Tag Archives: healthcare

Paul Ryan on MSNBC

Posted on July 31, 2009 | Leave a comment

This fella opens up a can on a few pro-Obamacare one liners.

I’m impressed.

What do you think about what he said?

HT:  Hotair

Related: check out Peggy Noonan’s most recent column on healthcare: Common Sense May Sink Obamacare.  An excerpt:

The common wisdom the past week has been that whatever challenges health care faces, the president will at least get something because he has a Democratic House and Senate and they’re not going to let their guy die. He’ll get this or that, maybe not a new nationalized system but some things, and he’ll be able to declare some degree of victory.

And this makes sense. But after the news conference, I found myself wondering if he’d get anything.

I think the plan is being slowed and may well be stopped not by ideology, or even by philosophy in a strict sense, but by simple American common sense. I suspect voters, the past few weeks, have been giving themselves an internal Q-and-A that goes something like this:

Will whatever health care bill is produced by Congress increase the deficit? “Of course.” Will it mean tax increases? “Of course.” Will it mean new fees or fines? “Probably.” Can I afford it right now? “No, I’m already getting clobbered.” Will it make the marketplace freer and better? “Probably not.” Is our health-care system in crisis? “Yeah, it has been for years.” Is it the most pressing crisis right now? “No, the economy is.” Will a health-care bill improve the economy? “I doubt it.”

The White House misread the national mood. The problem isn’t that they didn’t “bend the curve,” or didn’t sell it right. The problem is that the national mood has changed since the president was elected. Back then the mood was “change is for the good.” But that altered as the full implications of the financial crash seeped in. The crash gave everyone a diminished sense of their own margin for error. It gave them a diminished sense of their country’s margin for error. Americans are not in a chance-taking mood. They’re not in a spending mood, not after the unprecedented spending of the past year, from the end of the Bush era through the first six months of Obama. Here the Congressional Budget Office report that a health-care bill would not save money but would instead cost more than a trillion dollars in the next decade was decisive. People say bureaucrats never do anything. The bureaucrats of CBO might have killed health care.

The final bill, with all its complexities, will probably be huge, a thousand pages or so. Americans don’t fear the devil’s in the details, they fear hell is. Do they want the same people running health care who gave us the Department of Motor Vehicles, the post office and the invasion of Iraq?

She goes on to add three points to the debate that she thinks will continue to erode support for the President’s plan.  Not sure what to think about the first and third points, but am totally with her on the second.  Go read the full article for the details.

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Various and Sundry Thoughts

Posted on July 1, 2009 | 2 Comments

I don’t do this often, but it’s high time I actually do a “Roundup” (as Neil calls them):

1) Just when my ears had stopped ringing from the last round of anti-Palin screeching, there comes another round, this time started by Todd Purnum of Vanity Fair.  The fella wrote a near 10,000 word squawk-fest that should be used by logic textbooks to describe the ad hominem fallacy.   The “Sherlock Holmes of journalism” (sarcasm implied), a.k.a Andrew Sullivan, followed with a return to his speculatin’ that Trig Palin is not Sarah Palin’s son.

Folks are not letting the pile of bile stand, though.  Sister Toldjah has a great post linking to the many folks who have thoroughly debunked Purnum and Sullivan.

I have my doubts about Palin, but Purnum and Sullivan really, really cross the line.  I mean, seriously, folks!  It’s high time conservatives and liberals stand up to defend her for once, and simply squash this obsession.

Hotair provides a good quote from Patrick Hynes:

Look, I worked on the McCain campaign. Palin had her shortcomings, but she also brought some incredible strengths to the campaign. And perhaps the McCain staffers who continue to trash the governor are deflecting attention away from how remarkably screwed up and dysfunctional the operation was even before the Palin pick. What I don’t understand is this: Why would anyone hire a bunch of campaign staffers after watching how viciously they are attacking their former employer?

Melissa Coulthier adds her thoughts too: the folks from the McCain campaign who are engaging in the backbiting should never work a campaign again…but, given how politics work, they’ll unfortunately be able to find another job soon.

My question is: will the public see all the elementary-school backbiting and namecalling for what it is?  In this regard, I’m a pessimist: the public is easily snookered by media, on both sides of the political divide.

2) The Mullahs in Iran are, contrary to most politicians, making good on a promise.  Their pledge?  To execute those that oppose them:

As the Iranian authorities warned the opposition on Tuesday that they would tolerate no further protests over the disputed June 12 presidential elections, a report emerged of the hangings of six supporters of defeated candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi.

