Democratic Hypocrisy on Deficit Reduction

As Republicans will vote to repeal ObamaCare in the House of Representatives this week, Democrats are condemning the measure as fiscally irresponsible. Repealing their health care reform bill, liberals say, would add some $230 billion to the federal deficit over the next decade.

The numbers come from the Congressional Budget Office and while some Republicans dispute them, I don't really care. For a decent and concise summary, I recommend this blog post though.

What matters are two things:

1) During Speaker Nancy Pelosi's tenure (2006-2010), Democrats have almost doubled the national debt, running trillion dollar deficits each year. Now they're worried about deficit spending? I doubt it.

2) The notion that Republicans should favor any measure that reduces the deficit and oppose any measure that increases it is nonsense. Republicans have reinvented themselves as fiscal conservatives but fiscal conservatism is not an end in itself. It stems from principle: the principle that government should be limited and people free.

Even if repealing ObamaCare increases the deficit, Republicans should favor it because the law infringes on individual liberties and expands the role of government in an industry that is already far too heavily regulated.

Court Rules Health Mandate Unconstitutional

In what is another major setback for the administration's health care reform agenda, a federal judge in Virginia ruled part of the ObamaCare legislation unconstitutional today, noting that a mandate to buy health insurance exceeds the boundaries of Congress' power.

The state's Republican attorney general filed suit against the health reform law this summer along with prosecutors across the country who contested the mandate's constitutionality. The White House has maintained that the mandate is constitutional under the Commerce Clause which allows the Federal Government to regulate interstate trade. District Judge Henry Hudson has now struck down that view.

Federal courts in Michigan and Virginia previously ruled differently, opining that the mandate was constitutional. In his ruling Monday, Hudson stopped short of blocking health care reform's implementation until a higher court acts. "The final word will undoubtedly reside with a higher court," he wrote. Opponents of the law as well as the Justice Department expect the Supreme Court to ultimately make a ruling on the issue.

Health care reform's assault on individual rights may be argued to exceed the mandate however. Not only would all Americans be forced to buy insurance; health insurance companies could not deny coverage to anyone. The law is further meant to drive down permissible doctors' fees, affecting the rights of health providers.

The White House on Monday tried to downplay the significance of the Virginia ruling, point out that the full health care reform bill does not take effect until 2014. The administration expects all challenges to the law will have worked their way through the legal system by then.

Originally published at the Atlantic Sentinel, December 13, 2010.

Federal Judge Strikes Down ObamaCare

From the AP wire:

RICHMOND, Va. – A federal judge in Virginia has declared the Obama administration's health care reform law unconstitutional.

US District Judge Henry Hudson is the first judge to rule against the law, which has been upheld by two others in Virginia and Michigan.

Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli filed the lawsuit challenging the law's requirement that citizens buy health insurance or pay a penalty starting in 2014.

He argues the federal government doesn't have the constitutional authority to impose the requirement.

Other lawsuits are pending, including one filed by 20 states in a Florida court. Virginia is not part of that lawsuit.

The US Justice Department and opponents of the health care law agree that the US Supreme Court will have the final word.

More Unions and Companies Win ObamaCare Exemptions

Elizabeth MacDonald reporting for the Fox Business Channel:

The list of companies, insurers and unions winning exemptions from the new health reform legislation has grown to 222, doubling since early November and up from just 30 in the month of October.

Companies and unions that provide health coverage for more than 1.5 million people now don't have to abide by health reform changes for one year beginning January 1. That includes 34 unions with more than 140,000 members.

Many unions had fought hard for health reform and were dismissive about fears that companies would simply dump their coverage if health reform passed. But they are now demanding to be exempt from the new law.

MacDonald rightly wonders whether it's fair that companies without sufficient political pull in Washington DC must follow the new health care rules and regulations while their competitors who get waivers do not. It's not just unfair. It's outrageous.

Unions Extracting Waivers For ObamaCare

The conservative blog RedState reports today on the many American trade unions that are seeking waivers to the health care reform plans enacted by Congress this summer.

Union bosses fought tooth and nail to nationalize America's health care---even, in many cases, to the detriment of their own members. Now, instead of chewing on and swallowing what they bit off, unions are getting waivers to the very plan that they shoved down everyone else's throat.

