Health Wars (9/8/09)

Picture yourself in Barack Obama's shoes.  You've allowed unpopular wacko left-wing extremists on Capitol Hill to write your health care "reform" bill; you wasted your "panic/stampede" legislative bum's-rush tactic on Hogzilla, and it fails to ram through BarryCare before the August recess; the August townhallers are an unmitigated PR disaster throughout which public opposition metastisizes and spills over to the rest of your domestic communization agenda as well.  Now you're clearly in the position of having to salvage any bill that can be passed - if even THAT's possible - that can festoon the label "health care" on it, even if it's a resolution reiterating Hulk Hogan's old catchphrase to "do your training, say your prayers, and eat your vitamins".

You're clearly already overexposed, you wore out your honeymoon welcome months ago, but if you make a show of having gotten the message from aggrieved Americans, break with the dishonest, wildly partisan "all in one bite/cramdown" approach, and make a show of humbly reaching across the aisle, you might still be able to salvage something of your original putsch vision.  And you choose an address to a joint session of Congress - the Blue Dogs of which are your primary target audience - to turn that corner.

It's two days before that make-it-or-break-it speech.  You're in Barack Obama's shoes.  Do you, then, spend today reaching out to Big Labor bosses (hint: not "across the aisle") and snarl this?:

I’ve got a question for all these folks who say, you know, we’re going to pull the plug on Grandma, and this is all about illegal immigrants — you’ve heard all the lies.  I’ve got a question for all those folks: What are you going to do? What’s your answer? What’s your solution?  And you know what? They don’t have one.

Amazing, isn't he?  Three oft-repeated, long-debunked, transparent, incendiary lies in one paragraph.  Particularly the part about his critics (i.e. the majority of the American people) not having any alternative solutions.  Way to go cultivating the soil for a game-saving bipartisan harvest, Barry.  And good luck bringing in anything but more raspberries.

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Arrogance, self-delusion, obtuse dishonesty - this clip sums up the attitude of congressional Obamunists on BarryCare and the public's opposition to it inside of three minutes:

Oh, yes, I left out rank cowardice.

Say, when Ted Kennedy's hero-worshipping mourners were speculating about Mary Jo Kopeckne being "honored" to have died for the Massachusetts Manatee's life's mission of destroying American health care, do you suppose it was Congresswoman Kilroy they actually had in mind?  Or was Kilroy channeling Kopeckne's thoughts from the Great Beyond?

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Guess who's doubling down on dropping the public option from the House versions of BarryCare?:

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer indicated Tuesday that a public option might need to be dropped from the healthcare bill in order to get it passed.

“In the final analysis, we have to see what will pass,” said Hoyer (D-MD). “I think the public option is a very good choice for consumers to have. On the other hand, I’ve said I hope we can move a bill forward.”

Hoyer said that even without the public option there are other crucial changes to the healthcare system, such as capping healthcare costs for consumers.

Um, Congressman Hoyer, if you install health insurance price controls, won't that stimulate even more demand for health care services?  Which health care providers won't be able to supply because of the federal price ceiling?  Isn't another word for this sort of thing rationing?  And wouldn't that be simply laying another layer of foundation for a collapse of the health care sector and the "crisis"-driven imposition of the public option - or maybe just a straight leap to single payer - that you're kicking down the road?

Conversely, has the reactionary wing of your majority caucus backed away from walking out on any BarryCare bill that lacks a public option?  Are you freelancing on this, or are you playing Crazy Nancy's "good cop"?  Do you really think you can get a hundred Republicans and Blue Dogs to make up the loss of that many Donk votes when the House bills are crammed full of unconstitutional individual mandates, smothering regulations, and tax increases even without a public option?

Ensign Ed thinks this a "tell" that Dr. Chicago will announce a retreat from the public option on Wednesday night.  But to whom is the Li'l President more likely to pay attention?  And does he have the humility-capacity to step that far down from his "transformational" mindset to settle for a nibble instead of the Roman orgy he was expecting?

