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December 18, 2009
Exclusive – Oval Office Watch – Friday, December 18
Obama to Dems: We're "on a precipice!" HERE.
ObamaCare backer: Defying public, wrecking health care would be "a significant political achievement." - CLICK HERE.
A Death Blow To Health 'Reform' - HERE.
Seven key decisions that led to the current debate over health care. SEE HERE.
Can the Obama Administration Afford Any More Missteps?
Peter Wehner, CommentaryMagazine.com
As problems continue to mount and the president’s approval ratings continue to sink — the latest Rasmussen poll has Obama’s approval rating down to 44 percent, a new low — there are a lot of different, and damaging, story lines developing around the Obama administration. You can add a lack of basic competence to the list.
To take just one example from yesterday: on NBC’s Meet the Press, White House economic adviser Christina Romer was asked if the recession was over. Her first answer was that according to the “official definition … I think we have, at least in terms of GDP, reached that point” — before she then added qualifiers, inviting a follow-up question. When Romer was then asked, “So in your mind, this recession is not over,” she answered, “Of course not. We have — you know, for, for the people on Main Street and throughout this country, they are still suffering. The unemployment rate is still 10 percent.”
Now compare that answer with what Lawrence Summers, director of the National Economic Council, said on ABC’s This Week: “Today, everybody agrees that the recession is over, and the question is what the pace of the expansion is going to be.” (Apparently “everybody” does not include Summers’s colleague Christina Romer.)
This is what is known as sending mixed messages; to have it done by two of the Obama administration’s leading economic spokespersons on a basic economic issue makes it all the more harmful.
Governing involves missteps; that is an inherent by-product of exercising power and needs to be factored in when judging an administration. Still, add these incidents to others and you have a picture emerging of an administration and a party that are not only overmatched by events but that also look downright pitiable at times. This is the kind of thing, especially so early in the life of an administration, that can easily become a proxy for a wider inability to govern. Come 2010, voters are likely to extract a cost for this. Read article.
The 'Cost Control' Bill of Goods: How Peter Orszag and the White House sold a health-care illusion.
Review & Outlook, WSJ.com
ObamaCare's core promise—better quality care for everyone at lower costs—is being exposed as an illusion as it degenerates into the raw exercise of political power. Naturally, the White House and its media booster club are working furiously to prop up this fiasco, especially on cost control.
As Obama budget director Peter Orszag put it at a revealing media breakfast earlier this month, the Senate bill does everything the experts recommend to "get at the underlying drivers of health-care costs." While he admitted that "we don't know enough" to produce results right away, the key is to encourage "continuous improvement" through pilot programs and demonstration projects. Cost containment will actually take "years to decades," Mr. Orszag conceded.
The torch was then passed to Ron Brownstein of the Atlantic Monthly, David Leonhardt of the New York Times and editorial writers for the New England Journal of Medicine, among others. Last week the New Yorker ran a 5,000-word apologia from Atul Gawande, who likewise owned up to the fact that there is "no master plan for dealing with the problem of soaring medical costs," only "a battery of small scale experiments." Keep in mind, this is an argument in favor of ObamaCare. ObamaCare's core promise—better quality care for everyone at lower costs—is being exposed as an illusion as it degenerates into the raw exercise of political power. Naturally, the White House and its media booster club are working furiously to prop up this fiasco, especially on cost control.
As Obama budget director Peter Orszag put it at a revealing media breakfast earlier this month, the Senate bill does everything the experts recommend to "get at the underlying drivers of health-care costs." While he admitted that "we don't know enough" to produce results right away, the key is to encourage "continuous improvement" through pilot programs and demonstration projects. Cost containment will actually take "years to decades," Mr. Orszag conceded.
The torch was then passed to Ron Brownstein of the Atlantic Monthly, David Leonhardt of the New York Times and editorial writers for the New England Journal of Medicine, among others. Last week the New Yorker ran a 5,000-word apologia from Atul Gawande, who likewise owned up to the fact that there is "no master plan for dealing with the problem of soaring medical costs," only "a battery of small scale experiments." Keep in mind, this is an argument in favor of ObamaCare.ObamaCare's core promise—better quality care for everyone at lower costs—is being exposed as an illusion as it degenerates into the raw exercise of political power. Naturally, the White House and its media booster club are working furiously to prop up this fiasco, especially on cost control.
