This won’t hurt a bit

We all know what Sarah Palin thinks of President Obama’s “death panels.” But the former governor of Alaska isn’t the only prominent political figure guilty of injecting hyperbolic steroids into the nation’s deeply partisan bloodstream.

At a recent health care rally in Strongsville, OH President Obama stated “[Under our proposal] it’s estimated that your employers would see premiums fall by as much as 3,000 percent, which means they could give you a raise.” The President went on to say “Those aren’t my numbers. Those are the numbers determined by the Congressional Budget Office.”

Well, I sure hope not. The CBO should be aware, as most of us are, that the most one could possibly save on any given expenditure is 100 percent (provided it was given away for free). A 3,000 percent reduction would result in one helluva raise (a refund worth approximately 30 times the amount of the initial insurance premium)! My sense is that President Obama isn’t exactly being honest with his audience.

For the record, I’m probably right.

On March 10th, Democratic Senator Dick Durbin told his fellow members of Congress “Anyone who would stand before you and say ‘Well, if you pass health care reform now, next year’s health care premiums are going down.’ I don’t think is telling the truth. In fact I think it’s likely that they will go up, but what we’re trying to do is slow the rate of increase.”

I could make a joke or something here, but I’m not going to. Instead I’m just going to point out that the statements made by President Obama and Senator Durbin (ostensibly regarding the same reform package) are wholly and completely incompatible.

While I’m on the subject, pro-life Democrat Bart Stupak recently told a local Michigan radio station about a private conversation he’d had with influential liberal Congressman Henry Waxman. The two purportedly discussed whether or not federal abortion funding should be included in the new health care proposal. When Stupak handed Waxman an amendment that would unequivocally deny women the right to receive federal funding for abortions, Waxman demurred, saying “But we want to pay for abortions. We think we should.”

This conversation is disturbing primarily because just days before it transpired House Speaker Nancy Pelosi assured the American people that “there is no federal funding for abortion in these bills.”

Stupak’s revision has yet to be implemented.

Finally, consider this statement from December 2005; wherein then-Senator Obama denounces the exact same legislative procedure he is now relying on to pass health care reform:
“Under the rules, the reconciliation process does not permit debate. Reconciliation is therefore the wrong place for policy changes (…) The reconciliation process seems to have lost its proper meaning. A vehicle designed for deficit reduction and fiscal responsibility has been hijacked to facilitate reckless deficits and unsustainable debt.”

Wow, I honestly couldn’t have said it better myself (although I’m going to try anyways).

It really is an extraordinary state of affairs when a political party that dominates 2/3 of our political system needs to resort to lies, deceit and misdirection in order to get a “wildly popular” bill signed into law. After a year of debate, Americans have made up their minds. They do not want this bill to pass and it’s no wonder. The bill itself is amorphous. Not one embodiment has been in circulation long enough for any honest Congressman to become sufficiently familiar with its contents. The bill is also unpaid for.

In February of 2010, while President Obama was preaching fiscal responsibility during a televised health care summit, his administration was running a 220 billion dollar budget deficit (the largest in American history). Forget the fact that the CBO refused to score Obama’s initial health care bill (because the administration failed to provide sufficient information), the fact that the 371 billion dollar “doc-fix” is not included in any cost estimates and the fact that the current approximation is based on 10 years of taxes that finance only 6 years of benefits… the plan still costs 1 trillion dollars!

Needless to say, it’s going to take a lot more than a spoonful of sugar to make this (bad) medicine go down. It might take a syringe.