If one lone Republican supporting your socialist bill indicates “bipartisan” support, then Max Baucus and the Democrats got that yesterday as the first hurdle to a government takeover of our insurance industry was cleared.

Here’s Liberal in Republican clothing Olympia Snowe ruminating on whether a “public option” might be the thing to fix “what’s wrong” with accessibility to health care in this country:

“I think the government would have a disproportionate advantage” in the event of a government-run option, the Maine Republican said in a nationally broadcast interview. Snowe said “at the same time, I want to make sure the insurance industry performs, and that’s why we eliminate many egregious practices.“

Egregious practices, you say? Sounds serious. You’d think the AP would get right to telling us what those practices might be and why they’re so egregious. The AP of course doesn’t do that. We have to wait until paragraph 17 to find out what “egregious practices” this new bill is aiming to fix, which to me is strange. Burying them so deep in the story leads me to believe that they’re really afterthoughts. That the reason to support this bill that the AP really wants you to take away has nothing to do with the egregious practices at all, but has everything to do (as did Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize ‘victory’ last week) with…rooting for Obama (and maybe also re-making America into a socialist trough). See for yourself. Tell me if these “egregious practices” are really all that bad:

The measures would bar insurance companies from denying coverage on the basis of pre-existing medical conditions and for the first time limit their ability to charge higher premiums on the basis of age or family size.

Think about that. We’re about to embark on trillions of dollars of government spending over the next couple of decades at least because we don’t like the fact that insurers price their products differently depending on the risk they’re assuming.

Imagine you’re a skydiver with a bad heart. You’re attempting to set the new world record by Scotch-taping yourself to a 1968 VW Bus and parachuting out of a B-1 Bomber. Over the grand canyon. While on fire. You go to your local insurer and attempt to buy insurance. Would you reasonably expect to be charged the same for your policy as a healthy 25 year old non-smoking female Olympic swimmer? Would you really?

Insurance is NOT the same thing as “FREE CARE”. Too many people think it is and it’s this misconception that is driving this debate into the dirt. Insurance companies don’t have to offer you insurance in exchange for money. This (for now) is a free society. They could just as easily go make hot dogs or mow lawns. Instead, through their own free will, they have (thankfully) decided to offer a service to cautious people. In exchange for a monthly sum (called a premium), they’ll promise to pay you a set amount of money in the event that some event happens. As I’ve said in the past, it is a bet. You’re betting that the thing will happen and they’re betting that it won’t. Your death for example. Life insurance. You’re betting Prudential that you will die within the next 30 years. They’re betting you won’t. They’re so confident you won’t die that they’re willing to pay you a lump sum of a million dollars if you end up dying. And all that bet will cost you will be a monthly premium payment.

How big should that premium payment be? Let’s go back to our sky-diver. How big should his monthly premium be? How likely is it that he’ll be right and end up dying? Pretty likely, right? So of Prudential is going to pay him that million dollars for dying in the next 30 years, they’re going to require that the monthly premium be high, right? Higher at least than the 25 year old non-smoking female Olympic swimmer. She’s not likely to die at all. Their promise to pay that million dollars is then a safe bet.

People with pre-existing conditions, who are extremely likely to require care,  are by economic necessity going to be priced higher than people without those condition. Remember, it’s all about managing risk. Betting.  If insurers charged people with pre-existing conditions as if they were healthy, then when it came time to pay out benefits, insurers would take a huge loss. Multiplied over millions of policies, it wouldn’t be long before insurers went out of business.

This would be bad.

For everyone.

The same thing with premiums which “discriminate” by charging higher premiums to older people or to people with larger families. Whenever a party becomes “more likely” to receive a benefit, an insurance company must manage that risk by charging more. Low risk people mean low premiums. High risk means high premiums. All these “egregious practices” which have motivated the left to overhaul our entire insurance industry, are all founded upon basic economic principles. These insurance companies aren’t evil. Their practices aren’t “egregious”. They offer us ALL protection against unforeseen events and the current witch hunt against them is criminal.

Let’s get back to that word for a minute. “Unforeseen”. Health insurance, unlike life insurance, deals in things which are foreseeable, right? We know we want to go to the doctor twice a year and to get “routine” bloodwork done. We want  “regular” breast and prostate exams. Remember our sky-diver? His death was “foreseeable” in the life-insurance context, which means his premiums were adjusted up. Not much of a bet when it’s very likely you’re going to lose. To manage that (high) risk of loss, you charge a higher cost to the insured to play the game. Same with the sort of “regular” care most people want in the health-insurance context. If you’re telling your insurer up front that you’re going to DEFINITELY be making claims MULTIPLE TIMES a year to cover exams, shots, etc., then how can your policy be ANYTHING except EXPENSIVE?