As Obama budget director Peter Orszag put it at a revealing media breakfast earlier this month, the Senate bill does everything the experts recommend to "get at the underlying drivers of health-care costs." While he admitted that "we don't know enough" to produce results right away, the key is to encourage "continuous improvement" through pilot programs and demonstration projects. Cost containment will actually take "years to decades," Mr. Orszag conceded.
The torch was then passed to Ron Brownstein of the Atlantic Monthly, David Leonhardt of the New York Times and editorial writers for the New England Journal of Medicine, among others. Last week the New Yorker ran a 5,000-word apologia from Atul Gawande, who likewise owned up to the fact that there is "no master plan for dealing with the problem of soaring medical costs," only "a battery of small scale experiments." Keep in mind, this is an argument in favor of ObamaCare. Read article.
What a Difference a Year Makes
Alan Caruba, FactsNotFantasy.Blogspot.com
Historians are likely to look back at 2009, the first year of Barack Obama’s term in office and assess the damage it has done to Americans and to the image of America as the primary line of defense against the world’s thugs.
I long ago stopped reading news magazines like Newsweek, Time and U.S. News and World Report because they became increasingly useless as a mean to know what was actually occurring. Throughout the 2008 campaign they and others devoted cover-after-cover to the face of Obama, becoming in the process a very bad joke. It was a total abnegation of objectivity.
I am soon to drop my subscription to The Economist, a still widely respected news magazine because it has ceased to meet even the most fundamental standards of accuracy regarding an alleged “global warming” even though the planet has been cooling for a decade.
I am one of those people, though, that saves his magazines as a lens to look back over the year and a review of the reporting of The Economist in 2009 regarding Obama provides a useful measurement of his first year as seen by the magazine. Below are quotes that track his progress or lack of it. Read article.
Democrats try to put lipstick on government health care pig
WashingtonTimes.com
Time is ticking for Democrats to claim some kind of victory on health care legislation, as polls show a public increasingly disillusioned with what is being passed off as "reform." So now Democrats are trying to rename the public option in the hope no one will notice.
In fact, their new "compromise" is, if anything, a compromise with the furthest-left Democrats who wanted the even more unpopular single-payer system. No longer will we hear the words "public option" or "government option" coming from Senate Democrats. The latest terminology is "Medicare buy-in."
The proposal, created by moderate and liberal Democrats who cannot agree on what to call a public option, would allow Americans between the ages of 55 and 64 to enroll in the seniors program. The trickily named Medicare proposal gives cover to those moderate Democrats, who can claim they did not vote for a public option and only voted to expand Medicare to others.
The problem is, Medicare is collapsing, and adding more costs won't help matters. The Congressional Budget Office has projected that Medicare will be bankrupt in 2017, when it will cost more than $700 billion - and that's a timid prediction. It already costs $400 billion a year. The Medicare trustees say the program has $38 trillion in unfunded liabilities.
Seniors already have trouble finding doctors who will accept the government insurance. Read article.
Senate Health Care Bill Unconstitutional
Maggie'sFarm via StopTheACLU.com
While we know in our gut this massive piece of legislation coming out of the Senate, and said to be a health care bill, is unconstitutional, most of us cannot concisely explain the unconstitutionality of it, and why those seeking to pass it should be strung up, tarred and feathered. The Heritage Foundation has done the hard lifting for us.
Assuming a bill is passed, and assuming the information so generously provided by the Heritage Foundation is sound, which I believe it is, then the legislation must get in front of the Supreme Court if we are to be rescued from the unconstitutional grasp of Congress…and their unlimited power in the future, once they have forced this upon us.
The argument that mandated health care is no different from mandated auto insurance is everywhere. It is the single most relied up argument among bloggers to support ObamaCare. Those of you who read my blog know I sometimes take issues that are complex to me and cull them down in the form of a post. That’s what I’ve done here. I encourage you to read the original or the many, many pertinent details I have omitted, but hopefully not misconstrued. My disclaimer is: read the original if you want to know you’re getting it right. Read article.
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