ObamaCare Is All About Rationing (and Government Control)

Although administration officials are eager to deny it, rationing health care is central to President Barack Obama’s health plan. The Obama strategy is to reduce health costs by rationing the services that we and future generations of patients will receive.

The White House Council of Economic Advisers issued a report in June explaining the Obama administration's goal of reducing projected health spending by 30% over the next two decades. That reduction would be achieved by eliminating "high cost, low-value treatments," by "implementing a set of performance measures that all providers would adopt," and by "directly targeting individual providers . . . (and other) high-end outliers."

The president has emphasized the importance of limiting services to "health care that works." To identify such care, he provided more than $1 billion in the fiscal stimulus package to jump-start Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER) and to finance a federal CER advisory council to implement that idea. That could morph over time into a cost-control mechanism of the sort proposed by former Sen. Tom Daschle, Mr. Obama's original choice for White House health czar. Comparative effectiveness could become the vehicle for deciding whether each method of treatment provides enough of an improvement in health care to justify its cost.

In the British national health service, a government agency approves only those expensive treatments that add at least one Quality Adjusted Life Year (QALY) per £30,000 (about $49,685) of additional health-care spending. If a treatment costs more per QALY, the health service will not pay for it. The existence of such a program in the United States would not only deny lifesaving care but would also cast a pall over medical researchers who would fear that government experts might reject their discoveries as "too expensive."

The cap and trade bill, as it passed the House, and HR3200 as drafted, share many features in common.

1) They both create swarms of new officers to be sent hither to harass us, and eat out our substance.
2) They both create mechanisms of taxation which are separated from laws passed by Congress, and rely on administrators and bureaucrats to set tax rates, collect the taxes, and to judge and punish tax evasion.
3) Both rely on entirely untested, and in most cases hypothetical mechanisms to achieve savings.
4) Neither has a way to measure outcome in a validated and reliable manner.
5) Both are unlikely to accomplish their stated objectives.

Now, this is because 1) and 2) are the true purposes of both acts of pretended legislation, whereas the Members of Congress who voted or will vote for these things are indifferent to whether CO₂ emissions rise or fall, and are indifferent to whether or not you get any actual medical services.

These bills reveal much - about their designers.

"O ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose, not only the tyranny, but the tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the old world is overrun with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia, and Africa, have long expelled her.—Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart. O! receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind."

It is fatuous to believe that the United States alone, or even in concert with Europe, can legislate control of the world's CO2 emissions. Even Nancy Pelosi herself knows that she cannot legislate controls for Russia, China, and India all of whom have explicitly stated they will not accept such controls. Therefore, just as Jim Noble has asserted, we are left with no conclusion other than that the authors of the Cap and Trade bill have objectives in mind other than controlling global warming by curbing worldwide CO2 emissions.

To confirm the obvious, an alternative to CO2 emissions is nuclear energy but the administration has effectively undercut the expansion of nuclear energy when it throttled the Yucca Mountain disposal area study, thus ending any hope for the safe consolidated storage nuclear waste. This is an action utterly antagonistic to the idea of controlling CO2 emissions.

The Cap and Trade bill cannot find any justification as an effort to keep petrodollars at home or even to provide jobs at home through "green" products. As Sarah Palin pointed out in her Facebook article, prohibiting offshore drilling is a jobs killer, a balance of payments killer, and an inflation breeder.

It is literally the exclusive energy policy and a jobs policy of the Obama administration to build windmills.

Similarly:

The health reform bills are so incoherent and diffuse as to beggar analysis. But a cursory examination of these polls reveal the same structural defects as are exposed in Cap and Trade. The health care reform bills cannot be justified as a way of reducing costs because they: 1) add 46 million uninsured to the roles; 2) compel insurance companies to pay for pre-existing conditions; 3) prohibit caps 4) fail to permit interstate shopping for health insurance; 5) fail to provide tort reform which would tremendously reduce the cost of providing health care-all of which, whether or not good public policy, certainly add to the cost of national healthcare. Reduction of costs simply cannot be a plausible justification for Obamacare.

The Congressional Budget Office has confirmed that cost-reduction will not occur.

I am especially troubled by this discredited practice of the Obama administration to operate ultra vires authorizing legislation and even ultra vires the Constitution. One can only conclude that the Obama administration is usurping the powers of the Congress or acting entirely without constitutional authority. We have seen this in the appointment of what I like to call, "commie-czars."

I have little confidence that the Supreme Court will move courageously to defend their economic liberties and only the smallest confidence the five conservative justices can be found to protect the very structure or constitutional government and the very essence of our individual liberties.

If the Supreme Court does not act, there is no institution after talk radio and Fox news to put pay to the usurpations of this administration except the ire of aroused and righteous patriots. And if this language appears a little bit over the top please be advised that people like Jim Noble and myself have been predicting this state of affairs since before the election and long before the inauguration. We have tried every kind of language we can think of to sound the tocsin.

Lord Nelson upon ordering the attack at Trafalgar signaled, "England expects every man to do his duty." Robert E. Lee at the darkest days of the war said, "we shall win if it be God's will and every man does his whole duty."

Admiral William F. Halsey on receiving reports of sighting of the enemy signaled in reply simply, "attack, repeat, attack."

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