Core of Conviction : My Story (9781101563571) (22 page)

From the beginning, it was obvious that if Obama managed to get his legislation through Congress, he still wasn't going to make health care any cheaper. Instead, as Newt Gingrich said, all that Obama was going to do was put a bureaucrat between you and your doctor. As always, the real driver of health costs is illness itself. Illness is what costs money, and so the most effective way to reduce health costs is to make illness cheaper. And illness can be made cheaper only by prevention and cure.

An example of how illness has been made cheaper in recent years can be found in the category of heart disease. Over the last five decades, heart disease has become far less deadly and far less costly than it once was; these days, patients are avoiding costly heart surgery by receiving outpatient angioplasties and stents or by taking drugs called statins. Or even by simply taking over-the-counter aspirin; as our knowledge of heart disease has improved, we have been able to identify inexpensive chemicals that can save a trip to the hospital—or save a life. Heart disease is still a huge killer, of course, but the advance of medical science has greatly improved heart-disease survivability, not only lowering costs but also, as an extra benefit, increasing the nation's workforce output. And as always, this progress is the result of scientists making discoveries, not bureaucrats issuing rules.

The president has made another error of incalculable proportions by adding a layer of bureaucracy on top of the health-care system. Bureaucracy is very expensive and not very responsive; nobody asked to have more hassles in health care. If we thought fighting with private insurance companies over payment for services was a pain, wait until Big Brother becomes your insurance company—and there's no right of appeal. Under bureaucratic control, the only way to lower costs is by rationing—that is, by imposing arbitrary limits on medical care. And who wants that? Examples of rationing would be limiting the prescription of costly drugs or limiting the use of surgery or other costly treatments. And such practices are, of course, exactly what Obamacare envisions; among other control-freak committees, the legislation has created an Independent Payment Advisory Board made up of fifteen political appointees who, beginning in 2015, will have the fiat power to adjust Medicare expenditures. This is the sort of elite mechanism that imposes increasingly severe systemwide rationing, as in, say, the United Kingdom, where documented cases abound not only of treatment cutoffs but also of assisted suicide and euthanasia. That's one nation's way to save money. Indeed, it's heartless, but true: Rationing treatment and promoting suicide of the gravely ill—or the merely inconveniently ill—would lower government's costs at the expense, of course, of our lives and well-being. Most Americans, of course, fully agree that all such schemes are repugnant and unthinkable. But the chilling truth is that Obamacare is the law of the land today; unless we elect a new president with a clear mandate, and a fierce commitment, to seeing its full repeal. Otherwise, government rationing will become the new normal for all of us.

As a kid growing up in Waterloo, I remember adults talking with reverence and awe about Dr. Jonas Salk, the great scientist who had developed the polio vaccine in 1955. His vaccine not only saved lives but also changed the medical climate of American society, offering relief and freedom from fear—and it also saved money. Indeed, it saved a lot of money. According to one study I read, in the early fifties, before anyone knew about the vaccine, economists had estimated that if present polio trends continued, the United States would be spending one hundred billion dollars a year on treating the disease and its painful, often permanent, aftermath conditions. A large part of that money would be spent on wheelchairs, iron lungs, and all the equipment necessitated by the ravages of the disease. Of course, one hundred billion dollars back then, adjusted for inflation, would be an enormous sum today. But instead, how much money are we spending today on polio? How much are we spending today on his once-dreaded scourge of playgrounds and swimming pools? Virtually nothing. The scourge is long gone, at least in the United States. That's because the vaccine made the disease disappear.

So I thought to myself,
Surely that's a better way to “bend the curve” on health-care costs—to tackle certain costly diseases head-on.
And I knew we didn't need a giant government program; Salk developed the polio vaccine while working for the March of Dimes, a private charity. What we needed, I realized, was leadership—leadership that would mobilize private charity and philanthropy, energizing a new commitment to cures. And that leadership would carry out other tasks as well; not only would it streamline various regulatory procedures, including those of the Food and Drug Administration, but it would also, equally important, push back the power of the trial lawyers. Trial lawyers? How are they relevant here? Well, it's trial lawyers who regularly take billions of dollars out of the medical sector, who often engineer grotesque, out-of-proportion settlements in dubious medical lawsuits. Real victims, of course, should be compensated for their real losses, although only for their actual losses; the John Edwards–type tort lawyers should be barred from extracting outrageous sums from juries that don't necessarily correlate damage awards with either hikes in health-care costs or declines in medical innovation. If we want more medical cures, if we want researchers and scientists to pursue breakthroughs in cures and healing, we must shield these healers and their efforts from excessive damages that enrich the tort bar and scare away innovation.

