Shortly after the House approved the massive, historic health-care legislation and sent it to President Obama for his signature, the president declared the vote “proved that this government – a government of the people and by the people – still works for the people.”
In fact, according to Pollster.com, which tracks surveys, eight non-partisan polls surveyed Americans about attitudes towards the legislation just before the vote. None showed a majority of support. In fact, Obama’s “the people” is closer to a third of the electorate.
But when you dig deeper, looking at specific responses such as those showing “strong” support or “strong” disapproval, it looks even worse.
Americans want health care reform, but they clearly didn’t want this bill. Why didn’t Congress go back to the drawing board to present more palatable legislation? Read about it in my NRO piece, “The People Speak.”
I have repeatedly defended Obama against what I’ve considered unfair attacks from the right. I believe his actions for the most part have not been nearly as “liberal” as some have claimed. It’s wrong to use his middle name of “Hussein” used against him, as if he could have chosen it in any case. And I don’t care for the conspiracy theories such as his alleged foreign birth.
But one of my objections to all this is it weakens legitimate arguments against those actions and words of his that truly threaten our nation.
That includes his utterly outrageous claim following the House vote approving the health care bill.
The vote, he said last night, “proved that this government – a government of the people and by the people – still works for the people.”
Just for using that cliche he merits 20,000 years in purgatory. I trust even my non-Catholic friends will stand by me on that.
But beyond that, we have those pesky surveys that repeatedly showed “the people” opposed the legislation. They include Gallup, Rasmussen, Fox, Pew, NBC/Wall Street Journal, and others. All were released anywhere from days to a week before the vote. All show only about a third of the electorate wanted the legislation to pass.
Then there are the numbers in the House vote itself.
It squeaked by with just seven more yeas than nays, or 50.8 percent of those voting. It got zero votes from opposition party and had 17 defectors from the majority party. That doesn’t invalidate the vote, of course. It legally passed. But is that the kind of victory margin you’d really want for sweeping legislation that will affect all Americans presumably for the rest of our history?
Obviously it’s not what Obama would have wanted. But what he wanted more was a political victory and a massive expansion of government, and now he’s got them. Goody for him. But don’t pretend this is what we wanted.
Declaring “I love numbers,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared after getting a thumbs up from the Congressional Budget Office on Thursday just before a scheduled vote on health care legislation. The budget office found that the House changes to the Senate legislation will cut $138 billion from the federal deficit. Opponents have showed the figures are essentially mythical. Certainly numbers have worked against Pelosi in a very critical area, namely the idea that preventative care and wellness programs can save us money. That too, is a myth, as I make abundantly clear in “The Preventative Care Myth,” my article in today’s NRO.
Faust Wertz is a great interviewer and it’s always a pleasure to be on her show. Today we discussed Toyota, health care legislation (including an NRO piece I have upcoming today), and Mike’s need for financial support to keep doing what he’s doing.
by Hans Bader on March 8, 2010 · 2 comments
in Health and Illness, Healthcare, Insurance, International, Legal, Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Precaution & Risk, Regulation, Sanctimony
The health care bills backed by President Obama will cost $2.3 trillion, not the $900 billion Obama claims, and will be a “budgetary disaster” that drives up the national debt, explains health care expert James C. Capretta. The Obama administration managed to hide $1.4 trillion in costs generated by the health care reform bill though a series of budgetary “gimmicks” that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is required to treat as valid in scoring the bill’s enormous cost.
Although the CBO is low-balling the costs of ObamaCare, even it concedes that as a whole, “President Obama’s policies would add more than $9.7 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.”
ObamaCare spends money on frills like “cultural competency,” while cutting spending on crucial things like anesthesia.
Most Americans oppose the health care legislation backed by the president. It would reduce lifesaving medical innovation, raise taxes, drive up insurance premiums, break many campaign promises, and increase state budget deficits. It would jeopardize the quality of medical care, while imposing restrictions that failed when tried at the state level. It ignores advice from doctors and federal experts, and lessons from countries with universal health care, about how to keep costs down.
Fact-checkers say Obama is lying about health care. Obama often contradicts himself. In the very same speech, Obama claimed that Medicare is “unsustainable” and “running out of money,” then contradicted himself by claiming that “Medicare is a government program that works really well,” making it a model for national health care. The bill does nothing to curb massive waste and fraud in Medicare and Medicaid, even though it proposes to make massive cuts in Medicare (cuts so painful that most of them will never happen: year after year, Congress waives “the annual cut in fees paid by Medicare to physicians” mandated by an earlier law).
A CNN commentary noted that Obama’s plan would take away “5 freedoms,” contradicting Obama’s claim that the bill will leave you free to choose your doctor and keep your health care plan without government interference.
ObamaCare has also attracted criticism from groups like the Civil Rights Commission for containing both racial preferences and lower standards for treatment in predominantly-minority institutions, potentially harming both white applicants and minority patients. This racial discrimination appears to violate court rulings like the Supreme Court’s Adarand decision, and the Rothe ruling by the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals.
It’s fine to celebrate the Massachusetts victory of Scott Brown. I like how Daily Show host Jon Stewart put it: “The Kennedy legacy goes down to a naked guy who owns a truck.” (He once posed for Cosmopolitan.)
But remember from civics class that the legislation only need 51 votes to pass (technically 50, with Biden as tie-braker) and all Brown’s win does is allow a filibuster with one vote to spare. And as the Washington Post’s Steven Pearlstein writes today:
There is very little in the latest version of the health-care bill that Maine’s two Republican senators haven’t supported in the past or couldn’t support in the future. In succumbing to the intense social and political pressure from their caucus, both Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins flunked the leadership test last year. Massachusetts has now given them a second chance to redeem their reputations and political fortunes in a state that has always valued independence over party loyalty.
So here’s to the naked truckdriver, but we need to continue to get the word out on the need for health care reform but the terrible problems with the legislation that the Democrats are trying to foist upon us.
The health care legislation backed by the president and congressional leaders will increase Americans’ health care costs by more than $200 billion, concludes an expert at the federal Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services.
Earlier, Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), a lawyer, argued that the “individual mandate” in the health care bill legislation, which forces people to buy health insurance, is unconstitutional. Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum likewise is questioning whether it is constitutional to force people to do so.
This so-called “individual mandate” is unprecedented and appears to exceed Congress’s power under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution. As the Congressional Budget Office noted in 1994, “A mandate requiring all individuals to purchase health insurance would be an unprecedented form of federal action. The government has never required people to buy any good or service as a condition of lawful residence in the United States.”
As a news story notes, in Supreme Court rulings issued in 1995 and 2000, “the high court said the commerce clause is limited to economic activities that substantially affect interstate trade.” (I was an attorney in the latter ruling, United States v. Morrison (2000).) As UPI notes, “the weight of Supreme Court jurisprudence seems to favor a Commerce Clause challenge” to the health care legislation.
The individual mandate does not regulate activities, much less economic activities, but rather inactivity, by penalizing those who decline to buy health insurance. That exceeds Congress’s powers under the Supreme Court’s Morrison ruling, as I explained earlier.
The health care legislation also contains unconstitutional racial preferences for minority applicants, and lower standards of care for patients in predominantly-minority institutions. These drew criticism from the Civil Rights Commission.
Most Americans oppose the health care legislation. It would reduce lifesaving medical innovation, raise taxes, drive up insurance premiums and the deficit, break many campaign promises, and impose heavy burdens on state budgets. It would also jeopardize the quality of medical care for many, while imposing restrictions that failed when tried at the state level, and ignoring advice from federal and academic experts, and lessons from countries with universal health care, about how to keep costs down.
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