OBAMAFARE

I use the above term for the MSM's term OBAMACARE because "insuring" pre existing conditions is not "insurance", it is WELFARE! This is quite obvious; and no politician will touch this "third rail" of healthcare - a commentary on both Democrats and Republicans and a root cause of my cynicism on the future of our country if our political class does not change.

Two articles appeared today regarding Judge C. Roger Vinson's ruling in Florida that the individual mandate was unconstitutional and that the 2010 healathcare low should be overturned in its entirety. The justification for this mandate was the welfare aspect of OBAMAFARE!

Avik Roy on NRO's domestic policy blog The Agenda writes a clear analysis of the decision which everyone should read. This should be necessary reading for all.

The White House, through an assistant to President Obama, rebuts the decision here. Again, this should be necessary reading for all.

What makes sense to you?

TRUTH: It's hard to come by from BHO!

Patriot Post Chronicle explains the lack of veracity from our President. Why can't he admit what really happened?


"Blaming voters for not getting the message: "I think that, over the course of two years we were so busy and so focused on getting a bunch of stuff done that, we stopped paying attention to the fact that leadership isn't just legislation. That it's a matter of persuading people. And giving them confidence and bringing them together. And setting a tone. And making an argument that people can understand. And I think that we haven't always been successful at that. And I take personal responsibility for that. And it's something that I've got to examine closely as I go forward." --Barack Obama.

Editor's Note: Obama gave 42 news conferences during his first year in office, which is twice as many as George W. Bush did in the same period. On top of that, he visited 58 cities in 30 states, held 21 town hall meetings and read 52 speeches off the teleprompter telling us the virtues of ObamaCare. The problem is not a failure to communicate -- the problem is that he did communicate.

More Berwick; an interesting sidelight!

The Washington Times discovers Donald Berwick's "arrangements" with the "charitable" organization he works for.

I don't know about you, but I would rather have a "non-elite" - that is, one who has not received total medical coverage for he and his wife for the rest of their lives (and from a "charity"!) - running Medicaid and Medicare!

And his salaries - $2.3 million in 2008! - seem generous, also!

Read the column and understand what is being done to us by BHO and his cronies.

Obamacare: Sarah Palin was prescient on "Death Panel"

As a follow up to yesterday's post on the recess appointment of Donald Berwick to head Medicare and Medicaid, I find this IBD column titled "The President's One-Man Death Panel" and documenting some of his beliefs, a great summary of the problem.

It is amazing! The last three paragraphs of the column:


"The push for ObamaCare involved writing legislation behind closed doors by an imperial Democratic majority. Only through outright bribes to key senators and congressmen did it pass, voted on by politicians who didn't even read it. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said we had to pass the bill to find out what's in it."

With the recess appointment of Donald Berwick we find more secrecy and gimmicks from an administration as transparent as a concrete wall.

The American people deserve better. They also deserve a healthy democracy."

Obamacare: Obama makes repeal a real possibility!

John Podhoretz explains the suspect politics behind the recess appointment of Donald Berwick as head of Medicare and Medicaid - he is a promoter of the British style single payer Government healthcare.

The final paragraph:


"By running away from this fight, Obama is signaling that the possibility of repealing the health-care monstrosity before it really begins to sink its teeth into the American system by 2014 is very real indeed."


Let's hope his conclusion is true and we can repeal Obamacare and avoid a disaster!

"Patty Murray's Chutzpah"

Unintended Consequences is a double edged sword points out WSJ Best of the Web Today:


""We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it," Speaker Nancy Pelosi famously said, and the Associated Press reports on what abortion advocates are finding out:
Abortion opponents fought passage of President Barack Obama's health care overhaul to the bitter end, and now that it's the law, they're using it to limit coverage by private insurers.

An obscure part of the law allows states to restrict abortion coverage by private plans operating in new insurance markets. Capitalizing on that language, abortion foes have succeeded in passing bans that, in some cases, go beyond federal statutes.

