Posted on 08/12/2009 10:51:30 AM PDT by smoothsailing
Obama's Hoof-In-Mouth Disease
Larry Kudlow
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Its hard to know why President Obama said what he said at Tuesdays health-care town hall in New Hampshire. He actually stated, If you think about it, UPS and FedEx are doing just fine. Its the Post Office thats always having problems.
Oops. Freudian slip? Subliminally speaking, was the president inferring that private health insurers are doing just fine?
Government insurance is whats in trouble today. Medicare is in the hole by about $40 trillion on a discounted present-value basis over the next 40 or 50 years. And if were going to equate government care to government mail, according to Steve Hayes of the Weekly Standard, the U.S. Postal Service is going bankrupt with a $7 billion net loss this year. With 633,000 career employees, the Post Office wont be able to make $5.4 billion in retiree health-benefit payments. How many of these federal employees will populate the new government-backed insurance plan if it passes?
So its something of a mystery why the president went down the FedEx/UPS/Post Office turnpike. Perhaps the inner Obama is a free-enterprise guy. Maybe in the heat of battle his private-sector FedEx/UPS endorsement kind of, well, slipped out unconsciously.
Some will be skeptical of this reasoning. But having once had dinner with the man, along with other conservative pundits, and knowing how carefully he parses his words, its hard to understand how he let this free-market blessing slip out. Perhaps hes secretly competing with Joe Biden to win the hoof-in-mouth-disease contest.
Obamas health-care gaffes are mounting. At a press conference a few weeks back, the president let fly with an attack on doctors who remove tonsils instead of handing out allergy pills. Since doctors are very popular in America, and with many Obamacare protesters opposed to putting government central planners between doctors and patients, this was a big mistake. Worth noting, at that same presser, Obama also put his foot in it by attacking the Cambridge police officer at the center of the Henry Louis Gates affair. More hoof-in-mouth.
Obamas response in New Hampshire to the so-called death-board issue also was revealing. Some say these boards are tantamount to euthanasia for the elderly. Placards outside the meeting read: Obamacare, Down the Chute Granny. (Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin is spearheading this protest.)
Obamas response? He says reform would not basically pull the plug on grandma because we decided that its too expensive to let her live anymore. But the House bill comes dangerously close to giving unelected health boards the power to pull that plug. And as policy students know, its not always the precise wording of legislation that counts, but the regulatory interpretations of laws that are made by federal and state officials.
So, in a sense, Obamas denial was a non-denial denial. He should have unequivocally demanded that the death-board language be removed from any bill. But he didnt -- perhaps because he agrees with it. In interviews earlier this year, the president said that while he would have fought for his own grandmothers hip replacement, clinically he can see how these expensive decisions should not be made.
Grandma may indeed represent Obamas biggest political problem right now. As Team Obama attempts to placate concerns at the CBO that health reform is a budget-buster, seniors are rightly worried that the Medicare program on which they depend will be ravaged by cost cuts.
Rasmussen now reports that elderly folks over 65 are against Obamacare by 56 to 39. Thats a bad number for Democrats who rely on seniors to maintain their governing coalition. Incidentally, polls also show that about 75 percent of Americans are satisfied with their health-care services, while 80 to 90 percent are happy with the whole U.S. health-care system.
Its still tough to know whether this behemoth government takeover of heath care will actually pass. But two key markets are betting against it. First, over at the Intrade pay-to play online-betting parlor, the bid for the U.S. government health-plan contract is only 38 cents. Thats down from 50 cents in late July. Second, the share prices of big private health insurers have rallied in recent weeks. UnitedHealthcare is up 13 percent; Humana is up 12.4 percent; and Aetna is up almost 10 percent. These firms will be decimated if the government insurance plan passes. But investors are now predicting it wont.
For the sake of economic freedom, liberty, and fiscal sanity, lets hope the markets are right.
Copyright © 2009 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved.
obama did NOT say he would have fought for his own Grandmother’s hip replacement. He was very ambivalent- only when he picked up signals he was getting onto thin ice, did he say “I would have paid for it out of my own pocket because she was my grandmother” (BS. Look at his noninvolvement in helping his own impoverished african kin)
READ THE INTERVIEWS. Obama as candidate and now as President, has philosophized that such decisions should NOT be made on emotion, but by a board of “stakeholders” (HR 3200 language) based on practicality to society.
THIS IS COLD TO THE CORE. A watershed in how Govt “owns” decisions about individual life and its value ot the collective.
Excerpt from AARP article (!):
The Painful Side Effects of Obama’s Healthcare Reform http://bulletin.aarp.org/yourhealth/medicare/articles/the_painful_side_effects_of_obamas_healthcare_reform.htmlSide
“The scarcity of resources to pay for expensive medical procedures will only increase under a plan to extend medical benefits at federal expense to the 47 million Americans who lack health insurance. So why not save billions of dollars by killing off our own unproductive oldsters and terminal patients, or — since we aren’t likely to do that outright in this, the 21st century — why not simply ensure that they die faster by denying them costly medical care? The savings could then subsidize care for the younger and healthier.