This is what people on the Left just do not seem to understand, or if they do, they do a good job of concealing to perhaps realize their underlying objectives of a socialist government in general.

And this should all seem very familiar to you. This should all seem like deja-vu. There was a time when the government thought that more people should receive loans to buy houses too. Remember what happened there? Despite the basic economic principle that people should be given loans based on the likelihood of their ability to pay, the government forced lenders to lend to high risk people, then subsidized those loans and guaranteed them with Sallie Mae and Freddie Mac. What happened there? Do you remember? Look at the headlines if you’re unclear. Unemployment at 10%. No money to be found. Credit dried up. Housing market plummeting.

And we go blithely on pretending that THIS TIME the government knows what it’s doing and that THIS TIME they’ll get it right. Forcing insurers to make economically unsound decisions to insure high risk people at low premiums and then have the government guarantee those bad policies with tax dollars is ITSELF an “egregious practice”. Do we have to wait until it all blows up AGAIN before we realize it was a bad idea?

And this of course is not to say that high risk people should not receive care. That’s dumb. Of course they should receive care and of course they should be able to purchase some type of policy that insures the costs associated with that care. It’s just that government until now has stood in the way of private insurers working together to solve this problem via competitive markets. It is ILLEGAL for example to purchase policies across state lines and to buy policies that do not contain state-mandated things like prostate screening for women or breast exams for men. Because states require that all policies contain provisions for insurers to pay for these things, the costs of those policies (as we’ve seen above) rise unnecessarily. Astronomically. How about a sick person in NY being able to buy a stripped down policy covering only his immediate requirements via the internet from an insurer in California? He can’t. It’s illegal to do so.

That’s where health care “reform” should start. That it’s not, is all you need to know about Olympia Snowe and her “egregious practices”. Reform is not “reform” because someone tells you it is. Break it down. Look it over. When you do so, if it seems like it’s only really an excuse for another expansion of government, you know you’ve hit on something. You’ve hit on exactly why nobody on the left gets too into specifics when they talk about “what’s wrong” with the current system.

The following is part of a longer piece published by Doug O’Brien over  at biggovernment.com (the site on which all those delicious ACORN videos originated) that unfortunately is too long for a bumper sticker, but which nonetheless captures the spirit driving a majority of Americans in opposition to Obamacare these days:

Every day, the administration’s promotional campaign becomes more politicized, more strident, more arrogant, and less aimed at a discussion of the real concerns arising from the desire to hastily revamp one-sixth of the nation’s economy. Tell us in real terms how this will be paid for, not with vague estimates of possible “savings.” Tell us exactly how you will prevent rationing and unwarranted delays in care. Tell us how you will guarantee the survival of private insurance, not just pat us on the heads like children and promise that you won’t directly force anyone out of their current plan.

via Big Government » Blog Archive » Rev. Jackson to the rescue of Obamacare.

Obama and his flacks in the media of course won’t tell us those things because they can’t. Reform will be paid for with new taxes. Rationing won’t be prevented. It will be encouraged. Private insurance won’t survive. It’s obsolescence in fact, is the point.

But what kind of sales pitch is that?

So they lie. Peddle half truths. Counter legitimate questions with charges of racism. Because nobody ever chooses Socialism willingly. To gain the authority of law it must rely on the same coercive strategies which Obama is implementing right now.

Lies. Half truths. Manipulation.

Someone named Noam N. Levey penned this wonderful little bit of misinformation in today’s LA Times:

Imagine the debate over healthcare legislation on Capitol Hill as a tussle among three friends out for dinner.

All three have been struggling to pay their bills lately. When the check arrives, they try to figure out how to divide it. The problem is no one can really afford the meal. And if one manages to pay less, the other two will go home even deeper in the hole.

That is the dilemma facing President Obama and his congressional allies as they try to develop healthcare legislation that can unite liberal and conservative Democrats and make it to the president’s desk by the end of the year.

“It is all a question of balancing,” said Ken Thorpe, a healthcare economist at Emory University who has advised congressional Democrats working on healthcare bills.

Think of our three friends as consumers, businesses and government, the three major groups that pay for healthcare in America.

The check is the nation’s healthcare tab, which now tops $2.5 trillion a year.

via Splitting healthcare tab is a balancing act — latimes.com.

