August 17, 2009
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Obama’s Lying Again: This Ain’t Compromise
Our Dear Leader Supreme Dictator for Life His Royal Majesty Lord Barack Hussien Obama The Most Merciful said that he was ready to drop the public option from the healthcare bill and the American people are supposed to see this as compromise. But Sen. Richard Shelby correctly assessed that this move was “a step away from the government takeover of the health care system.” Translation: removing the public option is no compromise.
Senator Shelby is absolutely right. The way that Liberals view compromise is thusly: I win, you lose, then you lose some more. (Chapter Title from Confrontational Politics)
Barry has learned a thing or two from the insurance business. It’s called dangling a carrot.
For instance, if you are in a wreck, there is something in your auto policy called Pain & Suffering. If you think that this misleading title is the title of the clause of your policy that pays for your medical bills, you would be wrong. Pain & Suffering in this context is compensation, typically no less than three but up to five times the cost of medical expenses. The idea is that you lost more than the money it took to get you fixed up; you also lost time and income from your job, etc. So Pain & Suffering is designed to step in and compensate you for what you lost, even potentially giving you a little bit more than what you had to start with so you can get back on your feet again and “get on with the business of living.”
So how does this work in practice? First, the insurance company doesn’t tell you about this clause of the policy because it’s nothing but a black hole for them. Instead, they try to get you to settle the claim as fast as possible because once you sign on the dotted line, they are no longer obligated to pay out.
So let’s say that you’ve just been enlightened by my column here but got into a wreck after reading my words. You then call up your insurance company and ask about Pain & Suffering. Your adjuster will say something like this: “Awe shucks! Yeah, I forgot to mention that. Does $500 sound good to you?” And this is where you screw up. Your adjuster is hanging a carrot out for you to be content with. In reality, your medical bills were $1000, so you’re entitled to no less than $3K and potentially as much as $5K. So you ask for the $5K and your adjuster gets all flabbergasted saying “That’s impossible. Are you out of your mind?” That’s when you say, “Alright then. I’ll have my lawyer sue for $7K.” If you insurance company sticks to their stonewalling strategies, they wind up and pay out more money than they had to compensating not only you but your lawyer.
Now let’s apply that logic to what the White House has done.
The White House has fought hand and tooth to not even tell you about the Pain & Suffering that’s due you. In fact, Barry has on ever occasion possible attempted to sell the American public on this bill of goods that “50 million Americans are uninsured” and that’s where the real problem is. If only we insured the uninsured we’d have clean water, clean air and rainbow powered cities. But of course that’s not how it works. If you insure all these people, they all eventually get sick and ultimately die.
Now we all know that there are Liberals on the Hill like ex-Governor of Colorado Richard Lamm who think that “Elderly people who are terminally ill have a duty to die and get out of the way instead of trying to prolong their lives by artificial means.” Obama has said as much himself when he suggested that it would be better for all if the elderly took pain killers instead of opting for expensive procedures and drugs.
The fact of the matter is, HR 3200, the Kennedy Bill, or any other piece of legislation that comes from the Obama Administration on health care is bunk. Obama doesn’t want to reform a damned thing. What he wants to do is be able to play God and decide who gets to live and who gets to die. Treatment will be based on how much political power you have.
Obama wanted this plan approved by Congress and on his desk by the August recess. Instead, what happened was the American people read the bill and have told the President and his goons under no uncertain terms to go to hell. So Barry sent thugs constituents from SEIU, ACORN and various government agencies and officials to scare and beat people into submission. That hasn’t worked. Barry then tired running a snitch website and we as America have rallied around the Fourth Amendment and again told Barry “NO” and again Barry doesn’t listen. So now he’s offered a compromise: I’ll give up on part of my plan if you’ll let me have the rest of it..
The answer is NO! NO! NO! NO! just like the scene in It’s a Wonderful Life when George Bailey shakes hands with Potter after Potter tries to persuade George to give up the Building and Loan to work under contract for Potter. Removing the public option is just a way for Obama and the rest of his administration (Nacy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Hillary Rodham Rodham, etc.) to advance their agenda. They aren’t given up anything.
Right now they have to leave the table empty-handed. This so-called “compromise” is nothing more than a dangling a carrot. Don’t fall for it like Senator Shelby when he says, “we ought to look at it. I think it’s a far cry from the original proposals.” NO IT’S NOT! If Senator Shelby had stopped talking when he said this is “[one] step away from the government takeover of the health care system”, then he too would see what a fallacy it is to play ball under these new terms. There is no reason we have to dance to Obama’s tune.
