FEBRUARY 2, 2011
Obama scare
Last week The Washington Times ran a piece by Dr. Milton R. Wolf. It is one of the best indictments of ObamaCare that I have read. Wolf is a board-certified radiologist, medical director and cousin of President Barack Obama. In it he decries the way that the White House gives exemptions to special buddies and important friends. Color the Services Employees International Union (SEIU) happy.
I could never understand the argument pushed by groups who compared the building of the fence along the U.S./Mexican border to the Berlin Wall. After all, one is to keep people out of a country, and the other was to keep the pathetic souls inside of a country. Let's see: People are fighting to get in to a country (the United States), versus people who were fighting to get out. That seems like polar opposites to me.
Likewise, if ObamaCare is as great as the compassionate folks who care keep telling us it is, why are so many groups trying to escape its reach?
The Department of Health and Human Services, led by Kathleen Sebelius (she's the one who taught us all to sneeze into our elbows), has granted 733 waivers from the onerous regulations of the health care reform bill to privileged lucky stiffs, and the number is still climbing. Doesn't this tell you all you need to know about the merits of the plan?
In order to get excused from ObamaCare, Dr. Wolf suggests that you do what Andy Stern did and contribute $27 million to President Obama's re-election. As president of SEIU (that loveable little fuzz ball of a union), Stern had access to cash that you or I don't, so we're going to need another way. Let's hope that way includes the votes of the new guys on the block that are there thanks to last November's election.
News to me is that Obama exempted not only his union buddies, but also certain cities and even four states: Massachusetts, New Jersey, Ohio and Tennessee.
We all know that Obama and his cohorts lied about the costs and provisions of the bill. Secretary Sebelius even hid from Congress a damning report from the Medicare and Medicaid Office of the Actuary showing ObamaCare would cost $311 billion more than promised and would displace 14 million Americans from their current insurance (despite Obama's assurances). "For this administration, transparency promises last only until the teleprompter is unplugged," Dr. Wolf notes. A good example is their putting the "death panels" back into the bill in the dead of night under a cloud of secrecy.
If Obama won't listen to his cousin, it's understandable, then, that he refused to listen to Samuel J. Palmisano, chairman and CEO of IBM, before the healthcare bill debates.
Palmisano approached Obama and presented a plan that – get this! – would lower healthcare costs almost $1 trillion by curbing claims fraud and abuse. The best part of this whole deal was that it wouldn't have cost taxpayers a dime. Because IBM had worked hard on this technology for a long time, the private sector had already paid for the development of the system.
After two meetings with Obama and his team of supposedly cost-conscious thinkers, the offer was breezily and bluntly rejected. President Obama looked at a savings of nearly $1 trillion, lifted that chin of his, and said, "Not interested."
Instead, we taxpayers are treated to the heart-rending stories of folks who will die in the alley (even though they weren't dying in alleys before the bill was passed). Texas Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee embarrassed herself on TV last week when she showed a picture of a woman she claimed would die without ObamaCare, but who actually was covered by Medicare. Or she might be covered if Obama weren't robbing the program of nearly half a trillion dollars in order to pay for his ObamaCare.
This display by Jackson Lee, in which she warned that repealing ObamaCare would be the death knell for folks with pre-existing conditions led radio host Rush Limbaugh to quip: "I think Sheila Jackson Lee IS a pre-existing condition, if you want to know the truth. But that's just me." It's me, too, and the fear mongering has to stop.
I suppose it could be worse. Last month, due to the floods in Queensland Australia, two aggressive bull sharks were seen swimming in the streets of one town. On the other hand ...
