Crimes Against Liberty (46 page)

Now that’s something our coal industry-destroying president can support—and indeed, he is hyping the bill with the same propaganda flourish he’s employed for the rest of his disastrous agenda. Michaels presents two charts, one using his projections for APA climate impact by 2050 and the other by 2100. Each illustrates three different scenarios: the first assumes the APA or its equivalent is not enacted (“business as usual”), the second that it’s passed only in the U.S., and the third, that it’s passed in “Kyoto countries.” Michaels concludes, “As you can plainly see, APA does nothing, even if all the Kyoto-signatories meet its impossible mandates.”

OBAMACARE

Obama promised he would bend the cost curve down with his healthcare reform plan. He promised he would “not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits—either now or in the future.” Even as he signed ObamaCare in March 2010, he declared it would “lower costs for families and for businesses and for the federal government.”

We’ve already detailed in chapter six the gimmicks and deceits the administration used to secure a favorable, but ultimately fraudulent, CBO scoring for the bill. And lo and behold, we learned a month after the bill was passed that the CBO said the bill would cost an additional $115 billion due to discretionary spending that wasn’t counted in the initial scoring. Plus, a study inside his administration showed the bill was going to cost substantially more. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) issued a report finding that ObamaCare would not only fail to reduce the deficit, but the bill would actually raise spending by about 1 percent and cause healthcare costs to rise $311 billion over the next decade—and that’s without even factoring in the CBO’s $115 billion discretionary spending revelation or the other gimmicks and distortions in the administration’s accounting.

Another study following the bill’s passage estimated ObamaCare will add more than $500 billion to the deficit over the next ten years and $1.5 trillion in the following decade.
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And, as far as could be determined, none of these follow-up studies were even considering an analysis by the Center for Studying Health System Change, which found another flagrant underestimation of costs: ObamaCare doesn’t allocate nearly enough money to cover the estimated 5.6 to 7 million Americans with pre-existing medical conditions who will qualify for temporary high-risk insurance pools. According to
MoneyNews.com
, “The gap will force policymakers to freeze enrollment in the new pools, limit access and benefits, or increase premiums.”
⁴⁴

The CMS report also indicated more than 7 million seniors could lose their current Medicare coverage and as many as 15 percent of hospitals, nursing facilities, and home health agencies could be forced out of the Medicare system. Further, the funds derived from the new 3.8 percent Medicare tax (Obama’s tax on unearned income) will not be paid into the Medicare trust funds. The report might as well have directly described this provision as fraudulent advertising. It said, “Despite the title of this tax, this provision is unrelated to Medicare; in particular the revenues generated by the tax on unearned income are not allocated to the Medicare trust funds.”
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Instructively, Obama dispatched his hit-squad staff to attack CMS chief actuary Richard Foster and his findings. Both Nancy-Ann DeParle, director of the White House Office of Health Reform, and White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer criticized Foster’s analysis on the White House website, but Foster stood by his work.
⁴⁶

Following passage of the bill, dozens of companies have reported to the Securities and Exchange Commission—more than just the few that Henry Waxman tried to intimidate—the losses they expect to incur from ObamaCare. Companies that offer drug benefits to their retiring employees will be taxed on the federal subsidies they receive for those retirees. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has projected that some forty large companies will sustain losses totaling $3.4 billion.
⁴⁷

Furthermore, about a month after the bill was signed into law, Senate Democrats debated in the health committee a bill that would confer on states the power to reject premium increases that state regulators deemed to be “unreasonable.” This could not be included in the actual ObamaCare bill due to procedural rules. The
Wall Street Journal
editors opined that the reason for this new proposal is that “Democrats are petrified they’ll get the blame they deserve when insurance costs inevitably spike” under ObamaCare. “So the purpose of this latest Senate bill is to have a pre-emptive political response on hand.... As Democrats are showing by trying to pass a
new
insurance bill, they want all U.S. health care to function like price-controlled Medicare.”
⁴⁸

But the real shocker was that the administration had this information more than a week before Congress voted on the bill, at a time when Obama and his congressional Democrats were still maintaining what they knew to be false: that their bill would not increase the deficit. The economic report was submitted to HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius, and she sat on it until after the House vote. Inside sources said that Sebelius’s staff refused to review the document beforehand, saying they didn’t want to influence the vote. But as the source correctly observed, that’s the entire “point of having a review like this.” Obama was not going to let anything get in the way of this bill, not least the facts concerning costs.

The analysis was performed by Medicare’s Office of the Actuary, a non-political office. An HHS staffer said, “We know a copy was sent to the White House via their legislative affairs staff and there were a number of meetings here almost right after the analysis was submitted to the secretary’s office. Everyone went into lockdown, and people here were too scared to go public with the report.”
⁴⁹
So despite knowing full well he was lying through his teeth, Obama declared, as he was signing the bill, that it would “lower costs for families and for businesses and for the federal government.”

This is the way the Obama government operates, and this is the kind of fear they strike in civil servants to intimidate them from doing the right thing. Sadly, this was Obama’s behavioral pattern throughout the ObamaCare debate. In the beginning, he set up false premises to establish a false need for his particular fix, he distorted the facts all the way through the process, he badgered, bullied, and demonized his opponents, he refused to budge or compromise, and he blamed his opponents for the very tactics he was employing.