With the right kind of leadership, we might make real progress toward better treatments and cures. That could be a game changer in health care. To return to the Alzheimer's example: If we could push back the onset of the disease by even a few years, we could dramatically reduce the costs of maintenance and care. If we can be healthier, if we can work longer, and if we can retire later, the nation thereby saves vast sums of entitlement money.

Regarding another aspect of medical progress: the invention of medical devices that can save and improve lives. As it happens, my home state boasts a number of high-tech medical device companies, including Medtronic, Boston Scientific, and St. Jude Medical. Earl Bakken, cofounder of Medtronic, is a Minnesota version of Thomas Edison; in 1957, working in his garage, Earl invented that breakthrough medical device, the heart pacemaker. As a result of his vision and the entrepreneurship he shared with his cofounder, Palmer Hermundslie, Earl is responsible for saving or prolonging countless lives. We Minnesotans are truly proud of him. In addition, his invention led to the creation of new jobs as well as to a valuable export industry. And if Medtronic shareholders made money, that helps the creation of the next generation of medical devices. Enticing another generation of inventors and investors into the field of improving our health—that's Adam Smith's “invisible hand” in action: making money, saving lives.

Better health, more wealth—isn't that what we want? Yet strangely, the Obama administration hasn't seemed to care. In fact, the administration has actually seemed hostile to this wondrous vista of medical and economic opportunity. As part of the Obamacare plan, for instance—as part of an assurance to the public that the plan “would be fully paid for”—the White House sought to impose a forty-billion-dollar tax, over ten years, on medical equipment makers. The last thing we should seek are extra taxes on medical field Thomas Edisons! Minnesota's two liberal Democratic senators, Amy Klobuchar and Al Franken, sought to reduce that new tax to “only” twenty billion dollars, and they then happily voted for it—that is, voted for a huge tax imposed on some of their most creative and productive constituents. Klobuchar and Franken even claimed credit for “cutting” the tax by twenty billion dollars. That's Washington for you: Reducing a giant tax increase to a half-giant tax increase is seen as doing your constituents a favor. We have already seen, in fact, multiple layoffs across the medical device sector and new manufacturing ventures going offshore. Causing a medical recession within a recession is no laughing matter.

For his part, Obama didn't seem to notice. He just read his teleprompter speeches, sublimely content to speak at, not to, his audiences; even his talks in front of schoolchildren required what wits have since dubbed TOTUS—the teleprompter of the United States. Meanwhile, in Capitol Hill back rooms, Speaker Pelosi and her Democratic majority struggled to assemble their bill, a legislative leviathan over two thousand pages long—not including, of course, the many thousands of extra pages of regulations, which will never truly finish being written, required to “implement” the bill. According to one estimate, Obamacare would create 159 new boards and commissions, and the wording of the bill included some seven hundred repetitions of the phrase “the Secretary shall.” That's the secretary of health and human services, thus effectively promoted to “czar” status.

As with the “stimulus,” as with cap-and-trade, as with Dodd-Frank, we have learned that there's a cynical good reason why politicians favor these behemoth bills: They can hide the goodies inside bigger governmental bureaucracies, hoping that no one will notice. And yet the resulting paper piles are so complex that even the politicians lose track; as Pelosi once said of Obamacare, “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.”

Even the government says that Obamacare would cost a trillion dollars over ten years—and you know what that means in terms of cost overruns. And at the same time, the legislation, according to a Congressional Budget Office estimate, would result in the loss of 800,000 jobs? And that, according to one study, Obamacare could cost 114 million Americans their private health insurance?

None of us should be shocked, of course; the government has a dreary history of overpromising, and underdelivering. And so Obamacare, too, will be seen as that sort of failure; a bill that was touted as saving money as well as expanding health insurance is actually going to shrink insurance. And here are two reasons why:

First of all, the Left's long-standing goal is not just government supervision of the insurance market, including all those mandates. Genuine lefty ideologues don't want to
regulate
the private medical sector; they want to
eliminate
the private medical sector. That's the definition of the so-called single-payer system: The government is the single payer. And, of course, the government is the big taxer too, in order to pay for it all. So over time, all of us—except for those able to buy their way out—are swallowed into the government maw. That's “social justice,” George Soros style. All Americans will have something the government will call “health insurance,” of course, in the sense that they have a piece of paper telling them that they are “insured.” And so as they wait in line for an indeterminate amount of time to see a doctor, they can comfort themselves with the thought that they have “full coverage”; the only catch is that they will have to wait till the government is good and ready to give it to them.

