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Public Option Losing Steam? Dem negotiator says public option can't pass Senate; health secretary says public plan not 'essential'

Ha ha! Barney Frank is getting his ass handed to him ...

“UPS and FedEx are doing just fine. It’s the Post Office that’s always having problems.” -- Barack Obama, Aug. 11, 2009

No institution has been the butt of more government- inefficiency jokes than the U.S. Postal Service. Maybe the Department of Motor Vehicles.

The only way the post office can stay in business is its government subsidy. The USPS lost $2.4 billion in the quarter ended in June and projects a net loss of $7 billion in fiscal 2009, outstanding debt of more than $10 billion and a cash shortfall of $1 billion. It was moved to intensive care -- the Government Accountability Office’s list of “high risk” cases - - last month and told to shape up. (It must be the only entity that hasn’t cashed in on TARP!)

That didn’t stop President Barack Obama from holding up the post office as an example at a town hall meeting in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, last week.

When Obama compared the post office to UPS and FedEx, he was clearly hoping to assuage voter concerns about a public health-care option undercutting and eliminating private insurance.

What he did instead was conjure up visions of long lines and interminable waits. Why do we need or want a health-care system that works like the post office?

What’s more, if the USPS is struggling to compete with private companies, as Obama implied, why introduce a government health-care option that would operate at the same disadvantage?

Obama Unscripted

These are just two of the questions someone listening to the president’s health-insurance reform roadshow might want to ask.

Impromptu Obamanomics is getting scarier by the day. For all the president’s touted intelligence, his un-teleprompted comments reveal a basic misunderstanding of capitalist principles.

For example, asked at the Portsmouth town hall how private insurance companies can compete with the government, the president said the following:

“If the private insurance companies are providing a good bargain, and if the public option has to be self-sustaining -- meaning taxpayers aren’t subsidizing it, but it has to run on charging premiums and providing good services and a good network of doctors, just like any other private insurer would do -- then I think private insurers should be able to compete.”

Self-sustaining? The public option? What has Obama been doing during those daily 40-minute economic briefings coordinated by uber-economic-adviser, Larry Summers?

Capitalism Explained

Government programs aren’t self-sustaining by definition. They’re subsidized by the taxpayer. If they were self-financed, we’d be off the hook.

Llewellyn Rockwell Jr., chairman of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, and editor of LewRockwell.com, put it this way in an Aug. 13 commentary on Mises.org:

“The only reason for a government service is precisely to provide financial support for an operation that is otherwise unsustainable, or else there would be no point in the government’s involvement at all.”

Rockwell sees no “economic reason for a government postal system” and would abolish it.

Of course, there’s the small matter of the U.S. Constitution. Article 1, Section 8, grants Congress the power “to establish Post Offices and Post Roads.” A series of subsequent statutes gave the USPS a monopoly in the delivery of first-class mail. Congress thought that without such protection, private carriers would cherry-pick the high-profit routes and leave money-losing deliveries in remote areas to the post office. (In those days, the USPS covered most of its expenses with revenue.)

Less Bad Option

It was only through exemptions in the law that private carriers, such as UPS and FedEx, were allowed to compete in the delivery of overnight mail.

Short of a constitutional amendment or a waiver from Congress, we are stuck with the USPS.

But back to our storyline. Everyone makes a mistake or flubs a line when asked questions on the spot, including the president of the United States. We can overlook run-on sentences, subject and verb tense disagreement, even a memory lapse when it comes to facts and figures.

The proliferation of Obama’s gaffes and non sequiturs on health care has exceeded the allowable limit. He has failed repeatedly to explain how the government will provide more (health care) for less (money). He has failed to explain why increased demand for medical services without a concomitant increase in supply won’t lead to rationing by government bureaucrats as opposed to the market. And he has failed to explain why a Medicare-like model is desirable when Medicare itself is going broke.

The public is left with one of two unsettling conclusions: Either the president doesn’t understand the health-insurance reform plans working their way through Congress, or he understands both the plans and the implications and is being untruthful about the impact.

Neither option is good; ignorance is clearly preferable to the alternative.

New White House tactic to bring GOP back to health debate?By Ed Hornick
CNN


WASHINGTON (CNN) -- In the chess game over health care reform, the White House's last move was to say Democrats might use a procedural move to get a bill through without working with Republicans.


Congress will take up the health care reform debate in September.

But will Democrats really try to muscle something through without GOP support or is it a gambit to bring Republicans back to the table?

"I think this is something that they are putting out there maybe as a threat that they could pull back," said Roy Sekoff, the founding editor of the progressive blog, The Huffington Post. "And I think it is a smart move."