Debt Commission Proposes Deep Budget Cuts

Members of the president's debt commission have proposed deep budget cuts in order to rein in government spending in the United States. Entitlement programs as Medicare and Social Security, which are responsible for the brunt of federal spending, would be hit especially hard.

The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, created by President Barack Obama in January of this year, was not supposed to release its recommendations for several weeks yet. Its two chairmen however, former Republican Senator Alan Simpson and Democrat Erskine Bowles, who was President Bill Clinton's White House chief of staff in the 1990s, came out with proposals this week already. They have stressed that theirs are personal recommendations, not the findings of the commission as such which includes eighteen members in total, among them Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin who has previously proposed entitlement reform in order to balance the federal budget. Partisan deadlock may have compelled the chairmen to publish their own ideas after almost ten months of discussion.

Although the president has promised to preserve Social Security "forever", describing privatization as "an ill conceived idea that would add trillions of dollars to our budget deficit while tying your benefits to the whims of Wall Street traders and the ups and downs of the stock market," America's pension system is in dire need of reform. Medicare as well as Social Security will bankrupt without intervention.

In order to save the programs and achieve "nearly $4 trillion in deficit reduction through 2020" while reducing the deficit to just over 2 percent of GDP by 2015, the chairmen of the debt commission, in a draft put out by them Wednesday, suggest to raise the retirement age by one month every two years after it reaches 67 under current law. The retirement age would then reach 68 around 2050 and 69 by 2075. There would be a "hardship exemption" however for those unable to work beyond the age of 62. Other proposals include:

• Granting retirees the choice of collecting half of their benefits early and the other half at a later age to support phased retirement options;
• Asking doctors and other health care providers to slow the increase in health care costs;
• Reducing farm subsidies by $3 billion a year;
• Freezing federal salaries and government employee bonuses;
• Eliminating congressional earmarks

Several of the Democrats who sit on the commission have already voiced their opposition to these supposedly radical proposals. They warn that there will be no fourteen vote majority for many of these notions.

Several dozen of Democratic legislators immediately released a joint statement after the commission chairmen released their findings, urging the president to protect Social Security. "If any of the commission's recommendations cut or diminish Social Security in any way, we will stand firmly against them," they have pledged.

Democrat Raúl Grijalva of Arizona, who is considered one of the most liberal of congressman, complained that "we have waited through nine months of backroom negotiations only to be told that the American people will have to tighten their belts another notch while defense spending continues to grow and corporate bonuses continue to expand." Congress should have a "realistic, productive conversation" about deficit reduction, he believes. "Instead, we're debating a proposal from a commission dedicated to cutting crucial social programs and reducing corporate and upper income taxes at the same time."

The commission chairmen have proposed to reduce income tax rates but attest that the losses in revenue can be offset by closing tax loopholes and eliminating scores of tax deductions which currently make the US tax code incredibly complicated.

According to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who will lose her job next year since Republicans regained control of the lower chamber of Congress in this November's midterm elections, pension reform as considered by the commission is utterly unacceptable. "Any final proposal from the commission," she has declared, "must do what is right for our seniors, who are counting on the bedrock promises of Social Security and Medicare."

Conservatives on the commission, including Paul Ryan, have cautiously praised the chairmen for their suggestions. Although Republicans are divided on entitlement and earmark reform, fiscal hawks as Ryan would rather reform be more comprehensive. His "Roadmap for America's Future," which is a detailed plan to restore balance to the federal budget, represents, as then Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag put it in February of this year, a "dramatically different approach in which much more risk is loaded onto individuals." Congressman Jeb Hensarling of Texas and Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma are also renowned for their opposition to deficit spending but the other five Republican members of the commission may be more inclined to compromise. They have all spoken out against raising taxes however.

At a press conference Wednesday afternoon the two commission chairmen acknowledged the difficulty of reforming entitlement programs, something that has long been anathema to lawmakers from both sides. "We'll both be in a witness protection program when this is all over," joked Simpson. Bowles added that they weren't asking anyone to vote for their plan. "This is a starting point," he explained.

Originally published at the Atlantic Sentinel, November 10, 2010.

