A partial catalog of lies and prevarication related to Obamacare
15
Questions The Mainstream Media Would Ask Barack Obama If He Were A Republican: [#4] Through
dubious means, you and your allies in Congress managed to push through an incredibly unpopular health care bill
that helped lead to the worst election night for the Democratic Party in 50 years. Since the bill has
passed, many of your claims about the bill have proven to be untrue. ... Since the American people have rejected
your health care reform and it doesn't do what you said it would, shouldn't you work with the Republicans to
repeal it?
What
We're Learning about Obamacare isn't Good — Especially for Seniors. Obamacare is an
example of a federal government program that would not have been enacted if the fog factor test had
been applied. While Congress debated Obamacare, talk about death panels and rationing of healthcare services
abounded, but the warnings came from Republicans who were in the minority in the House and the Senate. Their
objections were dismissed out of hand. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority leader Harry Reid
rounded up Democrat votes and shoved Obamacare down our throats with the blessing of President Obama.
Obamacare Abominations.
President Obama says his health care "reform" will be good for business. Business has learned the truth. Three
successful businessmen explained to me how Obamacare is a reason that unemployment stays high. Its length and
complexity make businessmen wary of expanding.
ObamaCare's
Growing List Of Broken Promises. Just before he signed the health reform law, President Obama
said it would "bring down the cost of health care for families, for businesses, and for the federal government."
Instead, average family premiums have climbed $2,393 since 2008, the Kaiser survey found. This is the
latest ObamaCare prediction that has failed to materialize. If the history of state and federal health
care reforms is any guide, it won't be the last.
Bending
Obamacare's honesty curve downward. Obamacare is the product of statements known by their makers
to be untrue and meant to deceive — lies. Mr. Obama promised on at least eight occasions that
he would open his health care hearings to the public. ... The Obamacare lies are mounting: You could keep
your current insurance. You could keep your doctor. The plan would cost less than a trillion dollars.
Medicare would be protected. There would be no health care rationing. No one earning less than
$250,000 per year would see an increase in his taxes. Tax credits would alleviate the burdens placed on
small businesses. The plan would create 4 million new jobs, 400,000 almost immediately. Americans
would love Obamacare once they saw what was in it.
We're not buying
it, O. Once again, Barack Obama is a happy pitch man. ... He's still peddling Hope & Change,
although now he calls it health-care reform. He swears his miracle elixir will save your life, your
money and your country. It will do anything you could possibly want — unless you want the
truth.
Obama's
Proposal is the Illusion of 'Reform'. One job of presidents is to educate Americans about
crucial national problems. On health care, Barack Obama has failed. Almost everything you
think you know about health care is probably wrong or, at least, half wrong. Great simplicities and
distortions have been peddled in the name of achieving "universal health coverage."
Obama's medical horror
stories. President Obama believes in government by anecdote. ... Contrary to the bleak picture
Mr. Obama is conjuring up, most Americans are happy with their own health care, including those with serious
health problems. According to a study in Regulation magazine last summer, 92 percent of those with
insurance who were suffering from chronic illness rated their health insurance as excellent or good.
Five
Reasons The CBO Figures Are Phony. The Congressional Budget Office's preliminary "score" says
the health care overhaul will cost $940 billion over the first 10 years, saving $138 billion
over that time. But the CBO must assess legislation as written, rather than whether it will actually
be carried out.
The Future's Shadow.
Often the politicians who talk about health care the most believe in the Hippocratic Oath the least.
Barack Obama falls into this category. He promises that his health care plan will protect the weak and
vulnerable. This would be a little bit more credible if his policies weren't already killing and
exploiting them.
The massive accounting blunder that should sink health care reform.
Democrats had been insisting that bill somehow cut the deficit and strengthened Medicare, but as it turns out
the CBO had to clarify that the savings of the bill were being double counted. ... [T]he bottom line is that
this is a massive, massive blunder and the President and the Senate Democrats need to come clean about it.
They sold the American people, or tried to anyway, on specific promises regarding deficit reduction and preserving
Medicare. Now they can't be sure of either of those promises.
Dependence Day.
Remember the $246 billion that Democrats were going to take out of Medicare to keep the program solvent
as well as help fund their health care reform schemes? Turns out it was just a fantasy. According
to the Congressional Budget Office, the Democrats double-counted funds in their health care plans, drawing
the savings for Medicare and financing for the new medical programs outlined in the Senate bill from the
same source. The legislation, says the nonpartisan CBO, will increase the deficit, not reduce it as
its supporters claimed.
Constitutional or Not,
ObamaCare Has Got To Go. ObamaCare was shoved through the sludge of parliamentary trickery, lies,
horse trading, cooked-up numbers, and false promises. Even after waiting to see what was in the bill, as
Nancy Pelosi suggested, there was a historic electoral backlash. As for the court's decision, it probably
won't imbue many people with any more confidence in process. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan —
only recently charged with defending the administration's positions in federal courts as solicitor general, working
there while the health care law was being written and picking the legal team to defend it — will
be rendering her entirely untainted decision on the matter.
Can Obama Open His Mouth Without
Lying About Health Care? [Scroll down slowly] To sum up: The president said he "didn't
campaign on the public option," but it turns out he did. He said that there wasn't any "gap" between his
campaign promises and the final result, but it turns out there were several, as detectable by the most cursory
Google search. He said "every single criteria for reform I put forward is in this bill," but it turns
out they're not.
Give
Me Liberty, or Give Me Obamacare. Remember back in June, in President Obama's major address to
the AMA, when he said the following? "No matter how we reform health care, we will keep this
promise. ... If you like your health-care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period.
No one will take it away. No matter what." In the six months since, there seems to have been a
change.
We know more about the Obama's marriage than we do about healthcare.
False
transparency: I've given up hope of ever finding out what young Barack actually did at Occidental and
Columbia or even reading a snippet of what he wrote, if anything, for the Harvard Law Review. ... I'm not really
interested in Obama as a man (or as a husband). I'm interested in what he does. And most of that, of late,
he has done in secret. We know more about his marriage than about how the healthcare legislation was
drafted or how its contents are being negotiated.
Chart:
Total 10-Year Cost of Reid Bill is $2.5 Trillion. Senate Republicans have just released an
outstanding chart highlighting the accounting games that Democrats are playing with the costs of their
proposed health-care overhaul. The Democrats assert that their Senate bill would cost $848 billion
over ten years. But Congressional Budget Office projections show that only 1 percent of those
costs would kick in prior to the fifth year of what the Democrats are calling the "first 10 years."
In the bill's true first 10 years (2014 to 2023) — that is, in the first 10 years in
which it would be operational to any meaningful extent — the CBO projects that the bill would
cost $1.8 trillion.
From Awful to
Worse. The Obama administration and congressional Democrats long ago gave up any pretense of
working to rationally reform American health care. The exercise now underway in the Senate is a mad
dash to get to 60 votes, and nothing more. That's why some Democratic senators who had no idea
exactly what is in the "breakthrough deal" announced by majority leader Harry Reid last week immediately
hailed it as a milestone.
46 million mistakes.
Pick a news outlet — almost any news outlet. Chances are they have misreported one
of the key facts in the healthcare debate. One of the basic reasons for the supposed need for
healthcare reform is the huge number of Americans who lack health insurance. The number typically
quoted is 46 million (sometimes inflated to 47 million, 48 million or even
50 million).
Four Tactical Steps That Will Defeat Obamacare.
[#1.] Denounce this bill for the lying fraud scheme it is: Just as an example: The Congressional Budget
Office (CBO) "scored" the Pelosi bill to cost $1.055 trillion — far above Barack Obama's $900 billion
ceiling. Pelosi immediately held a press conference and announced her bill would cost $894 billion —
a figure that did not appear in the CBO report and which could be reached only by subtracting projected IRS-administered
penalties from the actual cost.
Obama Admin. Actuary Finds
Unsustainable Status Quo Cheaper than Obamacare. One of President Obama's primary justifications
for pushing health care legislation has been that the status quo is "unsustainable" because of the skyrocketing
cost of medical care in the United States. The way to rein in costs, he argues, is to do adopt the
policies that he and his fellow Democrats are proposing. But a new report by the government actuary at
the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, a branch of the Obama administration's Department of Health
and Human Services, has found that the exact opposite is true.
