Tag: obamacare

#rsrh So. About this “You lie!” thing…

I understand that it was, well, accurate?

Recent news reports that Democratic leaders promised Hispanic Caucus members that provisions inserted in the healthcare to win the votes of others would be removed later suggest that South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson’s (R) charge that President Obama’s denial that the healthcare bill would cover illegal aliens was a lie was dead on.

The healthcare bill as passed and signed into law prohibits illegals from buying into the so-called healthcare exchanges that will be established under the law and denies even temporary legal immigrants access to Medicaid unless they’ve been here for five years. Hispanic Caucus leaders are now charging that the administration specifically promised to eliminate these and other restrictions and are vowing to hold the president and congressional Democratic leaders to that promise.

More on that promise here.  It certainly sounds as if Hispanic Caucus legislators were led to believe that they would have the access to exchanges resolved in illegal immigrants’ favor… which leads to the question, “When will people start apologizing to Joe Wilson?”

Ha! Yes, I know: I’m quite the comedian.

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.

WH: Individual mandate now a tax.

Democrats, administration apologists hardest hit.

(H/T: Hot Air Headlines) If you are surprised at this… [deep breath] well.  You should not be.

When Congress required most Americans to obtain health insurance or pay a penalty, Democrats denied that they were creating a new tax. But in court, the Obama administration and its allies now defend the requirement as an exercise of the government’s “power to lay and collect taxes.”

[snip]

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.

Continue reading WH: Individual mandate now a tax.

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

Portion of Sen Orrin Hatch (R, UT) conference call.

Sen. Hatch had a conference call on Monday on two bills that he’s introduced in the Senate (the American Job Protection Act and the American Liberty Restoration Act) to remove, respectively, the employer mandate and the individual mandate from Obamacare. Below is my portion of the Q&A period:

To summarize: I asked how we were going to get these bills passed in the 111th Congress, and Senator Hatch was forthright in replying that he doesn’t expect that we will. But it’s still very important that we keep the Democrats’ feet to the fire, particularly since we will be in a better position in the 112th Congress to gut Obamacare; so let that be a motivator.

Indeed. Let it.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

President begging GOP for doc fix favor.

Not just “No.”
Not even just “Hell, no.”

The background: Obamacare assumed in its ‘official’ numbers cuts in Medicare payments to doctors; this has been scheduled for some time, but every year there was a ‘doc fix‘ to keep the cuts from being enacted.  The merits of the doc fix can be argued later: what is important here is that the Democrats used these supposedly planned cuts to make Obamacare look fiscally responsible, and the Republicans loudly pointed out that the Democrats had no intention of actually making the cuts, thus giving one more data point to support the argument that Obamacare was a passel of lies.  There was even a memo (later frantically declared fake, but never confirmed fake) noting that after the passage of Obamacare there’d be time to do the doc fix, so no need to talk about it at the time.

Lo. Obamacare has passed, and the President wants to talk about stopping the doc fix. Continue reading President begging GOP for doc fix favor.

Obamacare Deja vu. And vu. And vu…

Stop me if you’ve heard this one:

June 6, 2010.

White House and Allies Set to Build Up Health Law

WASHINGTON — President Obama and his allies, concerned about deep skepticism over his landmark health care overhaul, are orchestrating an elaborate campaign to sell the public on the law, including a new tax-exempt group that will spend millions of dollars on advertising to beat back attacks on the measure and Democrats who voted for it.

Continue reading Obamacare Deja vu. And vu. And vu…

Proposed Medicare Czar likes pretty, pretty pictures.

Witness this map.

It’s called the Dartmouth map, and as the New York Times and Hot Air notes, it was used by the Obama administration to argue that there were existing inefficiencies in the Medicare system that could be trimmed away, thus permitting a scenario where Medicare funding could be cut significantly while not sacrificing care (indeed, the map’s creators argue that it demonstrates that cutting Medicare will improve care). In fact, Sir Donald – that being the guy who loves the British Health Service to, ahem, death – is particularly enamored of this map:

Dr. Donald Berwick, nominated by President Obama to run Medicare, called it the most important research of its kind in the last quarter-century. In March, in response to the Congressional Democrats who would have otherwise withheld their support for the health legislation, the administration made a promise. It said it would ask the Institute of Medicine, a nongovernment advisory group, to consider ways of putting the Dartmouth findings into action by setting payment rates that would punish inefficient hospitals and reward efficient ones.

Just one small problem: it’s not actually a map of inefficient care. Just expensive care. More from the Times: Continue reading Proposed Medicare Czar likes pretty, pretty pictures.

Obamacare revisited: Sir Donald’s Medicare czar nomination fight.

Sounds like a fun way to spend the summer, doesn’t it?

President Barack Obama spent the last year insisting he doesn’t want to turn the American health care system into a carbon copy of the government-run British system.

But Obama’s pick to run Medicaid and Medicare — Donald Berwick — is a pediatrician and Harvard University professor with a self-professed “love” of the British system.

Berwick has called Britain’s National Health Service “one of the greatest health care institutions in human history” and “a global treasure.” He once said it sets an “example” for the United States to follow. And his decadelong efforts to improve the NHS were so well-regarded that Queen Elizabeth granted him an honorary knighthood in 2005.

Continue reading Obamacare revisited: Sir Donald’s Medicare czar nomination fight.