Fighting to Preserve Liberty in America
Judging by the two mail pieces I just received from my congressman, Tim Bishop, it looks like he has settled on his reelection strategy. After all, he doesn’t want to run on his record (ObamaCare, bailouts, Stimulus, trillions in deficit spending); with the demise of earmarks he can’t say he’s bringing home the bacon; since he is facing a re-match in his reelection bid, using the same smear tactics this time around will be harder; so let’s scare the bejeezus out of the seniors.
National Debt Clock A Long Time Ago When the Debt was Only $6 Trillion
Today the House of Representatives voted on a bill HR 2650, called the Cut, Cap, and Balance bill to get the runaway debt and deficit spending under control. The bill passed the house 234-190, will all but 9 Republicans voting for it and all but 5 Democrats voting against it. Tim Bishop voted no.
In article in the New York Times titled, “Squandering Medicare’s Money,” the article itemizes a number of procedures that are routinely perfomed under Medicare, but have little or no medical value. So why are they done? One reason is alluded to in the article while another is not.
The Democrats are banking on the American people returning to the days of voting by sound bite. They believe the Tea Party is an anomaly that will go down as a blip in the history books, rather than a force for educating the electorate on the issues. It is a strategy that has worked for them, even as recently as the 2010 election. In the First Congressional District of New York, Congressman Tim Bishop ran for reelection entirely on bashing his opponent, and not mentioning his record of voting with Nancy Pelosi 97% of the time.
Newt Gingrich may have just killed his presidential bid in less than a week after announcing it. Aside from his support of ethanol subsidies, the old commercial sitting on the couch with Nancy Pelosi, he tops it off by attacking Paul Ryan’s budget that was approved by all but four Republican members of the House of Representatives.
He says the Ryan plan is too radical. Compared to what? ObamaCare?
While Medicare savings under the Democrats’ health care law and pending proposals would come mainly from reduced federal payments to doctors, hospitals and insurance companies, the budget put forth by House Republicans would cut spending by turning Medicare into a system of vouchers for future beneficiaries to buy private insurance, but in amounts that would not keep pace with the projected inflation of health costs.
The Democrats’ plan is to pay doctors, hospitals, and insurance companies less. How does that work in the real world? Doctors will refuse to accept more Medicare patients as will hospitals. So Medicare recipients may have coverage, but won’t have a doctor to serve them. You cannot bring down the cost of medical care by government fiat.
Ryan’s plan actually brings the free market into play by putting the decision making in the hands of the consumer. Of course, the Democrats say that amount Ryan proposes will not keep up with the rising costs of medical care. Aren’t these the same people who said if we did not spend nearly a trillion on the stimulus, unemployment would rise to 9%, wheras if we did, it would go no higher than 8%?
Paul Ryan showed the courage to tackle entitlements and with a credible plan. It may not be perfect, but it is a solid start. The Democrats’ “plan” is just more politbureau control from Washington dictating to the rest of us their failed solutions. It’s time for a change.
As for Newt, he can go back to the think tank, and re-think some of his positions.
That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.
(This is the last of a series of articles focusing on topics presented at the Cato Policy Perspectives 2011 conference held at New York’s Waldorf Astoria hotel on Friday, April 8, 2011)
“What a difference a year makes” is short assessment of ObamaCare presented by Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute. “It cannot be fixed, it has to be repealed,” was his blunt conclusion.
As long as you are not Rip Van Winkle you should know by now that as Nancy Pelosi famously said, “We have to pass the bill, to find out what is in it.” Well, we’re finding out. We found out that it was true ObamaCare does double count $500 billion in savings, there are thousands of organizations asking for waivers from the program, and the individual mandate has been struck down by several courts.
Maybe it’s just me. Perhaps not having lived in the rarefied air of academia or politics, I have a more roll up the sleeves, get some dirt under the fingernails approach to what a job entails. Today it seems that politicians like to get in front of the cameras, fire off a sound bite and then go do something more interesting.