Folks, this fight is nearly won. The Obama isn’t retreating just yet, he’s falling back and regrouping. Obama has done nothing but lie since he’s gotten into office. This is just more of the same. Call your reps in both houses and tell them to VOTE NO on healthcare reform.
Comments (23)
“I’ve lost so now it’s time for compromise – do what I want.”
Maybe he’s hoping our brains will explode as the logic circuits fry trying to process that nonsense.
@JJ_Ames - Barry’s hoping that just like with the Contract with America we’ll take our bat and ball and go home. Well that’s not going to happen on my watch.
It is almost worth it just to watch all the people who just 2 years ago were screaming about descent being the highest form of patriotism. Seeing them now calling protesters un American, u patriotic, racist, redneck, idiots, anything they can think of in their frustration
@trunthepaige - Yes, it is amusing to watch, but I do not want to do so at the cost of the Country.
@trunthepaige - I thought I’d surely get a rec for this post.
@ProfessorTom - Oh here, I am not the fastest to do that.
@trunthepaige - I would ask you what you’re fastest at, but I’m afraid that I wouldn’t like the answer.
“Now we all know that there are Liberals on the Hill like ex-Governor of
Colorado Richard Lamm who think that “Elderly people who are terminally
ill have a duty to die and get out of the way instead of trying to
prolong their lives by artificial means. Obama has said as much
himself when he suggested that it would be better for all if the
elderly took pain killers instead of opting for expensive procedures
and drugs.”
I don’t know about Richard Lamm’s statement, but this is a delusional misreading of what the President stated. The only way you can draw that conclusion is if you bring to the table some preconceived notion of the President as some evil monster out to get rid of people.
All he is saying, is that end of life decisions will be between physicians and patients and that that has nothing to do with the health care bill they are trying to pass. The hypothetical he states that it might make sense for someone’s mother to take a pain killer instead of having a surgery is a reasonable hypothetical. It in fact happens a lot. A lot of times very invasive surgeries greatly reduce people’s quality of life at the end of life and cause more harm than good. Other times they work great as in the case of the woman’s mother asking the question. But the President is saying that getting bureaucracy, either government OR insurance out of the equation in such situations is in the best interest of everyone.
The idea that the President wants all or even any old people to die and get out of the way is not reasonably supported by the evidence you have provided not even if you listen to the whole clip in context (posted by the same person) here.
At best you can say he was a little insensitive and didn’t directly speak to the person involved about her mother’s situation and those like her. I think that’s true. He missed an opportunity to say something more powerful and effective. But nothing he said there is untrue or even in my opinion at all unreasonable.
And it’s certainly no indication that there’s this crazy conspiracy of monstrous elderly hating liberals out to take control over health care in order to make everyone’s lives miserable.
@nephyo - I don’t think that Obama has our best intentions at heart. If he did, he would have never demanded that the bill be past before the August recess.
Based on other things that Obama has said we can arrive at the conclusion that he does agree with Lamm. For instance, Obama has talked about how that under his plan private insurance companies would have to compete with the public option and that by failing to give the same amount of care for a lower cost than the public option it means that the private sector is inefficient. The problem with this argument is that the government is the regulator of the health care system. It sets the rules. Additionally, if the government can’t pay for something, all it need do is print more money. So given these two facts alone, the government can change the law at will to favor itself without the need for being fiscally responsible. How does an entity with limited resources that has to play a game with ever-changing rules compete with that? You’re no longer talking about the Free Market at work. Instead, you’re talking about regulating the market to death.
Besides, the whole issue is being framed as the reason for the current healthcare crisis is because people aren’t insured. That’s just insane. What that kind of logic appeals to is someone who has their hand out saying “It’s too expensive, someone else should pay for it.” If you’re going to give healthcare away for free, why stop there? Why not do the same thing with college and houses? Those things are expensive too. And once you’ve given everyone a house and a college education, they are going to need a way to commute to work. Cars are expensive. You’ll need to provide those too. Don’t forget to throw in vacations to exotic lands far away. Those cost lots of money too.
The fact of the matter is, the reason the system is broken is because of regulations put in place by Democrats and their buddies trial lawyers ala John Edwards. If we really wanted to reform healthcare, we’d limit the liability of honest mistakes while at the same time throwing the book at intentional, willful acts of destruction and negligence. We’d provide incentives for people who want to get into medicine to get the training they need and close our shortages in those markets, thus causing the Free Market to work via competition. By de-regulating the industry and creating an environment for competition to flourish, the price of medical services will be driven down to levels that routine check ups and the sniffles can be treated at rates that people aren’t deluded to thinking that they can’t get treatment if they aren’t insured because it costs too much.
