Health Wars (10/15/09)

Remember the old tale about the naked emperor?  It has found its legislative metaphor:

Maneuvering to boost prospects for sweeping health care legislation, Senate Democrats hope first to win quick approval for a bill that grants doctors a $247 billion increase in Medicare fees over a decade but raises federal deficits in the process, officials said Wednesday.

By creating a two-bill approach, Democrats intend to claim the more comprehensive health care measure meets President Barack Obama’s conditions — that it will neither add to deficits nor exceed $900 billion in costs over ten years.

If approved and signed into law, the legislation would avert a 21% reduction in Medicare fees paid to doctors that is scheduled to take effect in January as well as additional cuts in future years.

What continues to amaze me is not the roaring, gaping dishonesty of such shell games, but the frankly astonishing incompetence of the ducking & dodging.  The health care "reform" "debate" has been raging for nearly three months.  It's under the proverbial sun-intense klieg lights of public scrutiny and will stay there for the duration.  Do Dems truly believe, are they so deluded by their own self-reverential overestimation of their own intellectual candlepower, that this blatantly clumsy maneuver, whose only possible purpose is to bypass anymore CBO deficit-explosion broadsides, will actually slide by unnoticed?  Or is this their version of "incrementalism"?

Oh, and how's this for a punchline?:

In the Senate, the immediate impact of a two-bill approach is to slice $10.7 billion from the cost of the health care bill that cleared the Finance Committee bill, money that could then be spent on other priorities.

The reason why true incrementalism was such a successful tactic for the Left for so long is that it kept the true ultimate scope of their master plan for a Soviet Amerika securely hidden, and would until it was too late for Us, The People to realize the Republic-destroying Rubicon we had crossed.  Hogzilla, crap & tax, and BarryCare - pretty much the Obesidency itself - has pretty much blown that to merry hell, and its extremist domestic agenda right along with it.

At least until the sixteen-year hopenchange cycle spins 'round again with its next lib creature slouching toward Washington to be born.

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Oh, my, there's nothing fascistic about this, now is there?:

Get in shape or pay a price.

That’s a message more Americans could hear if health-care reform provisions passed by the Senate finance and health committees become law.

By more than doubling the maximum penalties that companies can apply to employees who flunk medical evaluations, the legislation could put workers under intense financial pressure to lose weight, stop smoking or even lower their cholesterol…

Critics say employers could use the rewards and penalties to drive some workers out of their health plans…

Under current regulation, incentives based on health factors can be no larger than 20% of the premium paid by employer and employee combined. The legislation passed by the health and finance committees would increase the limit to 30%, and it would give government officials the power to raise it to 50%.

A single employee whose annual premiums cost him and his employer the national average of $4,824 could have as much as $2,412 on the line. At least under the health panel’s bill, the stakes could be higher for people with family coverage. Families with premiums of $13,375 — the combined average for employer-sponsored coverage, according to a recent survey — could have $6,688 at risk.

IOW, a fat tax.  It approaches from a bit of a different direction by attacking Blubo-Americans directly instead of obliquely through demonizing fast food chains and food manufacturers (Don't worry, that gambit wouldn't be going away at all).  But still a fat tax.  And a big, well, fat one.

What ever happened to "the right to choose" what we "do with our bodies"?  Or is that just for the female reproductive system?  And is this not indeed just another grain of the BarryCare drive to bulldoze Us, The People, into the government healthcare collective?  Which would make it no less fascist, but still leaven the jackbooting with patronizing insults as we're shoved in the not-so-figurative cattlecars for shipment to Red Barry's concentration fat farms.

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Behold, a member of the domestic Axis of Evil and his power-addled candor about measures that can genuinely bend the healthcare cost curve:

Sure, fifty-four BILLION dollars is chickenfeed, a drop in the bucket, spare change in your sofa, almost nothing.  Particularly when it would come out of the pockets of his allied trial lawyer parasites who are one of the biggest reasons for health care insurance premium inflation, whose bottom line net income percentage is FOUR TIMES that of the supposedly "greedy" health insurance industry on which they prey, AND who are actually hurting for cash these days after having killed so many golden gooses and forked over nearly fifty million smackers into the coffers of the Donk Collective in the last cycle.  How our hearts should bleed for them.

Personally, I prefer the Chief Brody approach:

UPDATE: Can't omit Reid Altzheimersly admitting for viral posterity that the true cost of BarryCare over the next decade will be in excess of TWO TRILLION bucks, not the $829 billion phonily advertised.  Is it any wonder this Barney Fife reject is politically doomed?