Sound too draconian? Enter the ghost of Obama’s late maternal grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, who died of cancer at age 86 two days before her grandson’s election to the presidency. Dunham’s health issues first surfaced in a New York Times interview with the president on May 3. There, Obama questioned the appropriateness of a hip replacement that his grandmother had undergone after falling and breaking her hip shortly after being diagnosed with terminal cancer last year. The alternative to such surgery is typically excruciating pain and opiate dependency. Obama made it clear that he loved his granny and would have paid for the surgery out of his own pocket if he had to, but he said there ought to be a “conversation” over whether “sort of in the aggregate, society making those decisions to give my grandmother, or everybody else’s aging grandparents or parents, a hip replacement when they’re terminally ill is a sustainable model.” Obama suggested that such decisions be made not by patients or their relatives but by a “group” of “doctors, scientists, ethicists” who are not part of “normal political channels.”
Obama brought up his grandmother’s hip replacement a second time in his June 24 town hall event on healthcare on ABC. The “question was,” Obama said, “does she get hip-replacement surgery, even though she was fragile enough they were not sure how long she would last?” At that point I was thinking: If he says, “No hip replacement for you, Grams” one more time, it’s going to be a drinking game.
An audience member, Jane Sturm, told the story of her 99-year-old mother, who had initially been turned down for a pacemaker on account of her age. Sturm’s mother persuaded a second physician impressed with her joie de vivre to perform the life-extending operation — and she’s still hale today at age 105. “Outside the medical criteria,” Sturm asked, “is there a consideration that can be given for a certain spirit ... and quality of life?”
Nope. “I don’t think that we can make judgments based on people’s spirit,” Obama said. “That would be a pretty subjective decision to be making. I think we have to have rules that we are going to provide good, quality care for all people.”
I think she’s braying. That old guy with the Mr. Magoo glasses on who is peering into that big mouth of hers is Justice Stevens.
Think of cross-trained TSA employees having to change your diapers...
This should be required reading for any fool who "believes" in BamBamCare.
You’re right about the no top down part, and that’s a good thing. That’s what ultimately will defeat Obamacare.
Sarah Palin is part of the grassroots effort just like the rest of us, but she does have a dandy megaphone.
Exactly!
I like this line from an article I posted last night...
“Barack Obama mastered Alinsky tactics of campaigning for power and working the crowds down to the last little letter, but he absolutely has no plan of governance, no workable solutions, and can’t even talk about such things without a live-feed teleprompter glued to each hip.”
And hey, since the PO is running low on bucks, they’ll close Saturday and stop mail delivery those days.
So a “Public Option” would just shut down its hospitals on Saturdays to cut their debt?
I heard the tickets weren’t restricted to supporters only... but, according to news sources that didn’t have a clue about what they were disclosing - they were distributed by “community organizers”.
...”If that was supposed to be a true representation of the states population based on race, it was definitely rigged. Less than 2 out of 100 in NH are black.”...
Guess Rahm, Axelrod, and the boys aren’t so smart after all...who’d a thunk???
Tonsillectomies aren't done for anything related to allergies AFAIK. 0bama is redefining political intellect down below the grade school level.
Sure, why not. They could also work government hours, say 9 to 5 with an hour for lunch and all government holidays, sick leave, etc.
Of course, in order to serve the public good, they will have illness schedulers to make sure you don't show up when the hospital is closed.
Obama is a walking, talking gaffe machine. But I guess he says them so smoothly, nobody notices. (smirk) Actually as conservatives know, when The Great Spreader is not reading from Totus, he has quite a few er, ahs, and halting starts mixed in with his lies.
Or health care appointments like retiree dental care back when it was available in Oklahoma in the mid 80s. Around mid month they’d open the phone lines for an hour or so that DH used to refer to as “dialing for dentures.” The lucky few who got through got an appointment. Once all the appointments were gone (usually less than an hour later) the line essentially closed. Try again next month - maybe you’ll get lucky.
Remember your lessons in parsing Clintonese. 0bama is a lawyer too. He only eliminated one specifically worded rationale for "pulling the plug on grandma." He didn't say that bureaucrats would not decide when and why to pull her plug. They will, that's how government works. Bureaucrats administer programs and do the bean counting for gov run programs. Period.
And as policy students know, its not always the precise wording of legislation that counts, but the regulatory interpretations of laws that are made by federal and state officials.
Which is why the wording is deliberately vague in HR 3200 so that bureaucrats can fill in all of the details later at their discretion.
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doesn’t he realize that he just admitted by default that private enterprise left to grow and nationalize itself without bounds can do anything better than the government?
IOWs we can't even take a doctor's opinion that a patient has a chance for a good prognosis (much less the patient's opinion or the family's) we should just decide based on a sterile checklist formulated by a government bean counter. One size fits all.
That is not health care. That has no place in the healing arts. That is a model for an army procurement officer running a supply depot.
Or they just ignore it and move along.
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