Universal healthcare was a crown jewel for Democrats and, in their minds, both a historical jinx and an avenue to political hegemony. In their penchant for misreading and revising history, they have assumed their failure to pass HillaryCare was the primary reason for their loss of Congress in 1994—much more than the Republicans’ Contract with America. In part they were right: HillaryCare did have a lot to do with their thrashing, but not in the way they thought. The lesson the liberals took away from that experience was that if they had succeeded in passing this socialists’ dream they would have ushered in a new era of Democratic dominance, if for no other reason than it would have created a major entitlement on which more and more voters had to depend on Democrats to sustain.

Today’s Obama liberals weren’t about to repeat those mistakes. But liberals, as usual, misread the reality. Voters, whom Democrats characteristically underestimate,
did
understand socialized medicine, and they rejected it, as well as the high-handed and secretive manner by which the Clintons attempted to shove it through—with the same arrogance Obama later evinced.

Sure, Obama succeeded in passing his bill, but it was not because he correctly read the tea leaves. Americans flat out rejected socialized medicine every bit as much as they did in the 1990s, but he was able to hang on to the congressional majority Democrats won in November 2008 long enough to shove the bill through Congress via legislative trickery. Barring unforeseen events, Obama’s despicable abuse of power in this process should play a great part in the Democrats’ coming electoral smackdown in November 2010.

Already state legislators representing half the nation have introduced bills to exempt their residents from the dysfunctions of ObamaCare. Idaho, Utah, and Virginia have passed laws, while Missouri will vote on a referendum to nullify the provision man-dating participation in the healthcare system. As the
Washington Times
editors wrote, “It is a testament to the health of our democracy that so many states are fighting back.”
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In addition, attorneys general from at least fourteen states as well as the National Federation of Independent Business will challenge the law, arguing that it’s unconstitutional for the federal government to force its citizens, under penalty of law, to obtain insurance coverage.
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EXORBITANT COSTS AND QUALITY OF CARE

One of Obama’s central premises in demanding universal healthcare was his oft-repeated statement that Americans spend more on healthcare (one and a half times more per person) than citizens of any other country, “but we aren’t any healthier for it.” His corollary statement drips with bitterness toward this country: “We are the only democracy—the only advanced democracy on Earth—the only wealthy nation—that allows such hardships for millions of its people.” Do you get that? America is immoral for
allowing
these
hardships
. Almost everything in his two statements is wrong.

While America does spend more on healthcare than any other nation, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. We get what we pay for, and we get the best. Of course, there are exorbitant costs in many cases, but as we’ve demonstrated, these will only increase further under ObamaCare. One major reason medical costs have risen dramatically in recent decades is that the introduction of employer-provided insurance interfered with market forces. When Americans didn’t have to pay out of pocket for their medical care, the costs became invisible to them and demand soared, while the normal functioning of price was taken out of the equation. Further interfering with the operation of the market, obviously, was the advent of the various government programs now in place for medical care.

Another major reason Americans have higher medical costs is that we demand the best in medical advancements and in treatment of deadly diseases—and we get it, which is why people from across the world want to come to America for treatment when they get seriously ill. According to Cato’s Michael Tanner, most of the world’s best doctors, hospitals, and research facilities are located in this country. Eighteen of the last twenty-five Nobel Prize winners in medicine are either U.S. citizens or work here. U.S. companies have developed half of all the major new medicines that have been introduced on the market over the last two decades. Americans have played major roles in some 80 percent of the most important medical advances of the last three decades.

While Obama happily cites biased statistics showing America to have poorer quality healthcare than it really has, the fact is that comparative statistics on infant mortality rates and life expectancy are skewed and misleading. Other nations often exclude high-risk, low-birth-weight infants in tabulating their statistics on infant mortality, while America includes them, which greatly distorts the numbers in our disfavor. Life expectancy numbers, likewise, are misleading because of extra-medical factors, such as violent crime, poverty, obesity, tobacco, and drug use. But when you isolate and compare—apples to apples—our outcomes on serious illnesses like heart disease and cancer, the United States easily outperforms the rest of the world.
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America has the best quality healthcare in the world, but ObamaCare will make it worse. As Heritage Foundation expert Robert Moffit says, the uniform experience of other nations proves that you can’t deliver universal access to high-quality health care.

Consider Obama’s other central reasons for promoting Obama-Care—the numbers of uninsured, the inadequate patient choice, and access to care—and you will see not only the distortions in the premises, but also the fraud in his promises to fix the very problems he mischaracterizes.

THE UNINSURED CANARD

As we noted, Obama finally had to revise his false claim of 47 million uninsured Americans to 30 million because the higher number included millions of non-citizens, among others. Let’s look more closely at the actual numbers. In the first place, Obama conflates health insurance coverage with access to healthcare. All Americans, by law, have access to emergency room care. Plus, many of the uninsured lack coverage by choice—they can afford it but choose not get it, as explained below, but they still have access to care if they need it. Finally, the poorest Americans are eligible for government assistance for healthcare.