Tag: health care

Unpacking the Berwick Surprise.

[UPDATE]: Ben Domenech over at the New Ledger calls this a “formality.”

Roll Call reports:

President Barack Obama sent the Senate his nomination of Donald Berwick as administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services on Monday — a move that comes two weeks after Obama bypassed Congress to put his stalled nominee in the post until the end of 2011.

Via Senatus: background here; and Allahpundit over at Hot Air reports that he’s “honestly shocked.”  It is somewhat shocking; you don’t usually see an administration so openly caving in public. Continue reading Unpacking the Berwick Surprise.

Rep. Ciro Rodriguez (D, TX-23) gets cranky.

Ah, to be an Entitlement Democrat these days. Apparently, Rep. Rodriguez is not particularly happy with the idea that his constituents are checked out on the CBO’s revised scoring of Obamacare. Or that they feel entitled themselves to talk back to the man.

Shouting, smacking a newspaper against the table, a general ‘Do you know who I AM?’ – is this what Nancy Pelosi meant when she encouraged Democrats to go home and push back on health care? If so, by all means: keep doing it.

Moe Lane

The TX GOP reports (via the Francisco Conseco campaign) that this isn’t the first time Rodriguez has lost his temper.

Crossposted to RedState.

#rsrh QotD, Donald Berwick edition.

Not-quite-what-he-intended-to-say sub-edition:

President Bush, a White House official said, “was not facing the same level of obstruction.  Twenty-eight of President Obama’s nominees have been held on the Senate floor for more than three months. At this point in the Bush administration, only six of his nominees had been waiting that long.”

Interestingly enough, at this point the two administrations had something in common: a Democratic-controlled Senate.  Apparently, the Obama administration is now admitting that their boss is less competent at domestic politics than was Bush; something that we all already knew, but it’s nice to have it confirmed.

See also Hot Air for more, and The New Ledger for why all of this is abject cowardice on the part of the White House.  A quick summary: Donald Berwick hates our healthcare system, wants to replace it with the monstrosity that the British have saddled themselves with, and the White House knows that a confirmation hearing would a: have all of that come out; and b: force a bunch of Democratic Senators to vote in his favor just before the midterm elections.

You know, George W. Bush wasn’t afraid of a little controversy when he thought that the underlying issue was important enough.  How does it feel to have voted for a coward for President, anyway? – I wouldn’t know; I’m a Republican.

Moe Lane

One preloaded racism explanation, coming right up!

Via the Daily Caller we get to see the latest use of mass therapy to treat the crippling scourge of liberal  lack of self esteem.  Using your money.

If you think $50,000 doesn’t buy what it used to, think again. For that rough sum, a professor at UCLA has agreed to draw up a report that proves opponents of the Democrats’ health-care bill aren’t motivated by a sense of fiscal responsibility or a general distrust of back-room deals, but by race.

The kicker? Taxpayers are funding the study.

According to the study’s abstract, provided by the National Science Foundation, a government agency under the control of the executive branch: “This research project attempts to provide further evidence for this Obama-induced racialization by pinpointing the extent that health-care opinions are influenced by racial attitudes and determining Obama’s causal role in racializing public opinion about a policy that has no manifest racial content.”

Continue reading One preloaded racism explanation, coming right up!

Rasmussen: Support for Obamacare repeal almost 2-to-1.

I almost wish I hadn’t written this: it would have been perfect for this Rasmussen poll on Obamacare.

Support for repeal of the new national health care plan has jumped to its highest level ever. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 63% of U.S. voters now favor repeal of the plan passed by congressional Democrats and signed into law by President Obama in March.

Prior to today, weekly polling had shown support for repeal ranging from 54% to 58%.

Last year Sean Trende over at Real Clear Politics argued that the Democratic party took precisely the wrong lesson from 1994 by assuming that it was better to pass something titled ‘health care reform’ than to be visibly seen to fail; polls like this suggest that he’s right.

Roll on, November.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Administration caught lying on insurance relief law.

Yes. You are shocked.

(Via @amandacarpenter) Let us walk through a test case on the administration’s claimed insurance support for small business owners.

  • Zach owns a small business (24 employees, average salary $35K) and provides them with health care ($79.2K/year).
  • He has already seen a 15% increase in health care costs this year, so he is quite keen to hear about insurance relief.
  • The White House’s PR flunkies were bragging about a program that gives ‘broad eligibility’ to companies with less than 25 employees and average salaries below $50K.
  • Zach is covered both ways!  Bring on that insurance relief!
  • …Oh.  If you have more than 10 employees and average salaries above $20K… well.  The answer is, no, at Zach’s level he’s not getting insurance relief.
  • And here’s the important thing: he was actually told otherwise by the White House’s PR flunkies, remember?
  • We call that “a lie.”
  • And – possibly more importantly – “business as usual.”

Continue reading Administration caught lying on insurance relief law.

#rsrh This is somewhat specialized political humor…

…but if you do happen to have the right combination of knowledge and interest it’s pretty darn funny.  A taste:

18 CFR §2301: Regulations Concerning the Consumability of Food Items Determined to Be on the Ground, Relative to Time (the “Five Second Rule” and the “Thirty Second Rule”); Definitions; Penalties for Violations Thereof

(1)(a) Except as otherwise provided in subsection (2) herein, whoever consumes a food item, as defined in 18 CFR §§ 2302-11 inclusive, which has been in physical contact with the ground for greater than or equal to five seconds from the time the food item first came into contact with the ground, until the time the food item it removed from the ground, shall be deemed to have violated the Five Second Rule, and subject to the penalties set forth in subsection (4) herein.

Mind you, if you’re waiting for me to say that there isn’t something sad about the fact that I find it pretty darn funny, well, you may not want to drop anything important in order to keep waiting…

#rsrh Leaders of the PACs: Health Care Payola.

This was originally titled “Doing Well By Selling Out,” but by now, who really believed that they were sincere in the first place?

Vulnerable House Democrats who supported the healthcare bill last month reaped big financial rewards.

Federal Election Commission (FEC) reports show the crucial yes votes cashed in between March 21 and the end of the first quarter on March 31. They received big money from Democratic-leaning political action committees (PACs) and fellow Democratic members of Congress.

Several of these members were last-minute yes votes, which helped push the legislation to passage.

Continue reading #rsrh Leaders of the PACs: Health Care Payola.

‘Health Law Implementation Timeline (H.R. 3590 as Revised by H.R. 4872)’

Oh, boy.

Fifty-three pages of fun, fun, fun.  If you ever wanted to know the precise timetable of the government doing to health care what they did to the US housing market and manufacturing sector – more likely, if you gloomily think that you need to know – well, here you go. I’ve been told that there may be some multimedia of the more… typically Democratic… parts of it later; I suspect that it’ll happen after the House staff involved stop twitching.

But You Have Been Warned:

DISCLAIMER: This document represents the best efforts of the Energy and Commerce Committee Republican staff to describe the substantive provisions and effective dates of the legislation. Because of the lack of clarity, internal inconsistencies, and ambiguity in the text, many provisions will inevitably be subject to dispute or alternative interpretations.

I know that pity for House staffers may sometimes be in short supply around here, but you should show some sympathy for the poor Republican folks on the House Energy/Commerce Committee that had to wade through the legislative swill and greywater that is Obamacare for almost a month in order to extract useful information for the rest of us. After all, it’s not like any of their bosses voted for the despicable thing.

Moe Lane

PS: Why did Energy/Commerce have to do this one?

Why, indeed.  It’s amazing that Article I, Section 8, Clause 3 doesn’t whimper every time somebody looks at it, the way that we work it so…

Crossposted to RedState.