The other day we read reports of Democratic Senators scrambling to create an oversight panel to prevent health care providers from dramatically increasing premiums over the next four years because, shockingly, costs are supposed to go down not up.
Yesterday, the Department of Health and Human Services released a report analyzing the effects of ObamaCare:
The sobering assessment by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services concludes what Republicans had warned about during heated debate — that the double-counting of Medicare spending — as both savings and as a means to shore up the debt-ridden government fund for seniors’ health care — means the cost is unrealistic.
The analysis also found that the law falls short of the president’s twin goal of controlling runaway costs, raising projected spending by about 1 percent over 10 years, or $311 billion, up from the $222 billion previous estimated.
Excuse me, captain, but was that an iceberg we just hit? We all know the Titanic sank on her maiden voyage, and it looks like ObamaCare is taking on water only weeks after being launched. As Congressman John Boehner said:
“According to his own administration’s analysis, the health care law the president signed one month ago today would violate his pledge to ‘bend the cost curve’ and force millions of seniors off their current Medicare coverage. This is in addition to what we already know about how this new law is squeezing employers with job-killing tax hikes and leaving middle-class families to brace for higher premiums,” he said.
When talk turns to repealing this law is Obama still smugly saying, “Bring it on”?
This is from today’s New York Times:
“Fearing that health insurance premiums may shoot up in the next few years, Senate Democrats laid a foundation on Tuesday for federal regulation of rates, four weeks after President Obama signed a law intended to rein in soaring health costs.”
With the ink barely dry on ObamaCare, Democrats in Congress are scrambling to keep their masterpiece from unraveling. As I have pointed out repeatedly, there is nothing in the ObamaCare plan that helps reduce the cost of delivering health care. It is all about controlling what doctors, medical service providers, and insurance companies are paid. All the underlying pressures on health costs (tort reform, 3rd party payer, etc.) are still in place.
“We Have to Pass the Bill to Know What’s In It”
Nancy Pelosi’s stunning but famous words are coming into play. Let’s see what has the senators panicked.
So here’s the scenario. If you compare the cost of the penalty of $2,085 for a family vs. the cost of insurance for a family of $10,000, coupled with the inability of insurance companies to deny coverage for pre-existing conditions, healthy people will start dropping insurance coverage left and right. Why not? On the way to the hospital, you can call an insurance company and say you want to be covered for the pains in your chest and you cannot be denied. So insurance companies will only have sick people as clients. With only sick people that they constantly have to pay claims on, their only course of action if they want to stay in business is to raise premiums on all those sick people. If they start doing it now, they may be able to raise them less than if they wait until 2016.
So the insurance companies are acting rationally to this mess the Democrats dragged across the finish line and now they are shocked, SHOCKED, that they should do this.
Grace-Marie Turner, president of the Galen Institute, a research center that advocates free-market health policies, said the Democrats’ proposal was unlikely to succeed in lowering insurance costs.
“Capping premiums without recognizing the forces that are driving up costs would be like tightening the lid on a pressure cooker while the heat is being turned up,” Mrs. Turner said.
The Democratic fix is to have a new bureaucracy that will provide a check on unjustified premiums. I think you can look at this in one of two ways, both plausible. The Democrats were stupid enough to believe, as they typically do, that Americans don’t act rationally to their government policies. It’s also why they don’t understand that when they raise taxes they never collect as much money as they thought, and when taxes are cut they can’t believe how much money flows into the Treasury due to economic growth. The second scenario is this new commission will cap premiums to the point of driving private insurance companies out of business and then the Democrats will say, “Geez, we didn’t want to do this, but I guess we have to put in place a public option that, by the way, will be the only option.”
Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, the No. 3 Republican in the Senate, said: “Health insurance companies’ profits for one year equal about two days of health care spending in the United States. So even if we were to take away all the profits of the so-called greedy insurance companies, that would still leave 363 days a year when health care costs are expanding at a rate our country cannot afford.”
Now that I think about it, it is probably the second scenario that is more likely, that is, force the public option. Your government is about to swallow up another big chunk of the economy if we don’t turn them out in November.
