More Health Care Lies

It's no wonder the White House is delaying release of the latest dismal budget figures. It's not just that they are grossly more dismal than the projections. It's that they will undercut already-waning public support for Obama's socialized medicine scheme.

The White House was supposed to release the budget numbers this month but has delayed their release until mid-August, which even has The Associated Press raising questions about its motives.

But you don't have to be in journalism to realize that Obama is playing hide the ball with the facts in his desperate rush to ramrod this disaster through Congress before the public wakes up. The latest Washington Post-ABC News poll shows that not only are Obama's disapproval ratings soaring but support for his health care debacle is now less than 49 percent — a new low. And you can bet it will get much lower the more the public learns about his plan — a plan whose promotion has been riddled with lies.

Why else would Obama, who was very tardy for his most recent news conference, arrogantly refuse to answer any questions following his terse, combative and defiant remarks about his plan? Is this the new transparency we can believe in?

Here are some inconvenient truths Obama must conceal from the American public:

—Despite White House-generated hysteria about the urgency of reform, the only urgency is in preventing this fiasco because it would destroy America's economy and liberty. Doing nothing — even given the many problems that exist under the present system — is far preferable to adopting this monster.

—Proponents claim the present system leaves 47 million people without insurance and unable to get it. Bull. Almost half of these uninsured could afford coverage but choose not to obtain it; almost half only remain uninsured for four months; and millions are noncitizens. Moreover, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that 17 million would remain uninsured after the plan is implemented.

—Obama says his plan is not socialized medicine because he's just providing a "public option" to make the private insurers more competitive. Well, he's stacking the deck with mandated coverage — which, by definition, reduces competition — and subsidizing the public option. He would provide incentives to businesses to move employees to the public plan. Also, once you lose your insurance, your coverage choices would no longer be grandfathered, and you'd be forced to buy a plan that includes Big Brother's mandates — meaning most would gravitate toward the government plan.

A single-payer system is virtually inevitable.

—The plan is being sold as a necessary element of reviving the economy. No one, including the Congressional Budget Office, believes this bill would improve our economy, and most believe it would exacerbate our problems. The bill, with its taxes on successful small businesses and its Draconian regulations, would destroy job creation, as would increases to the deficit and debt the bill would cause.

—Health care costs would not be reduced, but increased — and shifted. Studies show that preventive care measures would not reduce costs. More importantly, the CBO says that even with the planned confiscatory taxes on higher-income earners (which no one can deny constitute real costs to them) and the penalties on employers who don't provide coverage, the plan would fall $239 billion short of covering its initial cost estimates of $1 trillion. And that's assuming everything goes well. But cost estimates for government programs are always understated. The actual costs for Medicare Part A were $67 billion, seven times higher than the government's 1965 projections of $9 billion. Even worse, the Medicaid special hospitals subsidy was $11 billion, more than 100 times the government's projection of $100 million in 1987, just years earlier. The only efforts at cost containment would come from artificial price controls, which would result in rationing — most likely for the elderly.

—The quality of socialized health care would not be improved as promised, but would necessarily deteriorate, as it has in all countries that have tried it and in our own government-run experiments of veterans care, Medicaid and Medicare. It's inescapably true — as noted by Dr. Thomas Sowell — that price controls would reduce quality care because they would reduce the incentive to provide quality.

—Health care choices would not be expanded, but essentially eliminated, by government mandate. The White House isn't even denying it would force taxpayer-subsidized abortions.

The apathetic and complacent among us must understand that once this anti-American outrage is passed, it will be enormously difficult to reverse legislatively, even with decisive Republican congressional victories in 2010 — a task made more difficult with ACORN's stimulus-fed election fraud operation firmly in place and an ever-growing dependency class voting itself money from the public trough. It will likely require supermajorities in both houses.

The time for action — to stop this bill and institute much-needed market reforms — is now!

David Limbaugh is a writer, author and attorney. His book "Bankrupt: The Intellectual and Moral Bankruptcy of Today's Democratic Party" was released recently in paperback. To find out more about David Limbaugh, please visit his Web site at www.DavidLimbaugh.com. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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