Second, as the government is herding us down the road to serfdom, there's the issue of Medicare. I was in a meeting at the White House and heard firsthand from President Obama in an unguarded moment what the plan is for Medicare. In that meeting, the issue of Medicare insolvency came up. As mentioned earlier, the Obamacare proposal included a $500 billion slash in Medicare. So the president was asked not once, but three times, did he have a plan for keeping Medicare solvent? Obama's answer astonished me. He answered no, he had no plan for keeping Medicare solvent, because if the program went insolvent, seniors could just go into Obamacare. Although of course, he didn't call it Obamacare. The formal name for the legislation, as passed, is the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act—pronounced, of course, “Obamacare.” But the president's meaning was unmistakable: The long-term plan is to collapse Medicare and Medicaid into Obamacare. So then we will all—young, old, and in between—be assigned to one giant single-payer system for everyone, just as in the United Kingdom. The question is, How soon will it be before access to private care will be restricted or even outlawed? After all, government doesn't like competition.

Now you know why I did everything within my human capacity to rally Amercians to oppose Obamacare's passage. And nearly to a person, my Republican colleagues were against it too. But of course, the Democrats had the votes. And so it would be high noon on Capitol Hill.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Tea Party!

BUT then something miraculous happened. The American people woke up.

In early 2009 many Americans recoiled from what they were seeing in Washington. They said, “Not with my country, you don't.” It was one of those moments when something snapped, and suddenly you knew things had changed—everything had changed. The spell had been broken; time had slipped from one epoch to another. And now, in the new light of the moment, the world looked different. Indeed, the world
was
different. The American people have come to see that Obamacare isn't just bad health-care policy and bad economics. It isn't just unconstitutional. In a deep way, in addition to all its other flaws, Obamacare is
immoral
.

That is, Obamacare is an affront to the animating principles of the American tradition of self-reliance and individualism. We might rely on one another for help from time to time, and we might work hard all our lives to save for a dignified old age, but there's something deeply wrong when a portion of the population—the productive portion—is subsidizing everyone else. We've all heard the phrase “robbing Peter to pay Paul.” Well, in America today, we have Peter writing a check to the government, then the government skims off a share and writes a check to Paul, and then Paul writes a check back to the government, which then skims off another share before sending a check back to Peter. In 2011 Fox News reported that the entire federal government sends out some 212 million checks a month. Here's a better idea: Why don't we start cutting out the middleman, which is the government, and just have each of us keep more of our money?

These doleful trends have been evident for some time in America—just as the damage done to our society has been evident and growing for some time. It has to stop. And that point is now. This is
our
rendezvous with destiny.

In recent years, even Americans who never paid much attention to U.S. history in school were suddenly becoming avid readers. They knew that our own don't-tread-on-me history would provide useful lessons for the present day. And so we were reminded of the language of our own sacred Declaration of Independence, in which the founders itemized the “repeated injuries and usurpations” that were causing them to rebel. One of those items from 1776 struck a particular chord in 2009: “He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.”

And so something was coming. The elements of a new kind of rebellion were brewing. Tea Party! Only this time, the Tea Party was televised—and then YouTubed. For example, on February 19, 2009, we saw Rick Santelli's famous rant on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade, denouncing the stimulus not only as bad economics but also as immoral. It was profoundly unfair, Santelli said, that some people had to work to carry the water, while others could simply do nothing and drink the water. That is, if we create a system in which unproductive people live permanently at the expense of the others, well, that's a lousy system. The American people are generous, but they are not suckers. The next thing we knew, the folks on the trading floor were clapping and cheering.

That's how the Tea Party gained critical mass. Ordinary Americans woke up and said, “I've had enough!” They could see President Obama's attempt to transform America into something unrecognizable: one part European-style socialism, one part trendy playground of multiculturalism, one part laboratory for progressive relativism, and one part lawless war zone of governmental gangsterism. And so they reached back into their history to find ways to show their opposition. For me, it was a flashback to my days as an education activist in Minnesota back in the nineties, when I would show parents what the liberals were up to—at which point parents would brace themselves for the necessary fight and ask, “Where's my pitchfork?” That's the moral spirit—and it's the fighting spirit.

