Covid is Fading, but Stern Justice Awaits

The Covid pandemic is fading, and hopefully it will stay faded, but the pernicious and baleful medical, scientific, political, and social effects will last for decades.

We can only hope that those who lab-created the Covid virus, that those who suppressed truths, that those who repressed the truthful, that those who suppressed effective, cheap, and available treatments thus allowing so many to die unnecessarily, and that those who profited off the suffering of others – that all these people will face stern justice.

 R Balsamo, MD

Is Obamacare a Failure or a Success?

The actual Obamacare statute, as the Affordable Care Act is commonly called, was a disaster from the start – a hodgepodge of tons of stuff, much nonsensible, pasted in by various Democrat congressional staffers and Democrat lobbyists.  No one actually read it all, and probably no one, no one, read even most of it.  Nancy Pelosi, the Democrat Speaker of the House at the time, infamously said then that the law must be passed so we can find out what’s in it.  Rational critics knew it would be a disaster, and, in reality, so did the Democrat puppet masters who pushed for it and forced its passage.  For those Democrats, the expectation was that the whole thing would fall apart and pave the way for a completely government-run system.    

Aetna, a large national health insurer (if what is in reality a medical care benefit plan without risk-based pricing can be called in any way “insurance”) just announced it is withdrawing from most Obamacare exchanges because of significant financial losses.  Some say now that this is evidence that Obamacare is a failure.

But to say that Obamacare is a failure is to not understand its actual purpose.  If the purpose of Obamacare is correctly seen as an intentional, unstable transitional state primarily designed to hook people on subsidies and the illusion of cheap, comprehensive medical care, such that upon collapse the masses will clamor for a complete government take-over to save their “health care,” then Obamacare so far has been a success. 

R Balsamo  

Roberts Rule of Disorder: The Supreme Court Decides the Obamacare Subsidies Case

In King v Burwell, the Obamacare subsidies case whose decision was released today, John Roberts and five other Supreme Court justices now say that the law is not the clear and plain meaning of its text but rather is whatever the Supreme Court says it is in order to accomplish its political goal at the moment.  Everyone now truly knows that the law was written precisely as intended, to induce states to set up their own Obamacare exchanges via a big financial carrot – federal subsidies for its poorer citizens available only through a state-established exchange, not one run by the federal government.  The Obamacare law’s drafters and the Democrats who voted for it did not foresee that some states would refuse to establish exchanges.  Thus to now uphold the law as clearly written and intended would cripple the law, and so Roberts and five other justices introduce a new concept – the Roberts Rule of Disorder:  if parts of a law will cripple that law if interpreted as clearly and purposefully written, then we as Supreme Court justices can simply rewrite the law to strike out those clearly-written and clearly-intended troublesome words if that allows us to accomplish a political goal we support.

Quin Hillyer writes (link):  "With today’s Obamacare decision, John Roberts confirms that he has completely jettisoned all pretense of textualism.  He is a results-oriented judge, period, ruling on big cases based on what he thinks the policy result should be or what the political stakes are for the court itself.  He is a disgrace. That is all."

R. Balsamo

Obama’s Obamacare "Fix" – He Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Legal Basis

Once again, as he did with the Obamacare employer mandate, Obama has personally decreed that he will not enforce, for as long as it suits him to do so, certain requirements that are the law of the land under Obamacare.  There is some uncertainty whether all such requirements stem entirely from the Obamacare law itself, which cannot be changed without new legislation, or whether some stem from his regulations, which are legally changeable only once a certain lengthy administrative process has been followed (for example, a public notice and comment period).  Either way, neither the law itself nor the regulations pursuant to it have been legally changed and so remain in full effect.  Obama cannot change either with a speech.

Regardless, despite being Constitutionally required to enforce the laws of the land and having taken an oath to do so (on Lincoln’s Bible no less), Obama now asserts that he will not enforce certain parts of the law and legally-established regulations, without bothering to go through the long and arduous process of legally changing either, and will look the other way if insurance companies follow his suggestion to willfully break the law in renewing policies that violate the new law.  If the companies break the law and later get sued over a dispute under an illegal policy, well that’s the insurance companies’ problem since they’re bad guys anyways.  If such insurance companies decide not to break federal law and decline to re-establish  illegal policies, Obama says only they, the insurance companies, will be to blame for this mess. 

When asked about the legal basis for his highly selective non-enforcement of laws he is sworn to uphold and for his public encouragement to insurance companies to willfully break federal law, Obama, parroting the bandit leader’s crafty legal opinion voiced to the skeptical Humphrey Bogart in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, said “Legal basis?! You want to see the legal basis?!  I don’t have no legal basis, I don’t need no stinkin’ legal basis!”

Lying about Who’s Lying at the NY Times -- Obama "Misspoke"

The New York Times recently published an editorial about all the now-obvious lying Obama engaged in to secure passage of the health law enacted solely by Democrats.  The NY Times says Obama “misspoke”.  The word “misspoke” means, at least to those not engaged in writing and publishing for a living, a mistake, a mistaken notion of what should have been said.  Obama, however, “misspoke” often, as often as he could to anyone who would listen, with the exact same unequivocal statements about Obamacare such as “If you like your existing health care plan, you can keep it.  Period.” – words we now know the Democrats knew were lies all along.   

Responding to criticism of the editorial’s using the term “misspoke”, the NY Times’ editorial page editor, one Andrew Rosenthal, defended the word by asserting “We have a high threshold for [saying] whether someone lied.”

This statement turns out to be a big, bald-faced lie, as Seth Mandel documents (link) in a post at Commentary online.  Not many years ago the NY Times repeatedly and explicitly called President George Bush a liar when disagreeing with him over policy.  Thus, when a Republican was president the NY Times was free and loose with the “liar” accusation, but now with a Democrat in office the NY Times can’t even use the word when evidence clearly shows that Obama and his aides discussed the ongoing need to lie as Obama was lying.  Ironic it is, the NY Times lying about its standard for calling someone a liar.   

