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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (39098)	1/9/2015 4:56:29 PM
From: FJB	1 Recommendation Recommended By Brumar89 Respond to of 42652

Liars’ Remorse Democrats have second thoughts about Obamacare William Voegeli January 19, 2015, Vol. 20, No. 18 In the Time magazine issue published after the 2008 election—whose cover depicted Barack Obama as Franklin Roosevelt—Peter Beinart anticipated a new “era of liberal hegemony” that would last until “Sasha and Malia have kids.” President Obama is not yet a grandfather, but his era of liberal hegemony only appears to have lasted months, not decades. Photoshopping gave Obama the pince-nez and cigarette holder that were FDR’s trademarks but could not conjure the startling congressional majorities of the 1930s. The Depression and New Deal left Republicans discredited, irrelevant, and shattered. GOP House and Senate majorities of 62 percent and 58 percent, respectively, after the 1928 election shrank to caucuses of 20 percent and 17 percent after 1936. Under Obama the trajectory has been the opposite: Republicans have gone from 41 percent of the House seats after the 2008 election to 57 percent after 2014 and from 40 senators to 54. Inevitably, Democrats are trying to figure out why the present that dismays them is so much less congenial than the future they recently anticipated. Some have begun to disparage Obamacare, the incumbent’s most FDR-like achievement. Half of the 60 Democratic senators who voted for the Affordable Care Act in December 2009—the exact number needed to prevent its being filibustered to death, since all Republicans opposed it—are no longer in the Senate. These ex-senators include eight who were defeated by Republicans, and eight more who chose not to run again and were succeeded by Republicans. One of the latter, Tom Harkin of Iowa, recently told a reporter, “I look back and say we should have either done [health care reform] the correct way or not done anything at all.” Charles Schumer of New York, in the remnant of Democrats whose Senate careers have survived Obamacare, voiced similar sentiments in a National Press Club speech three weeks after the 2014 elections. “Democrats blew the opportunity the American people gave them” in 2008, Schumer said. “We took their mandate and put all of our focus on the wrong problem—health care reform.” Arguing that 85 percent of Americans had health insurance they were satisfied with when Democrats took power in 2009, and few of the uninsured voted at all, much less on the basis of health policy, Schumer contended, “To aim a huge change in mandate at such a small percentage of the electorate made no political sense.” Continues... Source URL: weeklystandard.com

To: Brumar89 who wrote (39098)	1/11/2015 10:07:56 PM
From: FJB	1 Recommendation Recommended By Brumar89 Respond to of 42652

Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s ‘Berlin Wall’ The woman insiders describe as the president’s “real chief of staff” keeps out bad news and new ideas. By John Fund It’s high time the news media paid more attention to Valerie Jarrett. An old Chicago friend of both Barack and Michelle Obama’s, she exercises unusual influence in the White House as a “senior adviser.” Many in Washington believe that she is at the heart of the disappointment the Obama administration has become. They are unwilling to say so in public. But the evidence keeps piling up. One who is isn’t afraid to speak up is Steven Brill, the author of a searing new book analyzing American health care called “America’s Bitter Pill.” Brill is a liberal and still thinks that Obamacare should have been passed. But in his exhaustively researched book (he spoke with 243 people over a 27-month period), he slams “incompetence in the White House” for the catastrophic launch of Obamacare in 2013: “Never [has there] been a group of people who more incompetently launched something.” During an interview on NPR’s “Fresh Air” last week, he lay much of the blame at Jarrett’s doorstep. “The people in the administration who knew it was going wrong went to the president directly with memos, in person, to his chief of staff,” he told NPR’s Terry Gross. But “the president was protected, mostly by Valerie Jarrett, from doing anything.” Although Obama had no idea of the issues until they ultimately reared their head, he still bears the blame, Brill said. “At the end of the day, he’s responsible. . . . The president, whatever we can say about him on policy and on giving speeches, as a manager, he failed. He didn’t know what was going on in the single most important initiative of his administration.” How important is Jarrett inside the Obama White House? Brill was able to interview the president about the struggles of Obamacare and reports that he concluded: “At this point, I am not so interested in Monday morning quarterbacking the past.” That must be one reason Jarrett is still at his side, in the same outsize role she’s held since both arrived in D.C. in January 2009. How outsize? Brill told the president that five of the highest-ranking Obama officials had told him that “as a practical matter . . . Jarrett was the real chief of staff on any issues that she wanted to weigh in on, and she jealously protected that position by making sure the president never gave anyone else too much power.” When Brill asked the president about these aides’ assessment of Jarrett, Obama “declined comment,” Brill wrote in his book. That, in and of itself, is an answer. Brill isn’t the first liberal journalist to remark on Jarrett’s looming shadow. Jonathan Alter, author of a sympathetic book on Obama’s first term, reported this about Jarrett: Staffers feared here, but didn’t like her or trust her. At meetings she said little or nothing, instead lingering afterwards to express her views directly to the president, creating anxiety for her underlings and insulting them, saying, “I don’t talk just to hear myself talking.” After Obama’s inexplicable failure to note the rise of the Islamic State and to deal with problems involving veterans’ health care, I wrote last year that “Jarrett appears to exercise such extraordinary influence that in some quarters on Capitol Hill she is known as ‘Rasputin,’ a reference to the mystical monk who held sway over Russia’s Czar Nicholas as he increasingly lost touch with reality during World War I.” After my column appeared, I ran into a top aide to a Democratic senator. “You don’t know the half of it,” he told me. “[Jarrett is] not only Rasputin, she’s the Berlin Wall preventing us from even getting messages to the president.” The aide is convinced that the lack of communication between the then-Democratic Senate majority and the White House contributed to the GOP landslide takeover last November. It’s an old Washington parlor game to blame the staff for the failings of an administration and pretend that if only an irritating staffer of the moment were removed, all would be well. The president himself is responsible for his slow response to crises, contradictory messages, and blatantly political calculations on issues. But Jarrett isn’t any ordinary staffer. There are several things noteworthy about her. 1) Jarrett seems to be the only close Obama aide who entered the administration and is still there; 2) Jarrett has been highly successful in keeping new people with fresh ideas she doesn’t like from the president; and 3) she appears to suffer more than most staffers from a severe case of hero worship of her boss. Consider what she told David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, in an interview for The Bridge, his 2010 book on Obama: He knows exactly how smart he is. . . . I think that he has never really been challenged intellectually. . . . So what I sensed in him was not just a restless spirit but someone with extraordinary talents that they had to be really taxed in order for him to be happy. . . . He’s been bored to death his whole life. He’s just too talented to do what ordinary people do. He would never be satisfied with what ordinary people do. As columnist George Will noted in astonishment: “Leave aside the question of whether someone so smitten can be in any meaningful sense an adviser. About what can such a paragon as Obama need advice?” More and more people in Washington do have advice for Obama — on the conduct of his administration. No one I spoke to believes he will follow it, but they all agree that the organizational lines of authority at the White House need to be better observed, that there should be better communication with both parties on Capitol Hill, and that the decision-making process should involve more people and be less directed toward short-term political fixes (most of which haven’t worked). So far the Obama administration’s management style has guaranteed only one thing: The only long-term fixed presence in the Obama White House is Valerie Jarrett, the person who mentored the careers of both Barack and Michelle Obama a quarter of a century ago and who remains glued to their sides to this day. — John Fund is national-affairs correspondent for NRO.