Does Mr. Levey not realize that “government” pays for nothing? Every dollar spent by government must first come from a “consumer” or a “business” that created it in the first place.

Some might ask (and they’d be right in asking) why government needs to place itself in between citizens and their health care at all. Wouldn’t it all be more efficient to permit citizens and businesses who create their dollars to pay it directly to the insurance companies themselves? Wouldn’t it make sense to permit interstate competition between health insurance companies? Wouldn’t that competition (like competition between potato chip and motor oil companies) result in more choices for the consumers? Lower prices? Better quality? And wouldn’t it also make sense to permit consumers to purchase insurance against whatever type of contingencies they wish? Shouldn’t a healthy 22 year old male be free to insure against ONLY catastrophic occurrences? Why is he instead required to obtain and pay for a policy insuring things he doesn’t need?

Ah…and now we get to the reason for government. The reason that the government insists on insinuating itself between citizens and their health care is that without the government, the millions and millions of people who feel that they are entitled to FREE health care and who exist like CHILDREN within the soft fluffy womb of Big Government Insulation would be out of luck.

I’m not talking about people who despite their best efforts find themselves temporarily in need of assistance. I’m also not talking about the old, the young, the truly poor, the incapacitated. These people should be helped by the government and the government should be able to collect a little bit of money from the hundreds of millions of us who have some in order to help those who absolutely cannot help themselves.

But there are ALREADY government programs like that. Tremendously wasteful and inefficient ones, I grant you, but systems currently being funded that help the young (SCHIP), the old (MEDICARE) and the poor (MEDICAID). Not to mention social security.

Why isn’t “health care reform” focusing on fixing EXISTING programs to more effectively help those who are already eligible to receive that help?

Because that misses the point, doesn’t it? The object of the current Obama-liberal reform packages is to insure that the producers in this country are screwed to the highest possible degree so that those who are content to recline in the padded lap of government may do so from cradle to grave.

That’s why the various free market approaches that I outline above won’t be seriously entertained by any liberal. Because just as the Stimulus wasn’t created to stimulate anything except the liberal base, so too is health care ‘reform’ not intended to reform anything except capitalism.

The cure for capitalism is a heavy dose of socialism….and that’s just what Obama is planning to deliver.

If recent polls are any indicator though, these plans may be crumbling. Which of course is a good thing, despite what great thinkers like Noam N. Levey believe. The more Obama and his liberal cabal open their mouths to scold Americans on health care ‘reform’, the more we learn of his socialist mischief and the more sick and tired we become of his Presidency.

This chart from Rasmussen says it all:

Keep talking, Mr. President. Keep talking.

The title of this post is almost as long as the post itself.

Consider that the Washington DC Public schools are the only public schools in the country that are completely administered by the Federal Government.

Want to take a guess at what they spend per student?

You got it. $16,540.

Bear in mind that the average cost per pupil for all states (including DC) is about $9,500. So it costs DC almost twice as much to educate each pupil as it does the average pupil in other states. As a frame of reference, it costs about $34,000 a year to send your kid to Princeton.

So for $16,540, you’d expect DC students to be among the best educated in the nation, right? After all, according to Obama, once the Feds get involved, waste and inefficiency magically disappear.

Want to take a guess at how the DC public schools rank in terms of overall test scores?

You got it. Dead last.

So what do you think? Is it time to turn over health care to the Feds?

President Obama is fond of saying that there are nearly “46 million Americans without health insurance coverage.”

He’s of course blowing sunshine up all your asses.

Take a look at the real numbers:

[O]f those 45.7 million people:

* 6.4 million are enrolled in Medicaid or S-CHIP and just gave the Census taker the wrong answer. I’m serious. This is called the Medicaid undercount.

* Another 4.3 million are eligible for Medicaid or S-CHIP and have not enrolled. If they need care, the hospital or clinic generally enrolls them. They are protected against risk even though they don’t show up on the rolls as insured.

* Another 9.3 million are non-citizens. Different people come to different conclusions about what portion of this group should receive taxpayer-subsidized health insurance.

* Another 10.1 million have income more than three times the poverty line.

* Leaving about 15.6 million remaining uninsured, of whom about 5 million are childless adults.

The 46 million figure is technically correct, but it dramatically overstates the size of the population that many Americans would conclude is deserving of additional taxpayer subsidies.

