Health Wars (8/27/09)

Remember that most precious of hard-left social policy, abortion-camouflaging civil liberties, "the right to privacy"?  Evidently that isn't meant to apply to such trivial, unimportant items as your tax records:

One of the problems with any proposed law that’s over 1,000 pages long and constantly changing is that much deviltry can lie in the details. Take the Democrats’ proposal to rewrite health care policy, better known as H.R. 3200 or by opponents as “Obamacare.”

Section 431(a) of the bill says that the IRS must divulge taxpayer identity information, including the filing status, the modified adjusted gross income, the number of dependents, and “other information as is prescribed by” regulation. That information will be provided to the new Health Choices Commissioner and state health programs and used to determine who qualifies for “affordability credits.”

Section 245(b)(2)(A) says the IRS must divulge tax return details — there’s no specified limit on what’s available or unavailable — to the Health Choices Commissioner. The purpose, again, is to verify “affordability credits.”

Section 1801(a) says that the Social Security Administration can obtain tax return data on anyone who may be eligible for a “low-income prescription drug subsidy” but has not applied for it.

Wow.  I'm still pulling my jaw off the floor at the fact that an Obanetwork let a story like this slip into public view, even if it was buried on a blog instead of handed to Katie Couric live on camera (I'd have paid to see that coughing and gagging).

I'm also still fighting down the chills of that title - "Health Choices Commissioner".  The implication is clearly that the HCC will tell us what are "choices" are going to be, and what will happen to us if we don't docilely nod our heads, bend over, and squeak, "Yes, sir, may I have another?"

The fact that there appears to be no limit upon the powers of this HCC to rifle through our tax info to ferret out "mobsters" and "brownshirts" who qualify for "benefits" but haven't made the "right choice" to apply for them because they don't bleeping want or need them is so obligatory as to almost be an afterthought.  Besides, they'll already have our health records, our financial records, all our personal information, our phones and computers tapped, and all of us under 24-hour surveillance.  Kind of like these same animals used to caterwaul was the case with George W. Bush and the Patriot Act.  But it's okay of THEY do it, because it's "for our own good."

"Obamo: We own you - and there's nobody left who can afford to buy you back."

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"Co-ops" is senatese for "public option," which is housese for "single-payer" - which must be making it more cramped inside B.O.'s multi-layered trojan horse than my mother's purse:

Senator Kent Conrad (D-ND), a pivotal lawmaker in the health-care debate, wants to deliver coverage to the uninsured by starting up new cooperatives modeled on rural electric cooperatives that were founded during the Great Depression.

But rural electric cooperatives have a mixed track record, experts say. They brought electricity to millions of rural Americans who lacked it in the 1930s and today serve about 14% of Americans. But after 75 years, the rural electric cooperatives still rely heavily on federal credit subsidies, have weak balance sheets and, some studies suggest, operate less efficiently than privately-owned utilities.

In other words....

“A co-op by definition has several major advantages over private tax-paying corporations,” said Ken Glozer, a former Office of Management and Budget official and president of a consulting firm called OMB Professionals. “They don’t pay taxes, they borrow all their money from the U.S. government because they because can’t raise capital, and they are political as hell because they depend on the government. Over time they will seek and get untold favors that a private company won’t be able to get.”

Glozer added that cooperatives are “quasi-federal agencies.”

Sounds a lot like the "public option" that is "attracting enough heat to melt steel girders," doesn't it?  But it also sounds exactly like the kind of euphemistic sophistry that is usually employed in the upper chamber to sell unpopular statist schemes to "moderates" and RINOs, the proverbial "spoonful of (rhetorical) sugar to make the (lethal) medicine go down".

Given that this particular deceptive morsel isn't exactly new, and the meltdown that has transpired between then and now, perhaps there is grounds for hope-for-no-change that wouldn't have been there two months ago.  Any Snowe or Collins or "Blue Dog" who scarfed up single- payer-wrapped-in-the-public option-inside-co-ops now would have been occupying a "middle ground" that the past month has long since made politically uninhabitable. 

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Did Dr. Demented slip in the bathroom and hit his head on the commode like Doc Brown yesterday?  He not only was semi-lucid at Congressman Jim Moran's (D-VA) townhaller, but he [GASP] almost kinda-sorta told the truth to boot:

There's no question that Dean-o is right about not wanting to "take on" the trial lawyers.  The disingenuousness lies in the implication the notion of the Obama/Pelosi/Reid axis "taking on enemies," like they started this debacle as the underdogs - as if the Dems didn't control the White House and 3-2 majorities on Capitol Hill, and Red Barry hadn't bought off "Big Pharma" and pre-emptively neutralized Big Hospital and "tonsil-collecting, foot-chopping" Big Doctor and even had to lift a finger to reel in AARP.  Even Big Insurance was cowering back then.  The only "enemies" "Big Government" made with their incompetent dishonesty and reckless vituperations is a majority of the American people to such a degree that the Dems' supposed "enemies" are feeling confident enough to jump on the resistance train as it's rolling out of the station.

