The Problem With Obama

Posts Tagged ‘Democratic Party’

Gover­nor Sarah Palin writes the following:

Last week­end while you were prepar­ing for the hol­i­days with your fam­ily, Harry Reid’s Sen­ate was mak­ing shady back­room deals to ram through the Demo­c­rat health care take-​over. The Sen­ate ended debate on this bill with­out even read­ing it. That and mid­night week­end votes seem to be stan­dard oper­at­ing pro­ce­dures in D.C. No one is cer­tain of what’s in the bill, but Sen­a­tor Jim DeMint spot­ted one shock­ing rev­e­la­tion regard­ing the sec­tion in the bill describ­ing the Inde­pen­dent Medicare Advi­sory Board (now called the Inde­pen­dent Pay­ment Advi­sory Board), which is a panel of bureau­crats charged with cut­ting health care costs on the backs of patients – also known as rationing. Appar­ently Reid and friends have changed the rules of the Sen­ate so that the sec­tion of the bill deal­ing with this board can’t be repealed or amended with­out a 2/​3 super­ma­jor­ity vote. Sen­a­tor DeMint said:

“This is a rule change. It’s a pretty big deal. We will be pass­ing a new law and at the same time cre­at­ing a sen­ate rule that makes it out of order to amend or even repeal the law. I’m not even sure that it’s con­sti­tu­tional, but if it is, it most cer­tainly is a sen­ate rule. I don’t see why the major­ity party wouldn’t put this in every bill. If you like your law, you most cer­tainly would want it to have force for future sen­ates. I mean, we want to bind future con­gresses. This goes to the fun­da­men­tal pur­pose of sen­ate rules: to pre­vent a tyran­ni­cal major­ity from tram­pling the rights of the minor­ity or of future congresses.”

In other words, Democ­rats are pro­tect­ing this rationing “death panel” from future change with a pro­ce­dural hur­dle. You have to ask why they’re so con­cerned about pro­tect­ing this par­tic­u­lar pro­vi­sion. Could it be because bureau­cratic rationing is one impor­tant way Democ­rats want to “bend the cost curve” and keep health care spend­ing down?

The Con­gres­sional Bud­get Office seems to think that such rationing has some­thing to do with cost. In a let­ter to Harry Reid last week, CBO Direc­tor Dou­glas Elmen­dorf noted (with a num­ber of caveats) that the bill’s cal­cu­la­tions call for a reduc­tion in Medicare’s spend­ing rate by about 2 per­cent in the next two decades, but then he writes the kicker:

“It is unclear whether such a reduc­tion in the growth rate could be achieved, and if so, whether it would be accom­plished through greater effi­cien­cies in the deliv­ery of health care or would reduce access to care or dimin­ish the qual­ity of care.”

Though Nancy Pelosi and friends have tried to call “death pan­els” the “lie of the year,” this type of rationing – what the CBO calls “reduc[ed] access to care” and “diminish[ed] qual­ity of care” – is pre­cisely what I meant when I used that metaphor.

This health care bill is one of the most far-​reaching and expen­sive expan­sions of the role of gov­ern­ment into our lives. We’re talk­ing about putting one-​seventh of our econ­omy under the government’s thumb. We’re also talk­ing about some­thing as inti­mate to our per­sonal well-​being as med­ical care.

This bill is so unpop­u­lar that peo­ple on the right and the left hate it. So why go through with it? The Sen­ate is plan­ning to vote on this on Christ­mas Eve. Why the rush? Though we will begin pay­ing for this bill imme­di­ately, we will see no ben­e­fits for years. (That’s the trick that allowed the CBO to state that the bill won’t grow the deficit for the next ten years.)

The administration’s promises of trans­parency and bipar­ti­san­ship have been bro­ken one by one. This entire process has been defined by mid­night votes on week­ends, closed-​door meet­ings with indus­try lob­by­ists, and pay­offs to politi­cians will­ing to sell their prin­ci­ples for sweet­heart deals. Is it any won­der that Amer­i­cans are so dis­il­lu­sioned with their lead­ers in Washington?

This is about pol­i­tics, not health care. Amer­i­cans don’t want this bill. Amer­i­cans don’t like this bill. Wash­ing­ton has stopped lis­ten­ing to us. But we’re pay­ing atten­tion, and 2010 is coming.

Source: Gov­er­nor Sarah Palin, Mid­night Votes, Back­room Deals, and a Death Panel, The Governor’s Face­book page.

The Democ­rats in their des­per­a­tion for votes on their health care plan may have set them­selves up for a rather big embar­rass­ment regard­ing the spe­cial elec­tion for New York’s 23rd Con­gres­sional Dis­trict. Bill Owens is not the cer­ti­fied win­ner, he con­tested the results Novem­ber 2, and yet was sworn in by des­per­ate Democ­rats in Wash­ing­ton. Now, not only may he be in office ille­gally, he might even lose the vote count once all of the votes are counted and errors in orig­i­nal counts are cor­rected. It will serve the Democ­rats right if the results favor Doug Hoff­man and Owens has to vacate his seat.

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Repre­sen­ta­tive Joe Wil­son (R-​SC) has it right to pro­pose that the Demo­c­ra­tic over­haull of the health care sys­tem require par­tic­i­pa­tion of mem­bers of Con­gress instead of the mean­ing­less “may enroll” that the Democ­rats cur­rently sug­gest. If Con­gress is going to cre­ate a pub­lic option, espe­cially if it is now or fore­see­ably going to be a required pro­gram for the Amer­i­can pub­lic, then mem­bers of Con­gress should, with­out excep­tion, be required to par­tic­i­pate. Maybe the risk of par­tic­i­pa­tion will give them pause before replac­ing the cur­rent health care system.

See: Joe Wil­son Pro­poses Forc­ing Con­gress Onto Gov­ern­ment Health Insur­ance Plan (Fox News)

Bruce Walker makes an inter­est­ing obser­va­tion in “The Lawyers Party” when he notes that all Demo­c­ra­tic Party pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates since 1984 went to law school, though Al Gore did not grad­u­ate. Every Demo­c­ra­tic vice-​presidential can­di­date since 1976, except Lloyd Bentsen, went to law school . By com­par­i­son, Ger­ald Ford in 1976 was the last Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial can­di­date that was a lawyer. He does not iden­tify the last Repub­li­can vice-​presidential can­di­date who went to law school.

Aside from this trivia, I do not agree with the bal­ance of Walker’s arti­cle that rails against lawyers. I believe they serve an impor­tant, vital role in soci­ety and the laws that allow us to seek unfet­tered jus­tice when­ever and for what­ever rea­son we choose are nec­es­sary. Often this is our only recourse when injus­tice or injury is encountered.