to solve this problem by putting himself and other government officials in charge of rescuing medicine from the medical profession. If medical doctors with a decade of schooling cannot distinguish between good cures and ineffective ones that must be discontinued, then by gosh, we’re lucky that the good folks from the government can.
President Obama thus frames the issue as a false choice between doing nothing at all and handing over to Washington complicated, case-by-case medical decisions that cannot possibly be legislated or dictated by government.
That is Obamacare at its core. We cannot let doctors make decisions because they make costly decisions. So accountants with no medical understanding or training will decide who can have what kind of treatment. In essence, they will use the almighty dollar as an excuse to determine who lives, who suffers and who must die.
Frankly, having a aide to the President go on TV over the weekend and bring up abortion funding really didn’t help his cause.
All it did was remind folks that health care is intermixed with the culture war and as such there will have to be anegotiated settlement on the scale of that required to bring peace to the Middle East.
What REALLY didn’t help his cause was going off on that rant about “racial profiling” in Cambridge. Can you say “Distraction”??? The whole point of the presser was to get everyone to focus on Health Care, in order to move the process forward. What is everyone talking about today? A cop and a crazy perfesser in Cambridge.
And once again, Obama’s on the wrong side of that argument, an argument that he didn’t have to address at all.
Given Obama’s remarks last night – just WHO is acting stupidly here?
I believe Obama doesn’t have an organized “pitch” for this because he didn’t think he needed one. He has probably been in that liberal echo chamber so long that he really believes that (as Pelosi says) 70% of the people WANT government health care so this should have been a “no brainer” and would sail right through. He is probably quite perplexed at the pushback he is seeing on this and doesn’t really know how to respond other than “hey, its from the government, it HAS to be good!”.
My family has the best pediatrician I could have hoped for. Both kids still have their tonsils. I would pay whatever it took to keep that guy as my kids’ doctor and I don’t want some “green eyeshade” deciding what care my kids need.
I also don’t want “the government” having every tiny detail of information about my kids’ health history. How would someone who is 50 years old running for public office like to see it “leaked” that they had an STD when they were a teenager? Those are the kinds of things we risk when politicians control our medical records. Or maybe your records somehow get “lost” after coming out very publicly opposed to some government policy … right before the IRS starts auditing you and all your friends and family.
The opportunity for abuse is just too great. Joe the Plumber showed us what happens when you have partisan government employees peering into to people’s records when they oppose someone politically. Want that happening with your medical history or that of your family?
We want universal coverage, not Government coverage. There is a HUGE difference.
Hmm, apparently I have one caught in the spam trap.
Rasmussen approval rating 51%
[…] President Obama Failed To Calm The Nation’s Health Care Fears – The Strata-Sphere […]
So accountants with no medical understanding or training will decide who can have what kind of treatment.
Not only that, I’ll bet the accountants must have the “correct” kind of ideology as well.
–
“I’ll bet the accountants must have the “correct†kind of ideology ”
And be members of the “correct” union.
On Glenn Beck, Linda Chavez explained about those two departments on that busy Obamacare chart. One of them deals with minorities. Linda says that if you are a black or Hispanic, they will send you to a black or Hispanic doctor.
Obamacare bill is written in favor of the blacks and Hispanics.
What happened to the Asians?
OK, I think I know where Obama is coming from. I’ve been watching a little CNN, tons about the lousy care blacks are getting, mostly poor, but most don’t have health insurance, hospitals turn them away, maybe they have medicaid. Still reimbursement for medicaid is low, so go to clinics, or are pushed off to clinics. So Obama thinks that if he introduces a public plan and throws a trillion at it, these people will get better care. Still I’m sure that these people could get a check for medical insurance, just like they get rebates for housing, childcare, food stamps. I don’t know the program, but I’m sure it is administrated locally, and the systems are already set up. Why wouldn’t that work? My point is that we need to bring these people up to a better standard, not bring the whole medical care system down.
Now, I have no problem, really, with a program that subsidizes insurance for people in a situation like that. You get them a policy with someone like Kaiser, pay the premium, bill the deductible to the govt. and they have insurance … no huge bureaucracy needed. Maybe even split the program up between a few different carriers. If you spend even as much as $500 a month on premiums (that would be a pretty expensive program, probably one of the highest cost ones they have), you could still insure 2 million people for a billion dollars. I doubt there are more than 2 million people that meet that criteria.
