Democrats Reject Two Measures to Create Parity Between Congress’ Health Coverage and the Public’s
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 »
The Case of the Magically Doubling Health Care Surtax
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 »
Hank Waxman Loses a Blue Dog: Space Splits, Leaving Obamacare Compromise in Doubt Yet Again
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 Zack Space (D-OH) is rumored to have withdrawn his support from the ongoing negotiations over HR 3200, the Orwellianly-titled “Affordable Health Care Choices | Read More »
The Left is at a Loss on Health Care
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 »
Shorter Peter Orszag: ‘If We Stop Paying Doctors, Even CBO Concedes We Won’t Be Spending As Much on Health Care’
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 »
The Downside of a ‘Public Option’: Oregon’s Physician-Assisted Suicide Promotion and Overall Rationing of Care
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 »
Harry Reid Rebuffs Will of Obama, Says ‘Debate on Health Care’ Will Continue into September
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 »
New Hampshire Democrat: ‘My Constituents Would Love to Wait in Line for Medical Care’
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 »
Bernanke: Even a ‘Deficit-Neutral’ Health Care Overhaul Wouldn’t Fix the Cost-Debt Problem
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 »
Tonight’s Obama Presser: More of the Same from the Self-Styled “Agent of Change”
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 »
Lesson One for Capitol Hill Interns: Don’t Publicly Mock Your Member’s Constituents
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 »
Barack Obama’s Deficit Spending Doublespeak
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 »
Why are Democrats Rushing to Saddle America With an Unwanted Health Care Overhaul?
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 »
Rep. Roy Blunt (R-MO): If ‘Public Option’ is so Superfantastic, Surely the President and Congress Won’t Mind Replacing Their Current Health Care With It
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 »
Bad Care After Good: Obama Seeks to Trade the U.S.’s Health Care Problems for Britain’s Health Care Catastrophe
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 »
Senate Health Overhaul Bill Lays the Trillion-Dollar Groundwork for a Government Takeover of Health Care
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 »
Overnight Open Thread: Something to Think About When the Topic of Socialized Medicine Comes Up
By: Jeff Emanuel (Diary) | May 27th at 09:35 PM |
A good ad from Rick Scott’s gang: < Do bear in mind that Tom Daschle, who has returned to lobbying for a living, is still guiding “anti-lobbyist” President Barack Obama on health care “reform” even though his tax evasion lost him the spot of HHS chief and White House health care czar. Do also bear in mind that Daschle wrote in his book that Britain’s | Read More »
Republicans Offer Alternative to Democrats’ Government-Centric Health Care ‘Reform’ Proposals
By: Jeff Emanuel (Diary) | May 20th at 01:00 PM |
Shedding the Democrat-imposed and Republican-aided stereotype that they are the “Party of No” — no ideas, no cooperation, and no legislative alternatives — four Republicans today submitted a legislative alternative to the Democratic party’s federal government-centric health care “reform” proposals. This morning, Senators Dr. Tom Coburn (R-OK) and and Richard Burr (R-NC) and Representatives Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Devin Nunes (R-CA) announced their “Patients’ Choice | Read More »
The Skinny on Obama’s Supposedly ‘Watershed’ Health Care Meeting
By: Jeff Emanuel (Diary) | May 13th at 11:15 AM |
The Obama administration and its mouthpieces have spent a great deal of breath, airtime, and ink trying to tell America that, by the mere act of holding a press conference on heath care, President Obama has revolutionized America and proven he is a man of his word who “really intends to keep his campaign promises.” Despite all the self-congratulations and arrogant talk about the historicity | Read More »
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