I bother now to write this post not to document evidence of the extreme liberal bias at the NY Times, an unnecessary effort since examples are legion.  Rather, I write to express a certain sadness from the reminder that once-great institutions often corrode from the inside when no adults are left who know right from wrong, or good from bad.  We know now that the New York Times was long this way (its cover up of Stalin’s massacres by its reporter Walter Duranty [link] quickly comes to mind), and before the explosion of alternative sources to more readily grasp what is true and what is not, we just didn’t know different, or better.

Update 11/15/2013:  The NY Times by many accounts has abandoned the ridiculous "misspoke" terminology, and has adopted now the term "incorrect promise".  I am not making this up.  Honestly.

Obama Pulls Out the Big Lie Tactic on Obamacare

Just when it seemed Obama and his lying couldn’t get any worse, Obama has just blamed the health insurance companies for complying with Obamacare.  Really.  Really.  His lying has come to this.

Using the “Big Lie” (link) tactic made famous by such authoritarian luminaries as National Socialist mass murder Goebbels and Soviet Communist mass murder Stalin, Obama today in a speech blamed “bad apple” health insurance companies for all the policy cancellations flooding the news reports.  Everyone knows that insurance companies are cancelling policies because they are required to under the Obamacare law.  It would be illegal for them to continue to offer those policies. 

Not only is the lying by Obama and his minions continuing, but this one today from Obama is a whopper.  Obama clearly believes in the Big Lie principle – that the bigger the lie the more people will believe it.  

As I recently wrote (link), “All the promises about Obamacare have vaporized, promises like ‘if you like your health benefit plan and your doctor you will be able to keep them’ ....  All lies known to be lies by those who uttered them.” 

Want Medical Privacy with Obamacare? Fuggedaboutit

Compared to the Obama worshipers' image of Himself as the hippest thing in the universe, Mark Steyn writes (link) that “Obamacare wound up somewhat less hipper and, in fact, not even HIPAA [pronounced "hip'-uh"] — the unpersuasively groovy acronym for federally mandated medical privacy in America. Appearing before Congress ... the magicians of Obamacare eventually conceded that ... “You have no reasonable expectation of privacy regarding any communication of any data transmitted or stored on this [Obamacare] information system.”

Really, why would Obama and his followers, who have turned the IRS and the Justice Department into personal, partisan tools for use against their political adversaries, and who, since the day they took over the federal government have been illegally and immorally spying not only on Americans but even on foreign leaders – why would they care about the privacy of us plebs or have the slightest hesitation in using whatever information they can to control us while helping their friends and hurting their opponents? 

But that’s really nothing to worry about.  Once Obamacare is fully up and running and the medical care Rationing Board gets to rationing, in your suffering and anxiety while you’re waiting years for your knee arthroscopy or your heart valve repair privacy of your medical and financial records will be the last thing on your mind. 

Obamacare – A Blank Check For the Democrat Bosses

I see that the subtitle to Peggy Noonan’s latest essay (link) about Obamacare is “It's not what Americans were promised—or even what Congress enacted.”  True, true, but that was the plan all along.  Democrats always hoped and planned that this so-called “Affordable Care Act” would be just a stepping stone towards a full government-run health care system.  They achieved their goal of passing into law a plan so large, so detailed, so complex, so full of contradictions and conflicts, that no one knew what was really in it (as then-Speaker Pelosi infamously remarked at the time), requiring lots of interpretation and reconciliation of conflicting requirements that basically would allow those in charge to do whatever they wanted. 

Yes, that was the plan that has all come to pass.  One case in point – Obama abruptly, and without any legal authority, decreed a one-year delay to the employer mandate clearly etched in black and white in the law; since when can the president abrogate laws by decree?  Since now.

I know the thinking of the elites, who want people just like themselves to be bosses over all the rest of us misguided rubes and dictate their wise decisions across the land:  the end justifies the means.

 

All the promises about Obamacare have vaporized, promises like “if you like your health benefit plan and your doctor you will be able to keep them” and “health care coverage will be cheaper for everyone” (remember all the hype about "bending the cost curve"?) and "it won't add to the deficit".  All lies known to be lies by those who uttered them.  The subterfuge, the debasement of our polity -- it doesn’t matter to them, the Democrat bosses – the goal was a law so complex that they could do anything to us while hiding behind it, and that they have accomplished.      

Government Run Medical Care -- Dispatches from the UK

From the UK (link), the home to a government-run medical care system gushed over by Obama acolytes such as one of his big-name heath care experts, the controversial Dr Donald Berwick:

This morning, the British government released a major report outlining 290 recommendations for the country’s health-care system, the National Health Service. The move came in response to widespread disgust over the failures of Britain’s nationalized system, epitomized by the Stafford Hospital scandal, in which between 400 and 1,200 preventable deaths occurred from 2005 to 2008 at one hospital.

Hmm.  290 recommendations?  That's quite a big number.  As long as they got into that neighborhood, why not a nice round number, like 300, or something catchy, like 299?  They got to 290, and with all their problems couldn't come up with 10 more?  Then again, why not 289?  Did they stretch the count to have a number rounded to the nearest 10?

I doubt very much that Berwick and the left like the UK system because it results in better outcomes, because I very much doubt it does, accurately and honestly measured and reported.  The intellectual vanguard of the left likes it because it is a system controlled by self-appointed experts like themselves.  It's  all about undemocratic control by experts (see Liberalism as Bossism, & the Obamacare Medical Care Rationing Board).

Government-run medical care -- what could possibly go wrong, and how could it not be better than what we have now?

John M Greco

Also see:
More Liberal Love & Lies From MSNBC About Healthcare in Repressive, Socialist Countries

Obama's Latest Nominee a Big Obamacare Supporter -- For Her Competitors But Not For Herself

Well, she was for it before she was against it.  She still thinks Obamacare is right for you and me, just not for her.

