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.

I had an opportunity to watch some of the floor debate and the Democrats wasted no time in going in to scare and distort mode. Almost every Democrat who rose to speak said the bill was an attack on Medicare and protecting the rich.

Medicare

But what are the facts on Medicare?

• Medicare is in dire need of reform. Medicare is the second largest federal program and is growing at a staggering 7% a year.  Its costing taxpayers nearly $500 billion a year, with long-term liabilities in excess of $38 trillion. Medicare spending is expected to double over the next decade.
• Conservatives have a plan to save Medicare. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) has offered a plan, which passed the House on April 15th, that would save Medicare for current retirees and future generations without rationing or benefit cuts. The Ryan plan would inject choice and competition into the program, and thus save money by making Medicare more efficient. The plan would take effect  in 2021, and would not affect current seniors. Everyone born before 1956 could keep their current Medicare, exactly as it is.
• The Democrats’ Medicare plan is rationing and benefit cuts. Democrats vehemently oppose the Ryan plan. Instead, their plan is to cut $500 billion out of Medicare, in order to fund their massive new ObamaCare entitlement. They created a rationing board of 15 unelected bureaucrats, known as IPAB, to impose these cuts. IPAB will slash what Medicare pays doctors and hospitals to the  bone. As a result, seniors will have trouble finding a doctor who will take them. Mr. Obama’s own Medicare experts predict 15% of hospitals will go out of business.
• The Ryan plan will allow patients to choose their Medicare plan. Starting in 2021, the Ryan plan would enroll new Medicare seniors in the same kind of health care program that Members of Congress enjoy today. Seniors will be able to choose the coverage that best meets their individual needs from a list of competing high-quality health plans. Why do Democrats oppose giving seniors the same good health care Congress enjoys?

Congress gave themselves a handsome $174,000 salary. Does anyone believe they would skimp on their own healthcare? So why is it a bad idea if seniors have the same plan as Congress?

President Obama’s Plan

The Democrats also talked about Obama’s plan. What plan? As several Republican lawmakers said, “If you have a copy of that plan on paper, slide it over, we’d like to see it.” But there is no plan from the Democrats, just like there has been no budget for the last two years. They say Obama is proposing $3 in spending cuts for each $1 increase in taxes. Where have I heard that before? Ah, yes, that was the deal Tip O’Neill negotiated with Ronald Reagan. They got the tax increases, but the spending cuts never happened. Reagan was lied to. So now President Obama is playing Lucy and he wants Speaker Boehner to be Charlie Brown. No thanks. If it’s not on paper, it doesn’t exist.

Even as they tried to demonize the Republican proposal they couldn’t help themselves; they had to keep talking about the need for “investment” which to Democrats is just a code word for spending. They don’t invest anything. Investing is what the evil rich do, the Democrats job is to take it from them and give it to their backers.

The Democrats also attacked the Republicans for wanting to change the Constitution. How it would be hard to spend money in an emergency or in a time of war. Which is just another lie. There are provisions in the bill to exceed the limits with a super majority. But leaving these lifetime politicians, many of whom never held a job in the private sector, to curb their own appetites to spend their way to reelection, reminded me of budgeting in the private sector. When the business was facing tough times the word came down for everyone to cut. Inevitably people would push back and say, “everything in my budget is critical, I can’t cut anything, you’ll have to get it elsewhere.” That response was typically met as follows. “You can cut it, or I will, but it will be cut. If you cut it, you can decide how it will least impact your responsibilities, but being further removed if I cut it you probably won’t like it.” That’s how it works in the private sector and that is how it will work with the Balanced Budget Amendment. Tough choices have to be made.

In 2007 after the Bush tax cuts of 2003, the Treasury took in more tax revenue than at any time in our history. This is not a revenue problem. It is a spending problem. Congress cannot tax their way out of this and trying to do so will kill the already moribund economy. Tim Bishop, are you listening?

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NddO5yMxicw&feature=player_embedded

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

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 800 pound gorilla that drives medical costs continually skyward are the personal injury lawyers. Doctors practice defensive medicine because of these lawyers since they don’t want to be sitting in a witness chair answering the question, “Well why didn’t you perform test or procedure X?” Since it wasn’t performed, no one can say what the outcome would have been. In the doctor’s learned opinion he may say that it wasn’t relevant. The lawyer will argue otherwise, but if the doctor can produce negative test results, well, there’s your proof it wasn’t relevant. So the tests get done and billed and medical costs climb.

In Texas, they are reforming the system there. The have put caps on personal injury awards, and are passing legislation that would have someone who brings a frivolous lawsuit pay the legal fees of the winner. Applications for new doctor’s licenses have risen 60% and malpractice insurance premiums have fallen 27%.

The odd thing in the article is it criticizes a number of tests that would be considered preventative. ObamaCare supporters have been pounding the drum for more preventative measures. But sometimes preventative measures are not the best idea. Having a colonoscopy when you are 85 years old, is probably going to be of little value and may actually increase the risk of infection or a perforation of the colon. But when the patient is not involved in the payment process, who cares?