Another Company Feeling the Pain of ObamaCare

The Wall Street Journal reports that manufacturing company 3M Co. will stop offering its health insurance plan to retirees, citing the federal health overhaul as a factor.

The changes won't start to phase in until 2013. But they show how companies are beginning to respond to the new law, which should make it easier for people in their 50s and early-60s to find affordable policies on their own. While thousands of employers are tapping new funds from the law to keep retiree plans, 3M illustrates that others may not opt to retain such plans over the next few years

Whereas the administration previously insisted that retiree plans would remain largely exempt from the health insurance overhaul, an internal 3M memo states that "health care reform has made it more difficult for employers like 3M to provide a plan that will remain competitive." The company didn't specify how many workers would be impacted. It currently has 23,000 American retirees.

ObamaCare Forces Insurer Off Market

Cato @ Liberty reports that financial services provider Principal Financial Group is exiting the health insurance business as the impact of the Democrats' health insurance overhaul becomes clearer.

By forcing the exit of Principal Financial Group---which ran a profitable, $1.6 billion health insurance business---ObamaCare has now left 840,000 Americans to find another source of coverage.

And Principal is not the only one. Many small health insurers are struggling to meet the new requirement to spend at least 80 percent of their revenue on actual health care.

Administrations Threatening Private Health Insurers

Health care premiums are likely to go up as a result of the recent health care and insurance overhaul enacted by the Obama Administration. The Heritage Foundations' Kathryn Nix explains:

Starting this year, Obamacare prohibits plans from placing lifetime limits on coverage, severely limits rescissions, and requires all plans to cover children up to age 26. Plans also have to fully cover preventive services and are prohibited from denying children due to pre-existing conditions. The list goes on. Since extra benefits cost more, it makes sense that insurance premiums would climb as a result of the new law. Insurers cited increases between 1 and 9 percent.

The administration's response? Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announces that "there will be zero tolerance for this type of misinformation and unjustified rate increases."

What will "zero tolerance" means? Why is it "misinformation" on the part of private health insurers? Just what constitutes a "justified" price increase. And who decides that?

Well, Secretary Sebelius is clear on at least one of those issues. She decides what prices health insurers can set and if they don't fall in line, there'll be "zero tolerance" for them!

Governor Daniels on Obamacare’s Consequences

Governor Mitch Daniels of Indiana, who is sometimes mentioned as a possible Republican contender for the presidency in 2012, was recently interviewed by the conservative Heritage Foundation about the Democrats' overhaul of American health insurance.

Needless to say, Governor Daniels understands why it's a bad reform plan---and he knows how to do it better.

At Heritage's blog, the governor writes that that "it's a misnomer to even refer to this as 'reform.' It doesn't reform anything," he believes. "Instead, it perpetuates and magnifies all the worst aspects of our current system: fee for service reimbursement, 'free' to the purchaser consumption, and an irrationally expensive medical liability tort system. It's a sure recipe for yet more overconsumption and overspending."

Missouri Voters Say No to ObamaCare

A stunning 71 percent of Missouri voters on Tuesday rejected ObamaCare in their state's primary election.

Proposition C, the Missouri Health Care Freedom Act, amends existing law to deny government the authority to "penalize citizens for refusing to purchase private health insurance or infringe upon the right to offer or accept direct payment for lawful healthcare services."

The health care bill's mandate, which forces citizens to buy insurance, is one of the legislation's most blatant of assaults on individual rights. For a nation whose legal tradition is steeped in the defense of personal liberties, it borders on the absurd that a law need be passed that explicitly denies government the power to punish citizens for not doing something.

Along with Missouri, dozens of states are lining up to fight ObamaCare. Missouri's victory may just be temporary, depending on whether the insurance mandate is deemed to be legitimate under Congress' power to regulate "interstate commerce," but it's clear, in either event, that people contesting the bill throughout the land, if not the very notion of socialized medicine.

The Real Face of ObamaCare -- Frightening

I write about Dr Donald Berwick, Obama's head of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services and a self-confessed "romantic" about Britain's infamous National Health Service at the Atlantic Sentinel a few months ago. I already knew the quotes from this video but it's startling to hear them spoken by a doctor and an American; an educated man who, by all accounts, should be able to reason that his appeals to "humanity" and "civilization" are not objective standards; are not arguments to justify the collectivization of an entire industry as is happening with health insurance in the United States today.