The Onward March
Of ObamaCare. When you make a deal with people whose strategic goals are diametrically opposed
to yours, you must be careful that what you get is not a temporary tactical retreat that can be reversed at
any time, while what you have given is a huge and lasting strategic advantage. That principle had
already been illustrated plainly enough when Olympia Snowe helped to vote the Baucus bill out of committee
because it ruled out the public option, which she opposed. Within days, Harry Reid had put the public
option back in the bill that was now before the full Senate.
Obama's Health Care Rot, Calls For A Massive
Boycott. It's an old propaganda gimmick. If the rhetoric heats up against a government
initiative, they change the name and re-package it. They have been doing it for 100 years or more.
Welcome to the
P.T. Barnum Administration. Now the latest is health care. [Obama] and the Hill Democrats are
pushing through health care reform bills based on numbers that are virtually meaningless. ... The cost estimates
for health care reform aren't worth the paper they are printed on.
Understanding
all the facts about the uninsured. To support his sweeping makeover, Obama and
other liberal Democrats repeatedly point to the 46.3 million uninsured Americans. ... A
careful examination of the data, however, reveals that Obama and his allies are misrepresenting
the problem of the uninsured. Democratic plans would not come close to driving the number
of uninsured to zero. At best, about only 29 million would be covered.
Harry Reid's disingenuousness
on health care reform. The Senate Majority Leader is pulling out all the stops to get health care reform
passed. And the way he is trying to do it is just plain dishonesty.
There's No Free Health
Care. Give President Obama credit for persistence. And stubbornness. And lack of
imagination. He declared again last week that his health care plan "will slow the growth of health care
costs for our families and our businesses and our government." ... Does he think we're stupid? ... When you offer
more — much, much more in this case — of a good, it's going to cost more. Somebody
has to pay for it. Yet Obama says we'll all be paying less, and that includes businesses and government.
Obama uses fear to sell
health care. President Obama has begun a new phase of his effort to overhaul the nation's health care
system by trying to gird Americans for the perils that await them if his effort fails. In recent speeches,
including his weekly radio address Saturday, the president has begun using stark language to warn Americans that
failure to act on his proposed health care reform could lead more families into bankruptcy and could leave them
stranded when they get sick.
Obama Bill For Illegals
Healthcare. You would never know if from the protestations in his speech last night and in other venues, but
way back in May of 2006 US Senator Barack Obama co-sponsored a bill to federally fund healthcare for illegal aliens.
Liberal Lies About National Health Care.
[Scroll down] Apparently, promising to cut costs by having a panel of Washington bureaucrats (for short,
"The Death Panel") deny medical treatment wasn't a popular idea with most Americans. So liberals started
claiming that they are going to cover an additional 47 million uninsured Americans and cut costs ... without
ever denying a single medical treatment! Also on the agenda is a delicious all-you-can-eat chocolate cake
that will actually help you lose weight!
Some of the Democrat's Healthcare Lies
Discussed. For example, the new government run plan will supposedly "compete" with private
companies; however, the bill exposes employers operating group health plans to state law remedies and
private causes of action, but the government run plan can only be sued in federal court.
Obamacare
is losing support for good reason. During a town hall meeting by telephone this week, U.S. Rep. Paul
Hodes discussed his support for a trillion-plus dollar health care reform package with his constituents. "We've
got to lower costs for everybody," he said. Who does he think he's kidding? If we "lower costs for everybody,"
where exactly is the trillion dollars going to come from?
No, you won't be able to keep your insurance if you like it.
Dissecting the Kennedy Health Bill:
Last September Sen. Barack Obama promised that under his health-care proposal "you'll be able to get the same
kind of coverage that members of Congress give themselves." On Monday [6/15/2009], President Obama repeated
that promise in a speech to the American Medical Association. It's not true.
Obama's
Top Five Health Care Lies: President Barack Obama walked into the Oval Office with a veritable
halo over his head. In the eyes of his backers, he could say or do no wrong because he had evidently
descended directly from heaven to return celestial order to our fallen world. ... But when it comes to health
care reform, with every passing day, Obama seems less God and more demagogue, uttering not transcendental
truths, but bald-faced lies. Here are the top five lies that His Awesomeness has told — the
first two for no reason other than to get elected and the next three to sell socialized medicine to a
wary nation.
Insurance Is No Answer.
Health care "reformers" keep talking about getting us more health insurance. Then they talk about cutting
costs. This is contradictory nonsense. Insurance, whether private or a government Ponzi scheme like
Medicare, means third parties pay the bills. When someone else pays, costs always go up.
Let's Go With That
Analogy. President Obama recently drew an analogy between the proposed, government funded,
health care option and the United States Postal Service. He reasoned: a government funded postal
service hasn't put private parcel carriers out of business; therefore a government funded insurer will not put
private insurers out of business. His logic is sound and his facts are truthful, but only in a very
technical sense.
Something "fishy" when Obama's Organizing for America
plays doctor. [Scroll down] Behind the public stage is the staging of Obamacare that really matters.
It's called Organizing for America (OFA), and its main hallmark is deceit. In their own words, this is how OFA is
fighting "insurance companies" and "partisan attack groups" they accuse of "stirring up fear with false rumors about the
President's plan". "So we've cooked up an easy, powerful way for you to make a big impression: Office
Visits for Health Reform." That's right. The OFA comes right out an admits to their activists that their Office
Visits for Health Reform are "cooked up".
Health rationing by other
names. When Ezekiel J. Emanuel, a key presidential health care adviser, told The Washington Times on
Thursday [8/13/2009] that his "thinking has evolved" on the subject of health care rationing, he was making a distinction
without a difference. Even his "evolved" ideas amount to nothing more than government rationing by another name.
Obama's Health
Care Mess. Health care is stalled and insidiously undermining the presidency of Obama precisely
because the public senses he has not leveled with the American people. Of the uninsured, how many millions
are young people who feel no need right now to buy insurance, how many million are illegal aliens, how many
millions chose to use their optional income for things other than a low-cost catastrophic health plan, how
many millions still find care outside the insurance system? Nor do most Americans feel their system
is broken.
Obama Falsely Claims There Are 47 Million
Uninsured Americans. President Obama's inflated claim of the number of uninsured Americans was not
an off-the-cuff remark. It came in the prepared text at the beginning of the president's press conference
[7/22/2009] that should have been checked and vetted by White House staff. The president cited no source
for his claim that there are 47 million uninsured Americans. Since the White House first falsely claimed
in June that there were 46 million uninsured Americans, CNSNews.com has reported on the correct Census Bureau
figure [35.92 million uninsured Americans] on multiple occasions.
Obama's Health Care Fibs.
President Barack Obama has been busy attempting to sell his government takeover of the health care citizen.
In doing so, he contines to be, shall we say, a bit lax with the facts.
Did
someone mention socialized medicine?
Dem. Shill as 'Attendee' in Obama's Healthcare Townhall
Audience. One of Obama's first questions from the audience wasn't from a mere concerned citizen, but from a
former Democratic Party candidate for Congress that wants a socialist, single payer system to be implemented, raising the
suspicion that the administration knew exactly who was going to ask questions and what they were going to ask.
Who's
Funding the Obamacare Campaign? If you believe the White House, there are 30 million
Americans who support a government health care takeover. But if you look at the funding behind the
Obamacare campaign, it's the same few leftist billionaires, union bosses and partisan community organizers
pushing the socialized medicine agenda. Let's connect the dots.
Myths,
Lies and Stupidity About Health Care: President Barack Obama's health care plan, we are told,
will spend $1 trillion over the next 10 years. But since trillion is the new billion, Americans
aren't supposed to worry about that. Obama's health care plan will cause employers to stop providing
private health insurance for millions of employees and instead shift employees to public care. But Obama
says that government is the best arbiter of your health, so Americans aren't supposed to worry about that.
More
about socialized medicine.
