Sarah Palin's & Charles Krauthammer's Health Care Vision

"The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil."

Sarah Palin, on Facebook.

Conservatives have used their scare tactics. No one will be denied health care because of their lacked of productivity. There is zero evidence of this. Palin and other astroturfing organizations want to keep spreading the myth to kill support of health care reform.

47 million Americans are denied health insurance, either because of money or medical conditions. Jacqueline Ruess had laparoscopic surgery to see if a growth was ovarian cancer. Her insurance company dropped her.

But four months after Ruess's medical crisis passed, she faced a financial one. The Insurers Administrative Corporation (IAC), the company in Phoenix that managed Ruess's health care policy, completed what it says was a routine review of her records and discovered what it called evidence of a preexisting gynecological condition.

Because Ruess had not disclosed the symptom on her application, her insurer said she had never been eligible for coverage of gynecological problems. The result: Ruess was on the hook for the cost of her surgery, which, including doctor and hospital bills, amounted to more than $15,000.

Ruess was flabbergasted. "I was — please forgive me for lack of a better term — pissed off," she says. What IAC called a preexisting condition was a one-time notation in her file regarding "dysfunctional uterine bleeding" — that is, irregular periods, a common issue that at some point affects between 10 percent and 30 percent of women in their reproductive years. At the time she experienced erratic periods, Ruess had lost her husband and her father had died, too, which is why her doctor attributed the symptom to stress.

What happened to Ruess is becoming far too common. President Bush and Republicans were against increased SCHIP funding. Millions of children would be without health care, if it wasn't for SCHIP. Fewer employers are offering health coverage to employees' children. These kids have no other option.

Millions of Americans getting dropped from private health insurance isn't about offering life. This is about putting the interest of the health insurance industry over the welfare of American citizens. Charles Krauthammer's grand scheme is tax credits and tort reform. This would do absolutely nothing to help the uninsured. Krauthammer is revising the John McCain health care proposal. I blogged about the McCain plan: "Employers would have less incentive to offer health care." Krauthammer wants to end employer sponsored health insurance, without offering an alternative.

There is no logical reason to get health insurance through your employer. This entire system is an accident of World War II wage and price controls. It's economically senseless. It makes people stay in jobs they hate, decreasing labor mobility and therefore overall productivity. And it needlessly increases the anxiety of losing your job by raising the additional specter of going bankrupt through illness.

Krauthammer's proposal would save health insurance companies and employers money. American citizens are going to have a financially harder burden getting health insurance. Employers pay part of health coverage and can cut group rate deals with insurance companies. People will pay more getting health insurance on their own. The most likely outcome is less people with health insurance. Krauthammer can keep his reform.

CBO Reports Health Care Reform Will Save Money

The Congressional Budget Office reports the America's Health Choices Act will save the federal government. Contrary to what Republicans are saying, the cost saving will add $239 billion to the budget.

According to CBO’s and JCT’s assessment, enacting H.R. 3200 would result in a
net increase in the federal budget deficit of $239 billion over the 2010-2019 period.
That estimate reflects a projected 10-year cost of the bill’s insurance coverage
provisions of $1,042 billion, partly offset by net spending changes that CBO
estimates would save $219 billion over the same period, and by revenue provisions
that JCT estimates would increase federal revenues by about $583 billion over those
10 years.

The CBO breakdown where the cost savings will come from.

• Permanent reductions in the annual updates to Medicare’s payment rates for most services in the fee-for-service sector (other than physicians’ services), yielding budgetary savings of $196 billion over 10 years (excluding interactions—namely, the effects of those changes on payments to Medicare Advantage plans and collections of Part B premiums);

• Setting payment rates in the Medicare Advantage program based on per capita Medicare spending in the fee-for-service sector, providing savings of $156 billion (before interactions) over the 2010-2019 period; and

• Changes to the Medicare Part D program that would establish a new prescription drug rebate program for some people who are eligible for both Medicaid and Medicare, while expanding drug coverage to beneficiaries that are currently subject to a gap in coverage (often referred to as the Part D “doughnut hole”), saving $30 billion over the 2010-2019 period.

The doughnut hole was the result of President Bush's horrible Medicare overhaul. 2004 was an election year and the Bush White House pushed for changes in Medicare. The Medicare package went $400 billion over what the Bush administration projected. The White House told Richard S. Foster, the chief actuary for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, he would be terminated if he revealed the true cost.

"This whole episode which has now gone on for three weeks has been pretty nightmarish," Foster wrote in an e-mail to some of his colleagues June 26, just before the first congressional vote on the drug bill. "I'm perhaps no longer in grave danger of being fired, but there remains a strong likelihood that I will have to resign in protest of the withholding of important technical information from key policy makers for political reasons."

