Obamacare worth the price to Democrats

[Bronx33]

This....

http://www.ocregister.com/articles/h...overnment.html

So there was President Obama, giving his bazillionth speech on health care, droning yet again that "now is the hour when we must seize the moment," the same moment he's been seizing every day of the week for the past year, only this time his genius photo-op guys thought it would look good to have him surrounded by men in white coats.

Why is he doing this? Why let "health" "care" "reform" stagger on like the rotting husk in a low-grade creature feature who refuses to stay dead no matter how many stakes you pound through his chest?



Because it's worth it. Big time. I've been saying in this space for two years that the governmentalization of health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture. It redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state in fundamental ways that make limited government all but impossible. In most of the rest of the Western world, there are still nominally "conservative" parties, and they even win elections occasionally, but not to any great effect (Let's not forget that Jacques Chirac was, in French terms, a "conservative").

The result is a kind of two-party one-party state: Right-of-center parties will once in a while be in office, but never in power, merely presiding over vast left-wing bureaucracies that cruise on regardless.

Republicans seem to have difficulty grasping this basic dynamic. Less than three months ago, they were stunned at the way the Democrats managed to get 60 senators to vote for the health bill. Then Scott Brown took them back down to 59, and Republicans were again stunned to find the Dems talking about ramming this thing into law through the parliamentary device of "reconciliation." And, when polls showed an ever larger number of Americans ever more opposed to Obamacare (by margins approaching three-to-one), Republicans were further stunned to discover that, in order to advance "reconciliation," Democrat reconsiglieres had apparently been offering (illegally) various cosy Big Government sinecures to swing-state congressmen in order to induce them to climb into the cockpit for the kamikaze raid to push the bill through. The Democrats understand that politics is not just about Tuesday evenings every other November, but about everything else, too.

A year or two back, when the Canadian Islamic Congress attempted to criminalize my writing north of the border by taking me to the Canadian "Human Rights" Commission, a number of outraged American readers wrote to me, saying, "You need to start kicking up a fuss about this, Steyn, and then maybe Canadians will get mad and elect a conservative government that will end this nonsense."

Makes perfect sense. Except that Canada already has a Conservative government under a Conservative prime minister, and the very head of the "human rights" commission investigating me was herself the Conservative appointee of a Conservative minister of justice. Makes no difference.

Once the state swells to a certain size, the people available to fill the ever-expanding number of government jobs will be statists – sometimes hard-core Marxist statists, sometimes social-engineering multiculti statists, sometimes fluffily "compassionate" statists, but always statists. The short history of the post-war welfare state is that you don't need a president-for-life if you've got a bureaucracy-for-life: The people can elect "conservatives," as the Germans have done and the British are about to do, and the Left is mostly relaxed about it because, in all but exceptional cases (Thatcher), they fulfill the same function in the system as the first-year boys at wintry English boarding schools who, for tuppence-ha'penny or some such, would agree to go and warm the seat in the unheated lavatories until the prefects strolled in and took their rightful place.

Republicans are good at keeping the seat warm. A bigtime GOP consultant was on TV, crowing that Republicans wanted the Dems to pass Obamacare because it's so unpopular it will guarantee a GOP sweep in November.

OK, then what? You'll roll it back – like you've rolled back all those other unsustainable entitlements premised on cobwebbed actuarial tables from 80 years ago? Like you've undone the federal Department of Education and of Energy and all the other nickel'n'dime novelties of even a universally reviled one-term loser like Jimmy Carter? Andrew McCarthy concluded a shrewd analysis of the political realities thus:

"Health care is a loser for the Left only if the Right has the steel to undo it. The Left is banking on an absence of steel. Why is that a bad bet?"

Indeed. Look at it from the Dems' point of view. You pass Obamacare. You lose the 2010 election, which gives the GOP co-ownership of an awkward couple of years. And you come back in 2012 to find your health care apparatus is still in place, a fetid behemoth of toxic pustules oozing all over the basement, and, simply through the natural processes of government, already bigger and more expensive and more bureaucratic than it was when you passed it two years earlier. That's a huge prize, and well worth a midterm timeout.

