(Analyst's note - by Col Wayne Morris USMC (Ret): "AGAIN...and I say AGAIN...folks should be screaming at the top of their lungs to their elected officials. This is insane. Some voting block folks have the attention span of a flea...but...SENIORS DO NOT FORGET SUCH THINGS...they may forget their names...or what they had for Bfast...but...they will NOT forget something that brings great danger or discomfort to them!!! So while some others may forget by 2010, SENIORS WILL NOT!
My electeds are open here...hope the hundreds reading this forward it to their lists and that they light up their electeds!!!"
In an interview on my radio show Wednesday, Arizona Senator Jon Kyl underscored the fact that Senate Democrats do not have the 60 votes they need to pass Obamacare, and that reports about the inevitability of Obamcare passing are part of the Democrat's strategy. ( The transcript of the interview is here.) Kyl asserted that Harry Reid routinely announces, and then the MSM echoes, statements about the inevitability of the bill's passing, but then reality catches up.
This is happening again today as the premature reports of an agreement to expand Medicare to those 55 and older are exposed as more puff talk from a disappointed and reeling left that has seen its dream of a public plan take some serious blows in the past few days. David Drucker's and Emily Pierce's report in Roll Call (subscription required) conveys the difficulty facing Reid:
Democratic Senators involved in crafting what Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) described as a “broad agreement” on health care policy appear to be at odds over both the policy proscriptions and the notion that they had even reached such a deal.
Though Reid announced late Tuesday that negotiations among a group of 10 liberal and moderate Democratic Senators had largely resolved the intraparty standoff over the public insurance option, participants in the group said their “agreement” had been mischaracterized and that they agreed only to send the proposal to the Congressional Budget Office for a cost estimate, saying more information was necessary before making any firm decisions.
Seniors especially have to hope that the new deal falls apart as it represents a savaging of Medicare. The Obama-Pelosi-Reid assault on Medicare has three parts now.
First, Obamacare proposes to loot Medicare of about a half trillion dollars in benefits. Obamacare enthusiasts dismiss the devastating impacts to Medicare Advantage enrollees as necessary to rebalance the system, but the loss of benefits to those senior citizens will be huge. So too will the cutbacks for hospitals treating the elderly if the bill passes.
Second, Medicare payroll taxes are raised in the Senate bill, but that massive flow of new revenue isn't going to secure the financial future of Medicare, but to instead pay for new entitlements, thus crowding out a source of future funding for Medicare when it hits the rocks in a very few years.
And now, third, Democrats are proposing the expansion of the nearly insolvent Medicare program to millions of new enrollees 55 and older. This enormous mistake will not only quickly drain the program of its remaining resources, it will accelerate the trend of doctors heading into concierge practices, abandoning the low-paying Medicare patients for the much more equitable payments provided by the dwindling number of privately covered patients.
All of the versions of Obamacare are radical assaults on seniors, but the latest version is a recipe for disaster for Medicare, and seniors know it. The seniors' political punishment of all Democrats will come in 47 weeks, but right now they have to act to alert the few Democrats on the fence that voting for this reckless scheme is political suicide.
Here are the five steps that everyone should take, but especially those already or soon to be covered by Medicare.
Readers should also take a moment to review the Democrats' plan on the debt limit --lifting it by nearly $2 trillion!-- which is every bit as reckless as their gamesmanship with Medicare. This is another transparent political trick, one that will further undermine the dollar and lock in future inflation that will destroy the savings of seniors that are in fixed investments.
Two days ago, Rupert Murdoch wrote in the Wall Street Journal about the failures and future of journalism. The very first thing that journalists must do to have their enterprises survive, Murdoch wrote, is to "give people the news that they want."
This doesn't mean the lowest common denominator of news such as sensational tabloid stories, but it most certainly does mean news about how readers' lives are going to be impacted by what D.C. does. Right now I am devoting most of every show to Obamacare because the audience is huge and very dialed in to how the Democrats' massive scheme will change their health care and thus the arc of their lives. Incredibly, MSM is not covering this aspect of the story --is not talking to seniors or doctors or hospital execs. Instead the Beltway-Manhattan media elite is covering Obamacare like a game of whether or not Harry Reid can get to 60 votes. Not surprisingly Reid announces he is going to win and the MSM scurries off to report that Reid is on the verge of winning. Almost nothing is being written about what the proposed deal will do to seniors' health care, just as the impact on the dollar of the massive hike in the debt ceiling is also largely unreported.
