The debate over health care has reached a fevered pitch in our nation’s capital.  Over the last several months, millions of Americans have spoken out at town halls, have called and written in to the White House, and have even made personal visits to their members of Congress to express their strong opposition to government run health care.  Yet Speaker Pelosi has once again ignored their voices.

Speaker Pelosi’s health care bill H.R. 3962 was drafted without committee hearings or markups behind closed doors by Speaker Pelosi and a very limited number of her inner-circle.  Weighing in at more than 2,000 pages, Pelosi’s bill will cost the American taxpayers $1.2 trillion over the next ten years.

Real reform of our health care system is needed.  We must help those who want health insurance but cannot afford it.  We must expand access to health care in rural America.  We must fix our medical malpractice laws so that doctors can focus on saving patients rather than paying lawyers.  And we must expand our investments in preventative care.  However, that doesn’t mean we should throw out the car because it has a soft tire.  This country still has the best doctors, the best treatments, the best researches, and the best hospitals in the world.  Improvements need to be made, but not at the cost of potentially destroying our current health care system, saddling our children and grandchildren with trillions of dollars of debt, decreasing our standard of care, and burdening American families and small businesses with $729.5 billion in new taxes.

I will continue to oppose Speaker Pelosi’s government run health care legislation and any legislation that comes before Congress that includes a public option.

Congressman Frank Lucas represents Oklahoma’s Third Congressional District.  For more information, visit his website at www.house.gov/lucas.

The abortion issue, you may recall, was described by George Stephanopoulos as “the gravest threat” to the health reform bill. The largest concentration of Democratic NO votes on health care reform are because of the abortion issue.

So, naturally, in an article about Speak Pelosi’s efforts to rally votes for ObamaCare, the New York Times actually talked about other issues besides the public option as critical to passage of the bill. Here is what the New York Times said about abortion yesterday:

“House Democratic leaders are still trying to figure out exactly how to limit the use of federal money for abortions.”

In other words, they know that their current language will not satisfy, among others, the Catholic Church, which issued a change it or else threat. But the Democratic Leadership has not figured out what to do. The demands of the pro-life Democrats have been really straight-forward, give us a vote on our amendments to ban federally funded abortions and allow medical providers the ability to refuse to perform or help perform abortions.

What this really means is that the Speaker does not want to compromise and allow pro-life amendments, unless she has absolutely no other choice in the matter.

On that issue, the NYT reports “Ms. Pelosi said she had not decided whether lawmakers would be allowed to offer amendments on the House floor.”

The Speaker will not allow the pro-life Democrats to offer and get votes on their amendments. She has not said yes, meaning she is now at no.

Further, the need to get CBO to score the bill before it gets to the House floor was also acknowledged as another complication, as the NYT reported: “In addition, before taking their bill to the House floor, Democrats need to get a cost estimate from the Congressional Budget Office.” This is no small matter, since scoring takes about two week, once CBO has the language in hand.

There are other issues that are causing intra-Dem heartburn, and one of them is the Democratic Governors who are very concerned about the unfunded mandates the federal government is imposing on State governments. A Medicaid concerns letter signed by more than a dozen (14) Democratic Senators, sent late last week to Senators Reid, Baucus and Dodd, can be found here.

It is useful to note that the Speaker does not have the votes for ObamaCare now, nor will she likely anytime soon. Other vote draining issues on the Democratic side are the cuts to Medicare Advantage, the public option, the spending and tax levels of the bill and whether to give illegal immigrants benefits under the bill.

The unsatisfied quenching of the Dem thirst for health care reform continued as the Senate Finance Committee received their vapor score for their vapor bill which had the net effect of discrediting the Congressional Budget Office. U.S. Rep. Shadegg renamed CBO the Cooked Books Office with a stinging post (as in, that’s gotta hurt):

Could you make your family budget look good in a ten-year analysis if you counted ten years of income but only seven of expenditures? That’s what the Congressional Budget Office did in their report on Senator Max Baucus’s health care bill.

Their subpar accounting includes revenue from tax increases and cuts to Medicare and Medicare Advantage starting in 2010. However, the bulk of expenditures begin in 2013, when many of the bill’s programs go into effect. It sounds like the CBO has started taking accounting tips from old Enron manuals. How can Democrats be taken seriously if they use ten years of revenue to pay for seven years of expenditures?

Heritage Foundation’s Brian Darling weighed in yesterday with his “Where’s the Health Bill?” post in Human Events:

As you read this, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and officials of the Obama administration are in a room at the Capitol rewriting health care policy. The American people aren’t invited. Only a few lobbyists, Obama czars and liberal Senators have even been allowed to see this bill.

The Senate is keeping this bill a secret because politicians were shaken by the August town hall meetings and the rage expressed by the American people toward the president’s version of health care reform. So, to minimize complaints now, the administration and Sen. Reid are making sure citizens are shut out of the process.

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As Streiff noted yesterday, the Senate Finance Committee considered Senator Chuck Grassley’s (R-IA) amendment on the health care legislation that would require identification to take advantage of medicaid benefits.

Senator Grassley’s position, and the logical position, is that if one is not asked to show identification before taking advantage of a taxpayer funded health care program like medicaid, the program can be accessed by anyone under the sun, including people who are not supposed to take advantage of the program, like illegal aliens.

It’s common sense.

But not to Senate Democrats, including Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), who back home takes a tough stance against illegal immigration.

