The Future of Health Care In America: Thank You Mr. Obama

With the passage of ObamaCare earlier this year, and the appointment of Dr. Donald Berwick, who adores the British National Health Service, we can expect to see a great deal more of what happened to 37-year-old Jamie Merrett.  Mr. Merrett, a quadraplegic, was concerned about the poor level of care he was receiving under nurses supplied by NHS.  So, he installed a camera to record what his nurses were doing.  Watch this:



What you see is his unqualified nurse, turn off his ventilator. 

Just a few days after the webcam was set up early last year, it filmed nurse Violetta Aylward accidentally switching off the ventilator. In the video, the life-support system can be heard emitting a long, loud beep, causing Aylward to shout for help. A care assistant rushes into the room and asks the nurse: "What have you done?" Aylward replies, "Switched this off."
Conscious of what's happening, but powerless to move, Merrett can only smack his lips together as a warning. The care worker then tells Aylward to use a resuscitation bag to keep the patient breathing. However, instead of connecting it to the hole in his neck, she places it over his mouth. She can be heard urging, "Jamie, breathe please."

Ladies and gentlemen, this is what we can expect under government directed health care.  Ms. Aylward, turned Mr. Merrett into a vegitable...due to the 21 minutes his ventilator was turned off.  Instead of turning it back on...they waited 21 minutes for paramedics to arrive...

This is the future of health care in America...Thank You Mr. Obama!

American Health Care Statistic: Pre ObamaCare

Percentage of men and women who survived a cancer five years after diagnosis:

U.S. 65%
England 46%
Canada 42%

Percentage of patients diagnosed with diabetes who received treatment within six months:
U.S. 93%
England 15%
Canada 43%

Percentage of seniors needing hip replacement who received it within six months:
U.S. 90%
England 15%
Canada 43%

Percentage referred to a medical specialist who see one within one month:
U.S. 77%
England 40%
Canada 43%

Number of MRI scanners (a prime diagnostic tool) per million people
U.S. 71
England 14
Canada 18
(These are the actual numbers of machines available for use, per 1 million people-population)

Percentage of seniors (65+), with low income, who say they are in “excellent health”:
U.S. 12%
England 2%
Canada 6%

If ObamaCare isn't repealed, withing 10 years, we'll reach parity with Canada, and within 20, parity with the UK...really rather sad.  After all, the new head of Medicare is a great fan of the UK health care system.  So much so, that he wants to institute health care rationing here in the US.  But then, we'll see that any way  with ObamaCare.  After all, 57% of all health insurance plans DON'T meet the miminum guidelines of ObamaCare to remain outside of the governmentally mandate  plans pools.  So much for keeping your health insurance if you like it.

Orszag Describes the New Obamacare Rationing

Obama's Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) describes how Obamacare will ration health care.  Ed Morrisey makes some very valid points:

The bill sets up a supermajority threshold of 67 votes to bring accountability to [IPAB] decisions, and the rule on being in or out of order can get waived at 60 votes. However, as this battle shows, even getting to 60 is almost an impossibility, let alone 67. Clearly [Harry] Reid wants to put accountability out of reach with these radical propositions.

Under this system...Congress will not be able to change any health care rationing decisions made by this board...think about that.  The Senate will need 67 votes to change board rulings...they can't get 61 votes now...how in the hell do they expect to do anything? 

If anything, Orszag might be underestimating the difficulty in changing the IPAB’s decisions on rationing. The bill required a supermajority of 67 votes in the Senate to override the IPAB, which made Jim DeMint irate and prompted a big “I told you so” from Sarah Palin.

Bureaucrats will now make your health care decisions...do you think that politics won't enter into WHO gets health care and who  doesn't? 

HT:  Hot Air

No New Promises: by Keither Hennessey

This column is by Keither Hennessey...if you wish to read the entire thing, please click on the title.

This comment is addressed to those fiscally conservative Members of the House of Representatives thinking of voting for pending health care legislation.


America is on an unsustainable fiscal path. If we do nothing to address this, within 25 years the U.S. government will default on its debt, with devastating consequences for the U.S. economy and society.

We are on this path because past elected officials made unsustainable benefit promises and enshrined them in law. In some cases they paid for those promises in the short run. In all cases they created programs that would grow more generous over time.

