By: Jeff Emanuel (Diary)  |  August 3rd at 10:00 AM  | 

Obama (D-IL): “I don’t think we’re going to be able to eliminate employer coverage immediately. There’s going to be potentially some transition process” (3/24/07, at SEIU “Universal Health Care Forum”); “I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal health care system” (2003 at AFL-CIO event) Frank (D-MA): “I think if we get a good public option, it could lead to single-payer; that’s the | Read More »

By: Jeff Emanuel (Diary)  |  July 31st at 05:25 PM  | 

Bringing the Public’s Coverage to the Congressional Level House Energy and Commerce Committee Democrats voted 31-28 to reject an amendment from Reps. Roy Blunt (R-MO), Phil Gingrey (R-GA), and Lee Terry (R-NE) that would have opened up the multiple-plan health coverage options available to Members of Congress to the public at large. Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY), who spoke at length yesterday about the need to | Read More »

By: Jeff Emanuel (Diary)  |  July 31st at 10:48 AM  | 

Yesterday afternoon, House Energy and Commerce Committee member Rep. Lois Capps (D-CA) proposed an amendment to the House health care overhaul bill to allow for federal funding of elective abortion coverage for those enrolled in the “public option,” to mandate that every regional Health Insurance Exchange contain at least one private insurance plan that offers abortion coverage, and to permit taxpayer subsidies of those private | Read More »

By: Jeff Emanuel (Diary)  |  July 31st at 08:14 AM  | 

Last night, during yet another attempt to mark up the House health overhaul bill, Rep. Henry Waxman’s (D-CA) House Energy and Commerce Committee took up and voted down (33-25) an amendment by ranking member Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) to prevent the implementation of a little-known provision in the bill that would cause the highly-publicized surtax on high earners to double if the cost of the | Read More »

By: Jeff Emanuel (Diary)  |  July 30th at 10:04 PM  | 

For whatever reason — perhaps it was Congresswoman Carolyn Kilpatrick’s stubborn insistence on a fully-funded, competitive “public option” for her black constituents, whom she seems to think have no other option in life but to be on the public dole — Rep. Zack Space (D-OH) is rumored to have withdrawn his support from the ongoing negotiations over HR 3200, the Orwellianly-titled “Affordable Health Care Choices | Read More »

By: Jeff Emanuel (Diary)  |  July 29th at 11:15 AM  | 

In the post below, Fox Sports echoes what so many of us have been saying since President Obama heaved a 5.6 oz sphere 56 feet on July 14 — and sets itself up even further as the anti-ESPN with its refusal to kiss the ring of the First Fan on a daily basis. The idea that Obama is both athletic and some sports “superfan” — | Read More »

By: Jeff Emanuel (Diary)  |  July 26th at 03:22 PM  | 

Our good friends over at the Daily Kos have a story up that projects an amazing level of mystification at the ability of those no-good, lying scoundrels in the GOP to prevent the “collective will of the people,” which the author believes government-centric health care overhaul known as Obamacare to be. A few excerpts: The GOP goal is to kill healthcare reform outright. …Not to | Read More »

By: Jeff Emanuel (Diary)  |  July 25th at 09:53 PM  | 

That’s what White House Budget Director Peter Orszag had to say about the Congressional Budget Office’s latest statement that “the probability is high that no [health care] savings would be realized” by creating yet another federal board to oversee the federal government’s $33 trillion Medicare mess. Here’s what Orszag said: With regard to the long-term impact, CBO suggested that the proposal, with several specific tweaks | Read More »

By: Jeff Emanuel (Diary)  |  July 24th at 04:35 PM  | 

If you haven’t, read Erick’s post about an Oregon public health plan (“public option”) administrator responding to a cancer patient’s request for subsidized chemotherapy with a denial of treatment but an offer to fund a physician-assisted suicide. Now, know this: over the course of this decade, the state of Oregon has put in place a formal procedure for rationing care to patients whose health coverage | Read More »

By: Jeff Emanuel (Diary)  |  July 23rd at 02:19 PM  | 

The morning after President Barack Obama (D-IL) pushed back prime time network programming to make his (weak, unpopular, and factually-challenged) case for an immediate overhaul of the health care system, fellow Democrat and Senate Super-Majority Leader Harry Reid (NV) pulled the rug out from under his former incredibly junior colleague, declaring that the Senate would hold the proposed overhaul legislation over the August recess and | Read More »