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The August townhallers were supposed to "educate" the electorate on the glories of BarryCare.  Judging by the fact that The One's crown jewel is still under the polling water even in a survey of "adults" ludicrously overweighted with Donk respondents, I'd say the result for the White House was an epic fail.  Which ought to be the result when the Pelosi/Reid Collective refuses to listen to the concerns and objections of its constituents and slanders them as Nazis and mobsters and racists instead.

In the words of the noted right-wing conservative Hillary Clinton:

Yet another Donk one-way street.

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"Read the bill!  Read the bill!" - the American people

"No we don't!  No we don't!" - Congressional Democrats:

Across the country, “Read the bill!” has become a rallying cry of the health care debate.

People are shouting it at town halls. Local newspapers teem with editorials and readers’ letters demanding that lawmakers do it. Bloggers and their commenters say the same. Politicians of both parties are taunting their foes across the aisle with it.

But reading actual legislative text is often the least productive way to learn what’s actually in a bill.

Consider the House health care bill (or bills, as it were). The 1,017-page text is a tangle of references to other clauses, sections and subsections of the bill as well as numerous other statutes — some passed ages ago, all a pain to locate and search, even online: “Section 1179 of the Social Security Act (42 U.S.C. 1320d-8) is amended” by striking this and inserting that, or “the tax imposed under this section shall not be treated as a tax imposed by this chapter for the purposes of determining the amount of any credit under this chapter or for the purposes of section 55.”

Got that?

“These bills are not written for even the educated layperson. They are written for specialists,” said Ross Baker, a political scientist at Rutgers.

Even legislative staffers who deal with an issue every day can miss or fail to grasp the consequence of small turns of legislative language. “The legislative process is made up of people who are artisans at being able to craft language that looks innocuous” but isn’t, said Scott Lilly, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who spent more than three decades as a high-level staffer on Capitol Hill.

So what we have here is a situation in which "lawmakers" are nothing of the kind.  They're as much human placards as Barry Cool at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.  The REAL governing of Obamerika is done by unelected "technocrats" on the staffs of senators and reps and in the bowels of the Executive Branch bureaucracy, whose work isn't reviewed at all by the officeholders ostensibly responsible for it, who know nothing of the details but do endorse the general direction and let them have at it.  Kind of like the next level down from the exact same dynamic Comrade Hussein used to delegate the crafting of BarryCare to Crazy Nancy and Dirty Harry in the first place.

No, none of this ought to be a surprise.  That is the way of Big Government, and has been this way for decades.  What IS new is the level of brazenness and radicalism with and in service to which this SOP is being exploited.  It worked on Hogzilla, and got cap & tax through the House; now We, The People, aren't being hoodwinked anymore.  We have recognized that shoving thousand-page bills of impenetrable gibberish down our throats without any chance to read or debate them is authoritarianism behind a tissue-thin democratic facade, begging the question of the freedom-destroying, prosperity-crushing garbage inside.

Now the jam-down cannot be concealed behind a frenzied, "crisis"-driven, panicked stampede; it has to take place in the full, open light of public scrutiny and opposition.

Rotsa ruck selling that one Wednesday night, Barry.

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And too his captive audience, welcome back!

Man, accountability's a bitch, ain't it?  So will this return to "work" for Democrats be as chastened custodians of the people's will, or will it be as a defiant political suicide pact?  Their god's health care great commission may tell the tale, in unexpected ways.

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Over in the Senate - where the BarryCare focus is increasingly shifting as it becomes more and more obvious that even if the House manages a cramdown, it would be DOA in the upper chamber - the same tell-tale leftward tug of the Obamunist majority is burning away Max Baucus' last figleaves of "bipartisanship":

Baucus hopes to unveil his bill before President Obama’s speech to Congress on Wednesday, and possibly to bring it before his committee next week. Senate Finance is the fifth panel in Congress to produce a health care bill, and the only one that didn’t finish its work before the August recess. With jurisdiction over Medicare, Medicaid and the tax code, the committee represents a crucial missing link in the unfolding debate.

The “Gang of Six,” comprised of Baucus, two Democratic colleagues, and three Republicans, has spent months crafting legislation that aims to lower health care costs in the long term but also bridge the uninsured gap.

