DemCare Update

The 'bipartisan' summit where Obama is going to demand that the GOP agree with him will be held tomorrow. I'll have an end-of-week update to go over what happens there, but here are a few links to let you know what's happening as we ramp up to it.

The second highest-ranked Dem in the House says they don't have the votes to pass Obama's bill. That could be partly because Bart Stupak and his 'pro-life' Dems are making some noise that they won't support the new bill. I'm still skeptical they have the stones to follow through, but regardless of that, there's a lot of fuzzy math guesswork involved in trying to predict how many votes there are, and we probably won't know until the actual vote takes place.

The latest DemCare plan has yet another new tax that is bad, bad news:

The health care plan President Obama recently released is mostly a combination of the different plans passed by the House of Representatives and the Senate. But in one major way it breaks with long-standing precedent, proposing a fundamental wrong-headed change to both entitlement policy and tax policy. He proposes for the first time to tax capital income to support entitlement programs.

Payroll taxes have always applied just to wages and salaries and the revenue those taxes raise has gone solely to pay for entitlements like Social Security and Medicare. The deal has always been that we pay payroll taxes during our working years and receive the benefits they fund after we retire. President Obama’s health care plan would shatter this compact forever.

Another promise broken. I think I'm losing count.

And how about the plan to use reconciliation to shove this down the throat of America? Well, let's just say it's amazing how much difference a change in power makes to how the Dems feel about the filibuster and using reconciliation to get around it:

You know, I can respect someone who has different beliefs than I do, as long as they're principled about it. But this constant shifting of positions based purely on the political moment is really, really, obnoxiously hypocritical.

The bottom line is that for Obama to even propose a new DemCare plan after the outrage and opposition of the past several months shows only that he holds utter contempt for the American people. He has clearly lost the consent of the governed, but that's not stopping him. What other conclusion is there? The Wall Street Journal put it this way:

So after election defeats in Virginia, New Jersey and even Massachusetts, and amid overwhelming public opposition, Democrats have decided to give the voters what they don't want anyway.

Ah, the glory of "progressive" governance and democratic consent.

Simply because I like what they wrote, here's some more:

"The President's Proposal" ... is in one sense a notable achievement: It manages to take the worst of both the House and Senate bills and combine them into something more destructive. It includes more taxes, more subsidies and even less cost control than the Senate bill. And it purports to fix the special-interest favors in the Senate bill not by eliminating them-but by expanding them to everyone.

The bill's one new inspiration is a powerful federal board that would regulate premiums in the individual insurance market. In all 50 states, insurers are already required to justify premium increases to insurance commissioners, who generally have the power to give a regulatory go-ahead, or not. But their primary concern is actuarial soundness and capital standards, making sure that companies have enough cash to pay claims.

The White House wants to create another layer of review that will be able to reject any rate increase that is "unreasonable or unjustified." Any insurer deemed guilty of such an infraction by this new bureaucracy "must lower premiums, provide rebates, or take other actions to make premiums affordable." In other words, de facto price controls.

Great. Good stuff.

Sadly, the GOP are still planning to attend the summit, supposedly to 'crash the party'.

*sigh*

When can we get some real leadership in here that's more concerned with cleaning up the mess made by the Dems than with playing nicey-nice with Dems who are quite happy to stab the GOP in the back while spitting in their face?

Oh, and by the way, do you remember how Obama has repeatedly asked the GOP to put forward their own plans and ideas? If you've read this blog this week, you know that they've had a plan out there for months. Mary Katharine Ham points out that not only was the plan public, but it was linked on the White House's own website, too!

Talk about really, really, obnoxiously hypocritical...! And incompetent, too.

Ham adds the fact that the GOP plan has a CBO score that shows it not only cuts the deficit, but puts all of the major entitlement programs into the black over the next few decades. Obama's plan doesn't have a CBO score at all because he hasn't provided enough details yet. Just something to keep in mind during all this 'bipartisan' summit nonsense.

More details to come in the next couple days.

There's my two cents.