By: Jeff Emanuel (Diary)  |  July 23rd at 02:03 PM  | 

The wonderfully indicting video of New Hampshire Democrat Carol Shea-Porter is below, courtesy of NowHampshire: She says: “I just wanted to make a couple of comments and say I heard one of my colleagues say ‘waiting in line’ — that people would be ‘waiting in line for medical care,’ and I would like to say that many of my constituents would love to wait in | Read More »

By: Jeff Emanuel (Diary)  |  July 23rd at 10:34 AM  | 

Yesterday, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke gave his semi-annual report on monetary policy and the economy to the Senate Banking Committee. With the hot Beltway topic being the health care overhaul President Obama is so desperate to get passed and signed before more people find out what the effects of such a policy will really be, a few Senators had questions for the Chairman about | Read More »

By: Jeff Emanuel (Diary)  |  July 22nd at 09:01 PM  | 

Tonight’s presser was simply more of the same from the self-styled “agent of change” and “post-partisan politician”: Pure politics, unwavering liberal ideology, appallingly transparent scare tactics, demonization of a nameless opposition, and an argument so thick with straw men that the President had better wait until he’s several hundred meters away to light his next cigarette, lest the entire building go up in flames. Obama’s | Read More »

By: Jeff Emanuel (Diary)  |  July 22nd at 03:08 PM  | 

Update: A friend on Capitol Hill makes the following excellent point: “Attitudes like that, whether from an intern all the way up to Speaker, have no place in this complex. The people are here to serve — it is an honor to hear from constituents. It is an honor to hear them complain, to hear their ideas, to hear what they think. People who forget | Read More »

By: Jeff Emanuel (Diary)  |  July 22nd at 12:00 PM  | 

In an attempt to defend the trillion-dollar health care overhaul bills currently being marked up in Congress, and to shift attention from his own actions to those of his predecessor, President Barack Obama (D-IL) declared in his July 18 radio address that “The same folks who controlled the White House and Congress for the past eight years as we ran up record deficits will argue | Read More »

By: Jeff Emanuel (Diary)  |  July 22nd at 11:30 AM  | 

You’ll note that President Obama has all but dropped “health insurance for the 45 million without coverage” from his health overhaul stump speech. Why? Because recent polling shows Americans don’t care nearly as much about the “universal” availability of health coverage when they have to pay extra to provide it, and, as the Congressional Budget Office noted, the health overhaul plans currently making their way | Read More »

By: Jeff Emanuel (Diary)  |  July 21st at 07:52 PM  | 

After Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA)’s exasperated halting of the Energy and Commerce Committee’s health overhaul bill markup — done because of problems in negotiations that Waxman insists are going “well” — Rep. Roy Blunt (R-MO) took to the House floor to make his one-minute address. In a departure from the GOP theme of today’s minute speeches — “finding the jobs” — Blunt used his time | Read More »

By: Jeff Emanuel (Diary)  |  July 21st at 03:02 PM  | 

A series of recent polls showing that his health care proposal has fallen out of favor with a plurality of the American people, and that a majority are no longer predisposed to support a “universal” health care plan as they were before finding out that such a sweeping program would cost them money, has caused President Barack Obama to shift the focus of his health | Read More »

By: Jeff Emanuel (Diary)  |  July 18th at 06:02 PM  | 

The Orwellianly-titled American Health Choices Act, a health care overhaul bill the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee passed Tuesday with a 13-10 party line vote, contains a two-pronged mechanism for increasing government’s already enormous footprint within the health care market, and for driving private insurance into the ground. When the first public draft of the American Health Choices Act (AHCA) was released | Read More »

By: Jeff Emanuel (Diary)  |  July 15th at 06:41 PM  | 

Anyone who remembers, say, his campaign pronouncement that a Kansas tornado had left “ten thousand dead” and “an entire town destroyed” (the 2007 storm actually killed twelve people) knows that President Barack Obama (D-IL) hasn’t been one to worry about playing fast and loose with a few facts or numbers. However, his dogged refusal to deviate from his standard talking point of “150,000 jobs created | Read More »