Now, many will say that even if there is only 1 person without adequately free health care in this country, that’s way too many. To these people I say, get out of your pajamas, off your mom’s couch, and outside to look for a job….because anyone who works for a living and understands the concept of personal responsibility knows that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Carry your own weight. If you can’t physically do that, let Uncle Sam know and we’ll be more than happy to help. But if you can, but don’t ‘want’ to…or if it’s too ‘inconvenient’ for you to…then baby that’s too damn bad.

Sometimes, when you’re arguing back and forth on a topic for too long, it’s easy to sort of lose focus on what all the hub bub is about and it’s worth taking just a few moments to step back and put your hands on the arguments once again.

Health Care reform. Or is it Health Insurance reform? All we seem to know is that some powerful Americans (namely, the President and his fellow travellers in Congress) are pissed off that a condition exists in this country whereby becoming sick can be very costly.

“We should not be forced into bankruptcy by our health care bills!” they say, and “We should not be denied coverage for any reason!”

Does that about cover it?

I think a good way to get back to square one here is to look at the term “insurance”….since the companies who give us these policies (in exchange for money) seem to be bearing the brunt of a lot of rage these days. Evil profiteers, you know. Filthy lucre.

The purpose of an insurance policy is to protect yourself against damages likely to be sustained by the occurrence or non-occurrence of a particular event (or set of events). For example…let’s just say you run a flower-selling operation out of your backyard. In order to grow flowers, you need for it to rain. If you’re a forward thinking individual, you may want to consider purchasing an insurance policy that will pay you the cost of losing a particular crop of roses in the event that you lose that crop because it didn’t rain. Since you’d normally sell that crop for say $2,000 and the cost (in terms of time and money) to replace a lost crop would be say another $1,000, it wouldn’t be unreasonable for you to take out a $3,000 policy against it not raining. If it doesn’t rain AND such non-rain causes you to lose your crop, then the insurance company will give you $3,000. Not bad. But what does a policy like that cost you?

Suffice to say, there are very smart people currently being paid A LOT of money to determine at what cost insurance policies should be sold. I’m not one of those people, but I did stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night, so I’ll take a crack at it. You’re obviously not going to want to pay $3,000 for that policy, right? Since that’s the amount you’d benefit if it didn’t rain, it would make better sense at that point to just save your $3,000 in a bank and hope that it doesn’t rain.

In order to entice you to purchase a policy, an insurance company has therefore got to offer it to you for less money than the total benefit of the policy, right? Insurance companies also have to consider the likelihood of the thing being insured against. If the event is likely, then your policy will cost more money. If it isn’t likely, the policy will be cheaper.

Why is that?

This is the great equalizer as far as the current debate about health care goes. If an insurance company is promising to pay not only you but thousands of other rose-growers in the area $3,000 apiece if a drought occurs which ruins crops, it will NEED to know how likely it is that the event itself will happen. If you live in the Sahara desert, then the likelihood of them paying out is near 100%. It never rains there and therefore, it’s very likely that a drought will ruin your crop. And since they’d have to charge you less than $3,000 for the policy to begin with (see above), they’d LOSE money on every policy. In a free market economy, there would be no market for these types of policies. People would save their money and pay for damages out of their own pockets, or better yet, choose another profession. The risk of losing their entire crops without insurance would be enough for them to take up boat-making instead.

Let’s say instead of the Sahara, you lived in a Costa Rican rain forest. What’s the likelihood of a drought coming there and destroying your rose crops? Near zero, right? So how much do you think that policy would cost? Pennies. Insurance companies would be very competitive in this market, right? Offering you insurance against events that are practically guaranteed never to happen means they can price their policies very modestly. Then the rose-grower would have to decide—if the event is NEVER going to happen, is it worth insuring against? Probably, because you never know, but we’re talking nominal fees here.

So what have we learned? If you want to insure against things that are practically GUARANTEED to happen, you’ll find that policy (if indeed anyone will offer it) to be very expensive. If you want to insure against things that are practically guaranteed NOT to happen, you’ll find that policy to be very cheap.

Of course the crucible of this little experiment anticipates a free market without government interfering with the natural allocation of resources through pricing. Which brings me to my next point.

Why is health insurance so expensive?