MOST of the uninsured are the unemployed. Pretty much all of them will be re-insured within a few months. Remember when the Democrats complained in the third year of George W Bush’s administration that “2 million jobs have been lost”? Well, there are currently 6,225,000 Americans (according to CNN) on “continuing” unemployment benefits as of this week. 554,000 Americans filed for initial unemployment benefits.
So that is nearly 7 million Americans. That accounts for about 40% of the people without insurance right there leaving about 11.6 million if the “18 million” number the Democrats have been bandying about is accurate. That number remaining is interestingly close to the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants.
So while there might be at any given instant 18 million people in America without insurance, 40% of them are going to regain insurance on their own without any intervention by the government. Close to 60% of them are not going to get insurance EVEN if the government takes it over because they aren’t going to report themselves to the government to GET insurance. And once government takes over health care, they are going to be AFRAID to go to the hospital for fear of the government finding them out and deporting them.
What remains are probably a few million people who for whatever reason are in such dire economic circumstances that they have no hope of getting insurance. A poor family whose breadwinner has died or been sent to prison, the illiterate, people too sick to work, etc.
I think we can cover those people without handing over everyone in the country’s medical and financial records to the government.
More data from CNN:
So we aren’t really even going to know how many of the uninsured are a result of Obama’s economic failure. He needs to ram this through before the pitchforks and torches show up in Lafayette Park.
AJ,
“That is the staggering reality of Obamacare – only the strong will survive. In order to keep costs down we will need to stop trying to save the elderly and seriously ill. A reality that has people rightly concerned.”
It is quite sad that you keep repeating this scare tactic without providing any support other than comments from other conservative bloggers and a couple articles of isolated instances of citizens in other countries being denied coverage for certain procedures.
I’ll let you in on a little secret you apparently are not aware of. We don’t need to speculate about whether or not a US government run health care plan would result in allowing the elderly to simply die because it would be too costly to treat them. Don’t tell anyone because it is a secret – WE ALREADY HAVE A GOVERNMENT HEALTH CARE PLAN THAT COVERS THE ELDERLY – IT IS CALLED MEDICARE. It has been around since 1965, so surely there must be tons of examples of the government allowing seniors to die because it would be too costly to provide them the necessary care. And yet, oddly enough neither you nor any of the other health scare advocates ever cite any evidence that this has been occuring over the last 40 plus years. Why look at data of an actual plan in place when it is much more convenient to speculate? The vast majority of the country and an even larger percentage of seniors want to maintain Medicare. So it seems like this whole “the government will let the elderly and weak die to save a buck” is complete B.S.
Oh, by the way, the conservatives and private insurabne industry used the exact same scare tactics to fight Medicare in the 1960’s. And yet the sky hasn’t fallen over the last 40 years!l
You’re not up to speed on the latest news about Medicare.
You also have not read the Obamacare bill.
Oh, btw, it’s not B.S.
AJ is absolutely correct.
Go read that bill yourself. It’s all in there.
And, btw, Medicare is running up a huge deficit alone.
Lurker,
Yeah, I’m sure the bill says that if it is too expensive to provide treatment for the elderly or seriously ill, then the government will just let them die. If you believe that, I’ve got a bridge for sale!
Maybe you can point me to the language in the bill that supposedly supports this concept. You know, go to that conservative website where you got this concept in the first place, where it essentially says “here’s language in the bill that doesn’t mean what it actually says, it is secret code language that the liberals sneaked into the bill to allow them to kill off the elderly and seriously ill!” I need a good laugh today, so please provide me the supposed language in the bill that was enough to convince you the government plans to kill off all weak and old folks.
And yes, I’m aware that Medicare is not free. No government health care plan will be free, regardless of what the proponents try to say. The question is whether it will be more cost effective than our current private health care system. Under the current health care system, the U.S. health care costs account for 17% of our GDP. That is the highest % of GDP of ANY industrialized country, at least 2% more than the second highest. Which is amazing since all of the remaining industrialized countries provide health care for all of their citizens while close to 50 million Americans are not even insured. So we pay more to cover less. But hey, it is the greatest health care system in the world according to the GOP – which is odd given that the vast majority of Americans want health care reform.