Either way, it's not like their imagined "enemies" and the ambulance chaser lobby would have been co-belligerents in these hostilities.

The other quasi-subtle cover falsehood Captain YEEEEAAAARRRRGGGHHH pedals is of a piece with the entirely overt whopper that BarryCare is about any of the mendatious justifications the L'il President has cited for it.  Just as "cost control" and "insuring the uninsured" are pious frauds for the hyperLeft's true objective of Sovietizing America in one fell swoop, their real reason for not crossing the besuited Vikings of our age is that they are a top, perhaps THE top, source of campaign cash the Democrat Party has.  Allow tort reform into health care reform - thus actually including actual reform in "reform", and increasing the chances of Republican defections dramatically - and this "business arrangement" with the perveyors of litigatory piracy goes bye-bye.  Not a financial reversal the Donks can afford in a cycle that is shaping up to be as disastrous for them as the last two have been for the GOP.

I just astonished that the former Chairman How publicly admitted any part of it at all - instead of, say, building a Hogzilla-subsidized flux capacitor, and using a Puma for the testbed vehicle.

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Only because I still vividly remember Mediscare, and I can't help marveling every time I see a Democrat publicly proclaim the same damn thing:

Some people, including Medicare recipients, will have to give up some current benefits to truly reform the nation’s health-care system, Representative Betsy Markey told a gathering of constituents in Fort Collins on Wednesday.

Markey has repeatedly said during the August congressional recess that Medicare spending needs to be reined in to help pay for reforming the broader health-care system.

“There’s going to be some people who are going to have to give up some things, honestly, for all of this to work,” Markey said at a Congress on Your Corner event at CSU. “But we have to do this because we’re Americans.”

The same filth hanged Newt Gingrich in effigy for merely suggesting that the rate of growth of Medicare spending be nominally slowed in order to preserve the program - which is now scheduled to go tits-up in eight years anyway, but that won't matter once we're all trapped inside its evil clutches.  Then we can ALL go down with the same fiscal/economic ship.  Because, you know, "we're Americans".

Of course, some of us believe that "giving up some things" that aren't necessary to be given up to facilitate the destruction of an incumbent system that, while not perfect due to the cancerous extent of government intervention in the health care sector as it is, nevertheless, um, "works" far better than what Betsy Markey would replace it with is proof positive that we DON'T "need to do this."  Ditto the crude attempt to hide liberticide within ersatz patriotism.

But do keep sending more and more senior citizens over to the GOP, Betsy.  After seeing the Logan's Run-esque fate you petaQ'pu have in store for them, I think they and their long voting memories will feel right at home.

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While the policy consequences of embracing Medicare - an entitlement whose bankruptcy will be a prime cause of America's ultimate economic collapse in eight years and getting closer all the time - will be a political bed-short-sheeting that'll come back to haunt 'Pubbies eventually, the short-term electoral logic of scaring grandma are incontrovertible - and as Karl The Great illustrates, irresistable:

Medicare Advantage was enacted in 2003 to allow seniors to use Medicare funds to buy private insurance plans that fit their needs and their budgets. They get better care and better value for their money.

Medicare Advantage also has built-in incentives to encourage insurers to offer lower costs and better benefits. It’s a program that puts patients in charge, not the government, which is why seniors like it and probably why the administration hates it.

Already, an estimated 10.2 million seniors—one out of five in America—have enrolled in Medicare Advantage. Mr. Obama is proposing to cut the program by nearly 20% and thus reduce the amount of money each will have to buy insurance. This will likely force most of them to lose the insurance they have now. Yet Mr. Obama promised in late July in New Hampshire that, “if you like your health-care plan, you can keep your health-care plan.”

There are roughly 23,400 seniors on average in a congressional district who have Medicare Advantage, but who face losing it if Mr. Obama has his way. That’s enough votes to tip most competitive House and Senate races.

Oh, and what was the average vote margin in House races last year?  22,979.  And Republicans are now consistently leading in the generic ballot poll by mid-single-digits less than a year after having lost the aggregate congressional vote last November by nine percentage points - a fifteen-point swing.

At the rate they're going, Dems may end up hoping that they only lose the House by 1994-esque proportions.