Health Wars (10/21/09)

Looks like "Dirty Harry" Reid and "Houdini Max" Baucus sent "Crazy Nancy" Pelosi a set of their budget-busting-cost-hiding BarryCare shells, and she's positively fizzy with delighted gratitude:

House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Tuesday new estimates showed a healthcare overhaul drafted by Democrats would reduce the U.S. budget deficit over ten years and cost less than $900 billion.

The preliminary estimates from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office moved Democratic leaders closer to finishing a merger of three separate healthcare reform bills into one for debate on the House floor…

“We’re very excited by the CBO scores,” she said, predicting House Democratic leaders would finish their work on the merger soon…

“We’re in an excellent place with the cost, given the information that we have,” she said.

Well gollllleeeee, Madame Shrieker, if you're so "excited," how'd you people manage to, um, whack off a quarter-trillion bucks off of your version's price tag? And almost to the penny the same amount that Baucus pretended to "save", too. What a coincidence, huh?

He "deficit-neutralized" his version by carpet-bombing the middle class with ruinous tax increases and conveniently leaving out the [AHEM] quarter-trillion bucks in canceled Medicare cuts that Debbie Stabenow tried to sneak through in a separate bill. Did the (gulp) third-most powerful creature in the country just ape Baucus, or did she at least try to come up with something original?

It'll probably be the former. I say probably because she doesn't appear to have thought that far ahead:

The $871 billion estimate — well under the $900 billion limit set by President Obama — is the latest of several versions scored by congressional budget analysts, according to a Democratic aide, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss private talks. The measure would include a government-run insurance plan that pays providers at rates tied to Medicare, the aide added. That so-called “robust” public option is preferred by liberals because it would save the government money and could force private insurers to lower their own reimbursement rates, driving down the cost of health care overall.

But the idea is opposed by many conservative Democrats from rural areas, where Medicare rates are well below the national average. A new insurance plan that paid such low rates would be devastating to their communities financially, these Democrats say. Instead, they argue that any public plan should negotiate rates directly with providers, as private plans do.

This must be the "competition" meme Donks have been gibbering of late. As though private insurance carriers don't compete against each other, but are this dark, collusionary cabal of monopolists that all look like the board game's little mustachioed man in the 1895 three-piece suit and top hat and cane, and need a "robust public option" to "keep them honest." It's difficult to decide whether to laugh until I throw up at the idiocy of that caricature or blow my stack at the manifest insult to my intelligence it represents, particularly since it would take all our health care - with which five out of every six Americans are happily satisfied, thank you very much - down with it.

Now if the Dems' vaunted PO wouldn't have access to taxpayer money and had to compete on the same terms as the private carriers, I don't think anybody would have a problem with it. Mainly because, as a government-run entity (Remember Red Barry's Post Office comparisons?) Public Option Insurance, Inc. would go tits-up before he could even be thrown out of office. It would be a sick joke, but it would be honest, GENUINE competition. But, of course, POII would be permanently affixed with a taxpayer dollar IV drip the size of Niagra Falls, which is how it could "afford" (by not HAVING to afford it) to undercut private carriers' premium rates and screw providers on reimbursement rates and put both out of business.

And because nothing is ever REALLY "free", and those who are told health care will be free TO THEM will naturally overuse it, blowing medical costs sky-high, the endgame will be apocalyptic costs leading to Armegeddonesque taxes and/or cruelly long, and sometimes lethal, service delays - IOW, how we'll pay for single-payer to the degree we can't pay it monetarily.

Or, in the Ensign's English, "fixing prices does not lower costs." Which is akin to, instead of hiding the missing $250 billion under one of the shells, simply throwing it up in the air instead and hoping it doesn't come back down again until after this monstrosity has been inflicted.

You do realize, don't you, that if any private sector entity or group of entities tried to pull anything as hostile, predatory, and monopolistic as BarryCare - remember the Clinton administration's jihad against Microsoft? - it'd/they'd be power-bombed with a federal anti-trust lawsuit in a heartbeat. But it's okay for left-wing Democrats, because they're little slices of Barack, dontcha know.

The seeds of their fall are in the last 'graph of the quote. Think of it as the pebble that precedes the 2010 avalanche. We'll all be very excited about that.

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Criminal Marxist propagandizing - just another day at the ObamaHouse:

Senate Finance ranking member Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) is raising concerns that a Department of Health and Human Services Web site that urges visitors to send an e-mail to President Barack Obama praising his health care reform plan may violate rules against government-funded propaganda.

The Web page is accessed through a “state your support” button featured prominently on the HHS Web site and carries a disclaimer that the Web site is maintained by HHS.

In a letter sent to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius Tuesday, Grassley warned that “any possible misuse of appropriated funds by the executive branch to engage in publicity or propaganda in support of an Administration priority is a matter that must be investigated and taken seriously,” noting that in 2005 Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) argued that “the use of official funds for similar activities were ‘underhanded tactics’ and that these tactics ‘are not worthy of our great democracy.’”

Oh, but that was when Dems were smearing the Bush Administration with that charge; it's perfectly virtuous if THEY do it for real. At least until somebody notices it and raises hell about it. I figure this one won't even last as long as the ObamaHouse "snitch site" did.

Ed has the details.

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