Fausta's Blog

Michael Barone writes on Government Health Care in Stealth Mode, discussing this fishy video:

Barone says,

Many employers, single-payer advocates hope, will be happy to let their employees go onto the government plan. The Lewin Group, cited often by various analysts, estimates that a government-option plan, depending on how the law is written, could move as many as 100 million households off private insurance and onto the government plan in a few years.

Obama has never made his ultimate goal a secret; it’s the same as Schakowsky’s and Hacker’s. The video shows him saying in October 2003, when he was running for the U.S. Senate, “I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer health care program.” He adds, “We may not get there immediately,” noting the Democrats must “take back” the White House and both houses of Congress — a condition fulfilled last Jan. 20.

Campaigning for president in May 2007, he says, “But I don’t think we’re going to be able to eliminate employer coverage immediately.” That seems to imply that his goal remains the same as it was in 2003. “There’s going to be potentially some transition process — I can envision a decade out, or 15 years out, or 20 years out, where we’ve got a much more portable system.” Which of course government health insurance would be. You couldn’t get away from it. The president’s defenders depict this video and others like it as a patchwork of irrelevant and misleading statements. They also cite Obama’s oft-repeated pledges that any health care bill he would sign would let you keep the insurance you have. They don’t address the point, raised by Hacker, that you can’t keep it if your employer stops offering it.

Scott Johnson asks, Does Linda Douglass know about this?

Meanwhile, the Congressional Budget Office is at it again: Congressional Budget Expert Says Preventive Care Will Raise — Not Cut — Costs because

the added costs of widespread use of preventive services tend to exceed the savings from averted illness

To which Douglass replied,

“to work, prevention has to be targeted. Proven services need to be directed to populations that need it, as the CBO letter suggests.”

Can’t help but ask myself what does she mean by “populations that need it.” Doesn’t everyone need preventive care?

UPDATE
Via RightPundits, the healthcare bill is a whopper:

Go read the rest (click on graph).

Via I Think, a common sense approach:

If the goal is to make each of us pay the health costs linked to our own indulgences, there’s a more efficient way to do it: Simply make everyone pay his own medical bills — and scrap nationalized health care altogether.

Lifestyle dictators will have none of that, of course. They’d rather end personal financial responsibility for health-care costs and then claim government has a right to mandate how we live — since it pays the bills.

Which is why a vote for government health care is a vote for government-run life. Let’s hope Americans understand that be fore ObamaCare goes to the floor.

Dissent Is Not Un-American

The Cost Explosion: Pelosi and Hoyer also claim their plan will “lower costs.” But this has been thoroughly refuted by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). In fact, the House plan significantly expands health care costs and it is Pelosi and Hoyer who have gamed the system to try and conceal this truth from the American people. The House plan delays any real spending increases until 2013 so that Obama allies like the Washington Post’s Steven Pearlstein can claim the bill only increases government health care spending “by about $140 billion” In reality, once all of the House bill’s spending takes effect, Obamacare will be spending $245 billion a year. And in the out years? CBO director Doug Elmendorf said this: “In sum, relative to current law, the proposal would probably generate substantial increases in federal budget deficits during the decade beyond the current 10-year budget window.”

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This entry was posted on Monday, August 10th, 2009 at 9:38 am and is filed under Barack Obama, health care, healthcare, WhiteHouse. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.