Government Won't Allow
Fair Competition. Proponents of socialized medicine learned an important lesson from the 1993
failure of Clinton Care, and recognize that they must hide their agenda in the rhetoric of market competition.
Government is not going to take over insurance, they say; it merely wants to compete.
Healthcare
Crusaders Out To Plunder System. The number of uninsured people is grossly misleading.
Just because you are uninsured doesn't mean you have no access to medical care. And just because you are
insured under universal systems doesn't mean you will receive care. If you don't think the administration
is parlaying the crisis angle, then you must have missed the feigned urgency in Obama's declarations that
"reform" must be completed this year.
The Mystery of the $2 Trillion
in Health Care Savings. Kathy Sebelius, secretary of Health and Human Services, just held a
conference call with reporters in which I hoped to learn more details about how the health care industry
plans to save $2 trillion in projected health care costs over ten years. ... But when it came time for
questions, she could offer little in the way of details about the so-called savings.
Health Bill Hoax.
Only a Bernie Madoff could believe the Senate's health care bill will extend coverage to 31 million Americans
while cutting deficits by $127 billion over 10 years. It would be the first profitable
entitlement. But that's what Majority Leader Harry Reid, citing Congressional Budget Office estimates,
tells us the 2,074-page bill — said to cost only $849 billion over a decade —
would do.
We Pay Them to
Lie to Us. To be deficit-reducers, the health care bills depend on a $200 billion cut in
Medicare. Current law requires cuts in payments to doctors, but let's get real: Those cuts will
never happen. The idea that Congress will "save $200 billion" by reducing payments for groups
as influential as doctors and retirees is laughable.
They
Call It Fiscal Responsibility; We Call It Socialism. As President Barack Obama and his
party conspire to destroy — not reform — the greatest health care system
in the world in their quest to remake America into a full-blown Eurosocialist state, it is
instructive to remember the premise upon which Obama launched this disaster. In July,
Obama said that if we do not control our health care costs, "we will not be able to control our
deficit." ... Those who didn't know this was hogwash in the first place have no excuse not to
see it now.
Obamacare's Ugly
Math. The Office of the Chief Actuary for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS)
estimates that under the House health bill, the percentage of the United States gross domestic product spent
on health care would rise from 17 percent today to 21 percent in 2019.
Was
Democrats' Health Care Strategy Written In Federal Prison? [Scroll down slowly] A friend and I took
turns filming protesters on both sides of the issue. We caught an organizer from the group Health Care for America
Now (HCAN) instructing followers to block dissenting views: "So if they stand up and start asking questions, and
you're in that area, simply stand up, and start chanting... 'Health care now! Health care now!'"
How
Much Will You Pay for Health Care? You'll Pay Plenty. President Obama promised that
"you'll save money" as a result of this bill. That's going to be a hard promise to keep. Most
estimates suggest that the proposed legislation is much more likely to push costs up, not down, for most
Americans.
Socialism by any other name...
Time is ticking for Democrats to claim some kind of victory on health care legislation, as polls show a public increasingly
disillusioned with what is being passed off as "reform." So now Democrats are trying to rename the public
option in the hope no one will notice.
Health Care Reform
Vaporizes Obama Presidency. Obama's continued hard sell, including obvious lies regarding
the bill, revealed him to be nothing more than an unethical salesman attempting to foist a defective product
on what he considered to be a stupid group of customers. The selling of VaporCare cost Obama whatever
credibility he had left. His campaign guise of nobility and omnipotence was revealed as fraudulent when
he used the hard-sell approach of a used car salesman. Messiahs don't sell snake oil.
Spending America Into
Oblivion. [Scroll down] He went on to repeat basically what he had said during his State
of the Union Address earlier in the week, "By the time I took office, we had a one year deficit of over
$1 trillion and projected deficits of $8 trillion over the next decade. Most of this was the
result of not paying for two wars, two tax cuts, and an expensive prescription drug program." Heritage's
Riedl corrected President Obama on Monday, saying, "This is simply not true. The policies mentioned by
President Obama were implemented in the early 2000s. Yet even with all those policies in place, the 2007
budget deficit stood at only $162 billion."
The
Democrats' Orwellian Talking Point. Perhaps the most widely repeated Democratic talking
point in advance of tomorrow's health-care summit is that the Republicans have yet to offer an alternative
plan of their own. The point is not that Republican alternatives are misguided or underdeveloped, mind
you, but that they don't exist. By any and every measure, this is false.
White
House Contradicts CBO, Misleads on Insurance Rate Increases. Obviously it would not help the
cause of Democrats trying to pass this bill if the millions of people who buy insurance directly, and the
millions more who are forced to do so by the insurance mandate, end up paying even higher premiums than they
would under current law. But here's the thing — many of them will. At least according to
the CBO. And the White House is deliberately and irresponsibly misleading the public by claiming otherwise.
Obama's
bipartisan flimflammery. Yesterday [2/22/2010], Obama unveiled a "new" health care proposal.
It costs an eye-popping $950 billion (that's the White House's rosy estimate), and represents nothing more
than a warmed-over version of the 2,500-plus-page Obamacare proposals passed last year by the Senate and House.
Prez's
newest idea: Simply outlaw reality. Included in President Obama's latest stab at health-care
reform released yesterday is one of the more astonishing admissions of political deception
in recent memory. After months of swearing that his health legislation would lower the skyrocketing costs
of insurance premiums, Obama finally acknowledged that actually it would not. So, instead, he has
included a new provision that can simply outlaw premium increases his administration deems "unreasonable
and unjustified."
Obama's 'Putting
Perfume on a Pig'. The President has wrestled control of the health care debate away from Nancy Pelosi
and Harry Reid by finally introducing his own plan. Unfortunately, the White House's proposal includes
everything we found untenable about the old Senate bill — only this one is even more expensive!
Myth Diagnosis:
[In 2009,] When progressive politicians or journalists did address the disadvantages of being uninsured, they often
fell back on the same data [Ezra] Klein had used: a 2008 report from the Urban Institute that estimated that
about 20,000 people were dying every year for lack of health insurance. But when you probe that claim, its
accuracy is open to question.
The lie at the heart of
ObamaCare. Megan McArdle argues persuasively in the Atlantic that lacking health insurance does not
increase mortality rate and the numbers thrown about to suggest otherwise are poppycock.
The
President's Imaginary Health Plan: The president launched a last-ditch effort to pass a
government takeover of American health care yesterday [3/3/2010]. To hear him tell it, his plan would let
every American keep the health insurance he has today if he wants to. And it would reduce premiums,
cut taxes for the middle class, slow the pace of rising costs, reduce the federal budget deficit, and
keep bureaucrats out of health-care decisions too. This latest presidential health-care pitch might
have left some Americans scratching their heads. What plan is he talking about, they might ask
themselves. Because the plan he described doesn't remotely resemble anything the Democrats have
assembled over the past year.
WBHO and WBHO FM in the
Nation's Capital. President Obama said [3/6/2010] he had met with some of the insurance
companies two days earlier and said that "they couldn't give me a straight answer as to why they keep
arbitrarily and massively raising premiums — by as much as 60 percent in states like
Illinois." Sixty percent! Could that be true? Actually it's not...
Desperate
Dems Cling to Human Kiddie Shield. On Monday [3/8/2010], Obama surrounded himself with a
ticketed-only crowd of Arcadia University college students in Pennsylvania (sprinkled with purple-shirted
officials from the Service Employees International Union, natch). The Washington-based commander in
chief traveled outside his Beltway bubble to a campus bubble to trash the political climate, which he leads.
"That's just how Washington is. They can't help it," he pontificated as the idealistic young students
nodded like empty bobbleheads. "They"?
Pelosi
on health care: 'We have to pass the bill so you can find out what is in it...'. [Quoting Nancy
Pelosi:] "But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the
controversy." Americans are precisely worried they will find out, the hard way, "what is in it," after
it's been passed. Whence "the controversy."