Those past elected officials enjoyed the political benefits of creating a new promise, and they shifted the burden of paying for these promises onto their successors and onto future generations of citizens.

You are their successor, and we are those future generations. The bill is coming due. The gap between future spending and taxes is the most important economic problem America faces. If we don’t fix it, we’re screwed.

To fix this problem we need to slow the growth of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid spending. You may think we also need to raise taxes, either for reasons of policy or of political compromise.

The long-term fiscal gap is enormous. It’s not measured in billions or even tens of billions of dollars. It’s measured in percentage points of GDP. One percent of GDP this year is $146 billion, and our fiscal gap is many times that. We need to make huge fiscal policy changes to avoid economic disaster.

Big changes are easier to make if we phase them in gradually, so people have time to plan and adjust. The longer we wait to start, the bigger the necessary changes, and the more wrenching they are to American society.

Good policy is to start these changes immediately, so that they’re in place and it’s hard to repeal them. Set the changes up so they grow steadily over time. Turn the aircraft carrier by an enormous amount, begin immediately and do it gradually, but lock the full course and ultimate direction in now. American society can then incrementally adjust to the changing conditions, and elected officials will not be confronted with sudden, disruptive, painful policy spikes they will be tempted to postpone or repeal.
Slowing the growth of popular entitlement programs is politically painful. So is raising taxes. Elected officials get punished for both.

This problem may seem politically intractable because of serious policy disagreements about the relative mix of spending changes and tax increases. Each party sees electoral advantage in attacking the other’s possible proposed solutions, so it’s hard to cooperate across the aisle.

As the pain of a government default approaches, markets will punish the U.S. economy to the point where elected officials will be forced to negotiate a solution. The danger is that you and your colleagues wait until this time, when the changes needed will be bigger and even more painful. If you can fix this before the markets force you to, America will be better off...

Read the whole thing

Governement Controled Health Care: "I Hope You Die"

Rush Limbaugh is in the hospital with chest pains...in the Politico.com story, it only took the 12th commenter to state "I hope you die." These are the people who will be in control of our health care. Already people are worried that if they take positions that are unpopular with the government and have spoken out against policies, that if they need life-or-death health decisions, that decision would go against them based on their political beliefs...

Rush Limbaugh has said on his show many times that once the government runs health care, there is a threat that life-or-death decisions will be made based on politics, and people will worry that if they criticize the government or espouse the wrong opinions decisions will go against them.

UPDATE: When I went back to Politico.com's story...all of the negative comments had disappeared! Imagine that!

Health Care Ripoff

I've held off posting about this government's seizure of health care in this country. I appears that Senator Ben Nelson sold out for an exemption on his state of Nebraska on the unfunded mandate for Medicaid's expansion. This is unconstitutional on it's face. Because the US Constitution states that all the states must be treated equally...and that no state may be exempt from provisions of Federal legislation...

The Deal Ben Nelson struck was that Nebraska would be exempt from the Medicaid increases...that's unconstitutional. Not withstanding that I believe that this bill violates the provisions in the 10th Amendment of the US Constitution that states:

Amendment 10 - Powers of the States and People. Ratified 12/15/1791. Note

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

By mandating that individuals must purchase health insurance I believe violates the terms of this article. I suspect that this bill will never go into force as the huge numbers of lawsuits that will be filed will halt it's implementation.

Fact Checking Health Care Bill Numbers

Jeffrey H. Anderson of pajamasmedia.com has pulled together the following facts and figures. Once you peruse these figures, it will become obvious that none of the Democrat's proposals will in fact reduce costs. They will just as Medicare/Medicaid did, significantly raise the costs of health care.

According to the census, the real number of uninsured Americans is 28 million: 46 million, minus nine million non-citizens, minus nine million people on Medicaid who were falsely tallied as uninsured.

17: The percentage of the United States gross domestic product (GDP) that’s currently being spent on health care, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).

21: The percentage of U.S. GDP that would be spent on health care in 2019 under the House health bill, according to CMS.

3.4: The percentage increase in U.S. health care spending in 2019 under the House health bill’s coverage provisions (in relation to projections under current law), according to CMS.

60 billion: The number of American tax dollars that Medicare loses each year to fraud, according to 60 Minutes and the Washington Post.