We all remember the congressional town-hall meetings in the summer of 2009—those exuberant, colorful, sometimes even rowdy moments when the independent spirits of Americans erupted. “No to Obamacare!” they shouted. The mainstream media often tried to ignore those displays, but the new media were now bypassing the old-media blockade. So the protests, driven by the new technologies, went viral. You could see the shocked expressions on the face of liberal politicians as they were confronted by their own angry constituents.
I am here from the government,
they were saying,
and I am here to help you. What? You don't want my help?
No doubt George III was equally perplexed when he heard the news from across the Atlantic back in 1776.

Once again, if the main objective of the Obama/Pelosi/Reid forces had been to do the will of the people, they would have pulled back. But they proved instead that they didn't care what the people wanted; they cared about what they wanted. And yet, as I saw over and over again during this period, the Democratic leadership was more ideologically driven than politically pragmatic. They were liberals, even leftists—and they meant it. They had no intention of turning back.

By the end of October 2009, Speaker Pelosi and her House majority finally had their health-care bill—their legislative Frankenstein. Knowing that the public was increasingly fearful—the townspeople now had torches as well as pitchforks—Drs. Pelosi and Reid stitched and bolted their monstrous bill together, hoping it could stagger its way to completion.

Meanwhile, outside the dark castle, House Republicans met to discuss our counterstrategy. It had became clear to us, unfortunately, that even as the people made louder and louder noises of opposition, the GOP leadership was resigned to defeat. The Republican leadership was going to vote no—even hell, no—but that wasn't good enough; the Democrats had the votes in Congress. In other words, the Republicans would oppose the bill, and then, in defeated resignation, they'd watch it go through the House and the Senate, then on to the president for his signature. And that would be that. End of story.

Well, that wasn't good enough. People across the country wanted to see their leaders fight back. I am a fighter, and I fight to win. And besides, socialized medicine in the United States was the tectonic battle of our age—we needed a miracle. I came to Washington, D.C., for the same reason I went to St. Paul: not just to fight Big Government, nor even to contain Big Government, but actually to defeat Big Government and reverse its damage. So I stood up. Now was no time for a white flag. And as the town-hall meetings had shown us, our own people wanted us to fight.
Some Republicans said to me,
That's nice you're voting no, but it's too late—the Democrats have us licked.
I had heard that sort of resignation before, from some, in my days in the Minnesota state senate. But now, as I listened to the outcry of the American people, I knew what the people wanted us to do.

I thought to myself,
We don't have to accept things as they are. We can change things—we just need to be creative. We might be losing the inside game of vote counts in Congress, but we can still win the outside game of the country's wishes as a whole—and the outside game is bigger and more important. Most legislators do the best they can inside their own legislative chamber, and that's often the extent of their actions. But if they see a new reality outside—that is, masses of people demanding something different—they might think again about what to do. They might realize that for every voter who makes the effort to come to the capital, there are probably a hundred or a thousand voters back home holding the same opinions.
The battle is ultimately the larger battle, I realized—the battle for the heart and soul of America. And that's the battle we must all join.

So here was my idea. If Washington wouldn't listen to America, I would invite America to come to Washington—and speak even more loudly, forcing Washington to listen. And if enough noisy Americans came to Capitol Hill, perhaps we could stop this lumbering monster before it trampled our health and our liberty. That way, Republicans wouldn't just be voting no on the bill and losing; they would be voting no and winning the hearts and minds of voters outside the Beltway.

Fortunately, I had allies. When you stand true for something, you always have allies—and good allies at that. We immediately started planning: phone calls, e-mails, talk radio. And, of course, television.

On Friday, October 30, 2009, I went on Sean Hannity's Fox News show. He was in New York, and I was in Minnesota. Sean is that rare combination: a passionate public advocate for conservative principles and a perfectly nice and pleasant fellow in private. For the show Sean had done his job as a journalist; he had dug through the bill, which sat in a pile next to him, and told his audience that of the two thousand pages of legislative folderol, only five pages truly mattered. And then he held up those five pages, hitting the key points that every American needed to know: Yes, the bill funded abortions. Yes, it was a government takeover of the health-insurance market. Yes, it meant higher taxes. Yes, it cut $500 billion from Medicare. And yes, it included “death panels.”

