TR:  My good buddy Jefferson Paine weighs in with his ten-point plan to overhaul the “healthcare” system in a jiffy.  The reader will note that these solutions are free-market based and would be easy to implement assuming Congress-people had functioning brain cells, oh, and weren’t bought and sold by their special interests – leaving patients and doctors as the “odd men” out (pawns) here.  Note that the end result, if this plan were implemented, would result in higher quality service, for less cost, and truly cover more Citizens!  All of the things that Big Daddy is now saying you will receive through more coercion, more bureaucracy, all at higher costs!  Hellllooooo??

Jefferson Paine’s Easy HealthCare “Reform” Package

1. Deregulate Private Insurance companies allowing them to market innovative products to deal with portability, pre-existing conditions, young, uninsured, etc.
2. Ban Government from offering “insurance” which is actually Welfare.
3. Cap ridiculous “pain and suffering” awards and require the proof in major malpractice be proven scientifically beyond a higher standard than 50/50, and institute some form of “loser pays,” in civil suits.
4. Clean up all waste, fraud and abuse in MediCare / MedicAid, and plan to phase out these colossally corrupt Ponzi schemes over a few years.
5. Repeal corporate tax breaks for employer-provided medical insurance.
6. Ban all Illegal Aliens from receiving free healthcare services, and arrest and deport them when they reveal themselves at medical facilities.
7. Allow Private Insurance products to be bought and sold across State lines.
8. Ban Government issuing mandates, fines, etc. in Private Healthcare services or insurance, and ban all Government “coercion” forcing one Citizen to pay for another’s medical costs involuntarily.
9. Require Government officials and bureaucrats to buy from the exact same choices of private medical services and insurance products as available to the common peon.
10. Grant all active and retired military personnel at least the same quality of medical services as those enjoyed by Congress critters.

Any questions?

ThoughtRogue:  I’ll heartily admit that Dr. Sowell is one of my personal heroes.  Hear, Hear him!  BTW – a so-called “Birther” is someone who believes the Constitution should be followed to the letter (e.g. “No Person except a natural born Citizen..”).  Those who castigate and persecute us, Birthers, should be called “Constitution Deniers!”

Think Things, Not Words

Random thoughts on the passing scene.

By Thomas Sowell

Wise Man.

Upon learning that the Constitution requires a president to be a natural-born citizen, a college student asked: “What makes a natural-born citizen any more qualified than one born by C-section?”

Airlines that keep passengers trapped for hours in planes sitting on the runway should be prosecuted for unlawful imprisonment.

When politicians propose some hugely expensive new program and are asked how the government is going to pay for it, a standard ploy over the years has been to claim that they will pay for it by eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse.” At a recent town-hall meeting, a citizen raised the obvious question: If you can do that, why haven’t you done it already?

Marxism is an ism that has become a wasm.

What is called “universal health care” can turn out to be universal “don’t care” medical treatment, when Washington bureaucrats can overrule what you and your doctor want to do.

What ever happened to Samantha Brown on the Travel Channel? Could she have met with foul play? Where is the FBI when we need it?

The older I get, the more I learn to tolerate human shortcomings — and the less I tolerate bad attitudes.

After political crusades for “affordable housing” ended up ruining the housing market and much of the economy with it, many of the same politicians are now carrying on a crusade for “affordable health care.” But what you can afford has absolutely nothing to do with the cost of producing anything. Refusing to pay those costs means that you are just not going to continue getting the same quantity and quality — regardless of what any politician says or how well he says it.

Want to win an easy bet? Bet someone that Babe Ruth had a lower lifetime earned-run average than Cy Young, Whitey Ford, or Sandy Koufax. During his early years with the Red Sox, Ruth pitched nine shutouts in a season, which is still the American League record for a left-handed pitcher. He would have made the baseball Hall of Fame, even if he had never hit a home run.

Joe Wilson got into more trouble for telling the truth than Barack Obama got into by telling a demonstrable lie about adding millions of people to the insurance rolls without adding a dime to the deficit. As regards providing medical insurance for illegal immigrants, I doubt that the president will do that. More likely, he will legalize them first and then give them medical insurance.