Washington, Not The Individual,
Gets Control In President's Plan. On Wednesday [3/10/2010] in Missouri, President Obama delivered
his 37th speech promoting his health reform proposal, despite sustained opposition from inside and outside his
own party. Previous arguments didn't sell. In early 2009, he couldn't convince fiscal conservatives
with his pitch that "health reform is deficit reduction." In late 2009, middle America wasn't persuaded
that 2,000 pages of statutes were necessary to cover pre-existing conditions. Early in 2010, the
president tried the "it's time to get it over with" line — and Scott Brown was elected
senator from Massachusetts.
Health-Care Hell:
The president recently said, "Everything there is to say about health care has been said, and just about everybody
has said it." But wait. If everything, pro and con, has been said about a subject by everybody, that
means someone isn't telling the truth, right? I mean, if you've said X and not-X, that means you've probably
said something that isn't true.
The Big Lie of Health
Care Reform: One-Sixth of the US Economy is threatened with a takeover by the Federal Government
on the erroneous rationale that "Tens of millions of people in the US are without health care insurance, and
therefore are being denied access to adequate health care." Unjust! Unfair! This is, of course,
an absolute lie. And nor do some large number of people "die every day from lack of health insurance
coverage." That too is a lie.
Health
Care Deception Gets Uglier & Uglier. The finale of the health-care debate couldn't be more
fitting. House Democrats are considering passing an exotic parliamentary rule relieving them of the
burden of voting for the underlying bill, which will be "deemed" passed. So a bill sold under blatantly
false pretenses and passed in the Senate on the strength of indefensible deals would become law in a final
flourish of deceptive high-handedness.
ObamaCare:
An Ugly Process, and It Will Only Get Uglier. Here's what supporters have done (so far) to
advance their legislation: First, supporters hid more than half of the cost of their
legislation. ... Second, supporters changed the rules to suit their partisan purposes.
Obamacare
Increases Unemployment, Insurance Premiums, Deficit, and Debt. President Barack Obama and
congressional leaders claim that the Senate health bill ... will decrease the deficit and bend the cost
curve related to health care spending. However, recent analysis by The Heritage Foundation's Center
for Data Analysis (CDA) shows that this is far from true. Instead, the bill's mandates and numerous
new taxes will have tumultuous effects. Passing Obamacare will come at the expense of the American
people as it would grow the federal debt, increase premiums, and stifle economic growth.
You Lie! MSNBC Lets Dem's False 45,000 'Uninsurance
Deaths' Go Unchallenged. Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-NY, for one, does not want blood
on his hands from 45,000 Americans who allegedly die every year due to lack of health
insurance. And MSNBC's Alex Witt, for one, doesn't think it worth questioning the
veracity of that number.
The
Deem-o-crats' Towering Deception: If you cannot trust government's numbers, you cannot trust
government's words. This is the lesson of the House Democrats' desperate promotion of a phony-baloney
Congressional Budget Office analysis of their latest health-care-takeover package. Democratic leaders
leaked a solid-seeming price tag — $940 billion over ten years — before the CBO
released any official comment or report.
Obamacare's
Imaginary Savings. Some Blue Dog Democrats may try to use the latest [CBO] projections as an
excuse to switch their votes from opposition to support of Obamacare. But if they do so, the only people
they will be fooling are themselves — the public long ago saw through the gimmicks and sleight-of-hand
behind the Democratic deficit-cutting claims.
Digging
the Hole Deeper: The greatest of all the many painful ironies in the health-care debate of
the past year may be that the Democrats' closing "argument" is to claim the mantle of fiscal responsibility.
Their leaders are doing their best to twist yesterday's [3/18/2010] CBO score of their reconciliation bill to suggest that
their plan will not only solve America's health-care financing problem but reduce the deficit too. It
will do neither, and will make both problems worse.
Truth Is A Casualty Of The Final
Push. Not since the heyday of Bill Clinton have we had a leader play so fast and loose with the facts
as President Obama. And as the health care debate reaches a crescendo, he's been especially reckless.
No,
ObamaCare Is Not Becoming More Popular. Looking at Real Clear Politics' health care
poll average, the spread between opponents and supporters of ObamaCare has shrunk to single
digits — 49.1%-40.4% against. This has led Paul Krugman and pundits at The New Republic
to declare that support for health care reform has been increasing.
CBO Confirms That
Without Accounting Gimmicks, Obamacare Adds to Deficits. Democrats have touted a CBO report
that found that their health care bill would reduce the deficit by $138 billion from 2010 to
2019. But that number assumes that hundreds of billions of dollars in Medicare cuts would be
used to pay for the new health care entitlement.
Obama and the Doctors:
One of Barack Obama's favorite stage props lately is a doctor in a lab coat trying to make us believe that
physicians support Obamacare. In keeping with every other Democrat claim about health care "reform," the
truth is something rather different.
A Tyrannical Act.
The day after the House approved the health care bill, a reporter asked White House spokesman Robert Gibbs about
the lawsuits some states were threatening against the legislation on the grounds that the provision forcing all
Americans to buy health insurance was unconstitutional. "I think there's pretty longstanding precedent
on the constitutionality of this," Gibbs said, without offering any substantive explanation.
Obamacare:
Another Washington scam. In New Hampshire in October of 2007, candidate Barack Obama said, "We're not
going to pass universal health care with a 50-plus-one strategy." On Sunday [3/21/2010], his Democratic Party
did exactly that. Like so much else that the President has said about health care reform, that promise
was just talk.
Obamacare
advanced on a series of lies. From the beginning to right now, the Obama-led march toward
health care restructuring has been a lie, starting with the one about how many people had no access to
insurance and continuing with misleading rants about American longevity and treatment outcomes. The
public heard wrong data on insurance company profits and could easily have gotten the impression no insurance
equaled no care. Supposedly alert journalists left out or minimized the patient horrors of the systems
this program wished to imitate and President Obama pretended no one had ever suggested more effective, less
expensive alternatives. He repeatedly asserted the Democratic plan would bring health care costs down
when the economy-wrecking opposite is the case.
We've Crossed the
Rubicon. The bill was not really about medicine; after all, a moderately priced, relatively
small federal program could offer the poorer not now insured, presently not on Medicare or state programs
like Medicaid or Medical, a basic medical plan. We have no interest in stopping trial lawyers from
milking the system for billions. And we don't want to address in any meaningful way the individual's
responsibility in some cases (drink, drugs, violence, dangerous sex, bad diet, sloth, etc.) for costly and
chronic health procedures. No, instead, the bill was about assuming a massive portion of the private
sector, hiring tens of thousands of loyal, compliant new employees, staffing new departments with new
technocrats, and feeling wonderful that we "are leveling the playing field" and have achieved another
Civil Rights landmark law.
Coercive Charity
Destroys the Human Spirit. After the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Senate's health
care bill (without changes because they could not craft and pass a bill of their own), House Speaker Nancy
Pelosi proclaimed that the effort reflected American's founding declaration of "life, liberty, and the pursuit
of happiness." Nothing could be farther [sic] from the truth.
In
Iowa, Obama fibs about his own health bill. In Iowa, President Obama repeated the myth that his bill
forces insurers to cover children with pre-existing conditions.
The Real ObamaCare Fraud. In
the final days before the climactic ObamaCare vote in Congress, one hotly disputed issue was the reliability of the
Congressional Budget Office's projection that the health plan would cost "only" $940 billion over
10 years. Critics charged that this figure was artificially low because it included a projected
21% cut in Medicare payments to physicians that Congress would later restore as a separate $247 billion
"doc fix." In essence, ObamaCare critics charged that supporters were engaged in fraudulent
accounting. The critics are right.
Obamacare
bait & switch. Candidate Obama repeatedly assured the public that his health care plan
would cost between $500 billion and $650 billion. This modest amount was to be covered
entirety by discontinuing the George W. Bush tax cuts for those earning more than $250,000 a year.
Today, we know that Obamacare will cost at least double that amount. The basic price tag is
$940 billion over 10 years, to which one must add the $208 billion "doc fix." ... Mr. Obama
is still trying to hide the extent of the bait-and-switch.
The GOP in the Wake of
ObamaCare: The president has made, repeatedly and on the record, extravagant claims.
He promised the moon and the stars. When those things not only don't come to pass, but when people see
that their lives are worse off thanks to ObamaCare, there will be a very high political price to pay.
