What the (Bleep) Just Happened? (19 page)

The health care engineers never lost sight of what ObamaCare was
really
all about: government power and control. It was an epic seizure of freedom from the individual that was then concentrated in the hands of the state. On the most personal, intimate questions of your body and health, faceless government bureaucrats armed with slide rules would be making those decisions for you. Never mind that in every industrialized nation in which socialized medicine has been implemented, from Great Britain to Canada, horror stories abound of bankrupting costs, patient neglect, life-threatening waiting times, and rationing and above-average mortality rates. To the kooks, it was never about actually delivering better, more cost-efficient health care. It was always about seizing the ultimate power over you while maneuvering the health care system into one that served “social and economic justice.” Consider a revealing kook inconsistency: for decades, pro-abortion leftists have used the battle cry, “Get government out of women’s wombs!” Now, however, they want government to be in your womb, nasal cavity, and large intestine. Before you could say, “Holy British health care system, Batman!,” Nancy Pelosi would be taking your pulse while Harry Reid ran your blood work.

The redistributionists are also keenly aware of the addictive power of entitlements, which are the political equivalent of heroin. When people are given a hit of the entitlement drug, they become dependent on it. And with ever more people dependent, the kooks could then enjoy a built-in justification for growing the program, the spending, and the government to support it. This is how entitlements become self-perpetuating. People start out as normal, mild-mannered citizens … like Bruce Banner. Give those same people entitlements, and watch what happens when you try to take them away. They each turn into the Incredible Socialist Hulk, as they crash through walls, throw cars, and watch Fox News in a fit of rage. The kooks rammed through the ObamaCare entitlement in order to get you to go from your first hit to mainlining ObamaCare in no time flat.

The kooks’ ideal vision was a single-payer system, in which the government essentially runs every aspect of health care. In the past, political realities had made it impossible to achieve single payer, but the leftists never gave up hope. In 2003, then Illinois state senator Barack Obama laid out his deepest health care wish: “I happen to be a proponent of a single payer universal health care program.... But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately. Because first we have to take back the White House, we have to take back the Senate, and we have to take back the House.”

Alas: the kooks’ purest ambitions laid bare. They may have dressed them up or even disguised them occasionally, but they never made them much of a mystery. In reality, however, single payer proved a bridge too far even for some Democrats, whose resistance was based less on ideological opposition than political fear; most Americans rejected the very idea of a socialist-style single-payer system, and Democrats facing reelection in 2010 and 2012 did not want to have to vote for one. So even though the Democrats controlled big congressional majorities and the White House, getting to single payer was not to be, at least not immediately.

The redistributionists then changed their game plan. They designed a health care scheme that was as close to single payer as was politically possible, and they stacked the deck so single payer would ultimately be the end result.

A parade of leftists lined up to broadcast that very fact. When ObamaCare was passed in its final form in late March 2010, Senator Tom Harkin said, “I think of this bill as a starter home. It’s not the mansion of our dreams, but it has a solid foundation.” He also added, “By passing this legislation, we will achieve a progressive prize that has eluded Congresses and presidents going back to Teddy Roosevelt.” The then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi also chimed in, “Once we kick through this door, there’ll be more legislation to follow.” Obama himself said to Democratic representative Dennis Kucinich, “We’ve gotta start somewhere.” In other words, “Patience, my fellow kooks! We’ve just nationalized health care. Savor the moment.”

From the start, the Democrats were united on the objective if not always on process. They could never utter aloud the true objective of ObamaCare, so they stuck to a script that would sound palatable to the general public. They attempted to sell socialized medicine as the policy equivalent of Superman: It will contain and lower costs! It will bring down premiums! It will be deficit neutral! It will eventually even save the government money! It will get us to universal coverage! It will improve quality of and access to care! If you like your current health insurance, you can keep it! It is not a government takeover! It will leap over tall buildings in a single bound! The truth: pick which grandparent you like most, because the other one has to go!