"We don't consider elective abortion to be health care, so we don't think it's a bad thing for fewer private insurance companies to cover it," said Mary Harned, attorney for Americans United for Life, a national organization that wrote a model law for the states.

Abortion rights supporters are dismayed.

"Implementation of this reform should be about increasing access to health care and increasing choices, not taking them away," said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., a member of the Senate leadership. "Health care reform is not an excuse to take rights away from women."
Which explains why Murray voted against ObamaCare.

Oh wait, she didn't? Nope! In fact, on Dec. 23, she cast the deciding vote in favor of cloture, a necessary procedural step. Without her vote, ObamaCare would not be the law today. For Murray to complain about it now reminds us of that old joke about the definition of chutzpah: when a man kills his parents, then pleads for mercy because his mother was denied the right to choose and forced to carry her killer to term. "


At least there is something good in Obamacare!

Obama Chutzpah

James Taranto gets it right in WSJ Best of the Web Today:


'Hurry Up and Wait

In his latest show of chutzpah, Obama asks for patience with the law he rammed through.


By JAMES TARANTO

No, it was not an April Fool's joke, but an actual headline from the Associated Press: "Obama Urges Patience as Health Care Law Kicks In." Here's what the president had to say Thursday in Portland, Maine:



"Every day since I signed reform into law, there's another poll or headline that says, 'Nation still divided on health reform, no great surge in public support.' Well, yeah. It's only been a week," Obama said in remarks prepared for delivery. "Before we find out if people like health care reform, maybe we should wait until it actually happens. Just a thought."



For the past year, Obama has been demanding that Congress enact his so-called reform immediately. Last July, it had to be done before the August recess. Then, after Democrats suffered big losses at the polls in November, it had to be done by the end of the year. It was so urgent that the House voted stayed in session late into Saturday night after Election Day, and the Senate actually voted on Christmas Eve.

"Slow down!" shouted the voters of Massachusetts. In January they elected a Republican to the U.S. Senate for the first time in almost 40 years, in large part on Scott Brown's promise to stop ObamaCare. The president charged ahead anyway, declaring that the time for debate was over. His allies in Congress bribed, bullied and cajoled their way to a razor-thin one-party majority in the House, and in the Senate they found a procedural work-around to render Massachusetts voters irrelevant.

Last month, in a process as ugly as it was heedless of public opinion, Obama got what he wanted. Two weeks ago the time for debate was over. Now the president is still talking ObamaCare, trying to sell the public on what he and congressional Democrats have already imposed upon us. And he's insisting that the public owes it to him to be patient.

It reminds one of that old joke about the definition of chutzpah: when a member of a death panel denies medical treatment to his parents, then pleads for mercy because he's an orphan.'


Megalomania cannot be treated in the President of the United States who has too much power to allow treatment, so, almost three more years to observe the mistake. Fortunately he will be neutered in November and we can begin the work of fixing our country.

ObamaFare's real purpose by Democrat Max Baucus

Listen to this 46 second clip of Senator Baucus explaining the real reason for ObamaFare. You will then understand what has happened over the last year.

And guess who will get the $$$$? It will be their constituency, with the hope this will keep them in power for years.

It won't!

Social Security and ObamaFare

The NYT has this article today - an appropriate warning to us all - on the approaching insolvency of the Social Security system. Just what this country needed was a huge increase in expenditures for ObamaFare when our financial future is in jeopardy.


"This year, the system will pay out more in benefits than it receives in payroll taxes, an important threshold it was not expected to cross until at least 2016, according to the Congressional Budget Office."


Their last prediction was this would not happen until 2016! Gives you a warm feeling about their ObamaFare prediction!

The Real Meaning of ObamaFare! Important read!!