The problem with the $2,510 doughnut hole coverage is it costs the government money without providing coverage. Patients are left to go to private insurers or pay for prescription drug out of their pockets. The House bill is smart policy. It's is fiscally and morally responsible. Republicans continue to pitch how great the status quo is.

The House Republican released a four page health care plan. To say their plan isn't wonkish would be an understatement. The plan allows parent whom have their kids enrolled in SCHIP to get a private plan. Of course, Republicans ignore these families are on SCHIP because they are poor. Tax cuts are offered for people on private health care plans. That does nothing for people without health insurance. The meat of the Republican plan is cutting preventive care.

Tax cuts for people whom can afford health care and less health care is what the GOP is offering. Who wants to sign up?

Obama Keeps Promise On SCHIP

President Barack Obama fulfills his promise to expand coverage of SCHIP. The State Children's Health Insurance Program pays for the health care of poor children. President George W. Bush twice vetoed SCHIP expansion. Obama sign SCHIP into law today.

By doing so, the new president said, "we fulfill one of the highest responsibilities that we have: to ensure the health and well-being of our nation's children. It's a responsibility that's only grown more urgent as our economic crisis deepens, with health care costs that have exploded, and millions of working families are unable to afford health insurance."

SCHIP hater Michelle Malkin made a blacklist of Republicans that voted for SCHIP. Did it occur to Malkin that GOP candidates don't want to run against children's health care? With apologies to On-my-soap-box and alaskangrizzly, Malkin commenters aren't the entire electorate.

Health Care Workers Against John McCain

Change America Now will hold an event today at the Grand Hyatt, Tampa Bay. Health care advocates will discuss their problems with John McCain's positions on health care. McCain supports President Bush's veto against SCHIP.

Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, told CNN Wednesday he agrees with President Bush's veto of legislation expanding a children's health insurance program, saying the bill provided a "phony smoke and mirrors way of paying for it."

"Right call by the president," the Republican White House hopeful told CNN's John King.

That is the kind of straight talk the Maverick is now being taken to task for.

WHO: Nurses, healthcare professionals and advocates and families concerned about the healthcare mess in America

WHAT: Press Conference Responding to McCain Healthcare Remarks in Tampa and Calling on Him to Support Expanding SCHIP and overturning Bush Administration Efforts to Slash Medicaid by $13 Billion

WHEN: Tuesday, April 29th at 12:00 PM, ET

WHERE: Grand Hyatt Tampa Bay
2900 Bayport Dr.
The ‘PELICAN’ Room
Tampa FL 33607

Ric Keller SCHIP Ad

Americans United For Change is running an ad attacking Ric Keller's vote against SCHIP. This is just the beginning of Republicans are going getting hammered. Keller contempt of health care for the poor didn't end there.

Student Loan Lender Subsidy Cuts and Student Grants and the Section 8 Voucher Adjustments Act of 2007 - Nay

Section 8 Voucher Adjustments Act of 2007 - Nay

Keller voted against the bill because he wanted patients to submit citizenship documents. Keller doesn't have enough of a sense of humor to realize how Orwellian that sounds.

SCRIP Is Dead

House Republicans were able to maintain Bush's SCHIP veto. The Democratic bill for SCHIP is dead.

It's over: The House just voted on the SCHIP bill moments ago, and failed to override President Bush's veto.

The vote was 273-156, falling short of the two-thirds vote needed to overturn Bush's veto.

The roll call is here.

SCHIP is designed for children whose parents too much to qualify for Medicare. 6.6 million children received SCRIP coverage in 2006. Which is what made the Graeme Frost attacks so misleading.

This is how damaging the Bush veto is.

Keeping the program at current levels would require expanding funding by about $13.4 billion over five years, for total funding of $38.4 billion between 2008 to 2012, according to a CBO report in May. Part of the reason is rising medical costs. President Bush has proposed a $5 billion expansion, for total program funding of $30 billion over the next five years. He has said he might be willing to go higher. The bill Bush vetoed would increase funding by $35 billion over the five years, for a program total of $60 billion. Ultimately, it would cover 10 million people.

The budget increase wasn't huge liberal expansion. Healthcare costs have rapidly increased. The Democratic bill is $3 million less than what is needed to maintain SCHIP. Rep. Pete Stark (D-CA) said powerful words about the Republican hypocrisy on spending.

"Where are you going to get that money? Are you going to tell us lies like you're telling us today? Is that how you're going to fund the war? You don't have money to fund the war or children. But you're going to spend it to blow up innocent people if we can get enough kids to grow old enough for you to send to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the president's amusement."

Republicans seized on the opportunity to pounce on Stark.