(HT: Hotair)

The Iran issue might have died down in the ADD American press in the wake of more “important” news, but it’s still very much alive in reality.

3)  The Health Care debate is still hot in our nation’s capital.  Verum Serum points to the bottom line:

An immensely popular President has asserted that the public plan is intended only as a positive influence in the market, fostering competition and leading the way in cost efficiency. And recent polls demonstrate that support for the public plan as described by the President is as high as 70-80%. And yet in spite of all this the President is having difficulty obtaining enough support…from MODERATES!? What could possibly explain this? It’s simple:

The proponents of the public plan are lying, and doing so transparently.

For anyone who has paid more than casual attention to the evolution of the Democrats’ platform for health reform over the past few years, it could not be any more obvious that the public plan was devised solely as a politically viable strategy to move the country towards a single-payer model. Why else would so many liberal members of Congress who have always strongly advocated for single-payer now support the President’s plan? As much as we may disparage them, these moderate Senators are not idiots and most of them represent constituencies that would be strongly opposed to a government take-over of healthcare. And they know full well that this is the underlying agenda of the public plan.

This is no idle speculation.  They have documented the real motivation extensively.  Go read the full post for links on that.

4)  Timmy Brister has a great testimony on how serious biblical church discipline can work.  Unfortunately, most of us won’t ever get to see something like this, because most don’t bother to practice it:

So many churches today do miss out on experiencing the kiss of extraordinary grace and celestial joy when the gospel not only reconciles sinners to God but also to one another in the context of a repenting and believing community who is covenanted to be a pure witness as the bride of Christ. So many pastors miss out on one of the greatest blessings of seeing Christ rescue fallen sheep because they do not hang around long enough, or aren’t willing to do love deep enough, to embrace fallen sheep and see Christ rescue them from their prodigal ways. So many wayward sinners wander into the hidden paths of prolonged rebellion without the legitimate discipline of a loving church because there is no commitment either on the part of the member to pursue holiness or the church to pursue those who fall in trespass and sin.

When I hear reports of God-moments in churches, I often hear of x number of people professing Christ, being baptized, etc., and they are all praiseworthy. But how often to we hear church members walk away from the gathered congregation with a God-moment where shameful acts of sinful rebellion is renounced in humble hearts of repentance and the forgiveness of Christ is communicated with joy and gratitude to God?

There was a time when experiences like the one tonight were not uncommon, but I have a strange feeling that this God-moment is one of which I would have a hard time sharing, except with brothers of yesteryear. But it does not have to be that way. We do not have to have undisciplined churches, meaningless membership, and cowardly pastors who are unwilling or afraid to do what Christ has commanded. I would not have had the privilege of joining angels in heaven with shouts of joy were it no for a pastor 20+ years ago committed himself to the biblical principles of regenerate church membership, church discipline, and faithful gospel preaching–marks all of which should make us Baptist. Unfortunately, my experiences leads me to believe that are marked as being weird.

The whole testimony will bring joy to your heart.

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Why I Love Mark Steyn, Reason #289

Posted on June 14, 2009 | 1 Comment

From a recent column on Big Government:

…there is a cost to governmentalizing every responsibility of adulthood — and it is, in Lord Whitelaw’s phrase, the stirring up of apathy. If you wander round Liverpool or Antwerp, Hamburg or Lyons, the fatalism is palpable. In Britain, once the crucible of freedom, civic life is all but dead: In Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland, some three-quarters of the economy is government spending; a malign alliance between state bureaucrats and state dependents has corroded democracy, perhaps irreparably. In England, the ground ceded to the worst sociopathic pathologies advances every day — and the latest report on “the seven evils” afflicting an ever more unlovely land blames “poverty” and “individualism,” failing to understand that if you remove the burdens of individual responsibility while loosening all restraint on individual hedonism the vaporization of the public space is all but inevitable. In Ontario, Christine Elliott, a candidate for the leadership of the so-called Conservative party, is praised by the media for offering a more emollient conservatism predicated on “the need to take care of vulnerable people.”

Look, by historical standards, we’re loaded: We have TVs and iPods and machines to wash our clothes and our dishes. We’re the first society in which a symptom of poverty is obesity: Every man his own William Howard Taft. Of course we’re “vulnerable”: By definition, we always are. But to demand a government organized on the principle of preemptively “taking care” of potential “vulnerabilities” is to make all of us, in the long run, far more vulnerable. A society of children cannot survive, no matter how all-embracing the government nanny.

