Health Wars (10/22/09)

A couple of hors d'eovers before the main course....

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Bear in mind before you watch this vid that this pathetic wretch is the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee:

Leaky is asked by what constitutional authority can the American people be FORCED to purchase government-mandated health insurance, and the grand poobah of the Senate committee whose responsibility is yeaing or naying appointees to the federal judiciary, including the United States Supreme Court, is to repeatedly insist "We've got plenty of authority"?  How does one adjudicate the word "plenty"?  I would have thought he'd have at least rolled out the "interstate commerce clause" chestnut.  Indeed, I wish he would have, since he could then be bodyslammed with the retort that current federal law PROHIBITS health insurance from being sold across state lines, meaning by that reckoning, Congress would have NO "authority" AT ALL to regulate health insurance IN ANY WAY.

I suppose that's why the Vermonster gave such an appallingly non-responsive answer.  Either that or it never occurred to him to even wonder if constitutional authority existed for such a blatant and sinister power grab.  You can bet somebody's got a blocking lawsuit waiting to go on the launching pad if by some miracle Leahy's party ever manages to defecate this steaming pile onto The First Constitutional Scholar's desk.

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Looks like Sebelius didn't succeed in plugging all of HHS's leaks:

The nation’s medical costs will keep spiraling upward even faster than they are now under Democratic legislation pending in the House, a report from government economic experts concluded Wednesday.

Republicans said the report is a warning sign that health care legislation is likely to fall short of President Barack Obama’s goal of “bending the cost curve” by slowing torrid rates of medical inflation. …

Unlike previous estimates that have focused mainly on the legislation’s impact on the federal deficit, the actuaries’ report looked at total costs, public and private, over the next ten years. It found that the nation’s health care tab would increase somewhat more rapidly with the legislation than if nothing is done. The main reason: Newly insured people will seek medical care.

The nation’s health care tab, now at about $2.5 trillion annually, is projected to approach $4.7 trillion in 2019 without the legislation.

With the legislation, national health care spending would be nearly $4.8 trillion in 2019.

Well, yeah.  If you tell everybody that a commodity is now "free," you remove the one thing in a market economy that can effectively regulate demand for it: price.  If something is free to you, you're probably going to have as much of it as you can get your hands on.  The problem comes on the other end when it is soon discovered that the supply of "something" is not equally unlimited.  This leads, inevitably, to rationing, which is simply how consumers have to pay for "something" in the absence of any market-mechanism to attach a price to it that tells them what it's worth and how much of it they can afford to buy.

In the health care example, adding the additional wrinkle of banning pre-existing conditions creates a direct incentive for the very people who would most overuse the system - the already-sick - to come gushing in like ocean water into a torpedoed boat.  Which, in turn, is what gives rise to the unconstitutional "individual mandate" that Leaky Leahy thinks he and his Donk cohorts "have plenty of authority" to inflict.

It's like giving a pallet of blow to a cocaine addict and encouraging him to snort his own head off.  Sooner or later (and highly likely sooner) he'll do just that.

Yet another reason why nobody will ever convince me that the destruction of what's left of the private health insurance market isn't PRECISELY the Democrats' objective.

And just think - it was the Assholiated Press that reported this latest "inconvenient truth," not Fox News.

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This is the rip-roaring prelude to Dirty Harry Reid's latest trevails:

A dozen Democrats — and Independent Joe Lieberman — joined all forty Senate Republicans to block a permanent repeal of the Medicare Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) payment formula for doctors, as there was no consensus over how to pay the $247 billion ten-year price tag.

So much for breaking out expensive BarryCare chunks into separate bills and "sneaking" them past a withering gauntlet of public scrutiny and Blue Dog squeamishness in order to game the CBO scoring as a dishonest public relations stunt.  So what was the Senate Majority Chisler's brilliant rejoinder?  It's the AMA's fault!:

Reid brought the bill to the floor in an effort to secure the support of doctors groups such as the American Medical Association (AMA) for the future fight over an overhaul of the nation’s healthcare system.

Reid’s gambit, however, backfired, leaving Reid blaming the AMA for failing to secure GOP votes and the AMA retorting that the leader misinterpreted its pledge.

Reid told colleagues that the AMA said it could deliver twenty-seven Republican votes for the legislation, according to two Senate Democratic lawmakers, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Some Democrats wondered whether it was reasonable to expect that as many as twenty-seven Republicans would support a ten-year freeze in light of the fact that only seventeen Senate Republicans voted for a one-year freeze last July. Of that group, only eleven remain in the Senate.

The yowling ludicrousities abound in this fiasco.  The fact that not only didn't Reid deliver sixty votes for cloture, he didn't even garner a majority.  Or how the AMA was supposed to "deliver" twenty-seven, or seventeen, or eleven GOP votes when the AMA was supposedly on Reid's side.  Or, to paraphrase Ed, how it's the AMA's job to deliver ANY votes and not Reid's, or Ali-Dickbar Al-Durbini's, and why it was even necessary to deliver ANY Republican votes when the Evil Barney Fife has sixty f'ing Democrat members.

Karl sums it up:

So Reid, in one fell swoop: (1) failed to keep his caucus together on a cloture vote on healthcare just ahead of a massive battle on the issue; (2) failed to deliver a payoff to one of the Dems’ allies on the issue; (3) blamed that ally for his own incompetence; (4) created the likelihood of a damaging amendment and a bruising floor fight when he brings ObamaCare to the floor; (5) gave the GOP “Exhibit A” for the case that the Dems are running a dishonest shell game to hide the true costs of ObamaCare.

And when the Stabenow bypass gets reattached, the cost of Senate BarryCare re-zooms a quarter-trillion bucks skyward, and the resulting CBO score will put Reid at least as far from clearing cloture on the merged bill.

But that's not the punchline, folks - this is:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is feeling the heat from his liberal colleagues to include a government-run health insurance plan, or “public option,” in the Senate health care bill.

Now, as Reid and other negotiators move closer to unveiling their health care plan, liberal advocacy groups are ratcheting up the pressure, saying they will run Reid out of Washington if he does not bring a public option to the Senate floor. With a tough re-election bid ahead of Reid next year, the liberal “Netroots” could potentially make good on their threat. Coming from a purple state, that puts Reid between a rock and a hard place — and has some local progressive activists at least somewhat worried.

One television ad pressuring Reid to support the public option is already out: The Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC) is running a spot for at least five days in Las Vegas called “Is Harry Reid Strong Enough?”

The Stabenow gambit failed, scuttling the make-believe "savings" in the bill and re-categorizing it as a budget-buster, which is a poison-pill.  This goes along with the public-option poison-pill, the Medicare-disembowlement poison-pill to seniors, the cancel-the-Medicare-disembowelment poison-pill to the AMA, the retreat-from-individual-mandate poison-pill to health insurance carriers, annnnnnnnd the Hyde-Amendment-circumvention poison-pill to pro-lifers.  This "prescription" has so many poison pills, and so many conflicting and mutually exclusive "alliances," that it becomes ever easier to understand why Barack Obama wanted this disaster crammed down our throats sight-unseen at the end of July: he knew it would never pass any other way.

If Barry's got any "ocean-lowering," "soul-healing" counterfeit miracles left in his suit, now's the time to whip out his magic wand.  I'm sure he has plenty of authority to do so.  Leaky says so.