If Obamacare was fully and fairly explained, it would have been dead long ago, and the opinion polling shows that despite the best efforts of MSM to ignore the realities of the bill, it is deeply unpopular in the country and is triggering a massive blowback for Democrats, as it should.
Never have so many reporters produced so little in the way of accurate meaningful coverage of so important a bill. Perhaps they are simply not up to the complexity of the story, but the failure of MSM to get the story straight or the facts right or even to ask moderately difficult questions of so-called Democratic centrists like Indiana Senator Evan Bayh and Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey is remarkable.
New media will continue to report the reality of the Democrats' assault on older Americans, and all the AARP propaganda and MSM misdirection will not obscure the growing recognition that Obamacare is a massive bait-and-switch that is not going to help Americans get better medical care but will instead hasten the collapse of Medicare and the arrival of rationing.
Whose right is health care? Do you think it's yours?
Congressman Anthony Weiner has said that health care is not a commodity. If it isn't a commodity then do doctors and nurses have rights? Assigning health care the status of a right makes health care workers slaves to that right who must serve it. On what ground could a health care worker refuse to provide their products and services since that would violate the patient's "basic human right to health care."
That is a direct loss of individual rights for health care providers. The collective right of the people to receive health care would supersede the provider's individual right to set fees and hours or to change their occupational status or even decide how to apply their skills and knowledge if taken to its logical extreme. A collective right, by practical definition, is a state right because it is a right that is created and given by the government to those it chooses to give it to. It is not a natural right possessed by each person protected by the Constitution from the government. It is also a collective/state right by virtue of the fact that it would supersede individual rights when the two come into conflict. How else would the government view a right that it created and administers vs. one it has no control over?
Of course it isn't stated in any bill that a patient's right to care supersedes a provider's right to set fees and hours etc, but it doesn't need to. Rights, as always, are adjudicated in the courts. The Health Care Reform bills simply establish the foundation for the courts to rule in favor of the collective right.
Weiner’s view is collectivist, fascist and totalitarian. Collectivist because it has to be described as being a right of the many instead of the one and superior due to that fact. Fascist because ultimately the sole authority for its creation and oversight is from one entity the Federal government. Totalitarian because the Federal government is the enforcer of this collective right as well. State and local jurisdictions will have little say about it.
Congressman Weiner's view is the underlying philosophy of all of the Health Care Reform legislation in the House and Senate. Consider this section in the Senate version of the bill; the setting up of community watch dogs that will monitor citizens for various health parameters. Read pages 382 - 393.
TITLE IQUALITY, AFFORDABLE HEALTH CARE FOR ALL AMERICANS pps 382 - 393
So, even citizens themselves will be subject to Federal regulations on their behavior in order to fulfill the "human right" of universal health care. It isn't the individual's liberty that is being protected by that it is the government's control over its own health care system that is being guarded. How much clearer can it be that these bills abrogate the concept of individual rights? Someone will be checking your lifestyle, according to gov regulations, to be certain you serve the best interests of the "basic human right to health care" ie. "the Public Option."
HCR is not just about rationing care and wealth redistribution. It's about the end of individual rights as the corrosive effects of the new collectivist "basic human right to health care" spreads throughout the legal and political systems like a virus.
I think that the main purpose of Health Care Reform (HCR) is as a direct assault on individual liberties.
Health Care is a Liberty Issue
Conservative Underground - 18 August 2009 - Tim Dunkin
Another Stupid Argument: Heath Care is a Right
Obama's Authoritarian, Unconstitutional Health Care Proposal
To Americans Who Believe Healthcare is a Right
OBAMA: HEALTH CARE DESTROYING FREE SPEECH
Mandated health insurance threatens freedom, privacy
Second Bill of Rights aka FDR's economic bill of rights
(An early attempt to embed collective rights into American politics and society.)