The National Republican Congressional Committee issued this release in response to Stark's comment today: "Pete Stark and the Democrat leadership owe the American people an apology, the troops and their families an apology, and they should apologize to the millions of children being held political hostage by their party’s desperate attempt to score a political victory instead of providing healthcare for those who need it most."

Stark's home state will be gravely affected by Congress's failure to override the veto. The California Primary Care Association issued a statement.

"California’s Healthy Families program could run out of money next year and be forced to disenroll hundreds of thousands of children," said Carmela Castellano-Garcia, president and CEO of CPCA.

The Harvard School of Public Health, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and National Public Radio conducted a surcey and found two out of three Americans are against Bush's veto.

A Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found that 77 percent of voters favor reauthorizing at a $39 million price tag. This was political suicide for Republicans. That didn't stop Congressional GOP members from following Bush off the cliff.

Lobby Jim Marshall For SCHIP

Contact Jim Marshall and tell him to vote for SCHIP.

The Intellectual Vacancy of A-List Conservative Bloggers

Jonathan Cohn has a must-read post of the conservative blogosphere's bogus reporting on the Graeme Frost noncontroversy. He is a 12-year-old whom was hospitalized because of brain trauma from a car accident. He did the radio response to President Bush's veto of SCHIP. The conservative blogosphere decided to shoot the messanger. Creating Swiftboat-level doubt is a specialty of theirs.

Power Line

A Freeper took the trouble to investigate the 12-year-old who gave the Democrats' weekly radio address last week, and whose family ostensibly is too poor to pay for medical insurance, and therefore wants to use your money instead. The results are hilarious. Mark Steyn has more here.

Instapundit

Question: If business owners with half-million-dollar-plus homes and kids in expensive private schools now count as "working families," does this mean they'll get tax cuts?

Mark Steyn at The Corner

"icwhatudo" at Free Republic, however, showed rather more curiosity than the professional reporter paid to investigate the story and did a bit of Googling. Mr Frost, the "woodworker", owns his own design company and the commercial property it operates from, part of which space he also rents out; they have a 3,000-sq-ft home on a street where a 2,000-sq-ft home recently sold for half a million dollars; he was able to afford to send two children simultaneously to a $20,000-a-year private school; his father and grandfather were successful New York designers and architects; etc. This is apparently the new definition of "working families":

All this started because of an anonymous Free Republic commenter. John Hinderaker and Glenn Reynolds can at least pass off there factually-challenged posts by saying they're bloggers. Steyn is suppose to pretend he's a journalist.

The Frost are below middle income. They aren't living by Sudan standards, but aren't rolling in money. Neither parent can get private health coverage. The father is a woodworker and welder and mother works part-time. Graeme and his sister have been hospitalized. That scares off healthcare companies. Even the healthy looking Michelle Malkin is having trouble getting health coverage. That hasn't stopped her from crucifying the Frost family on her blog.

I often read attacks like this and wonder what is the motivation of these right-wig bloggers. They end up looking like fools. They attack a child and a popular government healthcare program. If these people were running for office they would be more marginized than Alan Keyes. One week it's attacks on Amanda Marcotte (like these people haven't written inflammatory punditry) and the next it's blaming the Washington Post for the Terri Schiavo memo Mel Martinez was passing around.

This isn't citizen media. It's Ann Coulter clones so angry at the Democratic Party all sense of reason leaves them. They could have argued against SCHIP on merits. They chose to go after a car accident victim and his family. These people never thought of how bad the Frost attack would hurt their side because they never gave serious consideration to the millions that would be cut from SCHIP by Bush's veto. It's bumper sticker slogans of "socialized medicine." Never is consideration given to the compassionate thing to do is provide healthcare. I dare any conservative blogger, with network news camera present, to turn people away from emergency rooms because they don't have health coverage. This would be seen beyond the wingnutsphere and low-rated cable news shows. Malkin backed away from accuing John Kerry of giving himself a self-inflicted wound. Conservative bloggers are scared when they are outside of their self-made bubble.



Bloggers such as Reynolds, Hinderaker and Malkin are the new stars of conservatism. The movement is in serious trouble. Intellectually-honest bloggers such as Dan Drezner and Ross Douthat should be conservative stars. The latter has is own ideological differences with SCHIP. Douthat does admit, "I will say that demonizing them is a lot worse than dumb..." The question is why are the dumbist voices the biggest stars in the conservative blogosphere?

Kathy Castor's Vote Against SCHIP

What does Kathy Castor have in common with Adam Putnam, Tom Feeney, and Gus Bilirakis? They all voted against the second SCHIP bill. Bitch Ph.D and FishOutofWater encouraging readers to put pressure on nay voters to break the Bush veto. I'm urging my readers to contact Castor's office and make her change her vote when this comes on the floor. Her email is Kathy.Castor@mail.house.gov.