I've been bandying comparisons with Britain and France, but that hardly begins to convey the scale of it. Obamacare represents the government annexation of "one-sixth of the U.S. economy" – i.e., the equivalent of the entire British or French economy, or the entire Indian economy twice over. Nobody has ever attempted this level of centralized planning for an advanced society of 300 million people. Even the control-freaks of the European Union have never tried to impose a unitary "comprehensive" health care system from Galway to Greece. The Soviet Union did, of course, and we know how that worked out.

This "reform" is not about health care, and certainly not about "controlling costs." As with Medicare, it "controls" costs by declining to acknowledge them, or pay them. Dr. William Schreiber of North Syracuse, N.Y., told CNN that he sees 120 patients per week – about 30 percent on Medicare, 65 private on private insurance plans whose payments take into account the Medicare reimbursement rates, and about 5 percent who do it the old-fashioned way and write a check. He calculates that, under Obamacare, for every $5 he now makes, he'll get $2 in the future. Which suggests now would be a good time to retrain as a realtor or accountant, or the night clerk at the convenience store. Yet Congresswoman Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., justifies her support for Obamacare this way:

"I even had one constituent – you will not believe this, and I know you won't, but it's true – her sister died. This poor woman had no dentures. She wore her dead sister's teeth."

Is the problem of second-hand teeth a particular problem in this corner of New York? I haven't noticed an epidemic of ill-fitting dentures on recent visits to the Empire State. George Washington had wooden teeth, but, presumably, these days the Sierra Club would object to the clear-cutting. Yet, even granting Congresswoman Slaughter the benefit of the doubt, is annexing the equivalent of a G7 economy the solution to what would seem to be the statistically unrepresentative problem of her constituent's ill-fitting choppers? Is it worth reducing the next generation of Americans to indentured servitude to pay for this poor New Yorker's dentured servitude?

Yes. Because government health care is not about health care, it's about government. Once you look at it that way, what the Dems are doing makes perfect sense. For them.

[bpc]

This is exactly the point.

1. Pass healthcare reform for all, get people hooked up on the "government tends to my every need drug." This saturates illegals, minorities rooting for Obama cause he's black, and the perverse 10-30 generation which has been brainwashed over the past 20-30 years by the hippie college professors hell bent on transforming this country to their will.

2. Pass Immigration Reform allowing amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants currently in the US. SEIU throws a big illegal bonanza union party! "Can you read English? NO? Can you write English? No? Can you check this little box right here for us?

3. Pass the Card Check Bill - Allow everybody and their momma to become a union. Why wouldn't you want to? You see what special favors get you on that side from this current regime with Obama-care. Let's all jump in the boat! That way you can have some crazy violent Black Panther times stalking around your voter registration area intimidating you and letting you know what's up.

Awesome. Sounds like a great future.

[Bronx33]

That's why obama wants this so badly it really has nothing to do with the uninsured ( they are just an excuse) used to tug at the heart strings and after the dust settles the dems get more power that leans left for the future and we get stuck with rationed sub standard bureaucracy filled expensive health-care that reaches into our lives far beyond our health is concerned.

This is why the republicans oppose this disaster i would be pissed if they rolled over and played dead but the good news is obama went to far and over reached for too much in 1 year and the public is on to him and his socialist agenda they want nothing to do with his progressive dogshyt constitution eating policies.

[Spider]

.................

[barryr]

Pelosi is very brave telling other democrats to sacrifice their futures by voting for this nonsense since she knows she won't get challenged in her district, so her job is safe no matter what the result of the vote.

It is all about control and telling others how to live. Sorry, I don't need any of them to tell me. My life has been just fine. I don't need my hand held. Too bad if the left needs that, but most adults are just that, adults, and take responsibility for our decisions and don't a bunch of excuses.