From the Daily Caller (link):

President Barack Obama’s newly-named nominee to run the Department of the Interior, REI CEO Sally Jewell, sought and received a waiver from Obamacare requirements for her outdoor clothing and equipment company [REI] in 2011....  Obama welcomed Jewell to the White House in 2009 to jointly argue for the passage of Obamacare.  Obama held REI up as a model company.

But after passage, Obamaphile Jewell's not so hot on Obamacare for her own company.  Better that her competitors spend the money to comply.

Two years later, Jewell secured an exemption from the law for REI.  REI received an Obamacare waiver around the same time that nearly 20 percent of the businesses in House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s Northern California district received waivers.

So that's the scam.  Pass an onerous law expensive to comply with, then give your friends, but to be sure not their competitors, a pass.  Reminds me of how the Democrats in Illinois play this same game.  They recently passed an almost 50% hike in the state corporate income tax, then welcomed the stream of supplicants from big companies and selectively passed out various exemptions, all of course behind closed doors.  If you're a midsized Illinois company not making contributions to Democrats, either because of cost or ethics, you're screwed.

John M Greco

Liberalism as Bossism, & the Obamacare Medical Care Rationing Board

I have long believed that the liberal/left/socialist assertion that equality -- numeric equality in economic, racial, gender, and sexual orientation outcomes -- is just a ruse to hide from the rubes the real driving force of the left's intellectual vanguard -- the insatiable desire for control.  Control over everything about you and me, control over us because the controllers believe that the rest of us are too stupid to make our own decisions properly, and they're smart enough to do it for us.  In fact, they convince themselves that it's a moral imperative that they make the "correct" decisions for us.  Their proof -- some people don't vote for them and so prove that these people don't know what's good for them.  All these elites want control, and they're content sometimes to publicly live modestly while expecting to have their private luxurious villas out of sight in the countryside.  Their bargain:  give us control over your life and we'll ensure radical equality for everyone like you, while taking our well-deserved cut to live extra specially.

A great example of this liberal/left belief in control by elites is the provision in Obamacare that creates an unelected "board" of bosses to ration medical care.  It's pitched under the ruse that it's there to identify and promote only that medical care that is really effective.  It's a lie.  The board is there to ration care so to limit spending on medical care and to ensure that money isn't spent on care for people who have outlived their usefulness, in the eyes of the liberal elite.  Turn 65 and need a hip replacement -- fuhgettaboutit.  Hit 70 and need cataract surgery to see -- tough luck.  Need life-saving heart surgery as a health 90 year old -- sorry, too expensive for someone your age.  Want to spend your own money to get that care even if Medicare won't pay for it -- Hahahaha -- think the controllers, the bosses, will let people with money escape their grip and let you get medical care they're denying for a person without money?  Not a chance.  Death Panel indeed.

From Elizabeth Price Foley posting today at Instupundit (link) about that Obamacare rationing board, which goes by the wonky and innocuous-sounding "Independent Payment Advisory Commission (IPAB)" and will probably have an office right next door to the "Ministry of Truth":

....[T]wo extremely bizarre aspects of IPAB that get far too little attention:
(1) The IPAB itself can be disbanded only by a 3/5 supermajority of both houses of Congress, AND
(2) only if the resolution to disband is introduced between Jan. 1- Feb. 1, 2017, and approved (by 3/5) before Aug. 15, 2017. That is a maximum 8.5 month window. After this time period, any attempt at disbandment is not allowed under the statute.

....[A]side from [the constitutionality of these provisions in Obamacare], the salient point is this: Progressives adore “expert” panels like the IPAB because they believe they are better able to make tough decisions about how to cut Medicare spending than our elected representatives. And they love these unaccountable expert panels so much that they attempt desperate measures like “entrenching” them statutorily, writing language that purports to make these boards hard to repeal–and impossible after a very narrow window. This isn’t very “progressive” at all, because such entrenchment presumes that future generations can’t govern/decide for themselves, and nothing can ever be altered or improved. Typical hypocritical, control-freak progressivism.

John M Greco

More on Ryan versus Obama on Plans for Medicare

A response to John M Greco’s recent post:  Romney-Ryan versus Obama on Saving Medicare (link):

The economic solutions to Medicare are complicated.  Neither side has something easy to understand for the average person without serious study and probably education in economics and public policy.  I doubt that the question of whether Obama’s plan or Ryan’s plan would take more from the system is very relevant to them.  What is maybe relevant is that Obama's reductions would not be very directly visible to the end user.

People recall George Bush's desire to privatize social security just prior to the collapse of the stock market.  Some people also don't listen well and don't spend a lot of time trying to understand things they are confused by, but they may very well recall an impression they had that someone wanted to reduce their security, while perhaps orchestrating an enormous, unprecedented “giveaway” of their money from government to the wall street private sector.  Ryan’s plan may, rightly or wrongly, bring back such thoughts.

Some people can be greedy.  I heard an interview recently with some Medicare people reveling in the fact that they got hundreds of thousands of dollars health care though Medicare but didn't have to pay anything for it.  They didn't see this as generous or lucky, but rather as well -deserved and not to be disturbed for themselves or their children. They don't want to pay more for it.  Some said they were Democrats, but some also said they were Republicans.

The elderly, people on Medicare, constitute an enormous, motivated voting block with a lot of time of their hands.

So, I think lots of people on Medicare who get out to vote will not vote for Romney/Ryan because they think Republicans want to do away with their current security, even if they could save the system for someone else after they are dead.  It won't take much of a shift for this kind of thinking to influence the election results.  People may be disgusted with Obama, be tired of him and disappointed, but they have little real reason to trust the other side with their security.  The Democrats are bent on giving away government (my) money like drunken sailors, but many elderly suspect the Republicans will too, just to different people. 

