Op-Eds and Editorials July '09
My Two-Point Plan For Health Care
Originally Posted At The American Spectator
By Greg Scandlen
July 31, 2009
Having been in health care policy for a very long time, I have read literally hundreds of six-point plans, eight-point plans, and 10-point plans -- all developed by very sincere and earnest people who think if only the world would do as they say, it would be a better place. No doubt they are right. If only the world would conform to their vision, and if only they could control people's behavior, many problems would be solved.
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The Blue Dogs’ Final Dilemma
Originally Posted At The Wall Street Journal
By Daniel Henninger
July 31, 2009
With the health-care bill faltering in Congress, the ritual weeping has begun over the death, once again, of “bipartisanship.” The belief that the answer to any problem lies with “the center” may be the greatest superstition in the ever-magical world of American politics.
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Obamacare Could Kill AARP
Originally Posted At The Washington Examiner
By Mark Tapscott
July 30, 2009
Marketing operations don't get any slicker than the one behind AARP. Their invitation to join arrived in my mail box even before I turned 50. I joined for one year, but never renewed because I knew the truth about this famous group. That truth is this: Millions join AARP and in return receive a host of useful services and resources. But their money and influence are hijacked to support causes that are absolutely inimical to their best interests.
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Obama's Plan Isn't The Answer
Originally Posted At The Washington Post
By Martin Feldstein
July 28, 2009
For the 85 percent of Americans who already have health insurance, the Obama health plan is bad news. It means higher taxes, less health care and no protection if they lose their current insurance because of unemployment or early retirement. President Obama's primary goal is to extend formal health insurance to those low-income individuals who are currently uninsured despite the nearly $300-billion-a-year Medicaid program. Doing so the Obama way would cost more than $1 trillion over the next 10 years.
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Obamacare Pushes Abortion
Originally Posted At Human Events
By Michael S. Steele
July 28, 2009
There is much about President Obama’s government-run health care plan that should have Americans alarmed. It would make health care more expensive. It would raise taxes on families and small businesses. It would let a government bureaucrat determine what treatments patients can receive. And it could force 88 million Americans off of the private health insurance they now have. None of that is likely the kind of change the American people expect when President Obama and Congressional Democrats talk about reforming our health care system.
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Obama's Misleading Medicine
Originally Posted At The Washington Post
By Robert J. Samuelson
July 27, 2009
The most misused word in the health care debate is "reform." Everyone wants "reform," but what constitutes "reform" is another matter. If you listen to President Obama, his "reform" will satisfy almost everyone. It will insure the uninsured, control runaway health spending, subdue future budget deficits, preserve choice for patients and improve quality of care. These claims are self-serving exaggerations and political fantasies. They have destroyed what should be a serious national discussion of health care.
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Common Sense May Sink ObamaCare
Originally Posted At The Wall Street Journal
By Peggy Noonan
July 24, 2009
This is big, what’s happening. President Obama appears to have misstepped on a major initiative and defining issue. He has misjudged the nation’s mood, which itself is news: He rose from nothing to everything with the help of his fine-tuned antennae. Resistance to the Democratic health-care plans is in the air, showing up more now on YouTube than in the polls, but it will be in the polls soon enough. The president, in short, may be facing a real loss. This will be interesting in a number of ways and for a number of reasons, among them that we’ve never seen him publicly defeated before, because he hasn’t been. So we may be entering new territory, with new struggles shaped by new dynamics.
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How Much Is A Year Of Your Life Worth?
Originally Posted At The American Spectator
By David Catron
July 24, 2009
All advocates of socialized medicine, including the President and his congressional accomplices, believe that government-imposed rationing is necessary to control health care costs. Having little faith in the judgment of individual patients and even less in the workings of the market, they are convinced that only the state is capable of efficiently allocating our medical resources. Very few of these people, however, have the courage of their convictions. With a few notable exceptions, they vehemently deny that they are for rationing. Indeed, as a matter of general strategy, they have done their best to exclude the "R" word from the reform debate. President Obama has gone so far as to explicitly to admonish his political allies "to avoid terms like 'rationing'" while promoting the Democrat health care agenda.
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The Most Destructive Disease
Originally Posted At The Washington Times
By Richard Rahn
Kuly 22, 2009
Washingtonosis(n): a disease most often found in people working within three miles of the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, although pockets also are found in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. It tends to infect elected officials, government bureaucrats, those working in the media, "government relations specialists," association executives and even top corporate executives.