[Pony Boy]

This tells it all in 5 seconds....

[Rigs11]

GOP health care refusal could backfire

(CNN) -- Most Republicans have opposed President Obama's health care bill from the first day he proposed reform. If the House passes the Senate bill in the next few days, it will probably do so without any Republican support.

In many ways, Republicans can benefit politically from their tough stand against the health care legislation. If the program does not work as expected and proves to be politically unpopular, Republicans can say they warned America. If health care premiums continue to rise and Americans feel that their policies have not been improved, Democrats will be to blame.

Regardless of whether the legislation passes, Republicans can already claim a victory, given that the struggle for legislation has lasted more than a year and tied up the rest of the Democratic agenda.

Opposing health care also provided conservatives with a rallying point that re-energized the party faithful and resulted in the creation of the Tea Party movement. Finally, the battle over health care was part of the reason that Democrats lost their filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.

Yet Republicans should be wary about celebrating too much. The strategy of obstruction poses significant risks.
The first risk is the most obvious. If this legislation proves to be popular, Republicans can easily be branded as the party of no.

Republicans have a long history in the 20th century of having to defend their record of opposition to popular programs. President Dwight Eisenhower famously told fellow Republicans to accept Social Security in the 1950s or suffer the political consequences. "Should any political party," Eisenhower said, "attempt to abolish Social Security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history."

During his campaign for the presidency in 1980, Ronald Reagan had to defend himself against charges that he had opposed the creation of Medicare in 1965.

A second danger is that Republicans have been so focused on health care, they have lost precious time dealing with the internal divisions and ideological weaknesses that were exposed in 2008. After that election, most Republicans were prepared to take a hard look at what had gone wrong. Some pointed to the fact that the party had been in power for so long, it became accustomed to the trappings of power as well as to the electoral benefits of government spending

Republicans were also aware that their party had run out of steam in terms of generating ideas to solve the problems that America faced in the 21st century.

When confronted with issues such as climate change or health care, Republicans instinctively turned to slogans about the free market that didn't offer much in the way of concrete solutions. This marked a stark contrast to the 1970s, when Republicans had emerged as the party of ideas after investing in think tanks like CATO and the American Enterprise Institute to challenge liberal dominance.

Moreover, the divisions among the different elements of the Republican Party have hampered Republican efforts in recent primary battles such as Texas and Florida. Without compelling ideas to unite Republicans -- such as Reagan's promotion of supply-side economics and anti-communism in the 1980s -- the party will continue to have a difficult time coming together.

A final danger is that the battle against health care will accelerate partisan warfare, which will come back to bite Republicans when or if they regain power. One of the many reasons that partisan polarization continues to intensify with each new Congress is that legislators come to Washington with powerful memories of earlier battles and seek retribution.

Whether it is Republicans thinking of the defeat of Robert Bork's Supreme Court nomination in 1987 or Democrats thinking about the Republican effort to impeach Bill Clinton in 1998, partisanship breeds more partisanship.

This year, Republicans have taken minority obstruction to new extremes, as was evident when Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby placed a unilateral hold on all of Obama's executive branch nominees. And Kentucky Sen. Jim Bunning was willing to single-handedly tie up a bill extending jobless benefits.

They have undertaken a scorched-earth legislative strategy. Democrats who have been frustrated with Republicans' use of the legislative process to hamper Obama's agenda will remember just how effectively a minority can obstruct.

Given that political reforms to diminish obstruction do not seem to be right around the corner, political retribution is a more likely outcome when control turns over to Republicans.

As the health care debate finally reaches a conclusion, Republicans need to realize that they still have a lot of work to do if they want to rebuild their party. Polls show that the public still does not think highly of the GOP, even as support for Obama and the Democratic Congress declines.

A recent leaked document from the Republican National Committee suggests that the party is planning to base its 2010 campaign on fear and negative attacks, rather than hope and ideas. Sometimes, in the enthusiasm over a battle, armies can lose sight of the war.