Kevin O'Brien in the Cleveland Plain Dealer summarizes the Dem's motives with ObamaFare as clearly and concisely as I've seen. Read and THINK about his points. The entire column is below:

"Don't let up until 'health care' bill is repealed: Kevin O'Brien"

by Kevin O'Brien, The Plain Dealer

"The Democrats in Congress and the White House have forced upon the United States of America a federal health care plan designed for people who are too stupid, incompetent and weak to manage their own affairs.

Such people certainly do exist among us, but to gear the nation's health care system to them is a terrible idea. Unless, of course, one happens to be part of our new ruling class.

It's so much more fun to be on the telling end of, "Do this; don't do that," than on the being-told end.

Politics and power -- not anything related to improving health care -- is what this whole, long wrangle has been about from the beginning: Putting the governed in the position of needing the consent of the government to live their lives, and ensuring that promoters of the power of the state do the governing in perpetuity.

There was a time when the politicians who sat in Congress and in the White House understood that they served the people. They were bound to us and subject to our will
.
The relationship has been changing for about a century, not coincidentally with the growth of Washington's power and reach. Most of the change has taken place in three convulsive periods.

First came the New Deal, which introduced government paternalism. Next came the Great Society, from which the nanny state emerged. Now comes "health care reform," and Americans are faced with the prospect of trading what's left of their individual liberty -- and a great deal of their wealth -- for a blatantly false promise of health security.

Oh, yes, Obamacare will get a few more people covered. But what "coverage" will mean is merely a place in line to await treatment. That line will grow longer and longer as expenses increase, as care is rationed, as the medical profession shrinks, as the incentives to innovate dry up and blow away, and as a bureaucracy dedicated chiefly to its own growth and preservation shifts the purpose of medicine away from healing and toward the making and enforcement of rules.

In short, we will buy -- at tremendous expense, using money we don't have -- a system far inferior to the one we have now.

There's a partisan political element to this outcome, too. You can see it in the e-mails that Eric Schultz, late of the Al Franken Senate campaign and now spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, is busily sending out about Republicans who have called for repeal of the health care takeover bill: They're trying to take away your health care!

You'll hear that over and over again, because it's the line the Democrats believe will keep them in power forever, once they endure just one or two losing election cycles. They think that once the Republicans regain Congress and the presidency, they won't have the guts to follow through on repeal pledges.

But the Republicans must follow through, because that's only half of the Democratic strategy. Here's the other half: Once their bureaucratic, financially unsustainable, lower-quality, lower-access parody of today's excellent health care system structure is fully in place, the Democrats can add a new threat: "Do as you're told, or we'll take away your health care."

That's what happens when you give government power over your life. The state giveth and the state taketh away. Buy insurance or we put you in jail.

The Democrats think you're too stupid to catch on, too incompetent to get organized and too weak to fight back.

They really believe that in one brief moment of uncontested power, they have set in motion a process of subjugation that will radically change not only the politics of America but also the character of its people.

The people need to prove them wrong. And the Republicans the people put in the Congress and the White House need to have the guts to do the right thing for the health of the country and its citizens: Repeal this monster before it can sink its socialistic roots into our soil.

This is far from over.

Come November 2010 and November 2012, there needs to be hell to pay -- and that needs to be only the beginning."


Don't be a "useful idiot" supporting this subterfuge called "HealthCare Reform". The REAL purpose is clear!

The Problem With Our "Entitlement" Society

The Dem's have just started us down the road to the largest entitlement from the Government we have ever seen - though it is certainly not their first. The problem becomes additive.

Mark Steyn with his great insight as an observer of America, says the following:


"As Europe demonstrates, a determined state can change the character of a people in the space of a generation or two. Look at what the Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population: That's what happened in Britain."


I will repeat the same old adage as a warning to my lefty friends:


Be careful - you may get what you wish for!

If Obamacare passes...

this column in the Aspen Times summarizes why Obama should get our thanks. A short read for my lefty friends which will open your eyes to what is happening.

