Obama on Health Care

''UPS and FedEx are doing just fine, right? It's the Post Office that's always having problems.''

—Barack Obama, attempting to make the case for government-run healthcare, while simultaneously undercutting his own argument, Portsmouth, N.H., Aug. 11, 2009

WAYNE ALLYN ROOT: Barack Obama: The great jobs killer

As former President Ronald Reagan might have said, "Obama, there you go again."


The current occupant of the White House claims to know how to create jobs. He claims jobs have been created. But so far the score is Great Obama Depression 2.2 million lost jobs, Obama 0 -- a blowout.


Obama is as hopeless, helpless, clueless and bankrupt of good ideas as the manager of the Chicago Cubs in late September. This "community organizer" knows as much about private-sector jobs as Pamela Anderson knows about nuclear physics.


It's time to call Obama what he is: The Great Jobs Killer. With his massive spending and tax hikes -- rewarding big government and big unions, while punishing taxpayers and business owners -- Obama has killed jobs, he has killed motivation to create new jobs, he has killed the motivation to invest in new businesses, or expand old ones. With all this killing, Obama should be given the top spot on the FBI's Most Wanted List.

Meanwhile, he has kept the union workers of GM and Chrysler employed (with taxpayer money). He has made sure that most government employee union members got their annual raises for sleeping on the job (with taxpayer money). He made sure that his voters got handouts mislabeled as "tax cuts" even though they never paid taxes (with taxpayer money). And he made sure that major campaign contributors collected billions off government stimulus (with taxpayer money). 
Read The Rest........ 

Is Health-Care Reform Constitutional?

by Randy Barnett

This article appeared in the Washington Post on March 21, 2010.

ith the House set to vote on health-care legislation, the congressional debate on the issue seems to be nearing its conclusion. But if the bill does become law, the battle over federal control of health care will inevitably shift to the courts. Virginia's attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli II, has said he will file a legal challenge to the bill, arguing in a column this month that reform legislation "violate[s] the plain text of both the Ninth and Tenth Amendments." On Friday, South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster and Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum announced that they will file a federal lawsuit if health-care reform legislation passes.

Will these cases get anywhere? Here is a guide to the possible legal challenges to a comprehensive health-care bill.

The individual mandate.


Can Congress really require that every person purchase health insurance from a private company or face a penalty? The answer lies in the commerce clause of the Constitution, which grants Congress the power "to regulate commerce . . . among the several states." Historically, insurance contracts were not considered commerce, which referred to trade and carriage of merchandise. That's why insurance has traditionally been regulated by states. But the Supreme Court has long allowed Congress to regulate and prohibit all sorts of "economic" activities that are not, strictly speaking, commerce. The key is that those activities substantially affect interstate commerce, and that's how the court would probably view the regulation of health insurance.

But the individual mandate extends the commerce clause's power beyond economic activity, to economic inactivity. That is unprecedented. While Congress has used its taxing power to fund Social Security and Medicare, never before has it used its commerce power to mandate that an individual person engage in an economic transaction with a private company. Regulating the auto industry or paying "cash for clunkers" is one thing; making everyone buy a Chevy is quite another. Even during World War II, the federal government did not mandate that individual citizens purchase war bonds.

If you choose to drive a car, then maybe you can be made to buy insurance against the possibility of inflicting harm on others. But making you buy insurance merely because you are alive is a claim of power from which many Americans instinctively shrink. Senate Republicans made this objection, and it was defeated on a party-line vote, but it will return.

READ MORE @ CATO

Education Lessons Are Lost on Obama

Not every failure occurs in the classroom

Steve Chapman | March 22, 2010

I can't pinpoint the moment when the Obama administration went wrong on the subject of education. But I can pinpoint the moment when it demonstrated that it can't be taken seriously.

It happened on Monday, March 15, when Education Secretary Arne Duncan was expounding to reporters about revising the No Child Left Behind law. The new policy, he asserted, "is going to revolutionize education in our country."

No, it's not. We have been at the task of education for a long time, and one thing we have learned is that you cannot revolutionize it. The American system of schooling is vast, complicated, self-protective, slow to change, and even slower to improve.

On these points, No Child Left Behind leaves no doubt. It was inaugurated with grand promises eight years ago. "As of this hour, America's schools will be on a new path of reform, and a new path of results," exulted President George W. Bush upon signing it.

For the first time, the federal government demanded that states create and enforce standards, hold educators accountable, and make prescribed changes. It seemed to hold great potential.