The Good Doctor

Romney-Ryan versus Obama on Saving Medicare

I’m happy about Romney’s pick of Paul Ryan as his running mate, thinking his knowledge, earnestness, and experience (7 term Congressman), particularly on budget issues (current chair of the House Budget Committee), will help the ticket’s chances in November.  My only concern about Ryan on the ticket has been the willingness he and Romney would show to proactively and aggressively rebut the Democrat smear that his thoughtful approach to Medicare reform amounts to “pushing granny off the cliff”.  I have thought that Romney and Ryan can win the argument on Medicare reform, but only if they are willing to confront the issue head-on and not be reactive to Democrat smears and distortions.

 

Happily, Romney and Ryan are doing just that – taking the argument to voters and getting favorable responses (link).  The simple reality is that the current Medicare program is financially unsustainable and that the Ryan reform plan only affects people now under 55.  Obamacare, on the other hand, already law, takes a huge chunk of money out of the current Medicare program, affecting seniors right now on Medicare – a chunk estimated by the government at about $450 billion when the law was first enacted and now pegged by the Congressional Budget Office at over $700 billion (link).  That’s it -- Obamacare takes out over $700 billion from the Medicare program seniors are currently on.  On top of that, throw in Obamacare’s new rationing board and the current law, enacted entirely by Democrats with no Republican support, dramatically affects seniors right now.  Once these facts sink in to more people it’s Obama who will be rightly seen as pushing granny off the cliff.

 

The Democrat response to this unpleasant reality – more smears and lies.  Yuval Levin at National Review Online (link): 

Last week I spoke with a journalist who covers health care who was marveling at the trouble the Democrats had allowed themselves to get into on Medicare — thanks to Obamacare on the one hand and the Romney-Ryan plan on the other, it’s suddenly Democrats who would cut the program for current seniors but would fail to save it from collapse and Republicans who would leave current seniors protected and stand a real chance of saving Medicare (and the federal budget) in the long run.  In their attempt to run away from this new reality, the Democrats have found themselves pushed into a series of increasingly implausible and unserious defenses and seemed to be losing ground on Medicare, which they had hoped might be their strongest issue this year.  

“So what will they do?” I asked him. He didn’t hesitate: “They’ll just lie.” He thought they would revert to the same story they have told for years — Republicans will increase seniors’ costs and destroy Medicare and Democrats won’t — and assume that people will just believe it.  That certainly made sense, and we now know he was right. On Saturday, the Obama campaign released this ad attacking the Romney Medicare proposal. The ad doesn’t walk some sort of narrow line between misleading and deceiving, it’s just simply a pack of lies from top to bottom.... 

....Those are all the claims in the ad, and they are all false. At least as striking, though, is what the ad doesn’t mention. It doesn’t mention that the Romney Medicare proposal would leave current seniors entirely unaffected or that it would provide a guaranteed comprehensive benefit to future seniors through a premium-support system. It doesn’t mention that the Democrats cut $716 billion from Medicare in this decade to spend on Obamacare, and did so largely through increased price controls, which are the most counterproductive way to reduce short-term costs since they tend to drive up long-term costs and undermine efficiency, quality, and access. It doesn’t say that Obamacare subjects Medicare to a board of 15 rationers who will decide which benefits are worthwhile and which are not — for both current and future seniors.  In other words, the [Democrat] ad pretends Obamacare does not exist, ignores the reality of the Romney Medicare proposal, and presents a series of flatly untrue claims in its place.

Now, people can debate the Ryan proposal and whether it would ultimately save Medicare or not, or suggest (implausibly) that in the long run it will take as much out of Medicare as Obamacare now does, but one cannot deny that Obamacare is taking $700+ billion out of Medicare as we speak.  Florida will be the laboratory this election on whether Obama, Slow Joe Biden, and the other Democrats can piss on seniors and convince them that it’s a sun shower with a rainbow at the end. 

John M Greco

More Liberal Love & Lies From MSNBC About Healthcare in Repressive, Socialist Countries

Tom Friedman, the NY Times reporter who openly pines for the authoritarian control possessed by nominally-socialist dictators, which bestows an effectiveness unencumbered by the retrograde necessities of free elections and the rule of law, you’ve got more company.

One of the biggest lies used to impugn U.S. healthcare in particular and the American system of free-enterprise in general is that the infant mortality rate is much lower most everywhere else in the world, especially in those authoritarian, freedomless countries American liberals admire so much. 

Now comes propagandist Andrea Mitchell, who on MSNBC (link) “did a particularly fawning segment about Cuba’s health-care system”, referring to “the advantages of the Cuban system, the low infant-mortality rate, for instance, which is legendary around the world....  As the conversation continued, MSNBC splashed the headline ‘Cuba’s Infant Mortality Rate Is Better than the U.S.’ across the bottom of the screen."

I seriously doubt that anyone outside of the most deluded liberal precincts (which include MSNBC) truly believes that “Cuba’s Infant Mortality Rate Is Better than the U.S.”

From Ramesh Ponnuru (link):

[L]iberal columnist ... Cohen’s top reasons for thinking [the U.S. has] a crummy [healthcare] system are our relatively low life expectancy and our relatively high infant mortality rate....  As conservatives and libertarians have pointed out time and again, the health-care system is not the reason for these statistics. Here’s the way I put it a couple of years ago: “In this country, a premature delivery followed by death would be counted toward the infant-mortality rate; not so in some other countries. And whatever we think of our health-care system, it is not to blame for the fact that America has a lot of car wrecks and homicides. When health economist Robert Ohsfeldt and John Schneider adjusted for these factors, the U.S. had the highest life expectancy of any developed country. (And they didn’t correct for obesity rates, which would make our advantage look even bigger, just like our waistlines.)”

Scott W. Atlas, M.D., senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a professor at Stanford University Medical Center (link), examines the data and reports and concludes:

The fact is that for decades, the U.S. has shown superior infant-mortality rates using official National Center for Health Statistics and European Perinatal Health Report data — in fact, the best in the world outside of Sweden and Norway, even without correcting for any of the population and risk-factor differences deleterious to the U.S. — for premature and low-birth-weight babies, the newborns who actually need medical care and who are at highest risk of dying.