Peggy Noonan's Obamacare Conclusion

Peggy Noonan concludes her "Now for the Slaughter" column on the tactics of Obama and his administration on Obamacare with this paragraph:


"And so it ends, with a health-care vote expected this weekend. I wonder at what point the administration will realize it wasn't worth it—worth the discord, worth the diminution in popularity and prestige, worth the deepening of the great divide. What has been lost is so vivid, what has been gained so amorphous, blurry and likely illusory. Memo to future presidents: Never stake your entire survival on the painful passing of a bad bill. Never take the country down the road to Demon Pass."


She seems to assume it is going to pass. I still hold out hope the Dem's will realize what they are doing and stop it. We should know by Monday!

Obama's Job Approval

RealClearPolitics average negative for the first time. This 'cramdown' of Obamacare is real popular with the country.

Wonder why Obama and Dem's are committing political "suicide"?

James Taranto in WSJ Best of the Web Today gets it:


"There seems to be an emotional desperation at work here. The legislative success of ObamaCare has become so tied up with Obama's sense of himself that he feels he must push ahead--and to some extent, the leaders in Congress feel the same way. Obama is not the calm rationalist he seemed during the campaign. But while there's a place for passion in politics, to be governed by a politician who fails to govern his passions is a frightening and creepy experience."


Creepy is a good adjective for what we are watching!

Governments true obligation in healthcare - Paul Ryans view

Paul Ryan, Wisconsin's First Congressional District's Congressman, spoke to a group in Washington D.C. in January regarding Obamacare. This two paragraph commentary on the Constitution and the Government's responsibility is all anyone should need to understand to see Obamacare for what it really is:


"Under the terms of our Constitution, every individual has a right to care for their health, just as they have a right to eat. These rights are integral to our natural right to life—and it is government's chief purpose to secure our natural rights. But the right to care for one's health does not imply that government must provide health care, any more than our right to eat, in order to live, requires government to own the farms and raise the crops.

Government's constitutional obligations in regard to protecting such rights are normally met by establishing the conditions for free markets—markets which historically provide an abundance of goods and services, at an affordable cost, for the largest number. When free markets seem to be failing to meet this goal—and I would argue that the delivery of health care today is an example of where this is the case—government, rather than seeking to supply the need itself, should look to see if its own interventions are the root of the problem, and should make adjustments to unleash competition and choice."


The people simply want the Government to make adjustments to the free market to unleash competition and choice.

Obamafare/Reconciliation Supporters: Read this before you proceed!

Today's WSJ summarizes the disengenuousness and HUGE costs to the Democratic Party if BHO and his cohorts proceed.

Note this paragraph:


"President Clinton preferred to use reconciliation to pass HillaryCare in the 1990s, but he was dissuaded by West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd, who argued that it would be an abuse of the process. Mr. Byrd, author of a four-volume history of Senate rules and procedures, told the Washington Post last March that "The misuse of the arcane process of reconciliation—a process intended for deficit reduction—to enact substantive policy changes is an undemocratic disservice to our people and to the Senate's institutional role," specifically citing health reform and cap and trade. "


President Clinton, with all his arrogance and problems, may look like a hero by the time BHO gets done!

Hugh Hewitt and Mark Steyn on Obamacare Summit

A little more biased, but realistic, look at the Obamacare Summit by two of my favorite pundits.

A Rare Non-Ideological Look at Obamacare Summit

IBD avoids the inuendo of how "great" our President ran the summit, and explains some facts that the idealogues refuse to address.

Remember, they are looking for POWER - and are not the least bit concerned with healthcare!

The Dems are embarrassing themselves, and are too blinded by their "mandate" from the last election and their elitist bent to see that fact!

On Bipartisanship!

Jesse Helms view (not always my favorite, but accurate on this subject):


"Republicans should remember the words of Senator Jesse Helms: "Compromise, hell! If freedom is right and tyranny is wrong, why should those who believe in freedom treat it as if it were a roll of bologna to be bartered a slice at a time?""


Hope our Republicans remember this!

H/T: Laura Ingraham