Crimes Against Liberty (33 page)

Of course, this was supposed to occur alongside the introduction of the public option—a measure Obama only dropped from his plan after it became clear it couldn’t pass the Senate. But Obama denied his overall goal was to displace private insurers, asking rhetorically, “Why would (the public option) drive private insurance out of business?” If private insurers “tell us that they’re offering a good deal, then why is it that the government, which they say can’t run anything, suddenly is going to drive them out of business? That’s not logical.”
⁴⁷

What Obama’s snarky analysis omits is that the government will stack the deck against private insurers to the advantage of its public plan. If a private insurance company is prohibited from excluding coverage for individuals with pre-existing conditions, it ceases to be a risk management evaluator and becomes a business ward of the state. When it is forced to keep its premiums below a level that would allow it to earn profits, it is a government utility, not an insurer. ObamaCare will force insurance companies to act as welfare agencies, which will eventually drive them out of business. At that point, Obama or his acolytes will ride in on a white horse and save the day with the public option.

Our foot-in-mouth vice president, Joe Biden, let the cat out of the bag in an interview with ABC’s Jake Tapper, saying,

Some of them . . . say, well, Joe, look, man, I mean, you know, you guys haven’t massaged this very well. And, you know, this thing has gone on so long, I don’t know. And my response is, hey, man, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. I’m telling you, you know, pre-existing, they’re going to be covered.
You know we’re going to control the insurance companies
. You know people aren’t going to lose their health care with their employer like is being advertised. So you’ve got to if you really want to make sure that you get the benefit of what you’ve already done, vote for the bill.
⁴⁸
(emphasis added)

The lynchpin of ObamaCare is the “individual mandate”—a constitutionally dubious law requiring all Americans to buy health insurance whether they want it or not. This is the mechanism that is supposed to allow health insurers to remain solvent while complying with Obama’s mandate to cover pre-existing conditions. At a New Hampshire townhall meeting on February 3, 2010, Obama stumbled into admitting as much. “You can’t [demand] insurance companies . . . take somebody who’s sick, who’s got a pre-existing condition, if you don’t have everybody covered,” he said. “And the reason, if you think about it, is simple. If you had a situation where not everybody was covered but an insurance company had to take you because you were sick, what everybody would do is they’d just wait till they got sick and then they’d go buy insurance. Right? And so the potential would be there to game the system.”
⁴⁹

Thus, Obama tacitly admitted that without the individual mandate, health insurers could not survive financially if they were required to cover pre-existing conditions. Yet for an entire year, before the individual mandate was passed, Obama demonized insurance companies for denying exactly that coverage—when by his own admission they could not afford it.

ATTACKING DOCTORS

At his news conference on July 22, 2009, Obama unleashed a stunning indictment of medical practitioners, revealing his profound ignorance and ill-will toward the medical profession. He declared, “Right now, doctors, a lot of times, are forced to make decisions based on the fee payment schedule that’s out there. So if they’re looking and—and you come in and you’ve got a bad sore throat, or your child has a bad sore throat, or has repeated sore throats, the doctor may look at the reimbursement system and say to himself, ‘You know what? I’ll make a lot more money if I take this kid’s tonsils out.’”
⁵⁰

In case anyone mistook that for a solitary gaffe, he made a similarly malicious claim against surgeons the following month. At another townhall meeting in New Hampshire he said, “Let’s take the example of diabetes.... If a family care physician works with his or her patient to help them lose weight, modify diet, monitors whether they’re taking their medications in a timely fashion, they might get reimbursed a pittance, but if that same diabetic ends up getting their foot amputated, that’s thirty thousand, forty, fifty thousand dollars immediately the surgeon is reimbursed. Why not make sure we’re also reimbursing the care that prevents the amputation?”
⁵¹

Consistent with his usual divide-and-conquer methods, Obama has favored general practitioners while penalizing medical specialists who, in President Obama’s Washington, “are slightly more popular than the H1N1 virus,” as the
Wall Street Journal
noted.
⁵²
The Obama administration is using Medicare regulations to increase payments to general practitioners, internists, and family physicians, but there would be an 11 percent overall cut in the field of cardiology and 19 percent in radiation oncology. The
Wall Street Journal
editors pointed out these cuts were made on cost considerations alone, because they couldn’t be based on sound medical judgment. The editors wrote, “Two-thirds of morbidity or mortality among Medicare patients owes to cancer or heart disease.”
⁵³

Obama’s war on specialists is also reflected in ObamaCare. Obama’s distant cousin, Dr. Milton R. Wolf, writing in the
Washington Times
, described a financial penalty “aimed at your doctor if he seeks the expert care he has determined you need. If your doctor is in the top 10 percent of primary care physicians who refer patients to specialists most frequently—no matter how valid the reasons—he will face a 5 percent penalty on all their Medical reimbursements for the entire year.” This “scheme,” wrote Wolf, “is specifically designed to deny you the chance to see a specialist.”
⁵⁴