In summary, the analysis and subsequent comparison of neonatal- and infant-mortality rates have been filled with inconsistencies and pitfalls, problematic definitions, and inaccuracies. Even the use of the most fundamental term, “live births,” greatly distorts infant-mortality rates, because often the infants who die the soonest after birth are not counted as live births outside the United States. In the end, these comparisons reflect deviations in fundamental terminology, reporting accuracy, data sources, populations, and cultural-medical practices — all of which specifically disadvantage the U.S. in international rankings. And unbeknownst to organizations bent on painting a picture of inferior health care in the U.S., the peer-reviewed literature and even the WHO’s own statements agree.

Oh, one more thing about Cuba -- another reason for its supposedly low infant mortality rate, which even to begin with is not believable:  “terminating the risky [pregnancies] at what may be the world’s highest abortion rate, with some reports indicating that it is more than 60 percent.” (link)

Let’s see where Mitchell goes for medical care the next time she’s really sick.  Any bets that it’s Cuba?  Where will her doctors have been trained?  Any bets on Cuba, or some other third world country?

Either Andrea Mitchell (like so many other liberals who bash America by falsely embellishing socialist countries) is stupid and unaware of the truth, or she’s lying in furtherance of her greater political cause.  My money’s on the latter. 

John M Greco 

ObamaCare Supporters Channel Billy Wilder

In the movie Some Like It Hot, a cinematic gem (with Marilyn Monroe how could it be otherwise) and comedic classic, which unfortunately overshadows another Billy Wilder movie -- his practically unknown masterpiece One, Two, Three (link), a ruling mobster played by Nehemiah Persoff turns down his hearing aid as he responds to the George Raft character, a mobster who at the formal banquet has just had a large cake rolled out in front of him that, unbeknownst to him, contains a machine-gun wielding assassin about to spray bullets his way, and who protested suspiciously, “but it ain’t my birthday for a couple of months”, saying with false affection but malign intent, “so what’s a couple of months ... between friends?”

I was reminded of this line when reading a concise and trenchant account of the various serially flimsily specious rationales the Obama team has advanced to attempt to prove up the Constitutionality of the individual mandate in Obamacare – the ground-breaking part of the law that requires private citizens to purchase a private product from a private firm (in this case, but only as the first step down the slippery slope, health insurance). Vegetables and DVDs about global warming climate change are next up for federal mandates.

David B. Rivkin, Jr., and Lee A. Casey write (link) in today's Wall Street Journal:

Consistent with the fundamental principle that the federal government is one of limited, enumerated powers, more than 220 years of case law requires that exercises of the commerce power be grounded in a meaningful, judicially enforceable, limiting principle. ObamaCare's defenders can't articulate such a principle…. If ObamaCare is to be upheld, then the Supreme Court will have to abandon … precedents, along with the plain meaning of the Constitution…. Thus the administration's position comes to this: What is one unconstitutional law, more or less, among friends?

John M Greco

Dem Congressman Says Republicans Are Wrong to Focus on Obamcare Rather than Jobs; Where Has He Been, in a Cave?

Robert Andrews, a Democrat Congressman from New Jersey, was a guest on today's Bill O"Reilly show and was introduced as one of the "co-authors" of Obamacare.  He was asked to respond to the announced Republican plan to hold a repeal vote on the law very soon as one of the first activities of the new Congress.  This guy said, and I quote, "I think it's wrong to focus on healthcare rather than jobs."   

This is too rich, too ridiculous.  In fact, this guy had such a flat affect even he couldn't muster enthusiasm for his argument, if one can even call it that.  For two years the Democrats have focused primarily on their health care scheme, to the detriment of job creation, and now this guy says it would be wrong to focus on health care rather than jobs.  He avoids defending the substance of the bill -- he just doesn't want to talk about it.

For the past two years, their health care scheme was the top priority for Democrats instead of jobs, the economy, and Islamic terror, to name just a few other things, and the voters responded with the Great Repudiation of 2010.  Now congresssional Republicans, many of whom were newly elected as much as anything else because of their opposition to Obamacare, want to try to repeal what they think is not only a very bad attempt at health care "reform" but a great harm to the economy and the Constitution as well, and all this guy Andrews can muster is to knock them for not focusing on "jobs".  This is appparently the Democrat approach to defending Obamacare -- change the subject to jobs.  Any problems with anything we've done or haven't done -- why worry about that?  Focus on jobs, jobs, jobs.   

A great impediment to more job creation IS Obamacare.  This Dem tactic is pathetic.  New Jersians and the rest of us deserve much more.

John M Greco

Some Thoughts on the Passage of DemocratCare

* Democrats in the House passed the Senate version on DemocratCare by a vote of 219-212; they needed 216 to pass. Just three votes to spare. Congress has just passed, and Obama has just signed into law today, one of the most momentous bills in American history on a straight single party vote, with not a single Republican vote, by a remarkably slim margin in the House where even many Democrats voted against it. We’ll now find out if a hyper-partisan approach to health care reform can last.

* Democrats have long blamed all ills on George W Bush, but this time it’s my turn. Ronald Reagan left a third term for his legacy, but Bush left us not just Obama but Democrat super-majorities in both Houses of Congress. His mishmash of policies, often confused, inconsistent, and poorly managed, his embrace of the oxymoronic “big government conservatism” that got him and his Republican allies nowhere, his often poor choices in personnel, and most importantly his utter inability to defend his positions and persuade Americans of their merits all led to a devastating wipe out of Republicans over two elections. How different things would be now if there had been all last year only, say, 56 Democrat Senators instead of 60 and 10-15 fewer Democrats in the House; Democrats needed every one of their 60 votes to break a threatened Republican filibuster and bring the Senate health care bill to the floor for a vote, where they then easily got the 51 votes needed to pass. Bush in his second term was weak before his adversaries and left conservatives and independents enervated and angry, and now we live with the consequences.