The way Hollywood elites have sprung to the defense of Roman Polanski to keep him from being extradited to the United States, despite the heinous crime he is accused of, suggests that — like other egalitarians — they consider those who are “one of us” to be more equal than others.

When I contemplate the direction in which this government and this society are moving, my biggest consolation is that economists’ predictions are often wrong. I can only hope that my expectations are wrong by miles.

What is most frightening about the political Left is that they seem to have no sense of the tragedy of the human condition. All problems seem to them to be due to other people not being as wise or as noble as they are.

Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “Think things, not words.” In words, many see a need for “social justice” to override “the dictates of the market.” In reality, what is called “the market” consists of human beings making their own choices at their own cost. What is called “social justice” is government imposition of the notions of third parties, who pay no price for being wrong.

Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, Moammar Qaddafi, and Vladimir Putin have all praised Barack Obama. When enemies of freedom and democracy praise your president, what are you to think? When you add to this Barack Obama’s many previous years of associations and alliances with people who hate America — Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, Father Pfleger, and so on — at what point do you stop denying the obvious and start to connect the dots?

TR:  Self-Important that is…

ThoughtRogue:  Watch Obama on this video..  listen to him carefully, and…   THERE IT IS.  Looks like ol’ Joe Wilson has been vindicated yet again.  Obamacare will cover illegal aliens, just as soon as Obama can grant them all Amnesty.

Obama’s Dissolving Credibility

By Robert Tracinski, RCP

Experience: ACORN. Any Questions?

We had our warning during the campaign, we really did.

Remember Barack Obama’s famous speech on race, back in March of 2008? Obama had spent 20 years listening to the sermons of Jeremiah Wright, full of venomous anti-Americanism and attacks on “white America.” Yet when the reverend’s rants were revealed to the public, Obama tried to convince us that he just happened to be missing from the pews on any well-documented Sunday, and that the Jeremiah Wright we saw and heard was not the Jeremiah Wright he knew.

It was a giant, implausible lie. Yet the speech was smoothly delivered and well-turned, perfectly balanced to seem to empathize both with the grievances of blacks and with the concerns of whites. So most people seemed to believe it.

This is what Obama’s supposed gift for rhetoric amounts to: the ability to tell a smoothly polished bald-faced lie.

And that was the whole essence of Obama’s big health-care speech. It was a pack of lies from beginning to end, and if we’re going to finally see through this flim-flam artist once and for all-as more and more people are beginning to do-then we had better identify them one at a time.

I’ll skip the lies by omission-his only mention of town hall meetings, for example, was of people who “shared their stories with us” because they are “counting on us to succeed” in passing a health-care bill. Yeah, that’s what happened at town hall meetings last month!

And I’ll skip the non-health-care lies, like Obama’s claim that he merely inherited giant deficits-when his first big legislative campaign was for three quarters of a trillion dollars in new deficit spending. Or his claim that the economic crisis was brought back from the brink “thanks to the bold and decisive action we have taken since January.” (Does anybody remember that day in February when the Dow dropped 300 points because Obama’s Treasury Secretary gave a speech in which he failed to outline any details of his latest plan? Bold and decisive indeed.) Or Obama’s claim that Ted Kennedy was not an advocate of big government.

For now, let’s just stick to the speech’s seven big lies.

1) Obama’s proposal is just minor, incremental tinkering.

The key to Obama’s speeches is that he counts on you not to be listening carefully and not to compare what he says from one moment to the next. So while he vows to be the “final” president to reform health-care-indicating that his approach is a sweeping, once-and-for-all overhaul, he then goes on to tell you that everyone else is a radical, but he’s just in favor of cautious, incremental tinkering.

There are those on the left who believe that the only way to fix the system is through a single-payer system like Canada’s, where we would severely restrict the private insurance market and have the government provide coverage for everyone. On the right, there are those who argue that we should end the employer-based system and leave individuals to buy health insurance on their own.