We Are Expected to
Believe. [Scroll down slowly] We are expected to believe that Obama's signing rendered
the bill benign. We are expected to believe three thousand pages of shalls and shants, musts and
mandates, have drifted away on the breeze and can no longer come between our doctors and us. We are
expected to believe that a half-trillion in new taxes and a half-trillion in Medicare cuts will suddenly go
unnoticed. We are expected to believe that Enron-style CBO accounting will be transfigured into wondrous
sums for our grandchildren to behold. We are expected to believe that our newly disciplined government
will never let this entitlement break the bank.
Heritage Foundation Hits Obama Claim.
The Heritage Foundation issued a scathing retort Wednesday [3/31/2010] to President Obama's claim that it originated
one of the ideas in the recently enacted healthcare bill.
The ObamaCare
Writedowns — II. So the wave of corporate writedowns — led by AT&T's
$1 billion — isn't caused by ObamaCare after all. The White House claims CEOs are
reducing the value of their companies and returns for shareholders merely out of political pique.
Obama tries to mop up the mess he has made.
Obama's
No. 1 focus: It is not jobs. As Obama jets around the country trying to convince Americans that his
health care law is not the disaster it so clearly is, the economy continues to struggle.
Support for
Obamacare still tanking. Americans don't like redistributionist schemes because they know
that when politicians talk about "spreading the wealth" while promising they'll only take from the rich,
the Middle Class always ends up being the ones with their wealth redistributed. The rich take care
of themselves as they always do. This is why Democrats soft pedaled the redistributionist aspects
of Obamacare.
Top 10 Reasons Obamacare is a Disaster:
[#1] The Congressional Budget Office sets the projected cost of the healthcare package from 2010 to 2019
at $940 billion, reducing the deficit by $138 billion. The true cost of the new law will be far
greater. The legislation uses budgetary gimmicks to make it appear cheaper, including omitting cuts to
Medicare provider payment rates, double-counting savings from Medicare and the CLASS Act, indexing benefits
to general inflation rather than medical inflation, and delaying expensive provisions of the bill. When
these costs are accounted for, the new law is likely to cost $2.5 trillion.
Distractions used
to hide Obamacare's failures. It should have been predictable that the reaction to the passage
of the health care bill was to focus on the tone rather than the substance. Racial slurs, veiled and
unveiled threats, a litany of name calling, and the level of hysteria have all been useful tools for the
proponents of the bill who would rather discredit the opposition than face the defects of the bill, the
campaign promises that have been become lies, and the general bribery and sleaze that surrounded the
support of the bill.
Obama's deficit
deception: Barack Obama claims Obamacare is necessary to keep the country solvent. This is
a strange assertion coming from the most fiscally irresponsible president in American history.
Five
things we learned about Obamacare after it passed. [#1] Despite all of Obama's promises
and talking points, Obamacare as passed by Congress does not require insurers to cover children with expensive
pre-existing medical conditions. Immediately, the White House got an assurance from the insurers.
After demonizing them for months as callous profiteers on others' misery (in fact, the entire industry is
barely profitable), Obama now tells Americans that they can trust health insurance companies to do the right
thing out of the goodness of their hearts.
An Off-Budget Office? Under the
headline "Costly Bill Seen as Saving Money," the San Francisco Chronicle last week began a front-page story
with these words: "Many people find it hard to understand how the health care legislation heading for a
decisive vote Sunday can cost $940 billion and cut the horrendous federal deficit at the same time."
It's not hard to understand at all. It is a lie.
Sorry: No bump
for Obamacare. Last September, just as public opinion was beginning to turn against Obamacare in a serious
way, Bill Clinton made a bold prediction. "The minute health care reform passed," he said in a policy forum in New
York City, "President Obama's approval ratings would go up 10 points." Clinton's prediction reflected the
wishful assumption of many wishful liberal-leaning pundits and think tank analysts, as well as the strategy of Obama's
political advisers.
Gaming The Health Insurance
Mandate. Democrats claim their newly passed health insurance reform will eventually provide
health coverage for more than 30 million uninsured people. Don't bet on it.
House
Democrats, Out on a Limb for Obamacare, Hear a Snapping Sound. Endangered House Democrat Brad
Ellsworth of Indiana, now running for the Senate in Indiana, justified his vote for the health-care bill by
declaring: ["]In addition to meeting my pro-life principles, the plan reduces costs, improves access to
affordable insurance options, covers pre-existing conditions, and does not add one penny to the deficit.["]
Now that it has passed, we learn that it doesn't do this at all.
When Does "Spin" Descend
Into Abject Lies? Last evening [3/17/2010], in an interview with FOX News Channel's Bret Baier,
President Obama made several statements that veered from simply untrue to outright bizarre. At one point,
he claimed that everyone "knows" what is in the bill. That is patently untrue. A handful of
favored members of Congress have the details of its contents and they are keeping those details very close to
the vest, as they have throughout this extremely secretive process.
What Lies Beneath: The
economic report released last week by Health and Human Services, which indicated that President Barack Obama's
health care "reform" law would actually increase the cost of health care and impose higher costs on consumers,
had been submitted to the office of HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius more than a week before the Congressional
votes on the bill, according to career HHS sources, who added that Sebelius's staff refused to review the
document before the vote was taken.
Decency Gap. A review of the
Democrats' health care bill, showing that the plan would increase costs, was available before Congress voted on the
measure. The health secretary reportedly sat on it. This is transparency?
Obamacare Costs Hidden From Congress.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) had information that Obamacare would raise health expenditures
and drive hospitals into the red prior to the final House healthcare vote, but didn't share it with members of
Congress because the pending report was being internally reviewed.
DeMint: "President Obama Thinks Americans are
Stupid". After Obamacare passed, The President announced that "it will reduce our deficit by over
$100 billion over the next decade and more than $1 trillion the decade after that." However, Rick
Foster, the Actuary for Medicare, predicts the opposite. ... President Obama acts as if the American people are
naïve. Yet Americans know enough about Obamacare and government to understand that a massive expansion of a
new entitlement program won't lower healthcare costs or balance the budget.
CBO Increases
Estimated Cost Of Obamacare by $115 Billion. Hot off the Presses, the Congressional Budget
Office released a revised estimate of Obamacare, adding about $115 billion more in discretionary
spending over ten years than the original cost projections which were already suspect. The additional
spending would bring the total estimated cost of the overhaul to about $1 trillion.
CBO
Hikes ObamaCare Cost Estimate By $115 Billion. The Congressional Budget Office today [5/11/2010]
released an analysis of discretionary spending in the law, and found that those costs will "probably exceed"
$115 billion over 10 years. At a stroke, that erases almost all of ObamaCare's $143 billion
in budget savings based off rushed, incomplete CBO projections given just before the decisive House vote in
March.
The Truth and Barack Obama:
[Scroll down slowly] There's a certain irony in being instructed by Obama about avoiding arguments that
"don't always rank that high on the truth meter." This instruction, after all, comes from a man who,
throughout the health-care debate, repeatedly made false and misleading arguments about the effects of ObamaCare
on bending the cost curve, on the deficit and debt, on whether people will be forced to leave their employer-based
policies, on whether his plan advocated Medicare cuts, on whether it would subsidize abortions, and much else.
Obamacare's
Cooked Books and the 'Doc Fix'. It is undeniably true that CBO says the legislation, as
written, would reduce the federal budget deficit by $124 billion over ten years from the
health-related provisions of the new law. But that's not [the] whole story about Obamacare's
budgetary implications — not by a long shot.
Never
Letting a Serious Crisis Go to Waste. [Scroll down] This doctrine similarly was
implemented after the ObamaCare health measure had been all-but-abandoned when Scott Brown surprisingly
defeated Attorney-General Martha Coakley in the race for United State Senator from Massachusetts.
Soon after, unexpectedly, a national pseudo-crisis emerged when Anthem Blue Cross, a California health
insurer, sought to raise its health premiums by as much as 39 percent. The crisis was not
wasted by Washington. Within days, ObamaCare was rushed back onto the House calendar. Forgotten
amid the federal legislative carnage that followed ... is that Anthem Blue Cross ultimately withdrew their
rate-hike request...
