As I’m writing this, they’re in a panic in Congress, voting
in the wee hours, bribing reluctant senators with millions in
slush funds for their respective states, all to ram through a
health reform bill that few if any of the lawmakers have even
read, let alone intellectually reflected upon or debated.
They’ve already lost the public. In the most recent NBC
News/Wall Street Journal poll, support for
the Democrats’ health reform bills has dropped to 32 percent. In
the latest CNN poll, the public is opposed to the Democrats’
health reforms by a margin of nearly 2 to 1.
“Democrats are on a political suicide mission,” writes
Megan McArdle, economics writer at the Atlantic
magazine’s blog. “At this point, the thing is more than a
little inexplicable,” McArdle asserts, speaking of the
unpopularity of the legislation and the subsequent likelihood
that Democrats will lose seats in both the House and Senate in
next year’s elections.
“No bill this large has ever passed on a straight
party-line vote, or even anything close to a straight party-line
vote,” writes McArdle. “No bill this unpopular has ever passed on
a straight party-line vote.”
The Democrats’ suicide mission is the result of their
defining America’s health care system as “broken,” a system in
such “crisis” that nothing short of an immediate and complete
overhaul is required, a task, unfortunately, that’s beyond the
skill levels of Obama, Pelosi and Reid.
Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s Chief of Staff, described the
strategy for power grabbing early on: “You never want a serious
crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity
to do things you think you could not do before.”
To get the “crisis” rolling so nothing short of a full
restructuring is required, pharmaceutical companies, health
equipment suppliers, hospitals and health insurance firms were
painted as greedy profiteers, while Obama charged that doctors
were taking out tonsils for money instead of simply handing out
inexpensive allergy medicines.
“Right now, doctors a lot of times are forced to make
decisions on the fee payment schedule that’s out there,” declared
Obama in a prime-time news conference. “The doctor may look at
the reimbursement system and say to himself, ‘You know what? I
make a lot more money if I take this kid’s tonsils out.”
Added the president, talking alleged “sense” about
America’s supposed threat from predatory physicians, “I’d rather
have that doctor making those decisions just based on whether you
really need your kid’s tonsils out or whether it might make more
sense just to change — maybe they have allergies.”
What’s missing from Obama’s teleprompter is the fact that
63 percent of men and 66 percent of women in the U.S. survive in
excess of five years after being diagnosed with cancer, versus 45
percent of men and 53 percent of women who make it five years
after diagnosis of cancer in Great Britain’s government-run
system.
Also getting the silent treatment is the leading role that
American companies and researchers play worldwide in health
innovations. “Eighteen of the last 25 winners of the Nobel Prize
in Medicine are either U.S. citizens or work here,” explained the
Cato Institute’s Michael Tanner in Senate testimony on September
30, 2009, while “U.S. companies have developed half of all new
major medicines introduced worldwide over the past 20
years.”
And so now the politicians, essentially inept, are all set
to fix what they know next to nothing about.
