Obama Sings the Blues

Posted by Larry Miller on September 10, 2009 under Why | Be the First to Comment

I am amazed at how good ObamaCare sounded as our President gathered the members of the House and Senate to cajole and deceive them into destroying the best health care system in the world. He gave us all sorts of generalities… many of them having no relationship to the house passed bill. This leaves me wondering if we will be seeing a new bill or if the current bill will be modified… or if the Pelosi bill will go through as passed. After all, the Obamessiah wouldn’t tell us these things if he didn’t want us to believe them.

When it comes to believing him, it is obvious not all in the room did. South Carolina’s Joe Wilson had enough and at one point shouted “You lie!”. It was a natural reaction. It was a reaction shared by millions throughout our land. The look on the Speakers face was priceless. In a later interview, John McCain showed he was never presidential material by emphatically criticizing Wilson for the violation of legislative decorum. Apparently McCain doesn’t appreciate the boisterous British House of Commons where they let their feelings be known either.

While respect for the office is fine, this thinking is indicative of the “club” mentality of many beltway insiders, especially those who have been around for some time. This often overrides their sense of right and wrong as well as their duty to the folks back home. Avoiding “bad taste” at the expense of allowing the proposed health plan to pass would be the ultimate in “bad taste”.

The evening started off by talking about the thirty million Americans without health insurance. This is down from the forty seven million last time we heard about their plight. Did seventeen million suddenly buy insurance, die off or sneak back out of the country? Perhaps he was tacitly admitting that they had been using an inflated number all along.

In a rare moment of honesty we were told that our automakers were at a competitive disadvantage to foreign manufacturers that did not have to supply health coverage for their workers. How could we help them out? In thinking about it, the best I can come up with is that somehow the burden would be shifted to the government… but that couldn’t be. President Obama said he just wanted to make sure be sure coverage was up to the governments specification… but the UAW coverage is some of the best in the country. President Obama told us he didn’t want a public option to take over health care. And we know, President Obama is an honorable man… at least John McCain would like to think so.

We, the viewing public and the assembled distinguished legislators were told to disregard those telling tall tales, which ironically came a few moments after we heard the promise that he would not sign any bill that adds one dime to the deficit. Again. I know he would not tell us these things if he didn’t want us to believe them.

So then, how can we get all these benefits and cover millions more people without it costing the taxpayers, present and future, boatloads of money, or generally reducing the levels of service to which we have become accustomed? We simply squeeze hundreds of millions of dollars of waste and fraud out of MediCare and MedicAid. This begs the question that if they have already identified that much waste and fraud, or even if they just believe it is there, why are they not squeezing it out now? It would seem that all he’d have to do is appoint a “Waste and Fraud Czar”.

So the President sounded good, as he usually does when he is guided by his teleprompter… but nothing adds up. Even some of the specifications for private policies that are good and needed, such as eliminating denial of coverage for pre-existing conditions, preventing companies from dropping someone with a diagnosed condition and the elimination of caps, can’t be implemented for zero net cost. They have to impact the expenses of the insurance companies and increase what we or our employers have to pay.

In perhaps the biggest whopper of the evening, we were told that the government could actually administer the program more cost effectively than private companies with their executive salaries and other non-essential expenses. This may sound good in socialist theory but no bureaucracy, particularly a unionized bureaucracy, has ever come near the efficiency of a profit driven private company… there is just no incentive, but there are plenty of extraneous considerations in a government bureaucracy.

Overall, we learned little that we did not know before. We already knew the health care plan he told us about and the one passed by the House were two different animals. We knew he could make things sound good… if you really did not look too close. We knew the government was the only organization competent enough to figure out what kind of insurance we needed. And one more thing we knew… we need to run, not walk away from this man and his schemes to make the world a more fair and free place to live by controlling as many aspects of our lives as possible.