President
Pinocchio sells Obamacare. President Obama's nose grows longer every time he talks about Obamacare,
especially when speaking to seniors. Obama told a group of seniors in suburban Maryland last week that
"what you need to know is that the guaranteed Medicare benefits that you've earned will not change, regardless
of whether you receive them through Medicare or Medicare Advantage." As the Wall Street Journal archly
observed last week, "nothing about that sentence is true."
The Bottleneck is Always at the Top.
The more the President flexes his media-enhanced, teleprompter-controlled, highly-reverberated communication
skills the more people don't want what he's selling. Using procedure and manipulation the same 50+1
strategy candidate Obama said should not be used to pass health care was used to pass health care while the
rest of the agenda stands waiting in the wings.
Obama's
tax-funded propaganda campaign isn't swaying seniors on Obamacare. For the 4th straight week,
Americans favor repealing Obamacare by a margin of more than 20 percentage points, according to Rasmussen's
poll of likely voters. This week, 58 percent of Americans favor repeal, while only 36 percent
oppose it. Among seniors, the direct targets of the disinformation campaign, support for repeal is
actually up from last week.
So
Much For 'Keeping Your Plan'. An early draft of regulations written for the health care
overhaul estimates that more than half of U.S. workers will see their medical insurance change. Funny,
that's not the promise we remember.
The Bad News About
ObamaCare Keeps Piling Up. [Scroll down] Take his oft-expressed statement that if you like
the coverage you have, you can keep it. That sounds good — but perverse incentives in
his new law will cause most Americans to lose their existing insurance. This was brought home to me when
I asked the CEO of a major restaurant chain about health reform's effect on his company, which now spends
$25 million a year on employee health insurance. That will jump to at least $90 million a
year once the new law is phased in.
Obama Admin. Argues in
Court That Individual Mandate Is a Tax. In order to protect the new national health care
law from legal challenges, the Obama administration has been forced to argue that the individual mandate
represents a tax — even though Obama himself argued the exact opposite while campaigning to pass
the legislation.
ObamaCare's Mandate Is Not A Tax, Except When It Is.
The Obama administration has filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit from 20 states opposing ObamaCare's
individual mandate, which requires almost all Americans to purchase health insurance. According to
Obama's Justice Department, the individual mandate is constitutional because "requiring individuals to
buy health insurance is an exercise of Congress' taxing authority."
Obama's
Hard Choices for Other People. Obama could have shelved his expensive healthcare reform in these
tough economic times, focused on real job creation, and tried again in a second term, on the back of a
recovery. Instead, he used a variety of accounting tricks to make his healthcare reform look
affordable and used the brute power of the presidency to push it through. He's currently scolding
private insurance companies for hiking their premiums to account for greater risk — risk caused
by his reforms.
Results not matching Obama
rhetoric. Obama told us his $1 trillion health care overhaul would lower medical costs,
reduce the federal deficit and not threaten Americans happy with their insurance. The Congressional
Budget Office says health care costs will continue to rise and put "tremendous pressure" on the federal
budget. Some companies are calculating that it may be cheaper to pay a fine than to continue
financing employer-provided insurance. And many seniors stand to lose Medicare Advantage coverage.
He's Playing You. The
bamacare socialized medicine takeover legislation doesn't even go into effect until 2014, and he is saying
now in 2010 just 3 or 4 months after its passage, hey, look around, where are all those scary results
they told us about? What I am wondering, actually, is just how stupid does he think we are? He is
thinking that enough of us are too stupid to know that his socialized medicine bill doesn't go into effect until
2014, and that he can play us for fools with this kind of shameful, manipulative, abusive rhetoric.
The
Obamacare Abortion Lie Is Up. [Scroll down] The truth of the matter is that news today
that Maryland was planning on funding abortions in their high-risk pool is but the tip of the iceberg.
Don't be surprised if another story drops. And if it's not a high-risk pool. And the administration
will have to provide a new myth or actually act — as HHS is saying it plans to — to
prohibit that which is not currently prohibited. But don't expect them to admit they've been
lying to us all this time.
Why
the ObamaCare Tax Penalty Is Unconstitutional. The Justice Department announced
last week that it would defend the new federal health-insurance mandate as an exercise of Congress's
"power to lay and collect taxes," even though Barack Obama had insisted before the bill's passage
that it was "absolutely not a tax increase."
Obamacare
and 'Reeducation'. The White House and its allies continue their reeducation campaign about Obamacare,
trying to convince people they should like this massive health-care overhaul after all, and it appears that
their latest tool is deceptively worded opinion polls.
Issa
hits Obama admin for extensive use of 'propaganda' to boost health care. Rep. Darrell Issa,
California Republican, is blasting the Obama administration in a new report, charging the administration has
engaged in an "unprecedented" propaganda effort to sell the president's health care and other policies.
"Under one-party rule in 2009, the White House used the machinery of the Obama campaign to tout the President's
agenda through inappropriate and sometimes unlawful public relations and propaganda initiatives," the report
says.
Media
Nearly Silent as ObamaCare Proponents Drop Deficit, Cost Savings Claims. It has now been five
days since Politico's Ben Smith published a powerpoint presentation created by an amalgamation of powerful
left wing interest groups, conceding that two of the central arguments for passing ObamaCare — that
it will lower the deficit and will reduce health care costs — have failed.
ObamaCare 'Amnesia'.
'They're betting that between now and November, you're going to come down with amnesia," President Obama told a
Milwaukee crowd on Monday [9/6/2010], vilifying the Republicans who "helped devastate our middle class." But it
seems as if the real case of amnesia — or maybe post-traumatic stress disorder — has
struck the Democrats, who are now doing everything they can to help voters forget ObamaCare.
Obamacare
6 Months Later. Remember when the president said, "If you like your doctor, you can keep your
doctor"? Not true. In Texas alone a record number of doctors are leaving the Medicare system
because of the cuts in reimbursements forced on them by Obamacare! The president of the Texas Medical
Association, Dr. Susan Bailey, warns that "the Medicare system is beginning to implode." Remember the
Obama administration's promise that Obamacare would cut a typical family's premium "by up to $2,500 a year"?
Not true.
ObamaCare: Will
Someone Please Kill It Before It Kills Us? A boondoggle is a "work or activity that is
wasteful or pointless but gives the appearance of having or adding value." That is a perfect description
of HR 3590, disingenuously titled the Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act and colloquially
known as ObamaCare. The Act cannot do what its title promises. In fact, it achieves exactly the opposite
what the president said it would do.
The
Anatomy of a Hostile Government Takeover. During the long national debate over the future of
American health care, President Obama frequently chastised his opponents for launching exaggerated attacks on
his plan for "reform." He took particular exception to the criticism that the changes he was pushing
amounted to a government takeover of the whole health sector. He knew full well that this kind of
criticism might derail the entire effort in Congress, because most Americans recoil at the thought of a
distant and bureaucratic federal government running the health-care system for everyone. So Obama
vigorously denied that his program would lead to any such thing.
If
you like your health insurance, too bad. President Obama's most frequently repeated health care
reform claim — "If you like your present health insurance, you can keep it" — sounds
about as credible these days as the finger-wagging Bill Clinton did when he said, "I did not have sexual
relations with that woman."
McDonald's:
Obamacare regulations will cause 30,000 employees to lose insurance. Back during the debate over
the recently passed health care bill, President Obama repeatedly stated that "if you like your health care
plan, you can keep your health care plan." This is proving to be increasingly as untrue as skeptics
said it was.
The Big Mac Attack On ObamaCare.
A big employer mulls dropping health insurance coverage due to ObamaCare's mandates. The claim that if you
like your plan you can keep it was a lie, and the effort to destroy private insurance is working.
Healthamburglar.
Among President Obama's core health-care promises was that Americans can keep their current coverage if they
like it. Among the reasons that a new ObamaCare squall blows in every other day is that this claim
simply is not true, as people are discovering.
You Can't
Keep the Plan You Have. President Obama clearly hasn't visited a real doctor's office recently.