8.3 billion: The combined profits last year, in dollars, of America’s ten largest private health insurance companies, according to Fortune 500.

830 billion: The combined profits, in dollars, that America’s ten largest private health insurance companies would make — at the rate of last year’s profits — over 100 years, according to Fortune 500.

1.009 trillion: The costs, in dollars, of the Senate Finance Committee health bill in the seven-year span from 2014 to 2020, according to the CBO.

90: The percentage of Americans who already have health insurance, according to the census.

95: The percentage of Americans who either have health insurance or make more money than most Americans, according to the census.

31,000: The number of dollars that the Senate Finance Committee health bill would spend by 2020 for every American that it would remove from the ranks of the uninsured, according to the CBO.

25: The percentage by which the Senate Finance Committee bill — now in the hands of Senator Reid — would cut Medicare payments to doctors in 2011, according to the CBO.

0: The percentage that the Senate Finance Committee bill would raise doctors’ Medicare payments back up at any point in the future, according to the CBO.

98.3: The percentage of the Senate Finance Committee bill’s “ten-year” costs that would hit during the last six years of that period, according to the CBO.

1.7 trillion: The number of dollars that the Senate Finance Committee bill would cost in its real first ten years (2014-2023), according to the CBO.

1.0 trillion: The number of dollars that Americans’ taxes would be raised under the Senate Finance Committee bill in its real first ten years (2014-2023), according to the CBO.

900 billion: The approximate number of dollars that the Senate Finance Committee bill would siphon out of Medicare and spend elsewhere in the bill’s real first ten years, according to the CBO.

2017: The year in which the Medicare Hospital Trust Fund is currently projected to become insolvent even if no one siphons any additional money out of it, according to the Medicare Trustees Report.

740 billion: The increase in federal deficits in the Senate Finance Committee bill’s real first ten years (2014-2023) if it doesn’t follow through on its scheduled cuts to Medicare (including doctors’ payments) and other federal programs, according to the CBO.

50: The percentage of Americans who think that they would personally pay more if the Democrats pass a health bill, according to a poll published this month by the Economist.

9: The percentage of Americans who think that they would personally pay less if the Democrats pass a health bill, according to the same Economist poll.

28: The number of dollars that the Senate Finance Committee bill would spend in its real first decade for every dollar that the House Republican bill would spend in its real first decade, according to the CBO.

1: The number of proposed health bills that the CBO says would reduce Americans’ health insurance premiums (the House Republican bill, which would reduce them by up to ten percent).

The best solution is to allow market forces to work by;

A. Eliminating barriers to portability and allowing the 1300 or so health insurance companies to compete against one another across state lines, and

B. Implementing Tort Reforms to significantly reduce both the number and the scope of malpractice suits that are brought to courts, and

C. Removing the tie in to employment for health insurance.

By implementing three rather basic reforms to the current system, we would bring down the costs of health insurance by roughly 25%. That would automatically broaden the base of coverage to roughly 95% of the population. Unfortunately, as these are fairly simple solutions to a complex problem, Congress will of course implement a plan that is both complex and vastly more expensive and derogate much more intrusive powers to the Federal Government, Hope and Change...

More in U.S. Say Health Coverage Is Not Gov’t. Responsibility

More Americans now say it is not the federal government's responsibility to make sure all Americans have health care coverage (50%) than say it is (47%). This is a first since Gallup began tracking this question, and a significant shift from as recently as three years ago, when two-thirds said ensuring health care coverage was the government's responsibility.

This is a huge turnaround from even last year where 56% wanted to replace the current system and the more than 60% who desired a change in 2006. What has occurred since then? An enormous bill that will literally wreck the current system and replace it with government run health care inside of 10 years. More importantly, 61% now desire to retain the current system, while only 32% desire to toss it out.

Health care in this country does need some sort of overhaul. However, throwing out the baby with the bath water won't improve the system. What needs to be done is to allow genuine competition. In other words remove the barriers that the various states have erected to protect favoured companies and allows unfettered competition. Additionally, tort reform must be accomplished despite the fact this is a favoured constituency of the Democratic party (i.e. John Edwards friends).