(Note that I'm not going to retort all the mundane, irrational arguments and claims put forward by Dr Berwick in this short video or during the entirety of his 2008 speech. You can read this post of mine from May which does exactly that.)

The Cycle of Government Interventionism

From Cato @ Liberty:

Ezra Klein and Jonathan Chait argue the only way government could reduce inefficient Medicare spending was to create a new health care entitlement program. Think about that.

It's the typical cycle of government intervention at work: first, regulation is passed or programs are enacted "for the common good"; next, the regulation or program inevitably fails; the private sector takes a beating; the economy turns down, at which point more regulation is proposed and an expansion of government pushed through, all in order to save society from the ills of human greed and the free market.

More government however won't fix health care. The only viable and the only moral alternative is to privatize health care entirely.

In a free market, patients chose their own doctor and doctors chose their patients. Without the interference of any regulator, patients will be able to receive the best care their money can buy, with the doctor's voluntary consent. Quite probably, millions of people will be left uninsured but without a government to protect them against their own irresponsibility; without any element of coercion, health care can be affordable.

ObamaCare: Bad Medicine Indeed

From the Cato Institute:

For better or worse, President Obama's health care reform bill is now law. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act represents the most significant transformation of the American health care system since Medicare and Medicaid. It will fundamentally change nearly every aspect of health care, from insurance to the final delivery of care.

The length and complexity of the legislation, along with the promises and scaremongering that accompanied the national debate before it was passed, rendered it nigh impossible to objectively gauge the bill's likely impact. But now that it's law, Michael Tanner has been able to author Bad Medicine: A Guide to the Real Costs and Consequences of the New Health Care Law and he concludes:

• While the new law will increase the number of Americans with insurance coverage, it falls significantly short of universal coverage. By 2019, roughly 21 million Americans will still be uninsured.
• The legislation will cost far more than advertised, more than $2.7 trillion over 10 years of full implementation, and will add $352 billion to the national debt over that period.
• Most American workers and businesses will see little or no change in their skyrocketing insurance costs, while millions of others, including younger and healthier workers and those who buy insurance on their own through the non-group market will actually see their premiums go up faster as a result of this legislation.
• The new law will increase taxes by more than $669 billion between now and 2019, and the burdens it places on business will significantly reduce economic growth and employment.
• While the law contains few direct provisions for rationing care, it nonetheless sets the stage for government rationing and interference with how doctors practice medicine.
• Millions of Americans who are happy with their current health insurance will not be able to keep it.

"In short," writes Tanner, "the more we learn about what is in this new law, the more it looks like bad news for American taxpayers, businesses, health care providers, and patients."

So it is a Tax?

When Democrats this spring were hard at work trying to get their health care reform bill passed through Congress, they denied high and low that the penalty Americans would be subject to under the bill's insurance mandate was anything like a tax.

Health care reform will force Americans to have "minimum essential coverage" starting in 2014. "For us to say that you've got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase," said the president last September on ABC's This Week. But now, The New York Times reports that his administration is defending its blatantly unlawful mandate in court as an exercise of the government's "power to lay and collect taxes."

Administration officials say the tax argument is a linchpin of their legal case in defense of the health care overhaul and its individual mandate, now being challenged in court by more than 20 states and several private organizations.

Many states are fighting the health care bill because they argue that the Federal Government is overstepping its constitutional boundaries by making them party to its assault on individual rights.

Under the Constitution, Congress can exercise its taxing power to provide for the "general welfare." No doubt that's exactly how proponents of this bill will defend it for insuring all Americans serves their welfare, no? But just as Democrats lied when they promised that health care reform did not mean more taxes, that argument is false.

Health care in the United States is in such a dire state because of government interference in the first place, notably due to the massive entitlement programs that are Medicare and Medicaid, due to government price controls, regulations and fiscally incentivized employer-based insurance schemes, all of which drive up costs at the expense of the average consumer. Yet we are to believe that even more government involvement will somehow make things better? There's ample evidence to the contrary! Countries with freer health insurance markets deliver more affordable care but wherever government insists on providing for the "general welfare," prices skyrocket and quality declines. This will also happen in the United States as soon as ObamaCare is fully enacted.