If he sat on my office couch, he would immediately discover that real patients are terribly worried about how
dysfunctional and expensive all health insurance, public and private, is becoming under the new law of the
land. Of course, the problem of spiraling health-care costs and inadequate access to essential services
was already happening before, but Obamacare is making it far worse.
The Unraveling Of ObamaCare.
We were told everybody had to be unconstitutionally forced to buy health insurance or the plan wouldn't work.
We were told health care costs would be lower, rates wouldn't rise and that if we liked our coverage we could
keep it. We were lied to. The plan still doesn't work. What we're seeing is ObamaCare revealed
as the fraud that it is. The waivers granted leave us with an "Animal Farm" version of health care in
which everyone is equal, but the politically favored in an election year are more equal than others.
Barack Obama: Liar and
Demagogue. [Scroll down] In furtherance of these aims, the lies and misrepresentations by
Barack Obama and his administration are legion. But none are as egregious as those made in order to pass
the Health Care Reform Act. Among the lies were assurances that premiums would not rise, Medicare would
not be cut, everyone would be able to keep his or her current doctor and insurance, abortion would not be funded,
and national medical costs would be reduced. All were total fabrications used to pass the most
insidious attack on personal freedom in the history of the country.
Aren't
Unions the REAL Special Interests, Mr. Obama? Why are Americans tuning out their president?
It starts with credibility. Beginning with the health care debate, the president has squandered an extraordinary
stockpile of the public's trust. A fourth-grader would have deemed absurd his core promise —
that we could provide free health care for an additional 31 million Americans and not add to our deficit.
Obama's
'Big Lies' Get Bigger. How many "Big Lies" has Obama told? Frankly, it's becoming
difficult to keep track of them. Most recently, the top actuary at the Centers for Medicare and
Medicaid — a pair of programs that shouldn't even exist in the first place — revealed
that millions of American seniors will have to pay increased out-of-pocket health care costs next year for
"less generous benefit packages" as a direct result of Obamacare.
Another
Unaffordable Entitlement. [Economist Morgen] Richmond says Families USA, an advocate of Obama-Care,
appears to be using the Lewin study as "the centerpiece of a major media campaign ... to promote the benefits
of the health reform legislation" and is calling the credit "one of the largest middle-income tax cuts in
history." That strikes us as being more than a little dishonest. The subsidy is not a tax cut.
In many cases, the "credits" will simply be another handout in a sea of entitlements in which we're already
drowning.
How
ObamaCare and an Old Red Union Betrayed Its Poorest Workers. ObamaCare's unintended consequences
continue to grow. A little over a week ago, in a Wall Street Journal article written by reporter Yuliya
Chernova, readers learned that "one of the largest union-administered health-insurance funds in New York is
dropping coverage for the children of more than 30,000 low-wage home attendants." Why did this happen?
ObamaCare:
Flight of the MDs. For all the times that President Obama promised "you'll get to keep your doctor"
under his health-care reforms, he apparently failed to ask any practicing doctors. A recent survey finds
that countless MDs will respond to ObamaCare by limiting which patients they'll see. The Physicians
Foundation asked 2,400 doctors and American Medical Association members what they thought of the new law; a
full 67 percent were against it.
Naked
cynicism: Twisted defense of ObamaCare. In an ABC News interview in September 2009, Obama
scoffed when George Stephanopoulos resorted to the dictionary to argue that the penalty must be a tax.
An irritated Obama waved it all off as another unfair charge by his unhinged opponents. So you reject
the notion that it's a tax increase? Stephanopoulos persisted. "I absolutely reject that notion,"
Obama declared. In retrospect, the former law-school lecturer should have consulted his lawyers.
No sooner had the law passed than Obama's Justice Department began insisting in court that the penalty
is a tax.
Stealth Socialism.
The constitutional ground on which ObamaCare purportedly stands keeps shifting, raising new questions about
whether the law can stand — and also, as we shall see, raising potential pitfalls for free-market
reforms of New Deal social programs.
This
Is No Reason For Reform. Over and over we were told Washington had to take over health care because so
many Americans lack insurance due to pre-existing medical conditions. So how many fall into this category?
Try 8,000. You read that right: In this nation of nearly 311 million, the Democrats overhauled the
world's best health care system to benefit 8,000 people.
Give Me Liberty or Give
Me Health. In the December 15 issue of America's most prestigious medical pubication, The Journal
of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Eric Friedman and Eli Adashi write, "In passing The Affordable Care Act,
the United States took a giant, if partial, step toward joining nations wherein the right to health constitutes
an inalienable moral and legal right." Notice how the authors replace the term health care with just the
term health. As a medical doctor, I strongly disagree that health is or should be a human right.
Liberals' Civility Test.
A week after President Obama's stirring remarks at the Tucson memorial service comes an important Civility Test for
liberals. ABC's Jonathan Karl reports that Democratic Representative Steve Cohen went to the well of the House
and compared what Republicans are saying on health care to the work of the infamous Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.
129
Million Lies About ObamaCare. "129 Million People Could Be Denied Affordable Coverage Without
Health Reform" blares the title of the piece of propaganda thinly disguised as a "study" released this morning
by the Department of Health and Human Services. The purpose of the propaganda was, of course, to generate
scary headlines on the eve of the House GOP's vote to repeal ObamaCare, likely scheduled for tomorrow. The
Washington Post and other media promptly granted HHS its wish.
When Incivility Is OK:
Does the civil political discourse that the left is demanding include Democrats likening Republicans to Nazis?
There's a good chance the country will get a close look this week at hypocrisy in action.
Barack's Five Lies About ObamaCare.
White House officials brag that the multi-trillion-dollar health-care bill reduces deficit and, as a result,
they argue that any repeal that goes into effect will increase deficit spending. But once fully
implemented, ObamaCare will have the nation swimming in even more debt than we already are. When
taxes and spending meet on the actual first 10 years of ObamaCare (2014-2023), the projected cost is
$2.6 trillion, far above what the Democratic Congress promised.
Medicare
Chief Actuary confirms Obamacare a tissue of lies. Absolutely devastating testimony yesterday
[1/26/2011] from Medicare's independent economic expert Richard Foster before the House Budget Committee.
In essence, in response to direct questions, Foster blew up the rationale for Obamacare and placed the
president and his party in the uncomfortable position of having to explain why they lied to the American
people about the two main selling points for the program.
The
False Advertising Of ObamaCare. The Democrats said that under their plan, health care costs
would go down and those who wanted to keep their insurance would be able to. A government official,
though, says neither is true.
Obama's Ongoing War on
Inspectors General. A cloud of suspicion hangs over the data Barack Obama and his team have been
presenting us regarding the purported success of their own programs. ... The figures regarding ObamaCare —
be they the costliness of the program, its effect on the deficit, or the number of uninsured — are
roundly considered suspect, if not an outright numerical analogy to snake-oil claims.
The Nuts and Bolts of the ObamaCare Ruling.
The Obama administration attempted to cloak an unprecedented and unsupportable exercise of federal power in
the guise of a run-of-the-mill Commerce Clause regulation. When the weakness of that theory was exposed,
it retreated to the Necessary and Proper Clause and the taxing power.
We
hold these lies to be self-evident... This won't surprise you, but Sen. Harry Reid told a big
whopper the other night right before the vote on Obamacare. Repealing the unconstitutional law, the
Nevada hack harrumphed, "would kick kids off their parents' health insurance." Kids? At exactly
what age do you stop being a "kid"? Obamacare says you're a "kid" at age 26.
Death
Panels And Job Losses. As the head of Medicaid and Medicare services testifies in favor of
ObamaCare, the CBO director says it will destroy 800,000 jobs. ... Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi once
famously said that we'd have to pass ObamaCare to see what was in it. She also boasted that the
health care bill would create 4 million jobs — "400,000 of them almost immediately."
Did
someone mention Nancy Pelosi?
Dr. Berwick and Mr. Hide.
The Dr. Berwick with whom we have become all too familiar was a vocal advocate of health care rationing.