Perhaps they even believed this fantasyland drivel. But they also knew that with their big congressional majorities and the Big Kookuna in the White House, they didn’t really need a public buy-in to pass the plan. If the American people came around to support it, great. If they didn’t, well, tough.

Obama was obsessed with getting it done but not as obsessed with micromanaging
how
it got done. He was no Lyndon Johnson, who relished getting in the faces of members of Congress until they gave him what he wanted. Obama preferred a more absentee-father approach. Instead of pounding members every minute of the day over the intricacies of ObamaCare, Big Daddy would let them sort it all out while he hit the links or shot some hoops. Get it done, and call me when it’s ready, kids!

With Obama taking a “hoop dreams” strategy to health care, the heavy lifting of the actual bill-writing was left to congressional Democrats, who then allowed kook special interests to run wild with influence over the bill. Groups such as the George Soros–funded Center for American Progress and MoveOn.org, ACORN, the Tides Foundation and its associated Apollo Alliance, and big labor unions such as the AFL-CIO (American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations) and SEIU (Service Employees International Union) teed up their laundry lists of demands, which the leftists happily included in the final product.

Furthermore, Team Obama worked all kinds of clandestine payoff deals with hospital groups, pharmaceutical companies, the AARP (American Association of Retired People), and unions, among others, to get them on board. The details of those deals were kept under wraps, lest the public see the billions of dollars in giveaways and promises as well as the corruption of this support-buying scheme. Before long, all of the kook interest groups and the bought-off unions and industries were singing from the same ObamaCare hymnal.

At that point, they became like the woman in a famous story about Winston Churchill. At a dinner party one night, a drunk Churchill asked an attractive lady whether she would sleep with him for a million pounds. “Maybe,” she said coyly. Churchill then said, “Would you sleep with me for one pound?” “Of course not!” the woman replied indignantly. “What kind of woman do you think I am?” “Madam, we’ve already established what kind of woman you are,” said Churchill. “Now we’re just negotiating the price.”

Pelosi and Reid also barred the minority Republicans from much of their corrupt process, prohibiting them from participating in closed-door sessions, debate, and adding amendments to the bill. This was the Democrats’ idea of “compromise” when they held big majorities in Congress. Republicans, like children, were to be seen but not heard. Along with the GOP, the leftists also dissed the opinions of the American people, who were growing increasingly infuriated with the content of the legislation and the perverse process the Democrats were using to get it done.

In August 2009, thousands of Americans packed the town hall meetings of members of Congress, demanding answers: If I have health insurance now, will I be able to keep it? How is this going to affect my relationship with my doctor? Will government bureaucrats be making my health care decisions based on cost? Why is Chuck Schumer now performing circumcisions at my local hospital? Can I opt out? What do you mean there is an individual mandate requiring me to carry insurance? What if I want to choose not to have insurance? Then I’ll have the IRS on my tail, enforcing a fine? What? When I’m close to kicking the bucket, are you going to kick it for me? Barbara Boxer is not a real boxer, so why is she speed-bag training with my colostomy bag? How is the country going to pay for this? Isn’t this stripping away more of my freedom to choose my own doctor/hospital/treatment? This is what they have in socialized countries, isn’t it? Why are you destroying the best health care system on earth? By the way, why is Al Franken now my wife’s ob-gyn?

Rather than answer these pointed questions, many Democrats either ducked them or canceled their scheduled town hall meetings altogether. When some of them did confront their constituents, they never revealed their true motive to build a Euro-style health care system. Obama gave scores of speeches in defense of his plan, including one before a joint session of Congress in September 2009 during which he made the preposterous claims that it was “not a government takeover,” that “no government bureaucrat would come between you and your doctor,” and that it would be “deficit neutral.” All ludicrous lies, and he knew it.