That day, we had gotten our “final copy” of the health-care bill, and I also kept a copy of the bill on my lap—all twenty pounds of it. In the hectic days to come, I would be lugging that heap of legislative language around to many different places. Meanwhile, I agreed with every one of Sean's points, adding that the bill was not only “the crown jewel of socialism” but also unconstitutional.

Then I launched my pitch. I said to Sean and his audience, “We need to pay a ‘House' call on Nancy Pelosi.” I was asking the American people, in other words, to come to D.C. by the carload. Meet me at high noon next Thursday, I said, right in front of the Capitol. We'd have a press conference and then the people could walk through the halls of the House—the Cannon, Longworth, and Rayburn buildings, plus the Capitol itself, seeking out members of Congress. When they saw them, they could look into the whites of their members' eyes and say, politely but firmly, “Don't take away my health care.” Thinking then of the Great One, talk radio giant Mark Levin, author of the bestselling book
Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto
, I added to Sean and his audience, “This is a ‘liberty and tyranny' moment.” As indeed it was.

Now I had crossed the political Rubicon. All that weekend and into the next week, I worked with more leaders—conservative, libertarian, Tea Party, and just plain not-going-to-take-it-anymore people—to pull a press conference together. Mark Levin was key, as was Erick Erickson of Redstate.com. And so was Jon Voight, the Academy Award–winning actor, and John Ratzenberger, the immortal Cliff Clavin from the sitcom
Cheers;
both came out to join us. We joked that we were holding the “Super Bowl of Freedom,” and that name stuck.

Our big press conference was held the following Thursday, on November 5, 2009. We welcomed what turned out to be tens of thousands of Tea Partiers: “You came to your House, you came for an emergency house call! Are they going to listen? Oh yeah, they're going to listen!” I continued, “Thomas Jefferson said a revolution every now and then is a good thing.” That's a peaceful revolution, of course, just as we are launching here and now. Then I recalled the question that Abigail Adams wrote to her husband, John Adams, one of our great founders and our second president. After all that we've done, Abigail wondered, will generations unborn know what was done for them? The answer was yes, of course. And now people will remember this day as well. We, in our time, are a privileged generation, because we have been summoned by destiny to do something great—to reclaim freedom.

I could see the reporters' heads spinning: All those ordinary Americans with non–politically correct views? Daring to defy the great Obama? So the mainstream media attacked, of course, using its favorite weapons, snark and ridicule. The
Washington Post
ran a bizarre
headline: “
NO ONE SAID FREEDOM WAS PRETTY
.” I thought,
Whoa, that's a low view of freedom-loving Americans.
To me, and to the vast majority of Americans, freedom is indeed pretty—it's beautiful, in fact. Period. Needless to say, the
Huffington Post
chimed in too, headlining: “
A DAY AT THE FREAK SHOW
.” You get the idea.

Yet the power of the Main Stream Media was not what it once was. The American people now had other sources of information—as well as, of course, their own common sense. And so despite MSM cheerleading, opposition to Obamacare ballooned, from just 28 percent in April 2009, according to an AP-GfK poll, up to 46 percent by the time of the “Super Bowl of Freedom.” All other polls showed a similar upward movement; by 2010 opposition to Obamacare was clearly the majority position—in reality, the big-majority position.

Yet the liberal Democrats formed an ungallant light brigade and charged onward. On November 7, 2009, Speaker Pelosi forced her House Democrats to cast their votes for the bill. Or rather, most of her House Democrats; some had been spooked by the rising opposition. In the end she won the assent of only 219 Democrats; 38 others voted “no”—some out of a sense of principle, some out of a sense of survival. The Republican ranks were more solid: 177 of us in opposition, with just one going over to the other side. The final vote: 220–215.

Yet by now, in late 2009, the Democrats were starting to worry. In the home state of the original 1773 Tea Party, Massachusetts, Republican Scott Brown won a historic U.S. Senate election, breaking the Kennedy family's six-decade grip on the seat. But for the Democrats, there was no turning back; they were now sailing forward blindly on the political equivalent of the
Titanic
. Captain Obama stood serenely at the wheel, telling his Democratic passengers to ignore reports of icebergs in the next election. So Obamacare passed the Senate on December 24, 2009; months later, in late March 2010, after a second confirming House vote, Democrats finally pushed the deadweight of Obamacare across the finish line.