I have to say that there are arguments to be made for both approaches. But either one would represent a radical shift that would disrupt the health care most people currently have. Since health care represents one-sixth of our economy, I believe it makes more sense to build on what works and fix what doesn’t, rather than try to build an entirely new system from scratch. And that is precisely what those of you in Congress have tried to do over the past several months.

Does it take a thousand pages of legislation to not “disrupt one-sixth of our economy”? The reality is that the proposals he advocates would create a vast new bureaucracy from scratch, with sweeping powers to regulate private health-insurance plans-eventually including employer-provided plans-and forcing individual health-insurance plans to be offered on a government-controlled “exchange.” It is a plan for the comprehensive restructuring of the health-insurance industry-but Obama wants you to think that he’s not really doing anything. Which makes you realize that he doesn’t want to you notice or think too hard about what he is doing.

2) Obama’s plan is bipartisan.

This is another attempt to deflect scrutiny by claiming that everything he is proposing is safe, bland, anodyne. Thus, his plan “incorporates ideas from many of the people in this room tonight-Democrats and Republicans.” Which explains why Obama has so few Republican votes that his allies in Congress are now talking about ramming the bill through, in a dubious parliamentary maneuver, on Democratic votes alone.

Obama’s one token concession to Republicans gives you a flavor for his actual “bipartisanship.” Citing Republican arguments that curbing excessive medical malpractice awards would help reduce “defensive medicine,” i.e., extra tests ordered to avoid a lawsuit, the president offered to authorize “demonstration projects in individual states to test these issues”-an ineffectual, symbolic measure the Bush administration tinkered with because it couldn’t get Congress to pass real tort reform.

3) You can keep your existing insurance.

This is the central claim of Obama’s speech: “First, if you are among the hundreds of millions of Americans who already have health insurance through your job, Medicare, Medicaid, or the VA, nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change the coverage or the doctor you have.” Notice that this is already a minor change from his previous statements on this issue, in which he made the same assurance for all “private health insurance plans.” The change acknowledges the fact that individual plans would be swept into the government “exchange.”

But notice that, while claiming he won’t change your existing coverage, Obama goes on to detail a whole set of changes to that coverage that will be mandated by government:

What this plan will do is to make the insurance you have work better for you. Under this plan, it will be against the law for insurance companies to deny you coverage because of a pre-existing condition…. They will no longer be able to place some arbitrary cap on the amount of coverage you can receive in a given year or a lifetime. We will place a limit on how much you can be charged for out-of-pocket expenses…. And insurance companies will be required to cover, with no extra charge, routine checkups and preventive care.

And notice what each of these regulations would do: it would increase costs for private health-insurance companies. They would have to pay more to cover people with pre-existing conditions; more for people who go over their yearly or lifetime caps, more to make up for the limits on your out-of-pocket expenses, and more for routine checkups. Oh yes, and later on, Obama explains that his bill will be paid for by increased taxes on drug companies and insurance companies.

There is no way to increase all of these costs for the insurers without causing a corresponding increase in health-insurance premiums.

So you can keep your health-insurance-except that its cost will be driven up by all of the regulations imposed by Obama’s bill. This is a well-documented phenomenon. In fact, the states in which health-insurance is most expensive-places like New York-are those which have the greatest number of “mandates” dictating benefits that insurers have to provide.

That’s why most of us grasp that the “public option” is not really an option, in the long run. Obama’s bill is designed to drive up the costs of private insurance, making it even more unaffordable-and thereby herding all of us into a government-managed insurance plan as the only remaining alternative.

And that brings us to the next implausibility in the speech.

4) The “public option” will not be subsidized by government.

President Obama would have us believe that a government-run insurance company would be less expensive than private insurance because it avoids “some of the overhead that gets eaten up at private companies by profits, excessive administrative costs, and executive salaries.” Does anyone actually believe this? Obama himself acknowledges that the “public option” leads to less efficiency when it comes to delivering mail. Why should we believe the government is suddenly going to become a model of efficiency in the health-insurance market?

It is obvious what is actually going to happen. Since the whole purpose of the “public option” is to provide a cheaper competitor against private insurance, the government will do whatever is required to ensure that this is the case-including subsidizing the public option.