Without limiting in some way the huge lawsuits for malpractice, costs will never, ever come down. Do victims of medical incompetence deserve compensation? Certainly, but there must be some sort of limits upon what is permitted. I suspect that next fall, if the bills presently before Congress are passed and signed into law, there will be a lot of surprised politicians packing up in Washington next December.

Detroit News: Americans Don't Trust The Health Bill

An excellent summary of why many Americans just don't trust this health care bill. Here's the gist...

Big shock. Americans know this drill. In 1965, Medicare Part A was estimated to cost the nation $9 billion by 1990. Actual cost: $67 billion, according to the Cato Institute.

Similarly, in 1988, when a home health care benefit was added to Medicare, the cost was pegged at $4 billion. Actual: $10 billion. And the Medicare Part D drug benefit doubled in cost in the time it took to move from Congress to the president's desk.

Americans are also too familiar with how the federal bureaucracy works to trust that government management of care won't mean more hassles and hardship. Most Americans have had a least some contact with bureaucrats, and it's rarely pleasant. The House bill will increase the frequency and intensity of those contacts.

It sets up panels to dictate what procedures will be covered, panels to choose who can deliver the care, and panels to decide whether the treatment is necessary.

"Hello, I'm from the Government and I'm here to help"...yeah right.

Camille Paglia Takes Congressional Dem's To Task on Health Care

here are some excerpts from Camille Paglia's Column, bold is my emphasis:

As for the actual content of the House healthcare bill, horrors! Where to begin? That there are serious deficiencies and injustices in the U.S. healthcare system has been obvious for decades. To bring the poor and vulnerable into the fold has been a high ideal and an urgent goal for most Democrats. But this rigid, intrusive and grotesquely expensive bill is a nightmare. Holy Hygeia, why can't my fellow Democrats see that the creation of another huge, inefficient federal bureaucracy would slow and disrupt the delivery of basic healthcare and subject us all to a labyrinthine mass of incompetent, unaccountable petty dictators? Massively expanding the number of healthcare consumers without making due provision for the production of more healthcare providers means that we're hurtling toward a staggering logjam of de facto rationing. Steel yourself for the deafening screams from the careerist professional class of limousine liberals when they get stranded for hours in the jammed, jostling anterooms of doctors' offices...

A second issue souring me on this bill is its failure to include the most common-sense clause to increase competition and drive down prices: portability of health insurance across state lines. What covert business interests is the Democratic leadership protecting by stopping consumers from shopping for policies nationwide? Finally, no healthcare bill is worth the paper it's printed on when the authors ostentatiously exempt themselves from its rules. The solipsistic members of Congress want us peons to be ground up in the communal machine, while they themselves gambol on in the flowering meadow of their own lavish federal health plan. Hypocrites! ...

International models of socialized medicine have been developed for nations and populations that are usually vastly smaller than our own. There are positives and negatives in their system as in ours. So what's the point of this trade? The plight of the uninsured (whose number is far less than claimed) should be directly addressed without co-opting and destroying the entire U.S. medical infrastructure...

How dare anyone claim humane aims for this bill anyhow when its funding is based on a slashing of Medicare by over $400 billion? The brutal abandonment of the elderly here is unconscionable. One would have expected a Democratic proposal to include an expansion of Medicare, certainly not its gutting. The passive acquiescence of liberal commentators to this vandalism simply demonstrates how partisan ideology ultimately desensitizes the mind...

I thouroughly enjoy Ms. Paglia's column. I don't often agree with her view point on many things, but now and then she is spot on.

Dems Raise Alarms At The Cost Of Health Care Overhaul

If the NY Times is reporting that Democrats around the country are freaking out over the hidden costs of the health care bills now snaking their ways through Congress, then the noise must be deafening. The bills claim to make upwards of $400 billion in savings on Medicare/Medicaid but don't address the real issues.

Both the House and the Senate are proposing cost-saving measures. The House bill projects $440 billion in Medicare savings over 10 years; the Senate Finance Committee bill projects about $420 billion. White House officials say there will be additional, substantial savings in the private sector, as well. But how much is not clear.

While the bills make "official" cuts in Medicare (the House version), other bills quietly reinstate those funds. The Senate recently attempted to side step on Medicare by not making the mandatory cuts that are required to be made each year. Every single year since it's inception, Congress has refused to make the mandatory legislative cuts in fees to physicians and health care providers.

