Health Wars (10/7/09)

If you respect diligence and tenacity and a never-say-die attitude regardless of how despicable and destructive the sought-after objective, then you have to tip your hat to "Dirty Harry" Reid.  No matter how many of his BarryCare cram-down schemes he comes up with, no matter how low his approval/re-election numbers sink in Nevada, he just will not give up:

Senate Democrats desperate to find a way to pass a health care bill that includes a federal insurance plan may have come up with a way to do it without putting moderate members who oppose it in political jeopardy.

Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-NV, is weighing a plan to bring the final health care bill to the floor without a public option — making it much easier to get the sixty votes needed to prevent a Republican filibuster — and then adding the provision later as an amendment.

The public option amendment would be there waiting, but the sixty-vote test would technically be on a bill without the government plan. Then moderate Democrats could drop out for the vote on the public option, which requires just fifty-one votes for passage.

Actually, fifty plus Slow Joe, in case anybody's keeping score.  But doesn't the very existence of this press report indicate that this latest Reid stealth gambit has already failed?  Indeed, why does he, or Crazy Nancy, or Baucus or Harkin or Waxman, et al, keep floating them when it ought to be obvious after all these months that nobody is going to fall asleep at the switch for the duration and get snookered by any variety of hand-waving?

The Donk Politburo can have BarryCare in some form and get destroyed in 2010, or it can live to fight another year and retain shrunken majorities in 2010.  It cannot have both.  For all the hype about "jam-downs" and such, Dem "leaders" seem awfully squeamish when it comes to actually pulling the trigger.

But that brings us back to my "short-sheeted bed metaphor."  The latest manifestation of it is that the biggest factor in BaucusCare's ostensibly lesser price tag is that - sho 'nuff - it overflows with new and higher taxes that a lot of rank & file House Jackasses aren't overflowing with enthusiasm to be seen voting for any more than the public option:

More than half of the Democrats in the House have signed on to a letter denouncing a key element of the Senate Finance Committee’s health care legislation as labor unions draw a line in the sand on paying for reform.

The Democrats are attacking a plan to finance expanded health care by taxing expensive health insurance plans. The plan, sometimes cast as a tax on “Cadillac” plans, would in fact include the health care plans of many public employees and union members and has triggered a revolt from Obama’s labor supporters and their many allies on the Hill.

The letter from 154 House Democrats to Speaker Nancy Pelosi urges her “to reject proposals to enact an excise tax on high-cost insurance plans that could be potentially passed on to middle-class families.”

“This is not an obscure detail of health care reform,” said Connecticut Rep. Joe Courtney, who drafted the letter. “Taxing health benefits was explicitly debated in the campaign by presidential candidates and people running for Congress.”

Pardon me a moment whilst I laugh hysterically at this Gordian knot of lib hypocrisies.  They just luuuuuv surtaxes on "Cadillac plans" as long as it's those of the other rich people, who are naturally dirty, rotten, stinking, thieving, plutocratic pond scum, but Baucus better not lay a finger on Big Labor's gold-plated benies!

I'm actually more than a little surprised that he forgot to exempt them from this tax.  But then if he did, that would carve a significant hunk out of the flood of new revenues he thinks will be raised from wealthy, Monopoly tychoon-looking morons who will just mindlessly bend over for his gouging rather than stop buying the comprehensive coverage plans.  Which would boost the net cost of BaucusCare.  Which would defeat the purpose of attempting a "compromise" plan in the first place.

This is far from the only voter-unfriendly new tax or tax increase in this monstrosity, either.  Would you believe that the senior senator from Montana wants to - okay, not rape, but certainly pillage - mommies?:

When Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus proposed taxing medical devices to raise $40 billion over the next 10 years for his health care plan, opponents started digging in and looking at what would be taxed. It turned out feminine products, like tampons, were classified as class I medical devices and thus, the “tampon tax” was born.

The backlash was quick and severe enough against the idea that the committee quickly drafted new language that would exempt those necessities from the tax, along with all other class I devices, like tongue depressors, and decided to only tax class II medical devices and higher that cost [more] than $100.

But, just wait for the revolt to start again because women will still pay a price under the new structure. Particularly new moms who want to use a powered breast pump to bottle milk for their babies. Those devices, labeled class II, typically retails for more than $100.

