Did President Obama truly set up Thursday\u2019s televised health care forum with Republican congressional leaders at Blair House, across the street from the White House, \u201cto try to hammer out a compromise with Republicans,\u201d as The Associated Press reported?<\/p>\n
The Democratic scheme is to impose higher taxes and fewer choices on the 85 percent of Americans who are pleased with their current health care, in order to insure illegal aliens and fund abortion with tax dollars.<\/p>\n
Republicans, on the other hand, would seek to make health insurance more affordable for everyone, allowing insurance to be purchased across state lines in defiance of the state-based \u201ccoverage mandates\u201d; allowing individuals and companies to form pools to seek reduced rates, and placing limits on medical malpractice judgments — an approach which the Congressional Budget Office says would save money by reducing unnecessary \u201cdefensive medicine,\u201d estimated to account for 26 percent of current costs.<\/p>\n
Which of those Republican ideas did the president agree Thursday to include in a new, \u201ccompromise health bill\u201d?<\/p>\n
The answer is none, because he never intended to include GOP proposals in any truly new, \u201ccompromise\u201d bill, at all.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve tried to take every single cost containment idea that\u2019s out there,\u201d the President lied. \u201cEvery proposal that health care economists say will reduce health care costs, we\u2019ve tried to adopt.\u201d<\/p>\n
In fact, Democrats refuse to allow interstate commerce in health insurance, which would reward the one small state that decides to invite insurance companies in with a \u201cno mandates guarantee.\u201d 258 House Democrats voted \u201cNo\u201d last year on a substitute Republican plan that the Congressional Budget Office said would reduce costs by as much as 10 percent.<\/p>\n
The president himself on Thursday mentioned a cost-cutting option that he won\u2019t consider, stating — clearly with sarcastic intent — that he\u2019s sure prescription costs could be reduced if we got rid of the FDA and left it to the free market to determine which drugs are safe.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s called \u201cjudicial regulation,\u201d since purveyors can still be sued if they sell a dangerous product … a system that seems to work pretty well for most foods.<\/p>\n
(In fact, it would work better than the current system. Can you sue the FDA if you\u2019re injured by a drug they approved? No — no more than you can sue your state medical licensing board if it turns out they licensed a quack. Meantime, marijuana — known to be an effective multi-purpose medication for millennia — is not \u201capproved\u201d for any use in the U.S. because no one will pay the millions of dollars necessary to prove the medical benefits to the FDA\u2019s satisfaction, since you could never make back that investment since you can\u2019t patent a plant.)<\/p>\n
The fact that no one in the room took Mr. Obama up on the best cost-cutting proposal offered all day (his proposal to get rid of the FDA) demonstrates why it would be better to elect Libertarians — who at least know the Constitution authorizes no FDA — than Republicans.<\/p>\n
Yet the president simultaneously insisted \u201cEvery proposal that health care economists say will reduce health care costs, we\u2019ve tried to adopt\u201d?<\/p>\n
If Mr. Obama and Democratic legislative leaders Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi wanted a bi-partisan bill that embraced low-cost, free-market reforms instead of a massive new Stalinesque \u201centitlement\u201d — now even including “hard” government price controls, both in the current Democratic federal proposal and in the Massachusetts “test run,” Romneycare — why wasn\u2019t such a meeting called a year ago? Why was it not dreamed up till a new \u201ckick start\u201d was needed after Scott Browns\u2019s Republican upset victory in Massachusetts, which last month deprived Democrats of their 60-vote Senate majority?<\/p>\n
The purpose of Thursday\u2019s health care forum, to Democrats, was to either paint Republicans as \u201cthe party of no ideas\u201d if they declined to show up, or else to get Republicans to \u201ccompromise,\u201d by which today\u2019s Democrats mean \u201cShut up and vote for our bill.\u201d<\/p>\n
Democrats couldn\u2019t embrace modest, sensible GOP proposals even if they wanted to, since liberal special interest groups and their party\u2019s major funding source — the trial lawyers — oppose them. We\u2019ve all seen how this works, in the world of Democrat thug politics. Allow consumers to buy a bare-bones insurance policy that doesn\u2019t cover mammograms — they could still buy such tests for cash, to their hearts\u2019 content — and suddenly you\u2019ll be branded \u201cin favor of breast cancer.\u201d Make dangerous pertussis vaccinations optional and you\u2019re \u201cin favor of childhood disease.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. Obama objected to the \u201ctheatrical\u201d use of \u201cprops\u201d Thursday — at a dog-and-pony show of his own device. But the only \u201cprops\u201d Republicans brought were copies of the Democrats\u2019 own 2,000-page bills, over the top of which Republican whip Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va., peered out as he read repeatedly from the Democrats\u2019 own scripture.<\/p>\n
Pursing his lips and shifting uncomfortably in his seat, the inexperienced Mr. Obama clearly was not happy at being called upon by newly invigorated Republicans to defend specific clauses of his own bills. Instead, the president repeatedly tried to shift the emphasis from specifics by complaining that these were mere \u201ctalking points,\u201d and that \u201cWe\u2019re no longer on the campaign trail.\u201d<\/p>\n
That was a bit ironic, given that Mr. Obama just set up his 2012 re-election office, and has been described even by left-wing sources as making \u201ccampaign-style\u201d speeches at recent public appearances, including this week\u2019s in Las Vegas.<\/p>\n
“We all know this is urgent,\u201d the president lied. (Digging people out of collapsed buildings or mineshafts is \u201curgent.\u201d Turning America into an even more repressive, bankrupt, and dysfunctional slave state is surely somewhat less so.) \u201cAnd unfortunately over the course of the year … this became a very ideological battle. It became a very partisan battle. And politics, I think, ended up trumping practical common sense.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ah. So when the president lies about abortion funding, lies about coverage for illegal aliens, lies about rationing, tells massive whoppers about the budget impact, and tries to use a temporary Democratic majority to hurriedly ram through a far-out, Moscow-style, state-run health care system that\u2019s opposed by two thirds of the American people, that\u2019s \u201cpractical common sense\u201d But when Republicans unite and use a set of Senate rules purposely established, long ago, to stop bad ideas from being rushed into law without sufficient national debate and consideration, that\u2019s some kind of bad thing called \u201cpolitics.\u201d<\/p>\n
Got it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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