This refusal has raised the underfunding of Medicare by approximately $5 trillion dollars. Yet, Congress insists that it can make health care, under government auspices, both cost effective and affordable. It's the old shell-game writ large. It can't be done, and voters are beginning to wake up to that fact, hence the majority who now oppose it by 54% to 41%.

Unemployment Vs Stimulus Package

The Obama Administration claimed that with the "Stimulus Package" that unemployment would top out at 8%...that was more than 6 months ago. Now, unemployment has zipped past 10% and is still climbing. How do I know? I just lost my job, so I'm vitally interested in the economy.

Unfortunately, it doesn't look like things will turn for the better any time soon. With the stock market sliding further, the temporary peak just above 10k at the NY Stock Exchange is a thing of the past. With the very narrow passage of the House's 1900 page health care seizure plan...one with a price tag that tops $1 trillion dollars (at the most conservative estimate), high unemployment levels are here to stay.

With manufacturing in a tailspin, lead by the destruction of the American auto industry (federal seizure of that vitally important sector spells it's eventual demise) means that if the Feds seize control of another 1/6th of the economy (i.e. health care) that small business won't be the engine of recovery most economist are hoping it will be. After all, if the government will require small businesses to provide very costly health insurance, they just won't hire new (or more) workers. In fact, most of the small business owners I know (I live in very Blue MD) are terrified of the taxation/fees that are listed in the House bill. Most tell me they will lay off workers rather than have what amounts to a 25% tax on their businesses.

I predict, that next fall, the Democratic Party will be shocked at the polls by the loss of at least 100 seats in the House and perhaps 12 seats in the Senate. I suspect that even "safe" seats will fall prey to challengers that pledge to overturn this bill. I suspect that those who do gain office won't necessarily be Republicans either, most will be independents, libertarians or fiscal conservatives.

Pelosi Unveils New House Health Care Seizure Bill

Nancy Pelosi, for now, Speaker of the House of Representatives, has unveiled the new House Bill that will seize control of health care in the United States of America. All 2,000+ pages of it. Over the next few weeks I'll attempt to wade through it and post my analysis of it. It's not yet available online, when I discover where Ms. Pelosi, et al, have hidden it, I'll post that link as well.

Officially, it's supposed to be "deficit nuetral", but of course the CBO only analyses what it's told to analyse. What's missing from bill already, is a $250,000,000,000.00 deduction for Medicare costs that the Senate voted down last week. There are other smoke and mirror provisions as well, to the tune of $300,000,000,000.00 so far...but I've not pinned them down yet. I'll let you know what I find, when I find it.

What Will Dems in Congress Gain or Lose by Ramming Through Health Insurance Reform

Personally, I think that they way Nancy Pelosi & Harry Reid have gone about this they already "own" Heath Care/Insurance Reform. A majority of Americans (54% in a recent Rasmussen Poll) already oppose all of the various bills being tossed about in Congress. Those bills were fashioned behind closed doors by the most liberal members of both the Senate and the House. None included any Republican proposals. So, once these monstrosities are enacted and go into effect, and are shown to be the debacle that they look to be now, the Dems will face huge losses in the polls.

I think that by 2016, once the various plans are expected to be fully implemented, they will be disastrous to America...and America will, to put it mildly, be pissed off in a way that's not been seen in 234 years...mark my words it will be ugly.

Health Insurance Reform Now Even Less Popular than Before

In middle America, the idea of Congress seizing health insurance and forcing everyone to get it or pay larges "fines" (i.e. taxes) is dropping in popularity. Rasmussen is reporting that 54% now firmly oppose the government taking over health insurance, while only 42% loosely support the idea. Yet, Congress, will flout the desires of America in order to force millions onto the public option.

In Massachusetts, the only state who has similar measures, insurance rates for private insurance have nearly doubled...in only 2 years. Additionally, the bureaucrats have continued to "move the goalposts" back. What was, originally, permitted now is not.

Massachusetts resident Wendy Williams, writing recently in The Wall Street Journal, told how new state rules made her bare-bones policy unacceptable. She and her husband were told to buy a pricier policy or pay $1,000. “We hadn’t imposed our health care costs on anyone else,” she wrote, “yet we were being fined.”

