Former HHS Secretary Under Bush Sees Need for Obamacare Health Insurace, Despite Problems

A former secretary of Health and Human Services under a Republican president supports President Obama's health care reform law, saying it is similar to a Republican-backed plan he helped develop 20 years ago.

Dr. Louis Sullivan, the HHS secretary under President George H.W. Bush from 1989 to 1993, said Friday during a visit to Anniston that despite its flaws, the Affordable Care Act will benefit millions of uninsured, low-income Americans. Sullivan visited Anniston to tour the Sarrell Dental Center to learn how the facility provides affordable care to low-income children.

Sullivan is CEO and chairman of the Sullivan Alliance, a nonprofit that works to improve health care for low-income and minority Americans. Anniston-based Sarrell Dental has 15 clinics across the state and serves children on Medicaid.

"I'm for the Affordable Care Act -- it's an imperfect build and has a number of things that need to be addressed, but rather than working to try to dismantle it, we should work to improve it," Sullivan said.

Sullivan said Bush introduced the similar health reform plan in 1992, but it did not get far in Congress, which was controlled by Democrats at the time.

"The plan had the similar concept of the health insurance exchange, but now the Republican Party is attacking the same concept," Sullivan said. "I'm not for that kind of political one-upmanship."

According to press accounts from 1992, under the Bush plan, low-income Americans not covered by Medicaid would have received tax credits to help pay for insurance. The ACA insurance exchange also offers tax credits to offset insurance costs. Press accounts also noted that other Republicans supported the plan, but it had little chance of becoming law since Democrats controlled Congress and favored more ambitious approaches to health care reform.

“Is this another case of “race trumps all?””

I think this is multi-factorial, and has a lot to do with, IMHO, a flawed concept of social justice and how to help promote it. I was thinking today for the first time that it is ironic that blacks have been hurt immensely by a sociopolitical philosophy - socialism/Marxism - that was promoted by a white European guy from a wealthy family (Marx), who didn’t work, and was funded by another wealthy white guy (Engels).

You don’t help people by destroying motivation, and every policy that the left pushes destroys motivation for all but those who spend their lives as political parasites on society. Maybe that’s harsh, but the evidence has stacked up over many years, many lifetimes, and many lost lives.

They create dependency, thus destroying motivation. They confiscate wealth and punish success - thus destroying motivation.

It never ends well. The way to social justice is through voluntary servitude, charity, and the assurance by law that all people are free and have the right and opportunities to better themselves and define what they want to be. Not through punitive legislation and the exploitation of social and financial inequities.

The Republican elites serve the multinational corporations and Wall Street banks. These institutions have no loyalty to nations, they are players on the world stage. As a result the Republican elites are globalists, not Americans. They are also not capitalists, they are crony capitalists who use government to intervene in the market to meet the objectives of their clients.

Given the above we now understand the “free trade” movement started by George H.W. Bush which destroyed the US industrial base and allowed China to become a global power. Wall Street and multinationals made trillions moving US manufacturing to Asia and funding the industrialization of China. The concurrent destruction of millions of US middle class jobs in manufacturing and the manufacturing service industries had the twofold effect of reducing government tax revenue while creating millions of new consumers of government services resulting in massive government deficits.

We can also understand the cost shifting legislation which shifted the burden of retirement savings from the employer (defined benefit pension) to the employee (401K and IRA). This might have actually been a good thing were it not for the manipulation of the financial markets through speculation by their allies the Wall Street investment companies as well as the deliberate suppression of interest rates by their allies in the Federal Reserve. Manipulation of the markets and interest rates destroys the accumulated savings of the middle class as well as the incentive to save additional sums. The destruction of the savings ethic forces the middle class to rely on big government for maintenance in old age.

Now we see open immigration and government paid health care as goals of the global elites. Unrestrained third world immigration keeps wages down in the US. Shifting health care costs to the federal government via single payer medical insurance (the ultimate goal) will improve the profitability of big corporations in the same way they lowered employee benefit costs by shifting employees from corporate funded defined benefit pensions to employee funded 401K and IRA plans.

The third major goal is the elimination of gun ownership by the masses. The statists who control the Republican Party, and those who control them, know the biggest threat to the establishment is a revolt by the population. Once citizens are disarmed, the state will have total control of the individual from cradle to grave.

The “new world order” has nothing to do with individual liberty. It is all about global institutions (government, corporations) organizing the population to do their bidding.

Both the Republican and Democrat parties are creatures of the “new world order”. It is naive to believe the Republican Party can be reformed by conservatives from within. In fact, we are now seeing the purging of conservatives from the GOP.

For traditional American values to have a chance of survival it will be necessary to create a new ideologically pure party. The sooner the better as it may be too late already.

Yes folks, the republicans could have VERY easily stopped this at the start. But the Romney wing wanted it as well as the Bushbots.

And just how could they have done that? With a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and a dominant majority in the House, the Democrats could do whatever they wanted -- so long as they stayed united, which they did.

Indeed, the only Republican vote ever cast for Obamacare was Olympia Snowe's, which allowed the bill to go from the committee to the floor. At the time, the rule was that at least one minority vote was necessary to get bills out of committee (a residue of Trent Lott and the "new tone"). But we all know (as did Snowe), that -- without that vote -- Harry Reid would simply change the rules.

So, unless you're referring to the Snowe vote, just how could the Republicans have stopped Obamacare in its tracks -- outside of a mass kidnapping?

How they could have stopped it let me count the ways:

1. A bill needs two votes from the minority to get out of committee.

A. The republican leadership should have removed any republican from the committee and replaced them with real conservatives, not the two most left-wing republicans in the senate, same in the House.

2. For a bill to be considered as read in to the record requires unanimous consent, if just ONE (1) member objects the entire bill MUST be read in to the record and CANNOT be withdrawn.

B. Republicans were ORDERED by the leadership to “NOT OBJECT” so the bill was never read in to the record so we did not know what was in the bill.

The Dems to a man, pick people ideologically in lock step with them. They advocate as a solid block. The Reps to a man, pick people ideologically in lock step with the Dems. They advocate as a solid block. Stragglers? Only a select few...

And the "stragglers (I'm assuming they're actual conservatives) advocate on personal hot-button items and have no sense of solidarity no matter what the consequences. When a Palin supports a candidate in a race, if there are any perceived hot-button flaws, folks point out how she may not be the real deal instead of analyzing why she would offer the support. Can't win even a little bit with that sort of fragmentation.

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