But the potential has gone unfulfilled. In the first five years, there were small gains in reading proficiency among 4th-graders, but the gains were larger in the five years before that. Likewise with math.

Among 8th-graders, there was no change in reading performance. Math scores rose a little, but less rapidly than they had been rising. Nor have minority students improved more than before.

High school students also have nothing to brag about. A 2008 report from the National Center for Education Statistics found that among 17-year-olds, performance in math and reading is worse now than it was in the 1990s and no better than in 1973.

READ MORE REASON

Libertarians: No need for ‘Iraq war rush’ to government-run medicine

Obama demands for immediate action, little transparency are hallmarks of bad legislation

WASHINGTON -- America’s third largest party Tuesday urged Congress to take its time deliberating the proposed government takeover of the nation’s health care system amid pressure from the White House to quickly adopt the troubled proposal quickly and with minimal debate. Libertarians oppose the plan, which deepens the federal budget deficit and leads to the rationing of basic health care.

“As confidence in President Obama’s plans for a federal government takeover of medicine plunges, the White House is pressuring legislators to rush to judgment while the plan can still be salvaged,” said William Redpath, Libertarian National Committee Chairman. “We urge Congress to deliberate this massive government takeover carefully, take their time to allow Americans to read the full bill and then vote down this legislative disaster.”

A poll conducted independently by the Gallup organization, not for any party or group, and released today shows disapproval of the Obama plan tops approval among adults by a 50 percent to 44 percent margin. Among political independents, the gap grows. Fifty-five percent of independents disapprove of Obama’s plan. Only 40 percent approve.

“The more we find out about the Democrat plan, whether it’s the language on page sixteen outlawing private insurance or Section 440 empowering government to visit your home and monitor your parenting, the more obvious it becomes why President Obama wants as little transparency as possible. As we saw during the rush to the Iraq war, nothing good can happen when the president demands Congress give him what he wants immediately and without debate,” said Redpath.

For more information on this issue, or to arrange an interview with the Libertarian Party, please call Director of Communications Donny Ferguson at 703-200-3669 or 202-333-0008, x. 225, or email Donny.Ferguson@lp.org.

The Libertarian Party is America's third-largest political party, founded in 1971 as an alternative to the two main political parties. You can find more information on the Libertarian Party by visiting http://www.LP.org. The Libertarian Party proudly stands for smaller government, lower taxes and more freedom.

Obamacare failed in Europe

posted by Donny Ferguson on Jun 30, 2009

Guillaume Vuillemey, a researcher at France's Institut Economique Molinari, and Philip Stevens, a researcher at Britain's International Policy Network write in today's Washington Examiner about how Obama's proposed government takeover of the health care system has worked in Europe.

Hint. Not so well.

Click here to read the column, or if you live in the metro D.C. area pick up a copy of The Examiner. Vuillemey and Stevens write, in part:

President Barack Obama's proposed "public insurance option" for universal health coverage seems logical: A large public insurance fund will provide quality coverage for the uninsured and force competing insurers to lower costs. In practice, though, one needs only look at what decades of government health care have done to ramp up the financial and quality problems endured by Britain and France.

The Obama plan is supposed to make health insurance more competitive. But heavy subsidies will give it a big advantage, pulling an estimated 118.5 million people from private insurers to the public system. This government-subsidized system will eventually dominate the market in a way that would overrule competition...

...One way government tries to limit demand is to decree which new drugs can be prescribed. Many drugs, widely available in America and continental Europe, are denied to British patients.

State mismanagement has also created waiting lines for hospitals, on average causing 8.6 weeks of waiting. Once inside, budgetary cutbacks on cleaning and maintenance mean higher rates of an antibiotic-resistant variety of staph infection. This "superbug" has turned even routine surgery into a lottery of death

This is precisely what happened in Britain. The state provides most health care, via the National Health Service. Patients have almost no say over which physician, surgeon or hospital they can use, while professionals have to conform to government plans and targets...

...America can certainly draw lessons from overseas about saving money on health care. But in the cases of France and Britain, these lessons are in what not to do. These countries show that nationalizing care damages care.

How Obama Will Ruin Healthcare

Dick Morris on How Obama Paralyzes Recovery

GM - Government Motors

The Obama Motor Co.

posted by Donny Ferguson on Jun 01, 2009

Today's Wall Street Journal editorial. You may read it in its entirety here or by picking up a copy of the Journal.