Republicans might have regained their fighting spirit over health care, but the strategy could prove to be costlier than they expect.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/03/0...ex.html?hpt=C2

[Bronx33]

did you even read the lead artical?

[rastaman]

Originally Posted by Bronx33

This....

http://www.ocregister.com/articles/h...overnment.html

So there was President Obama, giving his bazillionth speech on health care, droning yet again that "now is the hour when we must seize the moment," the same moment he's been seizing every day of the week for the past year, only this time his genius photo-op guys thought it would look good to have him surrounded by men in white coats.

Why is he doing this? Why let "health" "care" "reform" stagger on like the rotting husk in a low-grade creature feature who refuses to stay dead no matter how many stakes you pound through his chest?



Because it's worth it. Big time. I've been saying in this space for two years that the governmentalization of health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture. It redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state in fundamental ways that make limited government all but impossible. In most of the rest of the Western world, there are still nominally "conservative" parties, and they even win elections occasionally, but not to any great effect (Let's not forget that Jacques Chirac was, in French terms, a "conservative").

The result is a kind of two-party one-party state: Right-of-center parties will once in a while be in office, but never in power, merely presiding over vast left-wing bureaucracies that cruise on regardless.

Republicans seem to have difficulty grasping this basic dynamic. Less than three months ago, they were stunned at the way the Democrats managed to get 60 senators to vote for the health bill. Then Scott Brown took them back down to 59, and Republicans were again stunned to find the Dems talking about ramming this thing into law through the parliamentary device of "reconciliation." And, when polls showed an ever larger number of Americans ever more opposed to Obamacare (by margins approaching three-to-one), Republicans were further stunned to discover that, in order to advance "reconciliation," Democrat reconsiglieres had apparently been offering (illegally) various cosy Big Government sinecures to swing-state congressmen in order to induce them to climb into the cockpit for the kamikaze raid to push the bill through. The Democrats understand that politics is not just about Tuesday evenings every other November, but about everything else, too.

A year or two back, when the Canadian Islamic Congress attempted to criminalize my writing north of the border by taking me to the Canadian "Human Rights" Commission, a number of outraged American readers wrote to me, saying, "You need to start kicking up a fuss about this, Steyn, and then maybe Canadians will get mad and elect a conservative government that will end this nonsense."

Makes perfect sense. Except that Canada already has a Conservative government under a Conservative prime minister, and the very head of the "human rights" commission investigating me was herself the Conservative appointee of a Conservative minister of justice. Makes no difference.

Once the state swells to a certain size, the people available to fill the ever-expanding number of government jobs will be statists – sometimes hard-core Marxist statists, sometimes social-engineering multiculti statists, sometimes fluffily "compassionate" statists, but always statists. The short history of the post-war welfare state is that you don't need a president-for-life if you've got a bureaucracy-for-life: The people can elect "conservatives," as the Germans have done and the British are about to do, and the Left is mostly relaxed about it because, in all but exceptional cases (Thatcher), they fulfill the same function in the system as the first-year boys at wintry English boarding schools who, for tuppence-ha'penny or some such, would agree to go and warm the seat in the unheated lavatories until the prefects strolled in and took their rightful place.

Republicans are good at keeping the seat warm. A bigtime GOP consultant was on TV, crowing that Republicans wanted the Dems to pass Obamacare because it's so unpopular it will guarantee a GOP sweep in November.

OK, then what? You'll roll it back – like you've rolled back all those other unsustainable entitlements premised on cobwebbed actuarial tables from 80 years ago? Like you've undone the federal Department of Education and of Energy and all the other nickel'n'dime novelties of even a universally reviled one-term loser like Jimmy Carter? Andrew McCarthy concluded a shrewd analysis of the political realities thus:

"Health care is a loser for the Left only if the Right has the steel to undo it. The Left is banking on an absence of steel. Why is that a bad bet?"