Beyond that, experience in government-run healthcare systems shows that access to medical specialists is severely reduced. Stanford University Medical Center professor Scott W. Atlas says that independent, peer-reviewed studies show there are far longer waiting times for patients seeking care from cardiologists, orthopedic surgeons, and neurologists “under government-run health systems.”
⁵⁵

Obama and his supporters glibly dismiss accusations that the president harbors socialist goals. But looking at the short record he’s compiled as president, it’s hard to come to any other conclusion. While most United States presidents of our lifetime have reserved their harshest rhetoric for our foreign enemies, Obama delights in bashing American businesspeople—corporate executives, insurers, drug-makers, and even medical professionals. Incessantly denouncing companies for generating “excess profits,” he clearly believes making a certain amount of money is immoral. In his view, that money doesn’t rightfully belong to those who earned it, but to the government, in other words, to Obama himself, who is responsible for spreading that wealth around to those who supposedly deserve it.

There’s plenty of room to debate which branch of socialism he adheres to, but one thing’s for sure: Obama can’t abide the free market.

Chapter Nine

OBAMA THE IMPERIOUS

CRIMES AGAINST THE PRIVATE SECTOR, PART 2

S
hortly after he took office, Obama initiated a campaign that would become a major theme of his presidency: castigating Wall Street bankers. On January 29, 2009, he called them “shameful” for giving themselves $20 billion in bonuses when the economy was dragging and the government was giving them bailout money. “There will be time for them to make profits, and there will time for them to get bonuses,” he imperiously declared. “Now’s not that time.... That is the height of irresponsibility. It is shameful. And part of what we’re going to need is for the folks on Wall Street who are asking for help to show some restraint and show discipline and show some sense of responsibility.” Not to be outdone, Vice President Biden exclaimed, “I’d like to throw some of these guys in the brig. They’re thinking the same old thing that got us here, greed. They’re thinking, ‘Take care of me.’”
¹

But the following year, Obama told Bloomberg he didn’t “begrudge” bonuses worth $17 million and $9 million for J. P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, respectively. It wasn’t hard to figure out why Obama was suddenly singing a different tune. As he stated, “I know both those guys; they are very savvy businessmen.”
²
But more than that, Blankfein has given more than $100,000 to Democrats, while Dimon, though donating less, has given exclusively to Democrats, plus he’s from Chicago, and he’s Obama’s personal friend and “favorite banker,” as the
New York Times
called him.

Naturally, it is the prerogative of a potentate to treat his friends differently, but Obama’s double standard still raised some eyebrows.
New Hampshire Union Leader
editorial page editor Andrew Cline pointedly observed, “As Obama has accidentally admitted, taking a big bonus during a recession is not shameful. Pitting Americans against each other for purely political purposes is.”
³
Despite forgiving his rich buddies, Obama made clear he hadn’t softened his animus toward free enterprise when, at an appearance in Quincy, Illinois, he proclaimed Democrats don’t begrudge success that’s “fairly earned,” but “I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.”
⁴

It’s not clear exactly how much money is “enough,” but apparently it’s quite a lot—at least for certain special people; the
Washington Post
website reported that in 2008, as he campaigned for president, Obama reeled in a cool $2.5 million just on his book royalties.
⁵

FIGHTING OFF THE PITCHFORKS

At a March 2009 townhall meeting in Costa Mesa, California, after defending the government bailout of AIG, Obama went on to compare AIG and big banks to suicide bombers. “It’s almost like they’ve got a bomb strapped to them, and they’ve got their hand on the trigger,” he said. “You don’t want them to blow up. But you’ve got to kind of talk them, ease that finger off the trigger.”
⁶
Obama also savaged AIG for its “recklessness and greed” as he promised to try to block its executives from collecting multi-million dollar bonuses. “Excuse me,” he muttered, “I’m choked up with anger here.”
⁷
And like our wealth, Obama seemed determined to spread his anger around. “I don’t want to quell anger,” he said angrily. “People are right to be angry. I’m angry. What I want us to do is channel our anger in a constructive way.” Obama later deflected an uncomfortable question about whether he regretted his campaign having accepted in excess of $100,000 from AIG executives
⁸
—perhaps he was too angry to muster an answer.

Obama next summoned bank executives to the White House to make them justify their salaries and bonuses. When J. P. Morgan’s Jamie Dimon told Obama his company wanted to pay back the TARP money as soon as practical and asked him to “streamline” that process, Obama insisted that government money remain in the system to generate growth—a position that belied his later, phony condemnation of banks for not repaying TARP monies. Obama said, “This is like a patient who’s on antibiotics. Maybe the patient starts feeling better after a couple of days, but you don’t stop taking the medicine until you’ve finished the bottle.”

Obama worried that paying the money back too quickly could send a bad signal. But some CEOs at the meeting disagreed, arguing it was their duty to repay the funds now that they no longer needed them and that doing so would inspire the market’s confidence.
⁹
Eventually the administration instituted a “test” to determine whether it would permit banks to repay their TARP loans. If banks had plenty of capital and demonstrated an ability to raise fresh money, they would ostensibly be permitted to repay—providing the administration deemed that repayment would be in the wider economic interest.
¹⁰