* The story of how, in Illinois, three Democrats now represent historically Republican districts is instructive, and one I have posted on in the past (link). Big government, back-slapping, go along - get along Denny Hastert, former Republican Speaker, decides to retire mid-term, and a mentally-fogged Republican electorate nominates twice an astoundingly weak perennial candidate who proceeds to lose not one but two elections (a special and a regular biennial) in less than 12 months to a Democrat political newcomer (Foster). In another district, an old, doddering Republican congressman (Crane), the longest serving in Congress at the time, who had stayed around way too long, gets defeated by a smart, young Democrat newcomer (Bean) who runs, as so many of them do, as a fiscal conservative and social moderate – liberal?, hell no. In yet another district, the incumbent Republican congressman (Weller) unexpectedly announces his retirement to run off with his new Latin American bride, the daughter of a former dictator of Guatemala (a puzzling development), and then his hand-picked successor, the winner of the Republican primary to replace him, decides at the last minute not to run after all, leaving a mad dash to find a replacement candidate, a somewhat unskilled newcomer to politics, who loses the seat (to Halvorsen). All had been Republican districts, all now with supposedly “moderate” Democrats, all of whom voted for DemocratCare. That’s three votes just in one state that could’ve and should’ve been Republican but for Republican party ineptness.

* The Stupak fiasco was remarkable. The Michigan Democrat, elected explicitly as “pro-life”, insisted for weeks that he could never support the Senate bill because of its permissive language with regard to government funding of abortions. At the very end, after Speaker Pelosi held firm, he folded and sold out his principles (assuming he had them to begin with) and voted for the Senate bill, hiding behind a meaningless, infinitesimally small fig-leaf executive order Obama issued at the last minute to provide him some cover for his vote. Unfortunately for Stupak, everyone knows the order is meaningless and cannot ever contravene what’s in the Senate bill, and the Democrats laugh at how cheaply he was bought out. By first holding out but then selling out at the very last minute for nothing to a president who is not just pro-abortion but defended infanticide while in the Illinois Senate, Stupak looks like a big ass and now has Democrats who despise him and Republicans who hate him. A remarkable achievement. The 11th hour sell-out by Stupak and the small band of similar supposedly pro-life hold-out Democrats gave Pelosi the votes needed for victory.

* Pelosi’s public relations stunt before the vote, walking around outside with black congressmen while holding the big gavel used during the Congressional civil rights fight decades ago, is a transparent effort to bolster the despicable Democrat strategy to paint everyone opposed to DemocratCare as racist (and the black politicians were happy to allow themselves to be used as props). Moreover, some black congressmen played up the race card, alleging, without documentation or corroboration, they heard racial slurs from tea party demonstrators. Personally I doubt their stories; a very convenient time to shout racism at 30,000 anti-Obamacare protestors. I heard a number of angry liberals call in to conservative talk radio all lathered up and energized about these “facts”, which some conservatives foolishly played into by asserting that most tea partiers are not racist. Sheesh. Playing the race card works and smearing Republican and conservative opponents as racists has long been a basic play in the Democrat playbook, so no doubt we’ll hear many more such smears in the months to come.

* The new law contains an "individual mandate" ordering every American to buy health insurance, said by Democrats to be constitutional under the Commerce Clause, which gives Congress the right to regulate interstate commerce. Never before has the mere act of being alive been regarded as interstate commerce; never before has a law compelled an American to engage in interstate commerce through the purchase of a good or service (in this case, health insurance). If this law survives constitutional challenge in the Supreme Court, where it will inevitably end up, then any and all theories of Constitutional limitations on federal government power are gone, and the United States has truly crossed a threshold and entered the second phase of its existence, one of vastly diminished liberty and unrestrained central government control over our lives.

Repeal and Replace.

John M Greco

“Scheme & Deem” and Other Democrat Health Care Offenses

We Americans are witnessing an extraordinary grand political passion play unfold before our eyes, beyond our imagination, as the senior leaders of the national Democrat party, supported by the majority of its Congressional delegation, are attempting to muster support for an unpopular health care bill through means ethically offensive, patently deceitful, and arguably unconstitutional.

It has long been clear to the sentient that by all of their actions but by only a few of their words, the intellectual vanguard of the Democrat party consists of committed believers in European-style socialism focused on the outward appearance of economic equality, a race- and gender-driven political spoils system (“social justice”), self-loathing over perceived past white wrongdoing (global “imperialism”), and the gradual replacement of the rule of law by the rule of unelected elites through the “legal” theory of the Living Constitution (in which liberals fool the hoi polloi by pretending to base their redistributive, “social justice” decisions on the actual rule of law). But I don’t think in my lifetime there has ever been such a public, naked display of contempt for our established rules of democratic government. The Democrat leaders are saying that their bill will be a good thing for Americans, and it doesn’t at all matter that a majority of Americans don’t want it, and if the rules of American government have to be subverted in order to achieve their end, so be it.

Yesterday Fox News interviewed Barack Obama, and among other things he was dismissive of concern about the process being discussed that the Democrats might use to claim passage of their health care bill, saying “I don't spend a lot of time worrying about what the procedural rules are in the House or the Senate.” This has to be one of the most astounding statements in the history of our Republic. The President of the United States expresses unconcern about the validity, the constitutionality, of the process by which his signature plan, Obamacare, might be enacted.

Ann Althouse, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin, in a post today (link) expressed so well the horror any lover of the rule of law should feel at Obama’s remarkable statement:

As if procedure is a frivolous sidetrack that only trivial or devious people care about. Barack Obama was a constitutional law professor. Much of constitutional law is about procedural rights and structural safeguards that check power. Justice Felix Frankfurter famously wrote: "The history of American freedom is, in no small measure, the history of procedure." Law professors are seriously engaging with the constitutionality of the "deem and pass," and our erstwhile law professor Barack Obama would imperiously wave procedure aside as a distraction not worthy of his time. Let's concentrate on the end and pay no attention to the means. When the most powerful man in the world says that, we should feel revulsion and alarm.