Simply, health insurance is so expensive because insurance companies are being forced (through individual mandates of both the states and the federal government) to cover things they would ordinarily find to be too risky. Not only that, but you and I are forced to buy these policies, covering things we don’t even need. Why is this happening? Because government, in its infinite wisdom, decided once again that it knew more about markets than the private businesses engaging in those markets themselves. Does the Community Reinvestment Act ring a bell? This of course was the government’s ill fated attempt (*cough* RECESSION *cough* HOUSING BUBBLE *cough*) to ‘guarantee’ that poor people with poor credit be afforded the opportunity to receive a mortgage…regardless of their ability to repay loans. You see, the government thought that because poor people with poor credit (gasp!) weren’t receiving loans for HUNDREDS of THOUSANDS of dollars….banks were therefore not only EVIL but RACIST to boot (because anyone’s a racist, don’t you know, who doesn’t loan money to people who can’t repay). The government acted on a supposition that EVERYONE regardless of credit rating had a RIGHT to OWN a HOUSE. That right eventually translated into a recession that we’re still enduring today.

The current government project is to create a RIGHT for everyone to receive FREE HEALTH CARE….and then to destroy the INSURANCE industry to realize that “right”. The result will be the ruination of the insurance industry (and subsequently, the level of care accessible to all Americans) similar to the ruination of the financial industry.

Insurance, as we saw above, is not set up to be a guarantor of free stuff. Insurance is RISK MANAGEMENT. The more you require insurance companies to cover EVERYTHING (and not just unlikely, but costly events), the more expensive those policies will end up becoming. We’re asking our insurance companies to provide more and more coverage for more and more things, but asking the PRICE of that coverage to go DOWN?

It’s illogical and irrational. If you want to say that the government (and doctors) should be in the business of giving away free stuff, then say it. But don’t pretend that this is an INSURANCE issue…since any reasonable person knows that INSURANCE is not about guarantees. It’s about a safety net. This major disconnect is causing immense confusion in the current debate.

Imagine this in terms of car insurance. Imagine that we wanted every single expense associated with our cars to be covered under an insurance policy. That means gas fillups, tolls, tickets, regular maintenance, oil change, car washes, etc. What do you think that sort of policy would cost?

Astronomical, right? As well it should be because we’d be transforming our policy from one of “risk” to one of “guarantee”. In other words, we’re no longer insuring against the occurrence of an unlikely event, but insuring against the occurrence of very likely events. Events so likely, they’re guaranteed. Will our cars be “healthier” if we had all this stuff covered under our “insurance”? Sure. But at what cost?

We’re currently in the “at what cost” stage of the debate in health insurance. Everyone wants to be covered against drought in the Sahara desert, and insurance is just not set up to make that a cost-effective policy.

We need to remove “insurance” from this debate and clear the air. This is about the government guaranteeing that everyone be issued “free stuff”, to be paid for by people who are already paying too much relative to the value received. It’s nonsense, and it’s time we all realized it.

Ever get the feeling that Democrats can’t possibly be this stupid? To increase deficits to unmanageable levels on purpose under the guise of ‘fixing’ the economy? To cram health care ‘reform’ legislation through congress without even bothering to understand what it means let alone whether it will actually reform anything or make things infinitely worse? Purposefully putting in place “climate” legislation like “cap and trade” that will knowingly bankrupt our coal industry all because of Al Gore’s cuckoo and demonstrably false environmental fantasies?

It’s so easy to sit back and let it all wash over you. They’re smart people. They know what they’re doing. Someone, somewhere, deep in the party, wants the economy to actually work and for our health care system to be better. Eventually, Obama will listen to these better angels and “do the right thing”. Even if you don’t necessarily agree with the means, if it ends up fixing things, then who cares in the end, right?

That all wouldn’t be that bad a plan if Obama and the Liberals currently jerking the levers of government had the same idea of “fix” as you did. You may be a Yankee fan (I won’t understand it, but you may) and you may hate their manager, Joe Girardi. He may hit and run in the wrong spot. He may not position his outfielders well. But you know that regardless of all that, he basically wants to win baseball games. And because of that, you root for him to succeed, despite the methods he uses. If he can bring your guys the rings in October, he can play the outfielders in Monument Park if he wants. Just win, baby. As well it should be.

What does it mean for Obama to “win”?

Recall that the single thing that all his policies to date have in common is that they are very expensive.

That’s it. Whether it be cap and trade, the Recovery Act or health care reform, the bills (where there are bills) have all been hastily (and poorly) written, rushed through the legislative branch, and believed by experts to do little to “help” the situation that they were ostensibly launched to remedy. What everything was sure to have, however, was a steep price tag.

So if the object of these bills was not to actually fix anything or help anyone, then what was the point?

The point was to take your money.