Despite her tough claims, her vote yesterday proves she is full of it. According to the Senate, Senator Grassley’s amendment “amends Title 19 of the Social Security Act to require an applicant (or the parent or guardian in the case of a child under the age of 18) to present at the time of application for Medicaid or CHIP benefits government-issued photo identification and that identification must be authenticated with the issuing agency.”

Blanche Lincoln voted against this, opting instead to support illegal aliens using the program with no verification of their eligibility. She joined John Kerry and Chuck Schumer, two men who do not exactly have Arkansas’s values at heart.

From the diaries, by Erick.

As the health care industry collectively does a damage assessment of the Pelosi-Kennedy-Obama health care plans to their individual interests, one thing is clear: things have changed radically in the last week:

1. hospitals will be facing cuts of billions from Medicare and Medicaid;
2. big Pharma is facing a certain drug re-importation fight sooner than later, likely during the health care scrum;
3. the doctors are posting with a No to the public plan and irritation on medical malpractice;
4. the teabag teams have planned a national no-new-taxes-for-health-care reform day — in every state of the Union;
5. the slumber of the anti-tax, pro-business groups was jolted by the U.S. Chamber’s war-cry of No More Mr. Nice Guy, and now the Chamber is ripping the Senate Health Care bill;
6. the unions and some employers are spooling to fight the tax on health insurance planned by one Democratic faction, and the White House has announced its opposition;
7. the pro-lifers are now scrambling to catch up and be relevant on the most important government program to their interests;
8. the Move-On.org crowd keeps sending alerts to its base to hold the liberal’s feet to the fire on the question of a public plan;
9. the Heritage Foundation is coming under fire from its friends about their footsie with various aspects of the Democrats plans, especially mandates and the connector idea, which really began when President Obama ran an health care ad quoting the Heritage Foundation in support of one of then-candidate Obama’s Health Care Reform Plans;
10. Gun Owners of America is leading the charge against physicians who now feel empowered to ask if their are handguns in the house, and that information making its way into the great medical record computers in the vast U.S. government. GOA is asking its members if it wants their gun ownership showing up in their medical records;
11. Speaker Pelosi and President Obama’s commitment to a Public Plan option is being questioned by political moderates in the normally-fawning media; and,
12. there is growing consensus among those who are finding problems with the various and wide-ranging proposals that the 180 million Americans who have health insurance should be the real target of the attacks on the Obama plan: specifically, the idea that your health care plan will not change is going to be the focus of some serious and politically relevant attacks (I’ve heard it be told, anyway).

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Update by Jeff: Perhaps this comment will shine a bit more light on the import of this issue.

WHO SHOULD HAVE CONTROL over your medical care: your family doctor, or a bureaucrat you’ve never met whose sole job is to look out for the government’s financial bottom-line?

That question, which is the subject of today’s AOL Hot Seat poll, is being debated in court right now, as three states are currently seeking a ruling from a federal judge that the final say in an individual’s medical treatment lies with the government, not with that patient’s doctor.

In March, Georgia, Florida, and Alabama joined in an appeal of a 2008 U.S. District Court ruling that a patient’s physician was better positioned – and better qualified – to make decisions about that patient’s medical treatment than state bureaucrats.

The case centers on Callie Moore, a disabled teenage girl living in Georgia. A stroke Callie suffered in utero left her suffering from multiple conditions, including cerebral palsy and mental retardation. For the last decade, she has received around-the-clock in-home nursing care for her medical conditions.

IN 2007, THOUGH, the state of Georgia cut coverage of Callie’s in-home care by 15%, from 94 hours a week to 84 over the objections of her attending physician, who was intimately familiar with her case and her needs. State officials (who were not medical professionals) cited disagreement with the attending physician about just how much care Callie needed as the primary reason for this reduction in care.

Callie’s mother filed suit in 2007, arguing that the state had no right to contradict the orders of her personal physician and limit her treatment. However, because Callie receives her medical treatment under Medicaid, the joint federal-state administered health coverage program for low-income individuals and families, Georgia officials argued that Callie’s care was subject to rationing, as state bureaucrats’ need to ensure Medicaid resources were allocated “fairly” superseded her doctor’s care prescription or her personal medical needs.

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“We shouldn’t have to do that, because they should know better.”

So said President Obama in explaining why the Treasury—quite rightly—forced Citigroup to cancel the purchase of a $50 million corporate jet after the banking firm accepted tens of billions in federal bailout dollars. But he could well have been talking about his Democratic colleagues in Congress, who seem perfectly willing to give the former executives of these firms generous federal health benefits—even though they too should know better.

Consider the case of Henry Waxman, a Democrat who has represented Beverly Hills in Congress for over 30 years. Last fall, as Chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, he led hearings on the financial crisis, and criticized companies for taking “massive risk. When the bottom fell out, senior management walked away with millions of dollars, while shareholders and taxpayers lost billions.”

Fast forward to this year and a new Congress, where Mr. Waxman assumed the Chairmanship of the Energy and Commerce Committee, on which I sit. As Chairman, Waxman wrote major health-related sections of the economic “stimulus” legislation which Congress is currently considering. The proposal Mr. Waxman presented to the Committee spent more than $100 billion on various health spending projects, and created two new federal entitlements—one expanding Medicaid to individuals receiving unemployment compensation, and the second providing subsidies to individuals who choose continuation coverage from their former employers.

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