After all, weren’t Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac supposed to be self-supporting enterprises, too? Why should “affordable health-care” end up any differently than “affordable housing”?

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Yet Another Washington Flop in the Making

Obamacare will be one of many federal failures.

By Deroy Murdock, National Review Online

Don't Tread on US!

As the health-care reform debate roars on, Uncle Sam resembles a restless college senior who is flunking economics, finance, and management. Despite a report card full of Fs, he suddenly announces: “I want to go to medical school!”

Similarly, Pres. Barack Obama stood before a joint session of Congress Wednesday night and re-embraced a government option for health insurance. As he explained, “Sometimes government has to step in to help deliver” on the promise that “hard work and responsibility should be rewarded by some measure of security and fair play.”

Alas, too often when Washington steps in, failing grades follow.

• Medicare, the Great Society’s shining jewel, is a battered gem. Its hospitals program already bleeds ruby-red ink. “Medicare Part A again will spend more in benefits than it receives in revenues” this fiscal year, observes Heritage Foundation analyst Bob Moffitt. Its Trust Fund is an accounting fiction, but even that fantasy disappears in eight years, with depletion in 2017. Even worse, Heritage’s Brian Riedl calculates that between 2009 and 2083 Medicare’s budget will zoom from 3.1 percent to 14.8 percent of Gross Domestic Product. Its unfunded liabilities (promises backed by campaign balloons instead of cash) equal $36.3 trillion.
• Social Security, the New Deal’s cornerstone, is as cutting edge as a 78 RPM record. In 2016, barely six years away, it will begin paying more in pension checks than it collects in payroll taxes. Congress then will be unable to use Social Security’s surplus like a ShamWow to absorb red ink. Social Security’s unfunded obligations equal $17.5 trillion — again not financed by anything but congressional speeches.
• Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: These two government options in the home-mortgage arena are widely considered the twin jet engines that flew the economy into a hillside. These were supposed to be money-making, quasi-private companies, with no federal involvement beyond an implicit guarantee that government would cover their losses. Emboldened by this cozy federal safety net, these enterprises embarked upon financial acrobatics they otherwise might have avoided. Rather than generate profits between 2009 and 2019, the Congressional Budget Office estimates, Fannie and Freddie will cost taxpayers $389 billion.
• The Hope for Homeowners program began last October 1. Congress gave it a hefty $300 billion to help some 400,000 homeowners avoid foreclosure. According to an August 10 Newsday editorial, “It has produced exactly one refinanced loan.” One down, 399,999 to go.
• “UPS and FedEx are doing just fine, right?” Obama asked in August. “It’s the Post Office that’s always having problems.” Yes, indeed. Its two-year fiscal deficit approaches $8 billion. It has pried some 60,000 mailboxes off of America’s streets, the Lexington Institute reports. It also is weighing the cancellation of Saturday services. Even as e-mail, digitally attached documents, and online banking decrease demand for first-class snail mail, the Post Office keeps hiking the cost of stamps. What sort of business actually raises prices while customers walk away?
• The Internal Revenue Code is like John Donne’s poetry: It means something different to everyone. Perhaps flummoxed by its 67,000 pages, even IRS advisers offer conflicting answers to identical questions. But today’s U.S. Tax Code will be a triumph of window-like clarity compared with the U.S. Health Code that Obamacare would trigger. Just wait until every medical lobby — from the American Stethoscope Council to the National Tongue Depressor League — hikes up Capitol Hill to demand exemptions, loopholes, and subsidies.
• Although Washington already owns 54 percent of the square mileage west of the Rockies, it obsessively purchases new acreage. More than on private property, land-use restrictions on federal soil often prevent thinning of foliage. Flames frequently follow.

“Most western wildfires burn federal land,” William Welch wrote in September 9’s USA Today. To date this year, 123,554 private acres burned in California, versus 271,000 federal acres.

Rather than inaugurate a frivolous, bottomless government option for health care, Washington should launch a “private option” for nearly every federal activity outside the Pentagon.