Expensive things need to be paid for. By inking these legislative promises to pile up enormous debt, Obama is guaranteeing that the federal government will be in your pockets into the foreseeable (and unforseeable) future to repay. So it doesn’t matter that none of this legislation will “work” to “fix” the stated “harm”. What matters is that we will have guaranteed a commitment to tax. And tax. And tax.

Victor Davis Hanson lays some groundwork as to why:

The point [of the deficit-exploding legislation] . . . was the consequence of the resulting deficits, which will require radically new taxation for generations. If on April 15 the federal and state governments, local entities, the Social Security system, and the new health-care programs can claim 70 percent of the income of the top 5 percent of taxpayers, then that is considered a public good — every bit as valuable as funding new programs, and one worth risking insolvency.

Individual compensation is now seen as arbitrary and, by extension, inherently unfair. A high income is now rationalized as having less to do with market-driven needs, acquired skills, a higher level of education, innate intelligence, inheritance, hard work, or accepting risk. Rather income is seen more as luck-driven, cruelly capricious, unfair — even immoral, in that some are rewarded arbitrarily on the basis of race, class, and gender advantages, others for their overweening greed and ambition, and still more for their quasi-criminality.

“Patriotic” federal healers must then step in to “spread the wealth.” Through redistributive tax rates, they can “treat” the illness that the private sector has caused. After all, there is no intrinsic reason why an auto fabricator makes $60 in hourly wages and benefits, while a young investment banker finagles $500.

Spread the wealth.

We heard that from Joe the Plumber during the campaign and the Left went into near hysteria trying to convince America that the term didn’t mean exactly what Obama meant it to mean. Because the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he didn’t exist. But the term is real. It has meaning. Socialists embrace this meaning. They’ve been running (and losing) on this platform in United States elections for 100 years. Obama would have lost too if he’d been honest about his plan to reorder America according to his  disproved theories of Social Justice. Americans reject the notion that happiness should be guaranteed. We reject the notion that anything other than the “pursuit” of it is mentioned in the “mission statement” of our nation–the Declaration of Independence. We reject the notion that “luck” determines outcomes and that there is anything “arbitrary” or “capricious” about a hard-working family’s salary that needs to be “adjusted” to permit a non-working person to achieve something he didn’t work for.

Obama embraces all those things, and has pushed through terrible legislation designed not to fix anything except the scales of “social justice”.

Again, from Mr. Hanson:

[W]hy would intelligent politicians try to ram through, in mere weeks, a thousand pages of health-care gibberish — its details outsourced to far-left elements in the Congress (and their staffers) — that few in the cabinet had ever read or even knew much about?

Once again, I don’t think health care per se was ever really the issue. When pressed, no one in the administration seemed to know whether illegal aliens were covered. Few cared why young people do not divert some of their entertainment expenditures to a modest investment in private catastrophic coverage.

Warnings that Canadians already have their health care rationed, wait in long lines, and are denied timely and critical procedures also did not seem to matter. And no attention was paid to statistics suggesting that, if we exclude homicides and auto accidents, Americans live as long on average as anyone in the industrial world, and have better chances of surviving longer with heart disease and cancer. That the average American did not wish to radically alter his existing plan, and that he understood that the uninsured really did have access to health care, albeit in a wasteful manner at the emergency room, was likewise of no concern.

The issue again was larger, and involved a vast reinterpretation of how America receives health care.  Whether more or fewer Americans would get better or worse access and cheaper or more expensive care, or whether the government can or cannot afford such new entitlements, oddly seemed largely secondary to the crux of the debate.

Instead, the notion that the state will assume control, in Canada-like fashion, and level the health-care playing field was the real concern. “They” (the few) will now have the same care as “we” (the many). Whether the result is worse or better for everyone involved is extraneous, since sameness is the overarching principle.

Read that last bit again.

“Whether the result is worse or better for everyone involved is extraneous, since sameness is the overarching principle.”

It’s like the Joe Girardi suddenly running the Yankees like a little league coach, making sure that everybody got a chance to play, regardless of how such acts impacted the results of the game. Would Yankee fans still root for him to win if he did that? Would they still believe that, regardless of means, he was still interested in winning the game? Of course not.

They’d want his ass out of there.

What is Obama’s end game? To get health care, the environment and the economy right? Or is it something more sinister—to pronounce that it is ‘unfair’ for people ‘with’ money to ‘have’ it anymore, and to ‘take’ it away through ‘taxes’ and ‘give’ it to others?

I called it a “misdirection” in my earlier post.

