Posted on 08/18/2009 6:40:39 AM PDT by lward99
Warrenton, Virginia (PRWEB) August 18, 2009 -- Today, the Social Security Institute (SSI) joined with Patients First to carry an urgent message to three critical states: ObamaCare as originally conceived is dead, and the real danger now is RINOcare or ObamaCare Lite, which the Administration is trying to smuggle into law disguised as a "bipartisan compromise." The purpose of the tour is to convince critical Republican Senators in these states that the time has come to abandon unrealistic and potentially dangerous efforts to negotiate a bipartisan compromise. Instead, the Congress should put consideration of major healthcare reform on hold for at least a year until the economy improves and the supercharged political environment settles down. The only bipartisan agreement Senators should be seeking at this time is to abide by the 60-Vote rule for health reform the Senate TWICE voted (by unanimous consent and 79 yeas respectively) earlier this year to apply to the healthcare debate.
In a statement released yesterday, Hunter said:
"The American people have rejected ObamaCare. The President knows it, which is why he changed the definition of ObamaCare from 'healthcare reform' to 'health insurance reform' and why he pivoted from promoting a mandate that requires employers to provide health insurance to their employees to a direct federal mandate that individuals purchase insurance or pay a fine. The president also is repositioning himself to accept health-insurance co ops, the medical version of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac--call them Frannie Med--as a means of smuggling in a public option and eventually a single-payer system.
"The Hands-Off-My-Health Care Express is touring Wyoming and Iowa because Senators Mike Enzi (R-WY) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA) are two of the three most important United States Senators in the land right now. Senator Olympia Snowe (R-ME) is the third, and SSI is in the process of putting together a Maine tour before the Senate returns to session in September. These are the three Republican Finance Committee members trying to negotiate a so-called 'bipartisan compromise' on healthcare.
"We are concerned that the three Senate Republicans locked inside the hothouse of Washington, DC negotiations do not become so obsessed with the quixotic quest of forging a grand "bipartisan compromise" that they lose sight of the economic, political and fiscal realities of the situation and lose touch with the views and opinions of their constituents. The simple fact is, there is no way the Obama framework for reform within which Senate Republicans are being forced to negotiate can produce a solution that comports with the values and principles that most Americans hold dear; nor can that framework for reform produce a solution that will actually improve the healthcare system and be fiscally responsible. ObamaCare violates the fundamental laws of economic, and therefore it is time to go back to square one.
"Instead of trying to rush to enact a plan the American public is severely split over, Senators should come to a bipartisan consensus to abide by the 60-Vote rule for health reform the Senate TWICE voted to apply to the healthcare debate earlier this year. In Senate parliamentary terms, this means agreeing on a bipartisan basis NOT to ram health reform through the Senate by a simple majority vote under the special budget procedure known as Reconciliation.
"Reconciliation was devised as a special BUDGET PROCEDURE exclusively to facilitate annual budget legislation NOT for major reform of almost one fifth of the U.S. economy, which is at stake in healthcare reform. The Senate already has voted twice to maintain the REGULAR ORDER on health reform, i.e., NOT ram health reform legislation through under Reconciliation. These two overwhelming votes were ignored when the Senate Budget Committee Chairman (Senator Conrad-ND) took it upon himself to allow the 60-vote provision to be removed in the dead of night from the Conference Committee Report on the Budget Resolution despite a bipartisan vote of 79 Senators instructing the conferees to insist on the Senate's 60-Vote provision.
"The integrity and tradition of the Senate require that Senators of both parties abide by the Senate's cherished rules of unlimited debate unless 60 Senators agree to cut off debate and bring a matter to a vote. Senators who refuse to abide by the REGULAR ORDER in the Senate are resorting to legislative trickery and back room maneuvering to cram government healthcare down America's throat."
For more information on the Social Security Institute please visit our websites below: http://socialsecurityinstitute.com http://patientoptout.com
Obamacare by any other name would still be the taking of the beachhead of individual rights.
Now, more than ever we need statesmen and patriots, not the treasonous, self-serving politicians that currenlty afflict our great nation.
I have a cynical view so I have always thought Obama was over-reaching on purpose because, in the end, he knew he would be able to shove through radical changes because it was less than what he originally wanted.
OUTSTANDING article! Thanks for posting.
There’s always hope that the “useful idiots” are waking up to the good-statist/bad-statist routine.
BUMP!
RINOcare, love it ...
TORT reform now. Shut down the John Edwards sleaze.
Trojan RINO BUMP!
R or D. The only difference is how fast do you want your socialism
I believe this was the plan all along. They really wanted a water down version because they know they can add to and amend it and slowly get the Americans used to the socialization... I think Obama knows exactly what he is doing.
Plus it looks better/worse if democrats cant pull their party together
The current debate is not solely about health care. It's not about the auto industry, or the banking establishment. It's about liberty for individuals in a society versus tyrannical government control over the livelihoods, the earnings, and life and death decisions of each of those citizens.
The American Constitution was not supposed to allow that! Its Framers intended, through its protections, and through Article V, to put "We, the People" in charge to "bind them (elected officials) down by the chains of the Constitution" (Jefferson). They seem to have forgotten that.