Yet, this is what Democrats in Congress has in store for our country. First a "Public Option" to be the camel's nose under the tent. Within a few years, as unelected public bean counters change the regulations of what is permitted coverage, most people with private coverage will be forced to much more expensive plans or fined (or taxed for Cadillac plans) until EVERYONE is at the mercy of faceless bureaucrats who will literally have the power of life and death. Think about it...please.

AP Finally Fact Checks Democrat Claims Of Health Insurance "Skyrocketing Profits"

WASHINGTON (AP) -- In the health care debate, Democrats and their allies have gone after insurance companies as rapacious profiteers making "immoral" and "obscene" returns while "the bodies pile up." But in pillorying insurers over profits, the critics are on shaky ground. Ledgers tell a different reality.

Profits barely exceeded 2 percent of revenues in the latest annual measure. This partly explains why the credit ratings of some of the largest insurers were downgraded to negative from stable heading into this year, as investors were warned of a stagnant if not shrinking market for private plans.

Insurers are an expedient target for leaders who want a government-run plan in the marketplace. Such a public option would force private insurers to trim profits and restrain premiums to compete, the argument goes. This would "keep insurance companies honest," says President Barack Obama.

The debate is loaded with intimations that insurers are less than straight, when they are not flatly accused of malfeasance.

A look at some claims, and the numbers:

THE CLAIMS

-"I'm very pleased that (Democratic leaders) will be talking, too, about the immoral profits being made by the insurance industry and how those profits have increased in the Bush years." House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who also welcomed the attention being drawn to insurers' "obscene profits."

-"Keeping the status quo may be what the insurance industry wants. Their premiums have more than doubled in the last decade and their profits have skyrocketed." Maryland Rep. Chris Van Hollen, member of the Democratic leadership.

-"Health insurance companies are willing to let the bodies pile up as long as their profits are safe." A MoveOn.org ad.

THE NUMBERS:

Health insurers posted a 2.2 percent profit margin last year, placing them 35th of 53 industries on the Fortune 500 list. As is typical, other health sectors did much better - drugs and medical products and services were both in the top 10.

The railroads brought in a 12.6 percent profit margin. Leading the list: network and other communications equipment, at 20.4 percent.

HealthSpring, the best performer in the health insurance industry, posted 5.4 percent. That's a less profitable margin than was achieved by the makers of Tupperware, Clorox bleach and Molson and Coors beers.

The star among the health insurance companies did, however, nose out Jack in the Box restaurants, which only achieved a 4 percent margin.

UnitedHealth Group, reporting third quarter results last week, saw fortunes improve. It managed a 5 percent profit margin on an 8 percent growth in revenue.

Van Hollen is right that premiums have more than doubled in a decade, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation study that found a 131 percent increase.

But were the Bush years golden ones for health insurers?

Not judging by profit margins, profit growth or returns to shareholders. The industry's overall profits grew only 8.8 percent from 2003 to 2008, and its margins year to year, from 2005 forward, never cracked 8 percent.

The latest annual profit margins of a selection of products, services and industries: Tupperware Brands, 7.5 percent; Yahoo, 5.9 percent; Hershey, 6.1 percent; Clorox, 8.7 percent; Molson Coors Brewing, 8.1 percent; construction and farm machinery, 5 percent; Yum Brands (think KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell), 8.5 percent.

It's almost like the Democrats are lying and merely trying to grab more power for the Federal Government. But, they'd never do that now would they. What really angers me is the simple fact that Congress has exempted themselves from the "government option" that they are planning to inflict upon the rest of us. I would be more inclined to accept it if they didn't say it was to be done equally to ALL American...not just those of us who aren't Federal Employees, or members of Congress or THEIR employees. That is wrong and sheer hypocracy.

This is the Face of Government Run Health Care

This photograph from from the ridiculously long Flu Shot line in Milwaukee. (Via Gateway Pundit). Mark Tapscott comments,

“President Obama’s late-night declaration of a nationwide public health emergency last night shouldn’t be allowed to obscure the most important lesson of the developing swine flu crisis – The same government that only weeks ago promised abundant supplies of swine flu vaccine by mid-October will be running your health care system under Obamacare.”