One area of dispute the group will attempt to resolve Tuesday is where to set the federal subsidy cap for uninsured families. Baucus has proposed 300% of the federal poverty level, the equivalent of about $66,000 per year for a family of four. But some other members of the group — including moderate GOP Sen. Olympia J. Snowe (Maine) — want to push the level to 400%, or about $88,000 per year for a family of four. The lawmakers may compromise at 350%, said one individual familiar with the talks. The higher threshold would increase the bill’s cost.

Okay, it was somewhat of a trick lede.  It also begs the question of why the federal government continues to calculate a "poverty level" if a vast majority of Americans who aren't anywhere near impoverishment are going to be shoved onto the dole anyway:

Consider the following data points:

• The median household (not individual) income level in 2007 was $50,233.  That means there should be a roughly equal number of households above and below that level in the US.
• The percentage of Americans not covered by health insurance in 2007 was 15%.  Sixty-seven percent were covered by private plans through employment or direct purchase, while 27% had coverage through government plans such as Medicare (13.8%), Medicaid (13.2%), and military plans.

If 85% of Americans have coverage, 67% of them through private means, then the problem of non-coverage outside of choice falls into a very small category.  In fact, as the Census Bureau estimates, the actual affordability issue only afflicts around fourteen million Americans (excluding illegal immigrants).  As the Kaiser Foundation states, the number of uninsured for affordability reasons is almost strictly related to those making under the median income level.

Why, then, do Baucus, Snowe, and others on Capitol Hill propose a welfare program that would include well over half of the country?

One word: power.  It's what the left's obsession with taking over health care has always been about and always will be about.  If simply "helping the needy" - i.e. their ersatz "good intentions" - were truly the driving motivation, they could simply enact a program providing subsidies to those fourteen million Americans.  Which would also be a brand-new, unaffordable entitlement with an eleven-figure price tag, but far, far smaller than the zealously sought Obama upheaval.  The One would be bringing "hopenchange" to those who could be sold as demonstrably needing it, it wouldn't touch the coverage of the other 275 million or so Americans, and Republicans would probably defect in droves to vote for it to avoid being flayed alive for the third straight election cycle.

But no.  The "audacity" of "hope" was intended to make Borg zombies of us all, and they couldn't assimilate us fast enough.  And as Senator Baucus lefts-up his BarryCare bill to re-palatize it for hard left consumption, he'll experience the same GOP/Blue Dog alienation, have to resort to the same "go it alone" mentality, and without Ted Kennedy or Sheets Bird to theoretically carry "reconciliation" implementation....well, let's just say it's looking like HillaryCare all over again.

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Beltway Bob carries the Kool-Aid-reeking-backwater-laden pre-historic-speech-to-end-all-historic-speeches water for King Hussein.  I swear, you have to have no soul, no mind, and no ego to take a job that makes you look and sound like a complete idiot every single day.  Good thing his fellow Obamedians don't laugh in his face like they should, or it might be getting to him.

'Tis a pity Jay Cost couldn't borrow Dick Cheney's mind control machine and possess Gibbs for this question:

Why is the White House doing this? I think there are two answers that kind of relate to each other.

First, it has begun to believe its own spin that the President is good at giving game changing speeches. But he isn’t really. Nobody is. If the game could change because of a speech, the game would constantly be changing because lots of people can give a decent speech, especially when they have a TelePrompTer…

Second, it does not know what else to do. It looks like Congress is at something less than square one. There is no passable compromise that has been proposed - nothing that can win enough votes in the center without losing the left flank. But now the “Gang of Six” has basically broken up, public approval has tanked, moderates are scared, and if there isn’t bad blood on the Democratic side of the aisle there is at least a lot of finger pointing. If Humpty Dumpty breaks and you don’t know how to put him back together - why not give a speech and boldly proclaim how important it is to put him back together?

Bill Clinton was a tactical political genius because he was able to fool most of the people - or as many as he had to - all of the time.  Barack Obama fooled 53% of the people once, plus Hogzilla and half of cap & tax.  And he has no encore?

We've always known that this man's term was going to be very long and very, very painful.  If he's shot his wad already, forty months may not be much better for him, either.