What the debate is really about is people who haven’t planned for the unknown and set aside money for emergencies. It’s those people who haven’t been responsible for themselves that is causing a problem for those of us who go to our jobs every day and make this country work. Once you fix those problems, the only other issue to talk about is people who are in this country illegally who are costing us taxpayers egregious sums.
@ProfessorTom - I just said pretty much the same thing (in you know, my words) on someone else’s journal. It surprises me that we agree to this extent, especially given the hysterics you spew and giving conservatives a bad name and being just as asinine as the liberals, but on the other side of the coin.
Well done.
@ehowton - Even a broken clock…the proverb is somewhat musty.
@ProfessorTom - I find it interesting that you are saying that the President wants old people to die and then making an argument that is effectively asserting that people who have not saved enough money are irresponsible and deserve whatever they get. Likewise you imply the same for people in this country illegally.
You say the government should not try to help them. That it’s too expensive for the health care system. In effect you are issuing many of them a death sentence.
What about the people who get hit by a huge medical financial hardship soon after they first start working on a job that doesn’t provide insurance or right after College before they even have insurance? They haven’t had time to save the money. What about the people who just made bad investments or were DUPED into making bad investments and so don’t have money saved for their health care? What about people who just have damnably bad luck and keep getting sick over and over again and exhaust all their savings they THOUGHT would be enough? What about people who were cheated in the housing crises and forced into bankruptcy? What about people who become disabled? What about people who lose their jobs? Should no one ever help those people? What if you’re old now and always assumed you’d have medicare? Should all of those people be screwed? No government health care for ANYONE? No matter what???
“I don’t think that Obama has our best
intentions at heart. If he did, he would have never demanded that the
bill be past before the August recess.”
I can’t read the President’s mind. However, it is illogical to say that because he wanted the bill to pass before the August recess that therefore he must not have the nation’s best interest at heart. That’s way too big a leap. Imagine if you would for a second what would the President do if he thought that there was a desperately pressing need for Health Care reform that would help millions of Americans and that he thought he could get Congress to pass a bill that would implement great ideas to fix those problems?
Obviously he would try to get it passed as quickly as possible. He’d want to start helping people as soon as humanly possible. Wouldn’t you? IF he didn’t no doubt everyone would be calling him evil for NOT wanting the bill passed so soon.
But we don’t know if that’s his reasoning either. His stated reasoning is that “In Washington you have to set deadlines or nothing gets done”. That makes sense as a plausible reason too. Republicans and Democrats alike OFTEN criticize Congress as a do nothing institution that drags its feet all the time. It stands to reason that a President wanting to break that inertia might set a deadline in order to push Congress to act. In fact that happens all the time with every other President we’ve had. They call for bills to be passed by certain time frames. It isn’t unusual and it’s not a sign of an evil conspiracy.
Still another explanation that we hear often in the news and media (I’ve heard it on CNN, FOX News, NPR and read it in The New York Times) is that Obama wanted to push the bill to pass because he wanted to take advantage of his political capital and early popularity to get it through congress. This is sort of a cynical perspective but it could certainly be true. It’s not unusual in any way though. ALL Presidents, as these commentators often point out, try to pass their most ambitious endeavors early in their Presidency when they have the most political clout.
Any of these explanations could have been the reason for the President’s insistence. Another explanation as you imply that he was trying to pull one over on the American people. I find that last explanation unlikely and few in the media except on the extreme right advocate it. But it’s still possible. They’re all viable explanations. That you suggest that only the most negative view of his insistence MUST be the truth and then suggest that that is evidence that Obama doesn’t care about anyone I think is disingenuous.
“If you’re going to give healthcare away for free, why stop there?”
Or you could just as easily go the other way. Why should we give out education in high school for free or elementary school or kindergarden? Who needs social security, or medicare, or unemployment insurance? If people don’t deserve services for free, why not just get rid of the post office? Why not make people pay for every road they drive on? Why not a charge for every stop sign and traffic light? Why not a special price to pay so you can build your own bridge when you need to cross the river, or your own tunnel to get you past the mountain?
Or for that matter, why not the police? You should have to hire your own private security officers to protect you from crime and patrol your neighborhoods. Your own private firefighters and EMTs? Why not make people pay to be able to dial 911? What about the military? You want something done about terrorists, why not make it so you have to pay for your own private army to go to war and hunt down the terrorists?