Indeed. Look at it from the Dems' point of view. You pass Obamacare. You lose the 2010 election, which gives the GOP co-ownership of an awkward couple of years. And you come back in 2012 to find your health care apparatus is still in place, a fetid behemoth of toxic pustules oozing all over the basement, and, simply through the natural processes of government, already bigger and more expensive and more bureaucratic than it was when you passed it two years earlier. That's a huge prize, and well worth a midterm timeout.

I've been bandying comparisons with Britain and France, but that hardly begins to convey the scale of it. Obamacare represents the government annexation of "one-sixth of the U.S. economy" – i.e., the equivalent of the entire British or French economy, or the entire Indian economy twice over. Nobody has ever attempted this level of centralized planning for an advanced society of 300 million people. Even the control-freaks of the European Union have never tried to impose a unitary "comprehensive" health care system from Galway to Greece. The Soviet Union did, of course, and we know how that worked out.

This "reform" is not about health care, and certainly not about "controlling costs." As with Medicare, it "controls" costs by declining to acknowledge them, or pay them. Dr. William Schreiber of North Syracuse, N.Y., told CNN that he sees 120 patients per week – about 30 percent on Medicare, 65 private on private insurance plans whose payments take into account the Medicare reimbursement rates, and about 5 percent who do it the old-fashioned way and write a check. He calculates that, under Obamacare, for every $5 he now makes, he'll get $2 in the future. Which suggests now would be a good time to retrain as a realtor or accountant, or the night clerk at the convenience store. Yet Congresswoman Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., justifies her support for Obamacare this way:

"I even had one constituent – you will not believe this, and I know you won't, but it's true – her sister died. This poor woman had no dentures. She wore her dead sister's teeth."

Is the problem of second-hand teeth a particular problem in this corner of New York? I haven't noticed an epidemic of ill-fitting dentures on recent visits to the Empire State. George Washington had wooden teeth, but, presumably, these days the Sierra Club would object to the clear-cutting. Yet, even granting Congresswoman Slaughter the benefit of the doubt, is annexing the equivalent of a G7 economy the solution to what would seem to be the statistically unrepresentative problem of her constituent's ill-fitting choppers? Is it worth reducing the next generation of Americans to indentured servitude to pay for this poor New Yorker's dentured servitude?

Yes. Because government health care is not about health care, it's about government. Once you look at it that way, what the Dems are doing makes perfect sense. For them.

Well the irony here is Privatized For Profit Republican Health care has priced half the country out of affording good quality health care.

Besides Republicans had 10 years to make HCR affordable for 100's of millions of Americans and as usual the greedy private health insurers and the GOP failed miserable.

[Bronx33]

I'm not surprised you missed the point of the article and as usual end all of your idiot posts with some kinda of overused bush reference ( get a new game rasta) you're way to predictable it's been over a year since hes been gone it's time to move on and step up your game to something a little more relevant.

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

[Pony Boy]

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

Originally Posted by Bronx33

This....

Fixed.

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

[bpc]

Hey LA, what ideas can you actually convey besides posting political nickelodeon cartoons?

I think that America doubts the resiliency of those that truly believe in the constitution, the document our country was bound by. I think this is going to get ugly.

[peacepipe]

Originally Posted by bpc

Hey LA, what ideas can you actually convey besides posting political nickelodeon cartoons?
I think that America doubts the resiliency of those that truly believe in the constitution, the document our country was bound by. I think this is going to get ugly.

Well aren't the pot calling the kettle black.

[TailgateNut]

Originally Posted by bpc

Hey LA, what ideas can you actually convey besides posting political nickelodeon cartoons?

I think that America doubts the resiliency of those that truly believe in the constitution, the document our country was bound by. I think this is going to get ugly.

I hope so!

[bpc]

Well the funny thing is if the democrats lose this, the tidal wave created by the American public is going to crush their party over the next four years. NOW THAT WILL BE FUNNY.

Sadly, we're arguing a political game here where we're splitting hairs on which party will do slightly better than the other one. The ultimately loser in either situation is the people. Nothing funny about that.