And so I have documented the crazy, alarming process the Democrats are about to begin for my own personal later reference, since years from now, long after Americans have thrown all these dangerous bums out of office, I think I might scarcely believe it all. It is frightening, and profoundly embarrassing, to me to recognize that what follows might happen for real in America and not in some piece of fiction.

1. Senate Democrats have already passed their version of health care (HC) “reform” – the “Senate” bill. Democrats won a vote to bring the bill to a floor vote 60-39, with all 58 Dems and the two independents (de facto Democrats) voting for cloture; the bill itself passed by majority vote. No Republicans voted either to end debate on the bill or for the bill itself.

2. House Democrats have already passed their version of HC “reform” – the “House” bill. It passed 220-215, with one lone Republican vote, Chao of LA (who now says he will vote against the Senate bill if and when it comes to a House vote).

3. The two bills differ significantly in certain particulars. For example: the House bill exempts unions from higher taxes on “Cadillac” health care benefit plans (which many union members have), a feature lacking in the Senate bill; the Senate bill has all the ugly special “bribes” that were needed to secure specific votes, such as the “Cornhusker Kickback”, the “Louisiana Purchase”, and “Gator Aid” (which exempts Florida, where the Medicare Advantage plan is popular, from the general gutting of Medicare Advantage in the Senate bill); and significantly, the Senate bill has language that is seen as potentially permitting federal funding for abortions, whereas the House bill contains the “Stupak Amendment” (insisted upon for their needed votes by a group of anti-abortion Democrats), which explicitly bans federal funding for abortions, consistent with current law and practice.

4. It is generally believed that the House bill could not pass the Senate, and vice versa. Since it is harder getting a bill through the Senate because of the risk of filibuster, getting the Senate bill through the House is the less difficult approach.

5. The House Democrats cannot secure enough votes to pass the Senate bill straight up as it stands, in significant part because many Democrat representatives do not want to go on record as voting for such extremely unpopular parts of the Senate bill such as the Cornhusker Kickback and Gator Aid. Also, Speaker Pelosi’s assurance to House Democrats that if they voted to pass the Senate bill the House would immediately pass a companion bill that would remove, or fix, the unpopular provisions of the Senate bill has been unpersuasive to many House Democrats for this reason: they fear that these “fixes” would never come to pass because the Senate would be unable to pass some or all of them, even if the Senate Democrats tried to pass such House “fixes” via the risky and uncertain “reconciliation” process. Also, some House Democrats fear (undoubtedly with very good reason) that as soon as they passed the Senate bill, Obama would sign it into law, and thus once some version of Democrat health care reform was law, the political will to ram through certain fixes in the Senate via reconciliation will peter out, and the fixes will never happen.

6. Therefore, the House Dem leadership has concocted a convoluted grand scheme that would have the House Democrats pass the Senate bill without an explicit vote on it and would give House Democrats political cover by allowing them to remove the unpopular parts of the Senate bill at the same time.

7. The House Democrat leadership’s plan, endorsed by Rules Committee Chairwoman Rep Slaughter, is to pass in the House a new “Slaughter Rule” bill that would have two parts: Part 1 would “deem” the Senate bill to have passed the House, and Part 2 would change, or fix, the Senate bill to remove the significant parts that House Democrats find objectionable. This scheme would allow the House Democrats to “pass” the unpopular Senate bill without having to go on record as explicitly voting for it, thus allowing members to assert that they voted for a different bill that removed the unattractive elements of the Senate bill. But, in effect, by voting for the House Slaughter “combo” bill (my terminology), they would be voting for and against the Senate bill at the same time.

8. It seems to me that this Democrat grand “scheme and deem” is predicated in part upon the belief that, once the House combo bill passes, Obama could not sign the Senate bill version of HC reform into law because the House combo bill and the Senate bill would not be the same thing. It has been thought to be settled law that the exact same bill must pass both houses of Congress before the president can sign it into law, but this construct may be about to be challenged. Passing a “Slaughter Rule” combination bill seems to address the fear among some House Democrats that if the House passed the Senate bill as is with only a promise of a future fix, Obama would sign the bill into law and the fix would never happen, either because of political resistance in the Senate or loss of interest by Obama, Pelosi, and Reid, who, among other things, all like the weak anti-abortion language of the original Senate bill and would be delighted to declare victory with the Senate bill and move on.

9. If the Slaughter Rule bill were to pass the House, then, as I understand the theory, the Senate would need only to pass the Part 2 (the “fix”) of the House bill, called by some the “reconciliation” bill. Since the election of Republican Scott Brown in Massachusetts to fill the vacant seat created by the death of Edward Kennedy, the Democrat caucus only has 59 votes, and it needs 60 votes to break a filibuster and bring the House fix, or reconciliation, bill to the floor for a vote. Thus the talk among Senate Democrats of passing the House fix bill via the controversial tactic of “reconciliation,” which requires only 51 votes to pass and avoids the possibility of filibuster (hence the term “reconciliation” bill).

10. The problem with the grand scheme at this point is that there is no guarantee that the Senate rules would allow all of the “fixes” in the House “combo” bill to be passed via the reconciliation process (the abortion language is regarded as a good example), and if the House fix bill could not pass the Senate in its entirety, then there would be no Democrat HC bill that Obama could sign into law, which would leave the House Democrats hanging with a vote on this cockamamie scheme that ultimately failed in the Senate.

11. For the Democrats, this grand scheme is further complicated by the fact that the Senate rule appears to be that the reconciliation process can only be used to modify an existing law, not simply a previously passed Senate bill. If this interpretation were to hold up, then the Democrat scheme fails, for the House would have needed to have passed the original Senate bill as is and Obama would have had to have signed the Senate bill into law before the “fix” bill, desired by many House Democrats, could be passed in the Senate via the reconciliation process.