So, this is what Government Run Health Care will look like. I firmly think that it will be a disaster the like of which this country has never been forced to endure. But what truly enrages me is that Congress has excluded itself from ALL of the provisions in all the bills that are being considered. Additionally, they are excluding all federal employees and those who are employed by the executive branch. If this legislation is good enough for US, it's damn sure good enough for them.

The March To Government Economic Control Marches On

Mr. Obama has decided that bankers and financial leaders make too much money so his administration will force those banks that idiotically accepted TARP money to cut executive pay by 90%.

As many as 25 executives at seven corporations that received the largest chunks of federal money will see their compensation cut by about half on average, according to the Washington Post. Cash salaries will be cut by about 90 percent compared to last year.
The administration's "pay czar," Kenneth R. Feinberg, will also slash some executive perks, including the use of corporate jets, chauffeurs, and country club fee reimbursement.

This is a vast overreach into the economic sphere that no President has ever dared to go. Yet this President has dared much. He has seized 2 of the three domestic automobile manufacturers and illegally parcelled out huge chunks of stock to his allies in the UAW in contravention of Federal Bankruptcy Statutes. His next bit is to seize control of another 1/6th of the economy by nationalizing the health care industry...when will it end?

Congress To Keep It's Gold-Plated Health Care...While Screwing the Rest of the Country

You know, I'd support the attempts by Mr. Obama to sieze control of the health care sector in this country if Congress and the executive branch were going to be covered by the same kind of health care that they are trying to foist on the rest of the country. But alas, they will keep their gold-plated health care while forcing the plebs in flyover country to get in lines and accept rationing.

via Freerepublic.com
Here is the gist of the Congressional Health Care Plan:

Personal doctors on call 24/7. Coverage that knows no caps. No exemptions for pre-existing conditions.

Those are the sorts of benefits members of Congress currently enjoy on the taxpayer’s dime, and the kinds of benefits Americans on a government-run public health care plan will never see if Obamacare passes.

“One thing is certain: Congress will exempt itself from whatever lousy health care system it forces on we little people,” said Michael Cannon, director of health policy studies at the Cato Institute. “Congress will get better insurance than you do because politicians always get a better deal under government-run health care.”

While it’s not news that Congressional health insurance plans are posh, CBS News recently uncovered the details of plans – right as the details of the Baucus health care bill are being hashed out.

Members of Congress can choose from five different plans, and have access to both the VIP Bethesda Naval Hospital and a reserved spot Ward 72 at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, an elite division usually reserved for military members. Their everyday medical concerns can be taken care of at a doctors office located inside of Congress.

Their premiums are the same as those of insurance plans with half the benefits, and the plans last a lifetime; not until Medicare kicks in do ex-Members or loose their Congressional health benefits. Congress has repeatedly voted down any provision that would switch their insurance plans to the lower-grade public option if Obamacare goes through.

Helen Evans, the director of Nurses for Reform, a campaign for more consumer-led, sustainable healthcare systems in Britain, said that this sort of elite care for the bureaucracy – and low-brow care for the plebes – is the same thing that happens in the government-run British health care system.

“Independent academic research has shown that on average the professional and managerial types obtain 40% more resource per illness episode than lower down the social spectrum” in Britain, she said.

Evans is certain that the exact same thing would happen in the U.S. if Obamacare was installed.

“The National Health Service, is famous for being a highly politicised bureaucracy that whilst it legitimises itself on the basis of equality favours the powerful, articulate and well connected,” she said. Nurses for Reform is unsurprised that American politicians are pushing for government-run health care “while of course attempting to secretly perpetuate their own elitist system funded by ordinary taxpayers.”

Fortunately, at least one member of Congress is expressing doubts,

"If we pass a law that says a public option will be made available, I think people like myself should get out of this plan and go into the public option," Sen. Lindsey Graham, (R-S.C.), told CBS.

Rasmussen Poll: 54% Oppose Health Care Overhaul

From Rasmussen Poll:

Now that the Senate Finance Committee has passed its version of health care reform, 42% of voters nationwide favor the health care reform plan proposed by President Obama and congressional Democrats. That’s down two points from a week ago and down four from the week before.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 54% are opposed to the plan.