What a misogynist.  What's Baucus got against women, anyway?  And here I thought Dems, having already driven away the senior citizen demographic, would at least want to hold onto their traditional "gender gap" advantage.  But no siree!  Take a look at the sample list of medical devices that Ensign Ed compiled.  Even after the backlash-enforced list re-write, Baucus's medical device tax still includes mammograms.  African-Americans will be syphoned disproportionately for sickle-cell anemia tests.  The elderly (primarily) will get hit on dialysis catheters.  Even the Roman Polanksi crowd isn't spared (Treponemal syphilis test, Inflatable penis prosthetics).  And pretty much everybody goes to the dentist (Dental X-rays).

It also turns out, somewhat less than startlingly, that these assclowns really have no frakking clue how much revenue one of their tax hikes will steal even assuming their discredited static (as opposed to dynamic) scoring model:

The Joint Committee on Taxation says drug companies, medical device manufacturers and insurers would pay $121 billion over ten years as a result of taxes in the Senate Finance Committee bill.

That’s compared with $92 billion originally calculated.

The tax experts said the reason for the change is that the companies won’t be able to deduct the fees from their corporate income taxes.

Oops!  And the irony, of course, is that those levies will probably LOSE revenue depending upon their elasticity.

So Baucus can do another re-write exempting Big Labor from his "Cadillac" tax, sating those 154 House Donks but trigger another public backlash plus drive up the cost of his plan, making a filibuster more likely and more difficult to overcome; or he can leave his plan as-is, maybe somehow get to sixty votes in the Senate but then get shot down in the House.  And if the lower chamber didn't approve BaucusCare without amendment, any conference report "final version" would be filibusterable.  And that, in turn, doesn't even include the radioactive "public option".

Perhaps Dirty Harry's "bag o' tricks" includes having the Capitol Police arrest all the Republicans and Blue Dogs.  It's becoming increasingly difficult to fathom how BarryCare can be shoved down our throats any other way.

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In totally, utterly, and completely unrelated other news, Donk SuperCongressional approval ratings are dropping faster than Roman Polanski's pants at a middle school sock hop.

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From hysterical laughter to blithering rage.  Not the usual order of these mega-posts, but variety is the spice of life:

Not a secular hymn sung to the Idol himself, but more like kiddie disciples sent off to preach the Marxist gospel with a rhythm & blues accompaniment.  And, if you'll recall, the Twelve Ordinary Men were, you know, MEN.

Okay, I'll be somewhat merciful - this last item is a little of both:

The six people in Monday’s protest were blocking the doors to the Minnetonka headquarters of insurer UnitedHealth Group.

On Tuesday, thousands rallied in California in front of Anthem Blue Cross offices in cities from San Francisco down the coast to San Diego.

The Health Care for America Now group is organizing similar protests in front of offices of major private health insurance companies to officially declare them a crime scene.

Health Care for America Now is making a strong push for federal healthcare reform legislation to include the so-called public option, which would add government-supported medical insurance into the mix available for the currently uninsured.

Six people?  That would be six whole people, right?  Actually, those were just the demonstrators who got arrested, but it still only drew 110 people:

About 110 protesters sang and spoke about the need to change the way health care is organized and financed in the United States, and said that insurers such as UnitedHealth are making people sicker because the system doesn’t offer proper coverage for many patients.

They cited what they said is UnitedHealth’s practice of “denying care and claims in order to generate record profits.”

The demonstration was organized by a group called Health Care for America Now in Minnesota, a coalition of labor unions, faith groups and activist organizations, including Education Minnesota, the AFL-CIO and Isaiah, a social justice group that includes more than sixty congregations.

Um, since when is 3.3% a "record" profit percentage?  And how does denying coverage for pre-existing conditions in order to control health insurance premiums and make them as affordable as possible for the biggest possible market "make people sicker"?  And how would destroying the private health insurance market with a government takeover that would explode the cost of health care and result in denial of care to all but the REALLY rich and powerful - i.e. ruling Democrats and their fellow-travelers - not be the biggest, most egregious crime of all?

UPDATE: Uh-oh.  Or maybe not.  Karl reiterates the point above:

It might be more useful to look at the fact that the CBO’s preliminary estimate, with its cost-bending deficit numbers, relies on $201 billion in revenues from an excise tax on high-premium insurance plans. However, today, more than 150 House Democrats sent a letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi opposing a new tax on expensive insurance plans. While the letter is supposedly concerned with any such tax eventually hitting middle-income Americans, the reality is that these House Dems are acting at the behest of their Big labor masters, which means they are (ahem) unlikely to change their minds on the issue. Indeed, a White House that was willing to take over much of the US auto industry to save the UAW is probably not keen on tax, either.