Back in December, in an economy far, far away, then-CEO Rick Wagoner tossed out the scary cost to taxpayers of $100 billion if General Motors wasn't saved by the government. Well, GM was saved in December and again in March, and as early as today the feds will rescue it a third time in a prepackaged bankruptcy that is already costing at least $50 billion, and that's for starters. Welcome to Obama Motors, and what is likely to be a long, expensive and unhappy exercise in political car making...

...Every decision the feds have made since December suggests that nonpolitical management will be impossible. First they replaced Mr. Wagoner -- whom they are nonetheless still paying -- with the more pliable Fritz Henderson as CEO and Kent Kresa as Chairman. The latter are good at playing Washington but unproven in making popular cars. Then Treasury bludgeoned the bond holders in both Chrysler and GM to take pennies on the dollar, which will not make creditors eager to lend to the companies in the future.

There's also the labor agreement that the UAW approved last week, which goes some way toward reducing costs but probably not enough to make the new, smaller GM competitive. The new agreement simplifies some work rules and job descriptions but makes no reductions in hourly pay, pensions or health care for active workers. The agreement must also be renegotiated in two years by an Obama Administration running for re-election and weighing the need to keep Big Labor happy against the risks to taxpayer-shareholders. Who do you think wins that White House debate?...

...Mr. Obama likes to say he's a pragmatist who only prefers a government solution when it will work. But in resurrecting an industrial auto policy that even the French long ago abandoned, the President has made himself GM's de facto CEO. Our guess is that he'll come to regret it as much as taxpayers will.

Obamacare: Medical Malpractice

by Edward H. Crane

Edward H. Crane is the founder and president of the Cato Institue.

The columnist Robert J. Samuelson had a perceptive piece in the Washington Post recently in which he stood back from the policy trees to look at the Barack Obama forest. What he saw was disturbing. He suggests that Obama is advancing a "post-material economy" designed to "achieve broad social goals" that will end up spending more to get less. The president proposes to radically restructure America's energy industry through massive tax increases ("cap and trade") in the name of fighting the problematic notion that mankind's miniscule addition to greenhouse gases will create crippling global warming. But as the world-renowned scientist Freeman Dyson points out, "Most of the evolution of life occurred on a planet substantially warmer than it is now and substantially richer in carbon dioxide."

Obama also proposes to make the failed public school model available to even younger children and make liberal arts college more accessible to hundreds of thousands of students who, as American Enterprise Institute scholar Charles Murray points out, would be much better off going to vocational schools or junior colleges. Obama would escalate George W. Bush's efforts to essentially federalize education in America. Never mind that the word "education" in not to be found in the federal Constitution.

But perhaps most threatening to most Americans is Obama's determination to nationalize health care in America. It's a truly bad idea. But that is what the president has made clear he wants. Obama has publicly declared his preference for a single-payer system "managed like Canada." His initial proposal, part of an ill-defined $634 billion "down payment" on health care reform, would create heavily subsidized federal insurance that would put private insurance at an unhealthy disadvantage. Some estimates suggest that private insurance would be reduced by more than 60 percent, leading ultimately to its collapse. Speaking of the Canadian system, Obama says of his approach that "it may be we end up transitioning to such a system." Ya think?

That, of course, would be a tremendous mistake, a fundamental mistake. America is a land of free individuals. Socialized medicine is not what we as a nation are about—and with good reason, both philosophical and practical. Consider:

• Eight out of ten of the most recent major medical innovations, ranging from MRIs to hip replacement, have come from the United States.
• Americans have access, on a per capita basis, to three times as many CT scans as Canadians and four times as many as Britons. Had the actress Natasha Richardson had her skiing accident in upstate New York rather than in Canada, she might have had a chance of survival.
• According to Vancouver's Fraser Institute, the average wait for treatment by a specialist in Canada is 18 weeks. As the Canadian Supreme Court ruled when eliminating the national health care monopoly in 2005: "The evidence shows that in the case of certain surgical procedures, the delays that are the necessary result of waiting lists increase the patient's risk of mortality... The evidence also shows that many patients on non-urgent waiting lists are in pain and cannot fully enjoy any real quality of life."
• According to a Cato study British women face nearly double the mortality risk from breast cancer that American women face; British men face six times the mortality risk from prostate cancer than that faced by American men.

Really, does it make any sense whatsoever to change our health care system to a nationalized system? None of which should suggest that we can't improve on our employer-based, third-party payer approach. And we seem to be moving away from that. Cato published the first book on Health Savings Accounts, which bring about a major improvement by individualizing and making portable health insurance. The next great innovation is from University of Chicago finance professor and newly minted Cato adjunct scholar John Cochrane. His Cato Policy Analysis (no.633), "Health-Status Insurance: How Markets Can Provide Health Security," is a brilliant solution to high insurance costs and issues such as preexisting conditions.