And who needs FDIC insurance? If you put your money in the bad bank that makes grotesque bets with your money that’s on you you know? Why should the government get involved? And maybe make it so that you have to pay to get your own food inspected? And toys and other products imported over seas. If someone produces bad milk that kills babies and you miake the mistake of paying for it, well too bad for you. It’s your own private responsibility.
Why not make everyone pay every penny for every once of water they drink and for every gram of trash that gets removed from their property? Why not make the utilities all private for profit unregulated institutions? Why not take the government out of all of it?
Obviously this line of reasoning is absurd.
The place at which you draw the line between private and public institutions is a matter of social choice. That means we debate it and decide as a people where we want to draw the line. Precisely what is happening right now with regard to Health Care. It’s a sloppy chaotic debate with corporate interests on both sides manipulating people shamelessly, but it IS a debate. And we’ll get some kind of conlusion out of it and that will be the line we draw. We’ll stop there, because we decided to.
One day we may well decide we want everyone to have a right to a similar quality education or a simialr quality health care and maybe even one day a right to a home and food to eat. I don’t really see how that would be so utterly horrible, but whether it is or not is irrelevant. We’re nowhere near that right now. All we’re talking about right now is making it so that people who are uninsured are either A. required to buy their own health care, or B. provided subsidies to make it easier for them to afford it when it is too costly for them. THAT’s the whole argument for universally providing health care. It means that no matter how bad your means the government isn’t going to just let you grow unhealthy and die. That strikes me as fundamentally moral.
Why should the people with more money have a fundamental right to be more healthy than the poor?
“regulations put in place by Democrats and their buddies trial lawyers ala John Edwards”
The absolute facts are that tort reform and malpractice lawsuits are a very minor percentage of the problem that is creating high health care costs. There have been study after study that has shown this. For example, the non-partisan CBO did a study in 2004 under the Bush Administration when he was proposing tort reform. The study determined that less than 2% of overall health care costs had anything to do with malpractice. They determined that even if you had strong regulation that could achieve as high as a 30% reduction in malpractice suits it would amount to only a 0.5% reduction in health care costs. Most other studies I’ve seen show an even lower effect. The Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA) found that Health Care costs have risen 74.7% in constant dollars since 1988 whereas malpractice costs have only increased only about 5.7%.
Tort reform can probably be good for helping to correct some of the negative incentives making medicine more expensive. But that alone would be a miniscule impact. Likewise not enough doctors is also a factor but not a huge one (and the AMA doesn’t WANT to get more doctors at least not more specialist since it would drop the premium they’d be able to demand). It should be noted also that the Government currently is heavily involved in helping to provide resources to the schools that train our doctors and grants for the students that go to them. Asking for government to engage in reforms to bring in more doctors, be it by importing them or training new ones is in effect asking for more government involvement in Health Care, not less.
Rather the driving factor of Health Care costs is increased hospital stays and too many wasteful procedures. This is why the Brittish system does everything in its power to keep people out of hospitals and to prevent people from getting sick. To use the obvious example, it’s much MUCH cheaper to convince someone to stop smoking then it is to treat someone for lung cancer. A trip to a doctor’s office early that catches a small tumour could prevent that from becoming a devastating case of cancer requiring extreme surgery and long sequences of chemotherapy. Hence getting less people into hospitals. Actually in this case, insuring people who are uninsured actually saves money to the system overall (though not to the government up front). Because emergency room visits are amongst the most costly we currently pay for and there the government DOES currently pick up the tab and for very good reason. One it’s just the right thing to do. And two taking the time to check people’s insurance for clearance for a procedure would probably cost many patients their lives. So at the emergency room everyone is covered at great cost to the system. So it’s in our interest to get people treatment long before they ever get that far.
On the other hand there’s the wasteful procedures that doctors sometimes employ. Some of that is defensive medicine. But if you start looking more carefully it’s not the institutions most afraid of malpractice that prescribe the most unnecessary procedures. It’s the places that are rich and heavily profit driven that do that. Places where doctors don’t cooperate and doctors and hospitals are paid more per costly procedure that they can get the insurance company to cover. The cut throat competitive arena selects the procedures that provide the most bang for hte buck as far as insurance companies, doctors, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies are concerned but which have nothing to do with patient health. None of those players are given any incentive to insure the best outcome for their patients healthwise.
You’re right to focus on incentives. Note that that’s the language Obama uses often as well. For in the current system there is no doubt that the incentives are screwed up royally. But it’s not because of government involvement. It’s the opposite. The private system has never succeeded in aligning incentives the right way. And that only makes sense because profit is their motive and no matter how well meaning the people working at these private companies might be, it’s simply a fact that all of these organizations have no particular desire of providing for health care for anyone but the healthy and the rich.