To: Brumar89 who wrote (39098)	1/12/2015 10:29:08 AM
From: FJB	2 Recommendations Recommended By Brumar89 gamesmistress Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 42652

Ezekiel Emanuel: Go Ration Yourself - David Catron, American Spectator One reason your insurance premiums have skyrocketed during the past year is that Obamacare requires all health plans to provide “free” annual wellness visits and 15 associated preventive services for which they cannot charge the patient a copayment. According to a key architect of PPACA, however, “the annual physical exam is basically worthless.” Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, last heard from claiming that he wants to die at 75 in order to avoid becoming a burden on society, writes in the New York Times that “screening healthy people who have no complaints is a pretty ineffective way to improve people’s health.” The good doctor says he’ll forego his annual exam pursuant to a desire to “make the world a better place.” But, as with his professed willingness to depart this vale of tears after three-quarters of a century, he makes it clear that all men and women of good will should follow his example “to ensure there is no doctor shortage as more Americans get health insurance.” This is where the rubber glove hits the road. Emanuel wants you to voluntarily give up a much-ballyhooed feature of Obamacare for which the “reform” law itself compels you to pay via new taxes and inflated health insurance premiums. This is entirely consistent with Dr. Emanuel’s unique code of ethics. He is, for example, a long-time proponent of medical rationing for the elderly. Consequently, he probably doesn’t experience much cognitive dissonance when suggesting that, in order to forestall the physician shortage caused by a program he helped design, right-minded people should forego a “benefit” they were coerced to purchase. For him, this call for you to restrict your consumption of medical care is just another expression of his passion for rationing. The only thing new here is the exhortation for you to impose it on yourself. All of which raises a question: If annual physicals are worthless, why did Dr. Emanuel and his accomplices build them into PPACA? Their clinical limitations have long been known, and the President was called out as early as 2008 on his claim that such preventive care would reduce health care expenditures. Nine months before he was elected, the New England Journal of Medicine reported, “Barack Obama has argued that ‘too little is spent on prevention and public health.’… Our findings suggest that the broad generalizations [about preventive care] made by many presidential candidates can be misleading.” There isn’t the slightest possibility that Dr. Emanuel was ignorant of this fact, yet he enthusiastically helped to create a “reform” law that literally made it illegal to sell a health insurance policy which fails to cover all manner of preventive screenings, including the annual exam that he now tells us is worthless. And even as he was working with the White House to cobble Obamacare together, he was silent as the tomb while the very publication that ran his column last week claimed, “By increasing just five preventive services, clinicians could save more than 100,000 lives per year.” But, now that Obamacare has become law, the Times and Dr. Emanuel sing a different tune. The good doctor’s op-ed puts it thus: “Regardless of which screenings and tests were administered studies of annual health exams dating from 1963 to 1999 show that the annual physicals did not reduce mortality overall or for specific causes of death from cancer or heart disease.” Why, then, has Dr. Emanuel been such a consistent and vocal promoter of Obamacare? If he is a genuine opponent of useless and expensive preventive care, shouldn’t he be a critic of the law rather than one of its highest profile supporters? Even if he lacked the power to stop the preventive care illusion from becoming an integral component of “reform,” he doesn’t have to promote PPACA like a carnival barker. Yet he has been one of Obamacare’s most vociferous defenders. Indeed, during the comically inept rollout of Healthcare.gov, he blamed Fox News for the widespread perception that it was a disaster. His unrelenting support for the health care law is about his passion for rationing. Obamacare offers the best chance, through IPAB and other mechanisms, of realizing this vision of centrally controlled allocation of medical resources. And this commitment to health care rationing is also what inspired Dr. Emanuel to write an op-ed encouraging you to skip your annual physical. Such effusions, his claims to the contrary notwithstanding, are not about his personal choices. They are meant to convince you to self-ration. The regrettable necessity of working through a democratically elected Congress to pass Obamacare has evidently left too much individual choice in the law for Emanuel’s taste, so he wants you to feel guilty about using too much health care. He claims he will make this sacrifice himself as well, but talk is cheap. The final paragraph of Emanuel’s editorial guilt trip contains the following exhortation: “[J]oin me in my new resolution: My medical routine won’t include an annual exam. That will free up countless hours of doctors’ time for patients who really do have a medical problem.” But the looming physician shortage this will ostensibly forestall has nothing to do with your annual physical. It’s an artifact of the perverse incentives Ezekiel Emanuel, Jonathan Gruber, and their White House masters built into PPACA. If Emanuel really wants to prevent a doctor shortage, he should call for the repeal of Obamacare.