Ineligible Tissue Mass

ThoughtRogue:  Has anyone noticed that the consummate liar Obama makes Bill Clinton look like an Altar-boy by comparison (albeit, a naughty one)?  He’s now saying that Obamacare will not force any taxpayers to pay for others’ abortions by hiding behind the definition of mandatory health premiums, which you’ll be forced to pay, and ‘taxpayer dollars’ which we are equally forced to pay.  Listen carefully to his speech to Planned Parenthood (Pre-meditated Infanticide) – DO Not Let Him FOOL You.

This ass-clown Usurper of the Presidency is very, very sick.  Since when is a pregnancy a disease?  Wouldn’t that make the baby the toxin itself?  Abortion is “Reproductive Care?” – just how Orwellian of a euphemism is necessary to mask this crime of inhumanity?

Folks, THIS IS FASCISM SOLD WITH AN OBAMA SMILE.

TR:  50 Million babies slaughtered since the Roe vs. Wade abomination.  Any Questions?  Is this the “health” care system YOU WANT?!    Kill the Obamacare Bill.

TR:  Sir Hannon makes me tear-up a bit when he’s so optimistic about the great ”freedoms” we have here in America.  Alas, he doesn’t seem to realize the huge amount of our liberty which has been squelched, and which continues to disappear at an accelerated pace under Hopenchange – compared to Britain’s long-entrenched “English Socialism” dystopia.

ThoughtRogue:  Can’t you just wait for Obamacare to be implemented?!  Think DMV crossed with Amtrak.

Obamacare Likely to Emulate Post Office

By Lowell Ponte

Undocumented Joker

“UPS and FedEx are doin’ just fine,” President Barack Obama told his carefully selected audience of supporters at Tuesday’s mock town hall meeting in New Hampshire.

“It’s the post office that’s always having problems.”

Obama intended his comparison to show that a government entity can compete with private companies without destroying them, just as he claims a government health insurance company could provide healthy competition to improve private insurers.

Republicans for months rightly said that the federal government would run our healthcare system “with the compassion of the IRS and . . . the efficiency of the post office. . . .”

Echoing this on Tuesday, Obama seemed to agree that his Democratic health scheme will indeed be like the post office.

Obama spoke only days after the United States Postal Service (USPS) acknowledged that it will end 2009 $7 billion in the red. USPS threatened to close 700 local post offices and curtail Saturday mail deliveries if Congress is slow to boost its taxpayer subsidy.

In the early days of our young republic, jobs as postmasters, clerks, and letter carriers were among the “spoils” political parties doled out to reward its partisan political operatives.

Today the U.S. Postal Service is America’s second- or third-largest employer, providing 786,000 high-paying jobs handed out preferentially to military veterans and especially to politically-favored minorities. Letter-carrier union members are a ready source of cash and campaign shock troops for the Democratic Party.

Liberal Oregon now holds its elections entirely by mail. This effectively gives members of the letter carrier union the power to choose which ballots arrive to be counted. (In most other states, mailed absentee ballots now comprise more than 25 percent of those cast in typical elections.)

Likewise, Obamacare will give politically appointed bureaucrats the power to decide who does or does not get costly life-saving medical treatments.

From its beginning, the deeper purpose of the Postal Service has always been to advance federal government power — controlling development by where it used eminent domain to build “post roads,” monitoring and reading citizen communications, and sending federal government eyes and ears daily to every town and home.

The Postal Service briefly grabbed control of the first public telegraph service in America and even schemed — until politically slapped down — to charge citizens a stamp-like fee for every e-mail they sent in competition with the mails.

E-mail has now replaced nearly a quarter of what used to be mail revenue for USPS. Days before Obama’s comparison, even New York Times business columnist Joe Nocera on Aug. 8 joined the late libertarian saint Lysander Spooner in arguing that government control of the mails should be abolished.

“[A]ll over Europe,” blogged Nocera on Aug. 7, “postal services are being either partially or wholly privatized.” But Obama continues to swim dogmatically against the anti-socialist tide of history.

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