Thomas Sowell calls it a “bait and switch”:

It’s called “bait and switch” when an unscrupulous business advertises one thing and tries to sell you something else. When politicians do it, it is far more dangerous to far more people. Deception is not an incidental aspect of this medical-care legislation. It is at the very heart of it.

This legislation would bring about a massive change of our entire medical-care system, from top to bottom. That an attempt was made to rush it through Congress before the August recess — before anybody in or outside of Congress had time to read it all — should have told us from the outset that we were being played for fools.

Despite President Obama’s recent statements that he is not advocating a “single-payer” system for medical care — which is to say, a government monopoly of power over life-and-death decisions — just a few years ago, he was telling a union audience that he was in favor of a single-payer system. At that time, he pointed out that it was unlikely that such a system could be put in place all at once; it might take a number of years to advance, step by step, toward that goal.

In other words, Barack Obama fully understood the “entering wedge” political strategy that has allowed so many government programs to start off small and apparently innocuous — and then grow to gigantic size and scope over the years.

If telling us that he is not for a single-payer system will soothe us into going along, then it is perfectly understandable why he said it. But that is no reason for us to believe him.

Here’s Obama in April in an interview with David Leonhardt of the New York Times:

[W]hen Peter Orszag and I talk about the importance of using comparative-effectiveness studies as a way of reining in costs, that’s not an attempt to micromanage the doctor-patient relationship. It is an attempt to say to patients, you know what, we’ve looked at some objective studies out here, people who know about this stuff, concluding that the blue pill, which costs half as much as the red pill, is just as effective, and you might want to go ahead and get the blue one. And if a provider is pushing the red one on you, then you should at least ask some important questions.

[ . . . ]

[I]f it turns out that doctors in Florida are spending 25 percent more on treating their patients as doctors in Minnesota, and the doctors in Minnesota are getting outcomes that are just as good — then us going down to Florida and pointing out that this is how folks in Minnesota are doing it and they seem to be getting pretty good outcomes, and are there particular reasons why you’re doing what you’re doing? — I think that conversation will ultimately yield some significant savings and some significant benefits.

[ . . . ]

[End of life care is] a huge driver of cost, right? I mean, the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill out here. [To deal with it] . . . I think that there is going to have to be a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists. And then there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place. It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels. And that’s part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance. It’s not determinative, but I think has to be able to give you some guidance. And that’s part of what I suspect you’ll see emerging out of the various health care conversations that are taking place on the Hill right now.

Hmm. It seems all very jovial, doesn’t it? Conversations. Nothing determinative. Just kicking the tires a bit. Trying to talk through just why things are more money than others. Maybe have a few beers. Get a better understanding. Nobody’s pulling the plug on grandma. All we’re talking about doing is getting better “information”.

What’s implied by all this soft-pedaling is that ultimately the decision will be up to you and your doctor. If you want to go ahead and take the red pill, go ahead, we just want to give you all the facts. And if you want to have that hip replacement even though you’re terminal? We won’t stop you. Go ahead and do it. We’re just giving you a little background on what it costs.

And it all seems so bright and rosy. Who could object? The liberals will tell you that this is purely for the purposes of “counseling” only and that no decisions made by this “independent group” will determine whether you live or die.

It’s all a big lie.

Let’s look at these “independent groups” a little more closely. They’re called “IMACS”, which, according to the White House web site, stands for “Independent Medicare Advisory Council”, and they’re currently being proposed as a component of Medicare. According to the web site, the IMAC “would make recommendations on Medicare reimbursement policy and other reforms – playing a critical role in allowing health care policy to adjust flexibly to a dynamic health care market, thereby helping contain costs and improve quality over time.

Doesn’t come right out and say “death panel”, but you sort of get the feeling that’s exactly what it is. These groups are anything but independent. They are a government-funded group whose sole purpose is to make your health insurance experience as cheap as possible for the government. These “recommendations” aren’t blind handwritten submissions into a “how can we serve you better” suggestion box you might find at Red Lobster. These are official, capital “R” Recommendations submitted by the payer of your health insurance—the Government. As your parole board would “Recommend” that you remain in the clink for another 5 years, so too would the IMAC “Recommend” that you not get that hip replacement. You don’t take that recommendation with a grain of salt and go get a second opinion. After all, you’re on Medicare. The Government is your God. Thou shalt kneel before Him.

Which brings me back to Obama’s interview. All that soft-pedaling of just what sort of authority these groups would have. Just talking, he said. Trying to work with you, he said. Asking around. And in a system (unlike Medicare) where you would be free to take their “advice” and go talk to your doctor to explore alternatives, the IMAC isn’t that much to worry about.