Americans need to take their government back completely and get back to being smart, ingenuitive and fiscally responsible. Stay away from the world market/currency/bull**** liberals are trying to drive us towards.

[TailgateNut]

Originally Posted by bpc

Well the funny thing is if the democrats lose this, the tidal wave created by the American public is going to crush their party over the next four years. NOW THAT WILL BE FUNNY.

Sadly, we're arguing a political game here where we're splitting hairs on which party will do slightly better than the other one. The ultimately loser in either situation is the people. Nothing funny about that.

Americans need to take their government back completely and get back to being smart, ingenuitive and fiscally responsible. Stay away from the world market/currency/bull**** liberals are trying to drive us towards.

NO, "we're" not playing the political game. It's the republicans who are playing the game and the people are paying the price.

[cutthemdown]

I hear right now they dont have the votes. Obama backtracking on removing the special pet expemptions in the senate which rankles many in the House.

This could get ugly with the last 2-3 dem holdouts. I mean really ugly. Dems are going to eat some of there own on this one.

Also after the battle IMO this stretches what reconciliation could be used for. No doubt repubs when they get chance will take it even a step further.

Also one question I never get answered. I tried finding the answer and couldn't is how one part of this process works.

with Bush tax cuts they expired. I was told they expire because they were a budgetary thing done with reconciliation.

If certain changes are made through reconciliation, would congress have to revote on those provisions every 5 yrs? Maybe someone took more then HS govt because I don't remember ever talking about this even in entry poli sci in Jr College. After that no more classes on stuff like govt or politics.

[cutthemdown]

Originally Posted by TailgateNut

NO, "we're" not playing the political game. It's the republicans who are playing the game and the people are paying the price.

That right there is hyperbole. Everyone knows that both sides engage in gamesmanship. If not Dems would have done this a long time ago. Instead they played games with each other. Making deals in backrooms, playing games, until the lose Mass in a huge blunder. What a huge mistake in strategy. They could have been finished already had they just gotten enough dems to agree on a bill.

at your rhetoric all the while trying to sound like you and your party are above it.

well played indeed.

[Bronx33]

Originally Posted by cutthemdown

That right there is hyperbole. Everyone knows that both sides engage in gamesmanship. If not Dems would have done this a long time ago. Instead they played games with each other. Making deals in backrooms, playing games, until the lose Mass in a huge blunder. What a huge mistake in strategy. They could have been finished already had they just gotten enough dems to agree on a bill.

at your rhetoric all the while trying to sound like you and your party are above it.

well played indeed.

Nicely played and spot on if people can't even point or even recognize it's own parties shortcomings then we are in big trouble and desreve to pay the price..

[bpc]

Originally Posted by cutthemdown

I hear right now they dont have the votes. Obama backtracking on removing the special pet expemptions in the senate which rankles many in the House.

This could get ugly with the last 2-3 dem holdouts. I mean really ugly. Dems are going to eat some of there own on this one.

Also after the battle IMO this stretches what reconciliation could be used for. No doubt repubs when they get chance will take it even a step further.

Also one question I never get answered. I tried finding the answer and couldn't is how one part of this process works.

with Bush tax cuts they expired. I was told they expire because they were a budgetary thing done with reconciliation.

If certain changes are made through reconciliation, would congress have to revote on those provisions every 5 yrs? Maybe someone took more then HS govt because I don't remember ever talking about this even in entry poli sci in Jr College. After that no more classes on stuff like govt or politics.

Funny how liberals and their constituents are ready to cannibalize anybody who gets in their way. If somebody is chasing after something so fervently to the point where they can't or don't even bother to explain it, AREN'T YOU THE LEAST BIT CURIOUS about what would cause this reaction?

Corruption at its finest. The sad part is some democrats are dumb enough to eat up every word they say.

[barryr]

They have to twist arms to get other democrats to vote on something that is so supposedly wonderful and wanted so much by the people of this country? Makes a ton of sense.