On Tuesday night, Democratic sources told CNN that the White House was considering using the budgetary procedure called "reconciliation," which would bypass the normal 60 votes to get a vote on the Senate floor and instead require only a simple majority of 51.

But the White House said Wednesday that the president welcomes bipartisan support and will listen to any viewpoint. Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said that proverbial olive branch may change if Republicans show they unwilling to work across the aisle. Watch more on if the White House is changing course »

Democratic strategist and CNN contributor Paul Begala said Obama has two campaign promises in conflict.

"He ran around the country and said 'I will be post-partisan ... I'll bring Republicans and Democrats together.' He's not going to be able to do that," Begala said Wednesday.

"He promised to do health care and he promised to be bipartisan when those two are at war. Health care is a lot more important. He's gotta do his job which is try to bring quality, affordable health care to people even though the Republicans won't do their job."
...

It's kind of dumb even to try for something bipartisan. If the Dems plan on doing this they just need to ram a good bill through.

False charges about Obamacare don't help.

Like the end-of-life tempest. Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin popularized the term "death panels." She said: "The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care".

The charge that the House and Senate health care bills would mandate end-of-life counseling -- hence "death panels" -- caught on. Rush Limbaugh, defending Palin's charge, said, "(D)eath panels ... it's a great way to phrase this end-of-life counseling".

Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa piled on: "You have every right to fear. ... We should not have a government program that determines if you're going to pull the plug on grandma".

But no bill in Congress mandates end-of-life counseling, much less "death panels." And there's a deeper problem. When opponents of nationalization make such easily refuted charges, supporters of nationalization gain the upper hand. All criticism is undermined. Neutral observers can easily conclude, "If the death-panel claim is false, why believe anything else the critics say?"

That would be a disaster.

There's is reason to be concerned about end-of-life counseling, but the truth is more complicated. Here's the story.

The House bill does deal with the issue. (The Senate Finance Committee bill did until the provision was removed the other day.) Section 1233 amends the Medicare law to add "advance care planning consultation" (counseling about living wills and the like) to the list of reimbursable services. The provision defines "consultation," but nowhere does it require Medicare beneficiaries to participate or authorize death panels. (Grassley voted for a similar provision in 2003 when his Republican-controlled Congress added drug coverage to Medicare.)

But even if some conservative Republican critics are wrong about Section 1233, there is good reason to worry about Obama's nationalization scheme.

The reason can be found in Econ 101. Medical care doesn't grow on trees. It must be produced by human and physical capital, and those resources are limited. Therefore, if demand for health care services increases -- which is Obama's point in extending health insurance -- prices must go up. But somehow Obama also promises, "I won't sign a bill that doesn't reduce health care inflation".

This is magical thinking (http://tinyurl.com/5sznet). Obama, talented as he is, can't repeal the laws of supply and demand. Costs are real. If they are incurred, someone has to pay them. But as economist Thomas Sowell points out, politicians can control costs -- by refusing to pay for the services.

It's called rationing.

Advocates of nationalization hate that word because it forces them to face an ugly truth. If government pays for more people's health care and wants to control costs, it must limit what we buy.

So much for Obama's promise not to interfere with our freedom of choice.

This brings us back to end-of-life consultation. As the government's health care budget becomes strained, as it must -- and, as Obama admits, already is under Medicare -- the government will have to cut back on what it lets people have.

So it is not a leap to foresee government limiting health care, especially to people nearing the end of life. Medical "ethicists" have long lamented that too much money is spent futilely in the last several months of life. Are we supposed to believe that the social engineers haven't read their writings? And given the premise that it's government's job to pay for our heath care, concluding that 80-year-olds should get no hip replacements makes sense. The problem is the premise: that taxpayers should pay. Once you accept that, bad things follow. In the end, perhaps the biggest objection to nationalized health care is the "principal-agent problem." For whom does the doctor work? Ordinarily, the doctor is the agent of the patient. But when government signs the checks and orders doctors to reduce spending, it is not crazy to think that this won't influence their "advance care planning consultation".

Freedom is about self-determination. Obama's health care scheme would undermine both.

The Dems would be stupid to pull the 'reconciliation' trick. The Reps would murder them in the next election cycle with it.

It would upset a bunch of people who probably didn't vote for them in the last election cycle. They were not elected to avoid health care reform like the other party.

Gotta disagree. Playing to their base will lose them the independents that made the Obama victory possible. Many are already moving away to do this reconciliation crap would be to have them move directly into the Republican tent. I know Dean thinks that if they ram it through then it will lead to Republicans getting slaughtered in '10. But, I don't but it. It will only be a little over a year for the reforms to kick in and fundamentally change things for the better. I don't see it unfolding that quickly. And, with people against this thing and Obama's approval rating plummeting, I think it would be Dem suicide. That said...


go for it.

youre not really that dense are you? have you seen the polls? a lot of the people that voted for the dems last election are against this healthcare proposal. why do you eat the party line that only the far right is against this, when the polling clearly shows it cuts across a wide margin of Americans?

