Health Care

By: David Limbaugh | Copyright 2010 CREATORS.com

It’s sobering that 58 percent of American voters support the repeal of Obamacare just three weeks after Congress passed it, and that’s probably without even realizing the extent of the tainted cost estimates from the Congressional Budget Office or the tax consequences of the bill. If accurate accounting and the actual tax consequences were to be fully publicized, this nightmare would be even less popular.

The White House would disagree, of course, but don’t be fooled. The newspaper The Hill reports that White House budget director Peter Orszag says the CBO numbers actually underestimate the savings from the bill.

Orszag cites two reasons. One is that “on major pieces of legislation,” the CBO historically has been “too conservative rather than too optimistic” in its projections. The other is that the CBO’s scoring “largely does not take into account this evolution toward paying for quality,” which, Orszag thinks, “in this decade will begin to pay off.”

Well, the first reason — that the CBO historically has been “too conservative” — says nothing about the scoring of this particular bill. We know that government estimates involving health care programs have been grossly underestimated in the past, such as the government’s cost projections in 1965 that Medicare Part A would rise to $9 billion by 1990; its actual costs were $67 billion. The government’s 1987 projections for the Medicaid special hospitals subsidy were underestimated by a staggering factor of more than 100; they projected annual costs to be $100 million, and they ended up being $11 billion by 1992. American voters instinctively understand this phenomenon. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed last month, Scott Rasmussen and Doug Schoen argued that the main reason Obama hasn’t been able to move the skeptical public toward supporting Obamacare is that “people simply don’t trust the official projections. … Eighty-one percent of voters say it’s likely the plan will end up costing more than projected.”

Orszag’s second reason appears to be that Obama’s bureaucrats will start denying payments for treatments and procedures they deem unwarranted. That is, they’ll start dictating care decisions — something they’ve vehemently denied — and they’ll ration and pay only for that which they approve. So even if there are some savings here — which is highly doubtful — they will be achieved at the cost of patient and physician choice and the quality of care.

Read the entire article HERE.

There is no question that many feel as though there has been an inherent attack on American and its exceptionalism. With the stampede on American Liberty by way of the recent passing of Obamacare, there is much merit to the charge.

Dennis Prager, writer and contributor for Townhall, echoes the same sentiment.

It’s a Civil War: What We Do Now

 terrible thing happened to America on Sunday, March 21, 2010.The country took its biggest step ever down a road diametrically opposed to its original intent of keeping the state small so that the individual can be free and great.

Therefore, in this unprecedented crisis of values, this is what needs to be done:

1. Know and teach America’s core values.
2. Recognize that we are fighting the left, not liberals.
3. Democrats should be referred to as Social Democrats.
4. Work tirelessly to repeal the bill.
5. Our motto: “The bigger the government, the smaller the citizen.”
6. Do not let other matters distract.
7. Acknowledge that we are in a non-violent civil war.

Thank God this civil war is non-violent. But the fact is that the left and the rest of the country share almost no values. The American value system and the leftist value system are irreconcilable. If the left wins, America’s values lose. If American values prevail, the left loses.

After Sunday’s vote, for the first time in American history, one could no longer confidently believe that the American system will prevail. And if we don’t fight for it, we don’t deserve it.     Read the entire article HERE.