Symptoms include an overwhelming desire to associate and be seen with those in power or those perceived to have power and/or fame. Those infected tend to lose judgment, values, principles and sense of honesty as well as common sense. They say silly things like, "I will vote for (or support) this (1,000-page) bill because it is absolutely necessary to protect the American people and we must do it now"...
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Destroying Private Health Insurance
Originally Posted At The Washington Times
July 20, 2009
Don't mark his words. "[I]f you are happy with your plan, and if you are happy with your doctor, we don't want you to have to change," President Obama promised on the ABC News Health Care Forum late last month. The reality of the market is less accommodating. Many rules proposed in the Democrats' health care reform plan will ensure that private health insurance won't be around for long.
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What's Up, Docs?
Originally Posted At The Wall Street Journal
July 20, 2009
Everyone supports "health reform" as an abstract goal, but that mile-wide consensus is an inch deep when it comes to substance. Increasingly, however, most of the major health industry lobbies seem prepared to concede the mile -- as long they get their inch. The latest example is the American Medical Association's unqualified endorsement Thursday of the health bill patched together by House Democrats.
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O's Broken Promises
Originally Posted At The New York Post
By Betsy McCaughey
July 17, 2009
PRESIDENT Obama promises that "if you like your health plan, you can keep it," even after he reforms our health-care system. That's untrue. The bills now before Congress would force you to switch to a managed-care plan with limits on your access to specialists and tests. Two main bills are being rushed through Congress with the goal of combining them into a finished product by August.
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Here Comes Obamacare
Originally Posted At New York Post
July 17, 2009
It's full steam ahead for ObamaCare -- the radical health-care "reform" pack age that Congressional Democrats are trying to steamroll to passage by the end of the summer. And now America is beginning to learn how much it will cost -- and who'll pay the tab.
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Heavy Foot Of Government
Originally Posted At The Washington Times
By Richard W. Rahn
July 15, 2009
How old were you before you realized your actions could result in unintended consequences? Men create democratic governments to protect life, liberty and property. Yet much of what modern government does daily has the largely unintended consequence of endangering and/or reducing life, liberty and property.
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The Consequences Of Big Government
Originally Posted At The Washington Post
By Robert J. Samuelson
Monday, July 13, 2009
The question that President Obama ought to be asking -- that we all should be asking -- is this: How big a government do we want? Without anyone much noticing, our national government is on the verge of a permanent expansion that would endure long after the present economic crisis has (presumably) passed and that would exceed anything ever experienced in peacetime. This expansion may not be good for us, but we are not contemplating the adverse consequences or how we might minimize them.
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The Massachusetts Health Mess
Originally Posted At The Wall Street Journal
July 11, 2009
In a rational world, the prognosis for ObamaCare would wait on the evidence in Massachusetts, given that the commonwealth's 2006 program closely resembles what Democrats are trying to do in Washington. If the results were widely known, it might be dead on arrival.
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The McNamara Mentality
Originally Posted At The Washington Post
By George F. Will
July 8, 2009
The death of Robert McNamara at 93 was less a faint reverberation of a receding era than a reminder that mentalities are the defining attributes of eras, and certain American mentalities recur with, it sometimes seems, metronomic regularity. McNamara came to Washington from a robust Detroit -- he headed Ford when America's swaggering automobile manufacturers enjoyed 90 percent market share -- to be President John Kennedy's secretary of defense. Seemingly confident that managing the competition of nations could be as orderly as managing competition among the three members of Detroit's oligopoly, McNamara entered government seven months before the birth of the current president, who is the owner and, he is serenely sure, fixer of General Motors.
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Everyday Low Politics
Originally Posted At The Wall Street Journal
July 3, 2009
Corporate America's cheerleading for more government involvement in health care now includes Wal-Mart, that liberal paragon of social irresponsibility. The discount giant's ex-critics probably ought to be more skeptical, given that this seems to be anticompetitive special pleading in progressive drag.
This week the nation's largest employer blessed an employer mandate, aka "pay or play." This would require businesses that do not offer "meaningful coverage" -- i.e., government-approved -- to pay some percentage of their payroll to a federal insurance plan. This mandate is one of the more controversial policies in the Democratic health package, and Wal-Mart's endorsement will help it along, or at least give liberals political cover against business criticism.
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Help Me!
Originally Posted At The American Spectator
By Philip Klein
July 2, 2009
During an otherwise dull health care town hall meeting on Wednesday, a woman identifying herself as Debby fought back tears as she described her health predicament to President Obama.
In 1998, Debby said, she underwent radiation treatment to kill a tumor -- but the radiation caused other health problems, making it impossible for her to work. Now, she has another tumor, but cannot get it taken care of because she doesn’t have health insurance or qualify for government programs.
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