I'm discouraged by this. Was Castor really worried about pressure the cigar lobby was mounting against the cigaratte tax? She doesn't have a formible opponent. (Tim Fasano is a gift. Katherine Harris could beat him.) If so, that was a major miscalculation on her part. This makes her look bad nationally.

I'm disappointed by Castor's vote. She stood up to the stupidity on the Hillsborough County Commission. She got her House seat for standing up to Ronda Storms. Not by backing down to special interests. If that was to way to get elected to Congress than Tom Scott would wouldn't be on the Tampa City Council.

Progressives, contact Castor's office and make her change her vote. This veto must be overridden.

Update: Kenneth Quinnell disagrees with my assessment of Castor's vote. He links to a Buzz post. It essentially states Castor was uncomfortable with the cigar tax.

That included provisions to cut bureaucratic barriers to enrolling kids in the program, something Castor had insisted on. She said the Senate version also relied too heavily on cigar taxes for funding. The bill would have set policy for five years. If the president vetoes it as promised, and the House is unable to override it, then Congress will have a chance at crafting a better bill later, she said.

I stand by my post.

Bush Pressured On SCHIP

President Bush is feeling political heat for his veto of SCHIP. He has indicated he is willing to spend more than the minor $5 billion in increased he proposed.

"If putting poor children first takes a little more than the 20 percent increase I have proposed in my budget for SCHIP, I am willing to work with leaders in Congress to find the additional money." Mr. Bush said during his weekly radio address.

How generous of a man whom makes his most Bushisms when he is trying to sound compassionate. His rhetoric that "Government-run health care would deprive Americans of the choice," is hogwash. Poor children can't afford healthcare or even get a job. How do they have a choice is never explained by Bush. A President who has only issued four vetoes can not be taken seriously when he attempts to paint himself as a fiscal conservative.

Republicans know that the SCHIP veto is a political loser. Bush's instincts are horrible and he is beyond caring about the best interests of the party. Nancy Pelosi is working on overriding the veto in the House. With Congressional Republicans facing election next year, they do not want attack ads pointing out they voted against healthcare for children.

Let's break down the numbers: Bush proposes a $5 billion increase over five years. Congress passed a $35 billion increase over the same time period. Medical costs have increased greatly. Bush made matters worse with his porked-filled Medicare bill.

The administration hid the true cost of the bill. Bush will not allow the federal government to negotiate prices with pharmaceutical companies. The CEO President believes what works for Wal-Mart does not work for America. The taxpayers are left with increased costs. If Bush really cared about health costs he could stop making it so damn expensive.

Quote of the Day

"First of all, whenever I hear anything described as a heartless assault on our children, I tend to think it’s a good idea. I’m happy that the president’s willing to do something bad for the kids."

Bill Kristol, on President Bush's veto of the the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.

DCCC Targets Anti-SCHIP Republicans

The DCCC is targeting Republicans Steve Chabot, Thelma Drake, Tom Feeney, Sam Graves, Joe Knollenberg, Randy Kuhl, Jim Saxton and Tim Walberg for voting against SCHIP. Robocalls, radio ads and emails will be sent out.

Here is the text of the Feeney ad.

“Did you know Congressman Feeney gets health care at taxpayers’ expense, but Feeney and Bush are blocking health care for 10 million uninsured children? Tell Tom Feeney to put families first.”

But only lobbyists pay for his golfing trips. So let's cut the guy some slack. At least he's saving the taxpayers' money for his golfing outings. That has got to count for something.

Dan Gelber vs. Mel Martinez

Florida House Minority Leader Dan Gelber took Mel Martinez to task for calling SCHIP "socialized medicine."

"...As Chairman of the Republican National Committee, I recognize your role and responsibility to defend and endorse President Bush’s legislative agenda, including his opposition to the reauthorization of the State Children’s Health Insurance Plan. However, the rhetoric of “entitlements” and “socialized medicine” seems designed to fire up the President’s political base rather than honestly helping your colleagues figure out how to fix a system that has left more than nine million American children without health care. Ironically, your position hurts Florida more than nearly any other state as only Texas has a higher percentage of uninsured children than we do. .."

Martinez should pay attention to what is going on in his neighborhood. 5,805 children in Broward County rely on Kidcare. Part of it's funding comes from SCHIP. Florida's Kidcare program has a 700,000 waiting list. The state does not have enough money to provide healthcare for poor children. To deny children healthcare is cruel. Martinez voted no on SCHIP. That says much about where his priorities are.

Update: Gus Bilirakis voted no on SCHIP.