Except that that system is one that Obama, if he has his way, won’t permit to survive too much longer.

That’s because Obama and the Democrats’ real goal is to kill the private insurance industry (you know, that industry which permits you to shop around) and to install the Federal Government as the Lord, they Savior.  They’re not coming right out and saying “we want to kill private insurance”. That would be stupid. You won’t see anything in the new Health Care reform proposals which renders private insurance “illegal”. What they’re trying to do instead is called an “misdirection”. It’s a football term. Distract you with something over there, while the whole time the plan is to swing back the other way and expose the hole created by your paying attention to something else on the other side of the field.

The current “public option” proposal is a misdirection. This guarantee to people of a federally controlled “option” to “compete” with private insurance seems harmless.

Until you realize that this Federal option is a “Zombie”….which is to say that it “looks” like a real person, except that it’s undead. It doesn’t die. You see, things that die tend to take care of themselves. Watch bottom lines. Make sound business decisions. Limit waste. Things that can’t die don’t care about those things. They waste. They make bad decisions. Who cares, right? They can’t die. All they need to survive is warm blood. Tax dollars for the purposes of my little metaphor.

So now you’ve got this Zombie option out in the jungle “competing” with legitimate, private insurance businesses. Guess who will win? The Zombie can afford to take a BILLION dollars in losses next year. How much can the private insurers afford to take? What’s their break point? Once they no longer make a profit, they’ll be gone. The Zombie, however, will last for YEARS without care at all for profits. What should it care about profits when the spigot of warm tax dollars is wide open? Pumping gallon after gallon down its gullet?

Before long, the Zombie will be all that’s left. The Zombie option will be the only option, and all that warm talk about “comparative” this and “non-determinative” that will be so much gobbledegook. The IMAC will be Zod. We will all kneel before Him.

Can I have that hip replacement? The numbers don’t make sense—I recommend….NO.

Can we put Grandma on life support? She’s 95 years old—I recommend…NO.

We won’t have any other options. We won’t be able to go pay cash for it ourselves. We’ll be in Zombie hell.

Consider this story from Oregon:

Get ready, America. Here comes, Oregon.

Here comes Obama.

The socialists are promising that THIS time it will be different. Forget about that whole Medicare thing where we promised to take care of a small SLIVER of our population (the elderly). Forget that we utterly failed. Focus instead how THIS TIME it will be different and that we’re more effectively manage the health of the ENTIRE population. Doesn’t matter that we couldn’t do it for a sliver. Trust us to do it BETTER with MORE people at stake.

Consider:

At its inception in 1966, Medicare carried an annual price tag of $3 billion. Its Congressional founders predicted that cost would rise to $12 billion a year by 1990 – a figure that accounted for inflation.

The true cost of Medicare is stunning. In 1990, rather than costing American taxpayers $12 billion, Medicare cost $107 billion – an increase of 800% over the government’s best guess at the program’s cost 23 years before. That cost has increased exponentially as the years have passed since 1990. This year, $484 billion will be spent on mandatory Medicare outlays; by 2018, that number will be $885.1 billion, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office. The total amount owed Medicare beneficiaries (American workers who are at least 22 years old and who have paid into the system, meaning they are due Medicare coverage upon retirement) is a staggering $32.3 trillion – an amount over twice America’s GDP, and nearly five times the publicized national debt.

The fact that the federal government has allowed a key health coverage program with which it has been entrusted to fall over thirty trillion dollars in debt should send a powerful message about Washington’s ability (or, more correctly, inability) to be a good steward of Americans’ health care dollars and coverage.

Further, the fact that Congress has refused to do away with a law requiring seniors to enroll in Medicare or forfeit their Social Security benefits – a regulation that is currently being challenged in federal court by a group of plaintiffs led by former Republican Congressman Dick Armey – for fear of losing massive numbers of seniors to private health coverage serves to reinforce both the undesirability of the government-run program. It also demonstrates the federal government’s willingness, when given the opportunity, to force citizens onto the rolls of government care by denying them the opportunity to choose their coverage.

Medicare, the chief example of health care as run by the federal government, is an utter mess that is losing doctors, resorting to anti-choice laws to keep seniors enrolled, and hemorrhaging taxpayer dollars by the trillions. President Obama and his allies in the Democratic-led Congress should demonstrate their ability to be good stewards of the people’s health care dollars and coverage by fixing their own Medicare mess before they seek to expand their grip on America’s health care system as a whole.

Do you know what they take you for?

Fools.