A Round-Up of Obamacare News & Views
By Bronwyn's Harbor on December 19, 2009 at 7:03 PM in Current Affairs
The blogosphere is exploding with commentaries on the Senate and Ben Nelson’s cave-in. Here are but a few of the many, many astute commentaries you can find online. It is reassuring that, at least on many blogs, democratic voices are alive and screaming from the rooftops. Below the fold, you’ll also find a screenshot of Real Clear Politics’ polling data on the American people’s intense opposition to Obamacare.
“Ben Nelson’s selling price,” Betsy’s Page:
We’ll see whose vote cost more – Mary Landrieu’s or Ben Nelson’s. All the other senators are pansies for going along and not getting special carveouts for their states. When every single Democratic vote is crucial, why not hold them up. Of course, we may be finding those special provisions after people have had time to pore over the bill and figure out what all these subparagraphs are referring to.
Nelson was right to be concerned. As Paul Mirengoff at Powerline points out, this bill is a mammoth unfunded mandate that burdens the states to be on the hook for additional Medicaid payments. [...]
In a few years when states are having to cut their education budgets to pay for this health care mandate, will the media trace back the cause to the Democrats’ bill? Of course not. It will be just another one of these funding catastrophes of which few people understand the root causes. And there will be more such problems for the states as they face increased Medicaid costs. We’ll see calls for more federal money as more and more doctors continue to refuse to take Medicaid patients. …
“Sign O’ the Times,” VodkaPundit:
A pair of telling headlines from Drudge. The first one:
SOLD: Sen. Ben Nelson to vote for health care bill; Secured favors for his home state…
There’s your modern American democracy in action, as senators buy one another’s votes with other people’s money. However, a problem is revealed in the second header:
CHINA: ‘The world does not have Money to buy more US Treasuries’…
Yep. Not only did we spend all our money, we spent everybody else’s, too. …
“‘It’s unfair’ [Howard Dean on why he doesn't support the Senate bill, which he calls "hocus pocus" reform],” Joe Conason, Salon:
What irks him the most in the current bill, he said, is that it permits insurance companies to charge as much as 300 percent more to some customers than others. So even though they must provide coverage to anyone who applies — known as “guaranteed issue” — the price differential that can be charged to older or sicker customers virtually erases that promise. “If you have to pay $20,000 a year for insurance, what good does it do if you have guaranteed issue?” he asked rhetorically. “Which is in fact what you’d have to pay if they can charge you three times as much as they do ordinary people. They have 300 percent rate differences in that bill. …”
The bill lacks sufficiently stringent controls on insurance company pay for executives and other wasteful expenditures as well, Dean argues, which is why he also opposes its mandate requiring all Americans (with few exceptions) to buy health insurance. “Why should you force Americans into a system that takes between 20 and 30 percent off the top for CEO salaries and return on equity?” he asked. “You’re forcing them into that system and it’s unfair.” There should be no mandate without a public option, he said. …
[...]
So does he really want to kill this bill? “Oh, I think they should vote no on it. I would like to see it redone,” he said. “You can’t vote for a bill like this … You can’t say, oh, we’ll all vote for this piece of junk now, just to get it to the conference committee [with the House], because it’s not going to get any better when it comes out of the conference committee if four Senators from the insurance industry can veto the result.” He declined to name those four Senators, because “I’m trying not to get too much into ad hominem attacks.”
“A Pyrrhic Victory?,” William Kristol, special editorial, The Weekly Standard:
[N]ever before has so unpopular a piece of major legislation been jammed through on a party-line vote. This week, Rasmussen showed 57% of voters nationwide saying that it would be better to pass no health care reform bill this year instead of passing the plan currently being considered by Congress, with only 34% favoring passing that bill. 54% of Americans now believe they will be worse off if reform passes, while just 25% believe they’ll be better off. Making the 2010 elections a referendum on health care should work–if Republicans don’t let up in the debate over the next year.
“Sen. Mitch McConnell: Approving health bill would be historic mistake,” The Detroit News:
… Americans are outraged that lawmakers who promised to lighten the financial burden of rising health care costs are now poised to pass a bill that would make these burdens even greater. That’s the primary reason why a recent CNN poll shows that 61 percent of Americans oppose this bill. People feel like they’ve been taken for a ride in this debate, and they’re not happy.
There is simply no question at this point that the health care debate has gone off track. … Democratic leaders seem to have put a higher priority on satisfying various constituencies — on finding votes — than on meeting the president’s promises. They took their eye off the ball. As a result, the bill they produced breaks nearly every pledge the president made about reform. ….
RealClearPolitics’ polling data:
“The Health Care Bill Is Political Suicide,” Real Clear Politics:
Health reform is shuffling toward its endgame, and even though the bill’s popularity resembles George Bush’s circa 2007, Democrats seem determined to push the bill through. Browse through certain liberal blogs, or listen to Democratic leadership speeches, and you’ll read the same justification again and again: However bad passing this bill might be, politically speaking, not passing it would be much, much worse.
I’ve been skeptical of this line of argument for quite some time. This summer, I showed that Democrats from Republican-leaning districts who supported President Clinton’s agenda fared significantly worse in the 1994 midterm election than those who did not. It seems almost certain that an additional vote for Clinton’s then-wildly-unpopular healthcare bill would not have helped these Democrats any; passing ClintonCare almost certainly would have made 1994 even worse for the Democrats. …
[...]
If Democrats need to appeal to Independents and moderates to hold their majorities, then passing this bill is a terrible idea. The most recent polling shows that 81% of Republicans and 69% of Independents oppose the healthcare plan (with 74% of Republicans and 57% of Independents strongly opposing it). With majorities of Independents strongly opposed to the bill, it’s really hard to imagine any boost in Democratic turnout from passing the plan being enough to surpass the ensuing backlash from Republicans and Independents. …
I’ll keep adding sage opinions as I find them. It’s your turn now:
UPDATE #1: Michelle Malkin has a list of the “remaining hold-outs” who you can contact.
UPDATE #2: “Ben Nelson’s Betrayal,” The Weekly Standard.
UPDATE #3: “Nelson Bought Off, 49 States to Pay for Concessions for Nebraska,” The Lonely Conservative:
These people are maniacs and they should be in prison.
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The big question now is, once this clears the Senate and goes to conference, are they going to just jam it through without changes? My guess would be that they will.
UPDATE #4: “Hot Air TV: Jason Mattera takes on the AARP,” HotAir blog:
In January, I dubbed the porkulus bill the “Generational Theft Act of 2009.” Generational theft has been the leitmotif of the Obama administration throughout the entire year. We rang in the new year with it and the White House and Democratic majority want to end the year with it by ramming through a government health care plan that would cost at least $4 trillion and likely top $10 trillion when all is spent and done.
YAF/Hot Air TV correspondent Jason Mattera is back to speak generational truth to entitlement-expanding power. He presents AARP vice president Nancy Leamond with an invoice for generational theft and takes on the powerful senior lobby’s rank hypocrisy when it comes to pre-existing conditions (AARP’s main policy, Medigap, actually imposes long waiting periods on seniors who have pre-existing conditions, even though AARP reps, like liberals in general, decry the discrimination of folks with pre-existing conditions). Jason also confronts AARP on how ObamaCare will fatten their own wallets. Medigap, their $400 million cash cow, is left untouched by ObamaCare, while all other insurance providers are subjected to tighter regulation.
Talk about fat cats. …
[...]
A reader talked back to AARP via her rejected solicitation reform last month:
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