The Dems chickened out in the 90's on this and it didn't help them in the next election cycle.

I'm dense. The Dems lost congress in 1994 in no small part because the public opposed the DNC's plans to socialize medicine. Clinton, to his credit, realized that and moderated his positions, resulting in his re-election.

I have to say, however, I never thought I'd see you accuse Bill of being a chicken. You really have thrown over the Clintons for Obama, haven't you?

After the Dems lost power in 94 (after they failed to pass the health care reform) Clinton really didn't have much of a chance to get a bill to sign did he?

So it wasn't a case of the Dems "chickening out" was it? They tried to pass it, it failed and Clinton learned a valuable lesson about not being a leftist extremist.

It would upset a bunch of people who probably didn't vote for them in the last election cycle. They were not elected to avoid health care reform like the other party.

You're absolutely right, MEM. It's not like there is a group of voters who aren't registered to either the Democratic or Republican parties and vote based upon their own personal conscious instead of along party lines. Recent polls haven't showed that a majority of voters, including people from this fictional 'independent' status, have turned against the Health Care Reform plans of Congress and the President. There's no way that Dems won't get re-elected even if they bypass the will of the people and ram through a massively unpopular piece of legislation.

You're absolutely right, MEM. It's not like there is a group of voters who aren't registered to either the Democratic or Republican parties and vote based upon their own personal conscious instead of along party lines. Recent polls haven't showed that a majority of voters, including people from this fictional 'independent' status, have turned against the Health Care Reform plans of Congress and the President. There's no way that Dems won't get re-elected even if they bypass the will of the people and ram through a massively unpopular piece of legislation.

With support for his mission rapidly fleeting, President Obama is now the one with open arms asserting that if you believe in God you should believe in his policies.

It's been said that when people are experiencing trials and tribulations, they often seek a higher power. Apparently, the president is one of them.

Yesterday, in perhaps the most overtly religious move of his tenure thus far, the selectively faithful Obama preached his health care message to more than 1,000 leaders of different faiths in two conference calls, hoping they will see the light with regard to his overhaul. -- No word if Reverend Wright was on the line.

According to The LA Times:

"The effort, known as '40 Days for Health Reform,' features a national television ad, prayer rallies, meetings in congressional districts where lawmakers are waffling and a nationwide 'sermon weekend' at the end of August. The push also aims to influence leaders in the Jewish faith before the fall religious holidays."

I suppose grassroots organizing isn't so bad when you have the guy upstairs on your side. Take that town hall evil doers!

"We are God's partners in matters of life and death," Obama said during the call with Jewish leaders, according to Washington Rabbi Jack Moline via Twitter.

Translation: Seeee America?? It's just you and the man upstairs. No death panels!

Further, Pastor Obama said that many were "bearing false witness" and took a shot at his opposition calling the pushback to date: "fabrications that have been put out there in order to discourage people from meeting what I consider to be a core ethical and moral obligation: that is that we look out for one another, that I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper. In the wealthiest nation on earth right now, we are neglecting to live up to that call.

If Obama wants to be his brother's keeper, shouldn't he start with his own family?

So much has been made over Obama's religion it's an interesting turn of events that he has strategically decided to channel biblical references in hopes of turning believers into believing in his plan.

But will this theme of holy health care stick? When it comes to messages on universal health reform Obama has been all over the map. He initially argued it was a moral imperative, then quickly shifted to an economic imperative that reform would save costs. When the Congressional Budget Office debunked that theory saying the plan would actually raise costs, the White House pivoted yet again to a political imperative: demonizing the big insurance companies. Now with his plan and poll numbers in peril, he's back to embracing the moral dimension to this discussion in the hopes of a political miracle.

But what exactly are Obama's morals? Defend the weakest or reward the dumbest? Obama paints a picture of an indigenous mass of nomads but the Congressional Budget Office projects that among the uninsured in 2009, 17 percent will have family income above 300 percent of the poverty level (about $65,000 for a family of four); 18 percent will be eligible for (but not enrolled) in Medicaid; and 30 percent will be offered (but will decline) coverage from an employer.

Isn't it their moral duty to get coverage, rather than have others foot the bill for those who make bad decisions? And isn't our moral duty to try and cover them first before strapping future generations into massive debt? Can I get an amen for personal responsibility?

Not long ago Obama criticized those who "cling" to their religion. With support for his mission rapidly fleeting, he's now the one with open arms asserting that if you believe in God you should believe in his policies. I guess in times of adversity, it's acceptable to use a Hail Mary to get us to cling to him.