The whole thing is insightful.

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Economic Houdinery

Posted on May 26, 2009 | Leave a comment

Yesterday I wrote about the long term social ramifications of Obama’s domestic policies.  In this post I’m tackling the other side of the coin: will the economy recover as a result of Obama’s policies, or in spite of them?  Will his decisions aid or hinder the recovery process?

I am just beginning to explore this question, so I only possess a beginner’s knowledge.

Here are some posts I’ve been reading that have helped me put things in perspective.  They are all pretty much coming from a conservative point of view…I happen to think that view point has a lot going for it, so to the charge of bias, I say:  meh (shrug).

Without further ado:

Healthcare

The government plan option is an intermediate step to a single payer system. Dems favoring the government plan option aren’t being completely honest with the general public, but they let their real intentions slip out when talking with groups that favor a single payer system. As Charles Krauthammer points out, Obama has abandoned advocating a single payer system for now, but this is only a practical step.

Here is clip of another Democratic Senator letting the real game plan slip out (HT: VS.  Be sure to read the comments section in the link.  Very educational because they go past making critiques to offering and evaluating better solutions.):

VS makes yet another post on the “public plan” talk. The cat is out of the bag.

While some might object that Congress, not the White House, has taken the lead in healthcare reform, Obama is still in the background orchestrating the plan.

Hugh Hewitt has more on the potential consequences to the government option on healthcare.

Laura at Hot Air breaksdown the “uninsured crisis” by bringing to light some inconvenient facts for those who want government-run healthcare. (HT: Wintery Knight).  WK supplements with some videos of his own in the HT link.

Obama vs. the evidence.…again.

Obama on healthcare reform: let’s keep digging ourselves a hole.  Here’s a bigger shovel. (This one’s got some hefty stuff to wade through for economic midgets like me, but it’s well worth it.  VS has some great stuff almost every day.  I highly recommend that you subscribe.)

Wall Street Journal: How ObamaCare will affect your doctor (HT: HH)  Hint: longer waits, less time in the appointment itself.  A notable quote:

The surest way to intensify flaws in the delivery of health care is to extend a Medicare-like “public option” into more corners of the private market. More government control of doctors and their reimbursement schemes will only create more problems.

Hewitt lets the doctors themselves weigh in…some eye opening testimonies about what goes on in Canada.

The Economy

Here’s a nice lil’ graph from Keith Hennessey on who cut spending more: Obama or Bush?

HT: Winteryknight.wordpress.com

HT: Winteryknight.wordpress.com

Accountability? What accountability? Greg Mankiw, professor of Economics at Harvard, discusses how the Obama administration’s attempt at accountability is anything but. The administration’s quarterly reports give the “illusion of accountability without the reality.”

Verum Serum also comments on the chart referenced by Mankiw, adding a question: besides putting us into a gigundous financial hole, what, exactly, has the stimulus accomplished when it comes to getting us out of the recession?

The O administration seems to be wearing rose colored glasses. John points out that the administration has had to revise the deficit numbers up $90 billion. Oops.

VS also reports on the AP fact checking Obama on his deficit and budget claims in front of the cameras. Once again, he’s a little less than truthful.

Obama: “we’re out of money.” His solution? Spend more money that we don’t have (aka the “stimulus bill”– now there’s a misnomer if there ever was one–and the budget for FY 2009 and beyond.).

Speaking about being out of money, Obama blames 7 straw men for our financial woes.

Wintery Knight asks: is Obama saving or creating jobs? The law of unintended consequences rears its ugly head again.

WK continues, evaluating Democrat policies on the budget, healthcare, and cap and trade. A key excerpt:

When it comes to federal spending, there’s a pattern emerging with President Obama, and it’s not a flattering one. The president says all the right things about the importance of getting the deficit under control, but his actions don’t come close to matching his rhetoric.

I have seen this pattern pretty much across the board in Obama’s brief tenure.  I’m not one of those folks who thinks he’s an idiot and doesn’t know what he’s doing, and I don’t think he’s naive either.  He’s incredibly savy and slick, and is not a sinister guy.  He totally believes that where he is taking the country is truly good…yet that doesn’t comfort me one bit.  In fact, it concerns me more.  He knows his rhetoric doesn’t match reality.

Here’s another anecdote exposing Obama’s habit of issuing sleights of hand from the podium (albeit, it’s on another topic than the economy).

I don’t trust him, period.

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