At one point, Obama even turned the most routine ailments into wildly disingenuous examples of rampant greed among doctors. “You come in and you’ve got a bad sore throat, or your child has a bad sore throat or has repeated sore throats,” he said in July 2009. “The doctor may look at the reimbursement system and say to himself, ‘You know what? I make a lot more money if I take this kid’s tonsils out.’”

A few days later, he ramped up his attack on doctors by insinuating that many of them are amputating limbs willy-nilly in the dogged pursuit of money: “Let’s take the example of diabetes,” he said. “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 thousand, fifty thousand dollars immediately that the surgeon is reimbursed.” Here comes Dr. McDreamy to take your blood pressure. Whoops! There goes your arm!

In trying to argue that warped pay incentives might encourage some physicians to order unnecessary tests and procedures, especially in Medicare—a legitimate point—Obama clumsily insulted doctors by suggesting that many are greedy pigs performing unneeded surgeries to rob their patients blind. The hyperbole and lies were part of the orchestrated campaign, if not to win public opinion for their vision of “reform,” to at least reduce the public’s resistance to it.

One Republican representative could not contain his outrage at being lied to yet again about ObamaCare. During Obama’s September 2009 address to Congress, Joe Wilson of South Carolina shouted, “You lie!” after Obama stated that illegal immigrants would not receive free coverage under his plan. On the substance, Wilson was right; the bill mandated that businesses provide health insurance to all employees, with no exemptions or provisions to screen out illegals, many of whom obtain jobs by using false identities. The practical effect is that millions of illegals would be covered under the law. Obama and Pelosi knew this too, but feigned outrage when Wilson inartfully pointed it out. The thing that scared Obama and Pelosi the most was the possibility of Joe Wilson’s shout heard ’round the world becoming a trend because, if that started, from then on, you’d have two or three hundred congressmen and senators screaming “Liar!” for the duration of every speech Obama would deliver for the rest of his presidency.

Furthermore, in mid-2011, Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services announced it was transferring $28.8 million in ObamaCare funds to sixty-seven community health centers. Of that amount, “approximately $8.5 million will be used … to target migrant and seasonal farm workers,” and grant recipients will not be required to check the immigration status of people seeking health services. “You lie,” indeed!

Obama and the leftists also lied about the most fundamental elements of the bill. Its projected costs were manipulated through accounting gimmicks such as double counting, directing taxpayer funds to ObamaCare while shielding that same money for Medicare, Social Security, and other programs. If you tried using the same $100 bill twice for different things, you might be measured for an orange jumpsuit. But when they used such fraudulent techniques to make Obama-Care seem fiscally reasonable, those lies were simply considered the necessary means to an end. The Congressional Budget Office issued ten-year cost projections that varied from close to a trillion dollars to over a trillion dollars, but it could only process whatever numbers were handed to them. Junk numbers in, junk numbers out. By mid-2011, even Obama’s chief health care kook, Health and Human Services secretary Kathleen Sebelius, was forced to admit to the fraudulent double counting. And neither she nor anyone else responsible for ObamaCare could or would tell us if the more than $500 billion in proposed Medicare cuts to help pay for it would ever materialize, or if the “doctor fix”—a hike in Medicare reimbursement rates—which was dropped to game the CBO score, would be restored. The truth is that nobody knows for sure how much ObamaCare will actually cost, although ten-year estimates now range from about $2 trillion to over $5 trillion. Given the explosive costs of government-run health care programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, it’s safe to assume that the higher-end estimates are more accurate. As the European examples have proven for decades, socialized medicine neither contains costs nor improves quality of care, but it transfers wealth really well.

As public opposition to the bill grew more heated and the cost projections jumped all over the map, the leftists tried to leverage the emotional component of health care by spinning tall tales about “health insurance victims,” the most famous of whom was Obama’s own mother. Obama often cited the example of Stanley Ann Dunham as he made the case for his government takeover. Tightly gripping the podium in front of him, he would make the case for a ban on preexisting exclusions by insurers by recalling his mother’s deathbed fight with her insurer. “There’s something fundamentally wrong about that,” he’d say.