12. For the Democrats, even ignoring the problems with trying to pass the House “fix” bill in the Senate via reconciliation, their hope for the grand scheme is also significantly challenged by the fact that many people think that the scheme is unconstitutional, for the Senate and the House would not have passed the same piece of legislation, as they would bring to Obama’s desk the original Senate bill, the House Combo bill, and the Senate fix, or reconciliation, bill (assuming that the Senate passes the fix part of the House bill exactly as it is worded in the House bill). Obama would need to sign all three, but not one of the three would have passed both houses of Congress. If the Senate Democrats revised the original Senate bill to incorporate the House “fixes,” even if there were the votes for this, then still such a revised Senate bill would not be the same piece of legislation that the House combo bill would be, thus again the constitutional problem of Obama trying to sign into law a House bill and a Senate bill that are not the exact same piece of legislation.

Of course, Democrat leaders may twist just enough arms and extend just enough bribes to get a majority of House Democrats to pass the Senate bill straight up as is, without the “scheme and deem,” which Obama could then sign into law. But if they were able to pass it this way up till now, they would have already done it this way, the normal, straightforward, constitutional way.

The hallmark of liberalism in America used to be the defense of legal procedure and the rule of law as the surest way to protect liberty. The contemporary leaders of the Democrat party are turning that notion on its head as their pursuit of power now trumps historic procedural safeguards. It’s not much more of a step for a political party one day to just dispense with all this procedural rigmarole and declare their bill the law of the land and call out the troops. It’s happened before, just not here.


John M Greco

Obama’s a Hypocrite When It Comes To His Own Health Care

Like most statist, big-government elites, Obama apparently feels he is above the rules promulgated by fellow intellectual-vanguardists and by which the rest of us must live.

As part of his recent physical check-up, Obama chose as the screening test for colon cancer a “virtual” colonoscopy, which is essentially a CT scan of the colon, rather than an actual colonoscopy, the standard, recommended test which consists of a direct visualization of the lining of the colon by a doctor using a flexible tube with fiber optics.

Why? Presumably because it’s easier on the patient. The problem: The test is not recommended by the US Preventive Task Force, whose recommendations drive coverage in government programs and greatly influence coverage in private plans. Obama’s test is not covered by Medicare. Furthermore, most plans won’t cover such colon cancer screening tests for normal-risk individuals under age 50; Obama is 48 years old, and there’s no information I have seen to suggest he has a family history of colon cancer that places him at above-average risk.

This episode reinforces what we all know – that government elites know that whatever health care rules come to exist under socialized medicine won’t apply to them. Note the recent story of a Canadian provincial premier who chose to have necessary cardiac surgery in the United States, with his own money, rather than rely on the quality and efficiency of his own country’s system of medical care; Mark Steyn commented (link) on the Premier's statement that "it's my health, it's my choice": "the Canadian state does not accept that proposition, which is why, if a Canadian such as Mr Williams wishes to exercise his choice he is obliged to leave the country."

David Whelan wrote at Forbes Magazine online (link):

President Obama talks a lot about how Americans should hold the line on health costs by following evidence-based medicine and not rushing to embrace every new high-tech medical device. But when it comes to his own body, it turns out that he won't drink his own medicine…. Last year Medicare made the controversial decision to skip paying for these [“virtual colonoscopy” CT] scans, saying the evidence was too thin…. The decision showed how comparative effectiveness research, which the President funded in last year's stimulus bill and continues to champion, might lead to tough decisions to block certain kinds of expensive tests and treatments.

Dr. Mark E. Klein commented in the Wall Street Journal (link):

In 2008, the United States Preventive Services Task Force, an independent panel of experts appointed by the Department of Health and Human Services, issued a report that found that there was not enough evidence to determine whether Medicare should cover virtual colonoscopies. Medicare based its decision not to cover the virtual exam on the task force's findings.

I applaud the president. He and his physicians correctly recognized virtual colonoscopy as an excellent alternative to screen for colon cancer. Why undergo a traditional colonoscopy—a procedure that carries a risk of serious complication and requires sedation—when a safer screening method is available?

Of course, the problem is that Americans over the age of 65 do not currently enjoy the same option. They cannot have a virtual colonoscopy unless they are willing to pay out of their own pockets for it. You can imagine their surprise to learn that the president had personally chosen a procedure that his own administration had decided did not warrant Medicare coverage.

This is one reason why Americans fear a government-backed health plan. They have been told that such a plan would not affect the availability of high-tech diagnostic tests and treatment, but their eyes tell them otherwise.

John M Greco

Obama’s Health Care Push -- Destroy for Socialized Medicine

The Wall Street Journal reports (link) today that the Chinese are very critical of Obama’s fiscal management as they increasingly worry about the ability of America to repay its massive debt, much of which is owned by the Chinese themselves. And a big part of that fiscal mismanagement is Obama’s and the Democrats' relentless push for ObamaCare, with the unwillingness to try sensible alternative market-based and patient-centered reforms, all in the face of a massive federal deficit and unprecedented peacetime spending orgy.

Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson writes today (link) in a piece titled Obama’s Malpractice:

Recovering slowly from a devastating recession, it's widely agreed that … a prudent society would embark on long-term policies to control health costs, reduce government spending, and curb massive future deficits…. So, what do they [the Democrats] do? Just the opposite. Their sweeping overhaul of the health care system -- which Congress is halfway toward enacting -- would almost certainly make matters worse…. The disconnect between what President Obama says and what he's doing is so glaring that most people could not abide it…. But reconciling blatantly contradictory objectives requires them [Obama and the Democrats] to engage in willful self-deception, public dishonesty, or both.

So why are the Democrats pursuing this reckless and destructive path? John Steele Gordon writes (link) today at Commentary Magazine’s Contentions group blog:

Obama, Pelosi & Co. see this as a one-time opportunity to make socialized medicine inevitable. By destroying the current health-care system under the name of reform, they would make single-payer unavoidable…. [Obama] is bent on sharply shifting power in the direction of the government, away from individuals and the free market, and is willing to defy both the public and fiscal sanity to achieve this goal.

John M Greco