Will the new system change that? I don’t know. It hasn’t even been finalized yet. There’s still a half a dozen different proposals on the board. And they change almost daily responding to public and private pressure. But I hope it will be a step in the right direction. But just because the government is involved and people you don’t like happen to be in charge of that government does not imply that any solution they come up with MUST defacto be a bad system. That remains to be seen.
we should tax the rich for this!
@trunthepaige - Amen
@nephyo - What is delusional is to not believe Obama is evil. Take his own words at face value when he said we should look at who advises him to find out what he believes. One of his advisers on the health care issue is Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel. And in his writings he makes it perfectly clear that health care for people over 60 should be rationed. In fact the lowest probablility of getting health care are newborns and those over 60 according to the graph in his writings. Of COURSE it’s not going to say in the bill directly.. “Kill the old people!”. The truth if carefully obfiscated behind layers of lawyer babble, cross references within the bill and without. It is up to sane American citizens to look at the details and find the links since Congress has abdicated it’s duties to special interest groups and radicals. And then just look at other countries where similar plans are carried out like Canada, and the UK. They are failures. Why adopt failed plans?
I think our system does need some reform…but I’m talking about removing government regulations kind of reform, not more government involvement. Even broken, our system is still far better than what other countries have.
I’m not taking the carrot… I’ve been uninsured since March but I don’t think others should have to pay for my health care. Forget it, Mr. President. I won’t sacrifice my freedoms.
@firetyger - You keep fighting the good fight.
The public option, if done correctly will do to the health insurance industry what the post office does to the shipping industry. The post office isn’t doing that good or that bad. They’re competing and sometimes they’re better and sometimes they aren’t better than the private sector companies. Dropping the public option I think is a huge error on the democrats part. It’s a simple, elegant solution that uses capitalism to fix the problem of rising health care costs and dwindling benefits which is what our current system is doing.
@SirDoc - so Obama is evil because one of his advisors has done some writing that given a certain way of reading it leads one to believe that that adviser is evil? I hope you call GWB evil too, because Cheney is blatantly evil and was his Vice President!
Just to be clear though I simply do not advocate that line of logic at all. You can always choose to only accept the advice you get that is reasonable and a normal person does just that. Of course if one of their advisers only have bad advice to give then that does reflect poorly on the advisee.
@firetyger - This is for both of you and possibly everyone else who reads this blog. The American health care system is not the best in the world. No matter which metric you pick we are not number one and in most cases we aren’t even in the top 10. Should we move to socialized medicine? I don’t think so. Should we take the good parts of these other systems and adopt them. Fuck yeah!
@locketine - I fail to see how being dumped into a big federal database and having some bureaucrat decided if I get treatment is better than the current system of I can purchase whatever service I need provided I have the cash.
@ProfessorTom - When you buy a plan it’s some insurance bureaucrat deciding what treatments you can have. And yes, they have a big database too. The point of having the government do it is that they are driven to provide services to the consumer and not profits to the investor. You can still choose to have whichever insurance company you want decide your fate when it comes to health care but at least this way we’ll have one option that puts the patient first.
@locketine - The consumer in this case is the government. “Howso?” I hear you cry. The answer is simple.
The government is supposed to be providing all these services at a low rate for citizens. However, as we have seen with the likes of Social Security, Medicade/Medcare, etc. the surpluses that have been built up have been pilfered for political gain. Since the government (read: those in Washington) want as much money left in the government coffers to buy as many votes as possible, the government will simply deny care on the rationale that it’s too expensive a burden to put on the taxpayer. So again, all the public option does is infringe on Fourth Amendment rights and give bureaucrats the power to deny coverage to their political enemies, meanwhile using all of those tax payer dollars to buy votes.
Insurance companies aren’t the biggest problem. The biggest problem is not limiting the liability on the physician as well as not throwing out frivolous lawsuits.
@ProfessorTom - Medicare’s funding is separate from the government’s coffers. They can’t pilfer it like you’re claiming. The public option will be set up the same way. Such an issue doesn’t exist. If you think I’m wrong please provide a reliable source.
I’ve read several statistics already that put liability claims at less than 1% of health care costs. Seeing as how my doctor charges me 30% less for paying him in cash I’m guessing insurance companies make up a much larger percentage. We should probably reform that system too though. Keep cutting the waste until the system is as lean as it can be.
@locketine - Keep cutting the waste until the system is as lean as it can be
On this point, we agree.
Right on. We need to stay aware and focused. The worst thing you can do is believe someone who has made governing (i.e. controlling) others their career.