In a 2009 interview for Biotechnology Healthcare, he gushed with enthusiasm for the heavy-handed rationing
regime of Great Britain's National Institute for Health & Clinical Excellence (NICE) and advised his
interlocutor that "The decision is not whether or not we will ration care; the decision is whether we will
ration with our eyes open." When the good doctor's alter ego appeared before the Ways and Means
Committee, however, he told a different story.
Obama's Magic Trick.
In a layman's estimation, there are three basic components involved in any magic trick: an assurance of
truth, misdirection, and deception. ... The same components exist in Obama's political magic show. I'm
sure you remember his most famous trick. He presented America with a very real threat by declaring that
healthcare costs are rapidly increasing and that millions of Americans are uninsured. He then diverted the
audience's attention, shifting their focus to blame rich doctors, insurance companies, and Republicans for
all of these problems.
Kathleen
Sebelius Admits The Obamacare Books Were COOKED. They screamed, they begged, cajoled but
everyone called them liars. Ever since the outline of the Obamacare began to be circulated people pointed out
that the $500 billion dollars of Medicare savings were being double counted in the cost estimates.
Sebelius
Cracks! Admits the Obamacare Books Were Cooked. The House Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee
invited Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to swing by and have a little chin wag about the
budgetary implications of ObamaCare. Representative John Shimkus (R-IL) noticed that the rather large sum
of $500 billion was dedicated to both sustaining Medicare and funding ObamaCare. When he asked
Sebelius which destiny awaited those five hundred billion clams, she replied, "Both."
ObamaCare's
Numbers Game. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius admitted last Thursday [3/3/2011]
that in taking $500 billion from Medicare and moving it to ObamaCare, the White House counted twice
the same pile of money and claimed that it would reduce the deficit and sustain Medicare. "Both," replied
Sebelius when Rep. John Shimkus asked her during a House Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee hearing if
the $500 billion was for "preserving Medicare or funding the health care law?" If this were merely
an isolated event, it would go down a bit easier. But fraudulent accounting is an old habit next to the
Potomac.
Obama
compares Obamacare to Social Security, Medicare. Obamacare does have something in common with
these two entitlements: Both of them could have worked if they had been less ambitious. If Social
Security and Medicare had been means-tested programs — that is, if not for the liberal
ideological imperative that they pay out to everyone — we wouldn't be forced to scale either one
back now. If Obamacare had simply focused on helping insure more poor people, rather than trebling state
control over every American's health insurance plan, it might be a popular program.
Obama on Drugs: [Scroll
down] Another of its ugly heads recently popped up in President Obama's Orwellian "Framework for Shared
Prosperity and Shared Fiscal Responsibility." This budget proposal, announced on April 13, includes
the following verbiage: "The framework would limit excessive payments for prescription drugs by leveraging
Medicare's purchasing power — similar to what was called for by the bipartisan Fiscal Commission."
The commission called for nothing of the kind, of course. More importantly, however, is that this is yet
another Obama proposal to impose Soviet-style price controls on a private industry.
Obamacare
Based on Fraudulent Premise. [Scroll down] We've been through the phony numbers
before. Of that 40-plus million without health insurance, millions can afford it but choose not to buy
it, mostly young people gambling on their good health. Millions have access under existing government
programs but decline to avail themselves of it. Millions are not U.S. citizens. Many others are
misleadingly included in the uninsured category, though they are only without coverage for a part of the
year. Some experts have estimated that between eight million and 12 million Americans
actually fall through the cracks, making just enough not to qualify for government programs but not enough
to afford insurance. But even they can receive emergency room care.
Obama's assault
on the rule of law. The most famous requirement in the 2,700-page Obamacare law goes beyond any
previous federal claim to regulate commercial activity and extends it to merely being a living, breathing
human being. Mr. Obama sold the law by saying it does not constitute a tax, and then his attorneys
claimed in court that it is constitutional precisely because it is a new tax.
Fresh
doubt cast on Obama's health care story. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama
often discussed his mother's struggle with cancer. Ann Dunham spent the months before her death in
1995, Obama said, fighting with insurance companies that sought to deny her the coverage she needed to pay
for treatment. ... It was a simple and powerful story, one Obama would tell many more times as president
during the national health care debate. But now we're learning the real story of Ann Dunham's health
coverage is not quite what her son made it out to be.
Obama's
Fables Sell Health Care To The Gullible. Is there a health insurance horror story put out by the
White House and its allies that ever turned out to be true? ObamaCare advocates have exercised more
artistic license than a convention of Photoshoppers. Now, a prominent sob story shilled by President
Obama himself about his own mother is in doubt. It's high past time to call their bluffs.
Book Challenges Obama on Mother's
Deathbed Fight. The White House on Wednesday declined to challenge an account in a new book
that suggests that President Obama, in his campaign to overhaul American health care, mischaracterized a
central anecdote about his mother's deathbed dispute with her insurance company.
"Misstated" is a safe way to say fabricated.
Obama
Misstated Story About Mother's Health Care, New Book Says. During his 2008 presidential campaign
and the fight for health care reform, President Obama often told the story of his mother Stanley Ann Dunham and
how she spent the months before her death fighting with insurance companies who tried to deny her coverage based
on a pre-existing condition. That story is now being called into question by a new book which says Dunham
in fact had health insurance when she died from ovarian cancer in 1995.
The
Expanding Catalogue of Obamacare Fables. The tall-tale-teller-in-chief cited mom Stanley Ann Dunham's
deathbed fight with her insurer several times over the years to support his successful push to ban pre-existing condition
exclusions by insurers. ... But there was something fundamentally wrong with Obama's story. In a recently published
biography of Obama's mother, author and New York Times reporter Janny Scott discovered that Dunham's health insurer had
in fact reimbursed her medical expenses with nary an objection.
Pre-Existing Prevarication.
Throughout his 2008 presidential bid, Obama attributed his passion for health care reform to painful memories
of his mother's battle with a health insurance company that allegedly tried to avoid paying her medical bills
on the pretext that her disease predated her coverage. He used her image in a campaign ad as far back as
September of 2007, and he often told the tale during his primary battle with Hillary Clinton. ... Like Bill
Clinton's anecdote about charred black churches, the story of Obama's mother was moving. And, like
Clinton's tale, it was a work of fiction.
Barack
Obama & The Case of the Insurance Claim. Throughout the 2008 presidential campaign and again during
the bruising battle for health insurance reform, one of Barack Obama's oft-told anecdotes was of his dying mother's
struggle with insurance in the final months of her life. ... It was just one of those stories that was "as
journalists like to say, 'too good to check,'" says The Atlantic's Megan McArdle. But, recently,
someone checked.
Barack Obama's pants
on fire. Are we to believe that Stanley Ann's medical co-payments were beyond the means of her
loving son, who by this time was a Harvard Law School graduate flush with a six-digit signing bonus for his
first book? Moreover, are we as Americans to tear down the finest health care system in the world based
on — let's be honest enough to call them what they are — lies?
Researchers:
Obamacare cost estimates hide up to $50 billion per year. Federal payments required by
President Barack Obama's health care law are being understated by as much as $50 billion per year
because official budget forecasts ignore the cost of insuring many employees' spouses and children,
according to a new analysis. The result could cost the U.S. Treasury hundreds of billions of
dollars during the first ten years of the new health care law's implementation.
More
Lies: WH Emails Reveal Major Obamacare Accounting Fraud. When Democrats entered their full-court
press for Obamacare last winter, they made it clear that nothing would stand in their way. Not hostile
public opinion, not sound policy interests, not even a desire to know what was in their own bill.
Nothing. One of their boldest plays was to manufacture a CBO score explictly designed to reach the
ludicrous conclusion that theor new multi-trillion-dollar entitlement program would actually reduce the
deficit. In order to accomplish this feat, they used smoke and mirrors accounting gimmicks that
went far beyond even many Beltway cynics' wildest imaginations.
Obamacare:
Even If You Like Your Plan, You Can't Keep It. One of the most fervent promises President Obama
made to the American people before passage of the health overhaul law was, "If you like your health care plan,
you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period. No one will take it away. No matter
what." But, even before the law fully takes effect, millions of people are losing "the coverage they
have now," and tens of millions more surely will follow.
More of President Obama's Lies
More about President Obama's Culture of Corruption
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