Which brings up the point I make in my book, Liberty’s Lifeline, the need to eliminate third party payers. If you go to a restaurant that has an all you can eat buffet, and you know that someone else is picking up the check, do you not reach for that extra dessert? If you had to lay out the money, or at least part of it, you might question why the procedure was necessary or effective. Gee, that sounds a lot like the Ryan plan. Putting patients in charge of their health and their families, not a nameless, faceless, unaccountable panel of bureaucrats. Just imagine medical care modeled on the Department of Motor Vehicles instead of the doctor’s office that you know today. The former is ObamaCare, the latter is the Paul Ryan plan. Which do you prefer?

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

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.

President Obama puts our troops in harm’s way and then jets off to Brazil to be photographed doing the samba, and saying he wants to be first in line to buy more foreign oil, this time from Brazil. Didn’t he just say that he wants to cut our imports of foreign oil by one third? Shouldn’t we be drilling here rather than lining up new suppliers?

We have a myriad of problems that include spending, the crisis in the Middle East, North Korea, unemployment, the budget, and yet the president has found time to play sixty-one rounds of golf, at last count. Who’s minding the store?

Newly elected Delaware Senator Chris Coons got on television to lament that he is holding a job fair at his Delaware office and if the government shuts down Friday night, he won’t have any staffers to run the job fair. This is very, very bad. Er, excuse me, senator but your job is to pass a budget not to be the local employment office. Cancel the job fair, as I am sure there are plenty of government and private agencies that handle that, and get back to work doing what you were elected to do.

In a similar vein, Congressman Tim Bishop is scheduled to kick off his 2012 reelection campaign this Sunday so that he can plan on continuing to pick up his $174,000 salary for failing to pass a budget. I am sure his quick retort will be that he is in the minority and therefore powerless to move those stubborn Republicans. But it was his failure a few short months ago when he and Nancy Pelosi were in the majority to pass a budget resolution for the first time since budget resolutions became standard practice. They also failed to pass the appropriation bills to fund the government until the end of the fiscal year in October.

A cynic might look at it as a designed power play. “Look, we’re going to get clobbered in 2010, so let’s not vote on a budget or spending bills and it will be a twofer. One, we won’t be held accountable for voting for higher spending and that may save a couple of seats in November 2010; two, it will dump this mess in the Republicans lap and if we hold the Senate we can force a government shutdown and blame them like we did in 1995. Then we can coast back into power in 2012.” Of course, you would have to be a cynic to believe that, wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you?

In the midst of the current budget crisis we hear an announcement by Harry Reid that their staffs will be working through the night, and the politicians will be back in front of the microphones tomorrow.

I worked a number of years in Information Technology, specifically in the credit card business. I can remember sitting at my desk on New Year’s Eve 1999. Perhaps the biggest New Year’s celebration of a lifetime and I was at my desk. Why? Remember the Year 2000 software bug? Well, we had to be ready to respond instantly if anying we worked endless hours to prevent slipped through. Nothing did and around 3AM or so, we started to head home. On the day after Thanksgiving, known as Black Friday, in the retail world it was “all hands on deck” to make sure that things worked and if there were any hiccups, we were on top of them immediately. Although I was a VP, I was there on the floor with the first line folks. The same went for any major software releases. If a critical decision had to be made we were there to make them. That’s the way it was done. We didn’t make pronouncements and go play golf. We were there onsite. But that is in the private sector, where things like profits and losses matter, accountability is real, and lifetime employment is unheard of. We could be fired any day, not just one day every two, four or six years.

We have a right to that accountability from our political leaders. Instead of raising funds for the next run for office, these politicians should have their salary cut off and be dipping into their savings to pay for the skyrocketing gasoline prices that are a result of not exploring for energy here, and instead destroying the dollar. Instead of doing their jobs, those on the left are ramping up their slime machines to give every reason under the sun why they can’t possibly cut any spending. There was some Congressman on the news talking about how wonderfully efficient Medicare is and how those evil Republicans want to put that in the hands of private insurers, horrors! It is common knowledge that between $60 – $100 billion is STOLEN from Medicare every year. How is that for efficiency? As I point out in my book Liberty’s Lifeline Steve Kroft of Sixty Minutes reported that stealing from Medicare pushed aside cocaine as the major criminal enterprise in South Florida.

2012 is coming and everyone one of these hand wringing, overpaid, do nothing, politicians should be bounced out on the street, if they don’t want to step up and transform Washington in to an efficient and accountable government.

That’s my opinion, I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

“We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it” – Nancy Pelosi 

The White House claimed, incredibly, that most Americans support ObamaCare.