Can anyone who reads Jefferson, Adams, Washington, Madison, or any other Founders actually believe their Constitution allows the principles of the Declaration to be violated in such a way by those elected to positions of power in government?
Any citizen whose passion is liberty should not be tricked into accepting such "compromises" of their liberty. There is a time and place when liberty is so threatened that, on behalf of our posterity, we should stand and declare to our elected officials in both Parties:
"This is a matter of principle. It is not negotiable. Stop taking away our Creator-endowed rights to be free to succeed or fail. Stop your arrogance in believing you were elected by us to take what we work hard to earn and 'redistribute' it in the name of 'compassionate conservatism' (R) or 'economic justice' (D). Sometimes you even try to fool us by redistributing it back to ourselves, as in 'cash for clunkers.' It is neither compassion nor justice! It is tyranny! Don't compromise away the future of your great-grandchildren!"
ObamaCare is NOT DEAD. Do NOT think we’ve won anything and let your guard down, because we haven’t won.
Public option vs. utilizing the private insurance system to control every aspect of how we get health care and to make health choices for us is the difference between being a little pregnant and a lot pregnant.
The government will still control you through the health system because it will be standardizing policies that can be offered on the exchange, taxing your payroll like it does for SSI and paying the premium on your behalf, and telling the insurance companies how to administer the plans. Everyone will get the same thing and the same treatment as if there were a public option. If it isn’t covered you don’t get it, and if you have a serious health problem you will be treated according to statisics.
If you manage to have a policy that is authorized by the state and not the Fed, which I believe would be the exception rather than the rule, you will still get a payroll deduction as if you had a federal government sanctioned plan in addition to having to pay the premium for whatever you choose to have on the side. It’s like being taxed for the public school system and paying again to send your kids to private school. And there will still be a real temptation for employers to dump any true private insurace offering to avoid double cost.
Look up HR1321 on Thomas and read it for yourself before popping the corks on the victory champaign. You will see that there’s a victory there for the insurance companies, but Average Joe will still be hosed just the same.
Whatever RINOCare may or may not be the truth is that the left will always ALWAYS try to push universal healthcare because it is the single most effective avenue for fabian socialists everywhere.
If you look at the successful socialist incrementalist processes in Europe, it all began with government healthcare programs perpetrated around the same time FDR foisted his “New Deal Socialism” programs in the US.
The left MUST keep trying to impose government authority over healthcare because it’s the single most proven play in their playbook.
As conservatives we’ve been attempting to erode and privatize social security and medicare for four decades with little success. Once a social entitlement program is instituted the fabian socialist approach is to pack that institution with unionized voters who will never allow the institution to be repealed.
The challenge thus is to either prevent the institution of new entitlement regimes forever (which is a downhill battle in most cases) or PRE-EMPT SOCIALIST PROGRAMS and install a free-market based institution which serves the intended role whilst enshrining free enterprise, individual freedom and personal responsibility forever.
When GWB pushed medicare part D, a successful and extremely popular private-sector based pharmaceutical medicare benefit, what he ACTUALLY succeeded in doing was PRE-EMPTING the socialist clamor for free medicine with a program that employs dramatic free-market systems that encourage individual choice at minimal cost to the consumer.
Like Medicare Advantage, Medicare Part D is immensely popular, fiscally sound, tremendously successful and HATED BY OBAMA. Even though Medicare Advantage has a proven track record (seniors under Medicare Advantage have a 27% less likelihood of going to the emergency room) Obama is so frustrated about its free-market approach that he’s trying to cut its funding just to diminish its effectiveness (and thus popularity).
If RINOCare isn’t some handout program like Obamacare and is instead something close to what the GOP has proposed that includes massive reductions in entitlements, privatization and personal Health Savings Accounts (like Singapore), then it is the conservatives best hope of blocking socialist incrementalism FOREVER.
This bill has been written over the past 40 years. The House leadership didn't write a bill - they had a coming out party.
EVERY SINGLE BAD THING in the bill is nauseatingly familiar to anybody in the medical field, because these people have been yammering about all of these things for more than a generation.
And every time we "compromise", they get to recruit a new battalion of destructive Leninists, whose cover is running some innocuous sounding "program" but whose actual function is to make the job of doctors, nurses, and hospitals harder and harder, and the patients' experience worse and worse, with the goal of making everyone cry out "ENOUGH! THE SYSTEM IS BROKEN! WE NEED YOU TO FIX IT!"
Lenin's maxim, "the worse, the better" describes the agenda of every Federal and state bureaucrat who are currently administering any public health program. They don't CARE that the programs don't work and cost too much. That's their FUNCTION - to screw things up, more, and more, the worse (for us) the better (for them).
Defeating the "public option" by replacing it with "co-ops" run by the same Leninists, to the same purpose of destroying what we have, is no victory.
Every GOP counterproposal (and even a lot of FReepers are saying, "you have to have an alternative") will just employ and empower the same Leninist termites. Only the name of the office they work in will be different.
And you're entirely correct.
That is the point of this Article - Obama is working with the RINO’s to pass ObamaCare Lite - or RINOcare.
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