While left-wing coalitions like Health Care for America Now gear up to do battle, and more traditional opponents of socialized medicine like the business community and the American Medical Association prepare to essentially capitulate, all parties should pay attention to a recent front page story in the New York Times, headlined "Doctor Shortage Proves Obstacle to Obama Goals." You don't suppose that shortage has anything to do with the prospect of nationalized health care, do you?

This article originally appeared in the May/June 2009 edition of Cato Policy Report.

Monday's LP Message from Donnie Ferguson

Last week I shared with you the disturbing fact the White House wants total control of the nation’s health care system so they can ration your access to medical procedures.

Well, it’s already happening in Oregon.

Sarah McIntosh reports in this month’s “Health Care News” “the Oregon Health Services Commission has drawn up a formal procedure for rationing health care services available to recipients of taxpayer-subsidized coverage.”

McIntosh reports, “the commission listed 680 common medical procedures and treatments and ranked them in order of priority. Beginning in 2009, the commission will reimburse physicians only for procedures and treatments ranking in the top 503 of 680. This means a Medicaid recipient in need of a procedure the commission decided to rank 504th would be ineligible for the procedure.”

If you think that’s just a problem for poor Oregonians, you’re wrong. That is precisely what the Obama administration promised to do to all Americans in an April 19 Meet The Press appearance by White House advisor Lawrence Summers.

Claiming health care is becoming more expensive; not because government regulations drives up costs, but because too many people get health care, Summers flatly stated the White House wants to begin “coordinating” your doctor’s decisions so they cut the cost of health care by 30% by simply denying people possibly life-saving procedures.

Along with their plan to invade the health care market with taxpayer-subsidized insurance and prohibit any private health insurance plan not rubber-stamped by the government, the intent is the eradication of private health insurance and total control of health care.

Illinois Democrat Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky even openly admitted that in a speech to cheering left-wing activists that was captured on tape.

Once Obama gets control of health care, you will have no choice in your health coverage. You will be forced to accept rationed care.

The March 27 Wall Street Journal calls it “the Bay State bait and switch,” referring to Massachusetts, where Republican Governor Mitt Romney launched the government health care invasion.

“First, create vast new entitlements that can never be repealed, then later take the less popular step of rationing care when it’s their last hope to save the federal [government’s fiscal situation.]…The real lesson of Massachusetts is that reform proponents won’t tell Americans the truth about what ‘universal coverage’ really means: Runaway costs followed by price controls and bureaucratic rationing,” the Journal writes.

To quote Ted Knight in one of his greatest roles, “You’ll get nothing, and like it.”

It’s the same kind of rationed care you’ll find in nations like France and the United Kingdom, where waiting lists for lifesaving procedures are sometimes years-long, and the death rates from breast and prostate cancer are twice to three times higher than in the United States.

If you think you can count on Republicans to stop it, you’re wrong. In states like Utah, it’s the Republican governor expanding government-run health care. Here in Washington, The Politico newspaper reports that White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel is meeting with nearly a dozen Republicans to secure their support of Obama’s socialized medicine takeover.

And as the Wall Street Journal just showed us, they’re looking at a Republican governor – Mitt Romney – for their inspiration.

If Obama and the Republicans are successful, they will have not only nationalized one-seventh of the economy, but they will have made millions of Americans dependent on government for their very lives – and dependent on a system built on rationing and substandard care that requires drastically higher taxes to maintain.

Skyrocketing taxes, bigger government and more dependency are precisely why millions of Americans oppose the Obama health care scheme – and the Libertarian Party is the only party that represents them.

Only Libertarians can oppose the Obama health care scheme, because Republicans are just as guilty as Democrats. Their Medicare prescription drug entitlement, the biggest expansion of the welfare program since Lyndon Johnson created it, simply laid the pavement for Obama’s road to socialized medicine.

And only Libertarians believe in the real solution to rising health care costs – opening up the health insurance market, knocking down regulations that delay and drive up the costs of developing new medicines and treatments, and repealing protectionist regulations installed by connected lobbyists to force more competition into the system.

Government-run and rationed health care, responsible for skyrocketing taxes and higher death rates in other countries, is already here. You can thank both Democrats and Republicans for that.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. We can provide affordable health care to all. With your support, the Libertarian Party can continue to fight for a vibrant marketplace of affordable, quality care.

With optimism,

Donny Ferguson