“If you take the last 12 independent polls, and you throw out four by Rasmussen, whose results the White House doesn’t like, and you throw out six others that show a wide margin of opposition, then you have two polls with results consistent with the Washington Post poll showing a fairly small margin of opposition to the Democrats’ national health care plan. And that is Benenson’s case. By the way, the headline of his article? “Most Americans want health care reform.”  – Byron York, National Examiner

Governor Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania, gushed on Fox News last night, about how ObamaCare was good for Pennsylvania.  Why?  Well, he said, today Pennsylvania is only reimbursed 50% for Medicare while under ObamaCare Pennsylvania will be reimbursed 90%.  Very cool.  Er, who’s picking up the tab for that extra 40%?  That question goes to the heart of the Liberal/Progressive movement which is basically you are too damn stupid to recognize a shell game when you see one.

Unless the plan is to have ObamaCare paid for with the profits from GM and Chrysler, the only thing the government does for a profit, it is all a giant shell game.  The giddy governor of Pennsylvania knows that this is a shell game and that extra 40% will either come out of Pennsylvanians federal tax pocket instead of their state tax pocket or it will be subsidized by citizens in other states through their taxes.  Oh wait, no, there is always those evil drug and medical device companies to tax.  But where do they get their money?  That’s right taxes are built into the price of their products, so expect drugs and medical devices to cost more.

The Evil Health Insurance Company Myth

Obama & Co. jumped all over a 39% premium increase by Anthem Blue Cross in California as Exhibit A justifying their takeover of the health care industry.  This is not going to be fixed with ObamaCare but only made worse.  An example is given by a doctor who says for the last seven years he has been reimbursed $50 for an office visit under Medicare.  In that time his expenses have risen 30%. (Quick check — if the good doctor gives his staff a 4% raise each year for 7 years that comes out, compounded, to about 30%).  Under ObamaCare they are proposing a 21% reduction in Medicare reimbursement, so the doctor will now get a $40 reimbursement for an office visit.  The doctor can do one of two things.  He can stop seeing Medicare patients, or he can charge his other patients more to make up the difference.  If he chooses the latter course of action, then private insurance companies, like Anthem, will have to pay for the increase.  How do they recover their costs?  That’s right by increasing premiums.

Just like you never hear statists blaming government polices of HUD, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac for the housing bubble that triggered the financial crisis and recession (it was all those greedy, evil bankers), you won’t hear them mention their policies regarding Medicare as triggering the premium increases.  It was all about greed.  So government will need to step in and make sure those greedy insurance companies cannot increase prices like they have.  So expenses rise, premiums are capped, insurance companies fold, and voila you have a public option, which becomes the only option.  Next to keep expenses from rising, health care will have to be rationed because there are no market mechanisms in ObamaCare to actually reduce costs.  No tort reform.  No elimination of 3rd party payers.  No true insurance that protects against catastrophic costs while you pay for the routine, like all other insurance.  Just government fiat.  Obama can no more order health care costs to decline than he can turn off gravity. 

News flash to people around the world living under socialized medicine who travel to the United States for critical care when they need it, that door will soon be closed.

Who Is Really Stupid?

Statists believe the average American is too stupid to make decisions, or should I say the right decisions, about their lives, health, safety, etc.  We need the really, really smart people in government to tell us what is good for us and follow their instructions.  Or…in November we can send them the message that they were really, really stupid to ignore what the American people were screaming at them, STOP!!!! If Jefferson, Madison, Washington, Adams, Hamilton, et al, thought Americans were smart enough to look out for their own best interests, who are Pelosi, Reid, Waxman, Boxer, Rangel, Schumer, Dodd, et al, to say otherwise?

If you look at President Obama’s record on what he says one day and one he says later when reality sets in, are we really ready to believe him when he says,

“Whatever plan we design upholds three basic principles,” he said. “First, the rising cost of health care must be brought down; second, Americans must have the freedom to keep whatever doctor and health care plan they have, or to choose a new doctor or health care plan if they want it; and third, all Americans must have quality, affordable health care.”

He told us we absolutely had to pass his $787 Billion stimulus package or the unemployment rate would hit 9%, but if the package passed, the unemployment rate would be held to 8%.  It didn’t work.  Unemployment is at 9.1% and climbing.  He said bankruptcy for the auto companies would be disastrous for the economy.  After pouring billions into the auto companies, where are they?  In bankruptcy.  It is estimated that his health care “solution” would cost between $1 and $1.6 trillion. Why should we believe it?  What has he told us he would do that has actually come to pass?  North Korea?  Iran?

What confidence do we have that the government can do anything, other than national defense, better than private industry?  The postal service?  Amtrak? Farm subsidies? Earmarks? Speaking of healthcare what about Medicare and Medicaid?  In a report from March 2008:

“We need to act quickly and effectively to address Medicare’s fiscal health, including enacting the steps proposed in the President’s budget, which would postpone the insolvency date of the Part A trust fund for ten years,” said Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt.

A Modest Proposal

Before attempting to overhaul one-sixth of the U.S. Economy, why doesn’t the Obama Administration fix Medicare and Medicaid?  Show us your stuff Mr. President. Not your charm, not your winning smile. The campaign is over.   Prove that you can make these government programs work before you take on any more massive health care undertakings.