Video clip of the day

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With the Supreme Court hearing opening arguments on the legality of ObamaCare starting today, Reason.tv's Nick Gillespie reminds us of why ObamaCare needs to be scrapped for just 3 simple reasons.

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1. It Represents the End of Limited Government.

2. Its Price Tag is Already Ballooning.

3. Obamacare Won't Make Us Healthier.

While #2 and #3 are perfectly legitimate reasons for scrapping ObamaCare, #1 is indeed the biggie. If the government can force you to purchase health care insurance, what can't they compel you to do?


Once again, here's Congressman Pete Stark (D-CA) with the answer to that question.





Here's what we wrote when we first posted this video a year and a half ago:

Great points all, made by this young lady as it's readily apparent that she is talking at a level way above Stark's pay grade as he has no concept nor interest in understanding how the 5th, 10th and 14th amendments would prevent you from being compelled to sign up for health care just as it would prohibit the confiscation of goods and services from others as is the case when you declare particular goods and services a right.

Stark is a thug. There is simply no other way to put it.

Another memo to our goo-goo (good government) liberal friends: Sure, you would like to see the government play an active role for good in society but does Pete Stark's vision of a Thomas Friedman-esque totalitarianism look like your view of liberalism? Does what Pete Stark is saying sound anything remotely like, "Keep your laws off my body?"

The Democratic Party, which has for years been informed by notions of the limitless power of government dared not actually say it, until now. The passage of ObamaCare has proved to be truth serum to its authoritarian acolytes who now attend town hall meetings and impassively tell their constituents:

I think that there are very few constitutional limits that would prevent the federal government from (making) rules that could affect your private life.

Well, shoot-howdy, that doesn't sound like the bra and draft card burning Democratic Party of dear old Mom and Dad, now does it, gang?

If they can do this, what can't they do?

A year and a half later and nothing's changed except for the fact that the constitutional arguments against ObamaCare are now being joined in force by the unfolding revelations by bodies like the CBO, that we are adding yet another unsustainable entitlement program for which we have no way to pay.

Different author, same story

Nearly a year after letting the House and the Senate do his heavy lifting with respect to crafting health care legislation, the President is putting forth his own plan. From the AP:

President Barack Obama is putting forward a nearly $1 trillion, 10-year health care plan that would allow the government to deny or roll back egregious insurance premium increases that infuriated consumers.

Posted Monday morning on the White House Web site, the plan would provide coverage to more than 31 million Americans now uninsured without adding to the federal deficit.

It conspicuously omits a government insurance plan sought by liberals.

(italics ours)

You know you are going to get a balanced analysis when the piece kicks off with that paragraph.

And the absence the public option? We’ll get to that later.

The premium increase referenced was Anthem Blue Cross in California that jacked up its rates by 39%. This gives the President the fodder he needs to claim the system is broken and that Obamacare is the cure in front of the much ballyhooed bi-partisan healthcare summit with Republicans on Thursday.

There’s one problem, though, with the President’s claim of budget neutrality. The CBO says it won’t be anywhere near being able to provide a score to Obamacare (we can now use that term in full veracity) by the end of the week.

Moreover, preparing a cost estimate requires very detailed specifications of numerous provisions, and the materials that were released this morning do not provide sufficient detail on all of the provisions. Therefore, CBO cannot provide a cost estimate for the proposal without additional detail, and, even if such detail were provided, analyzing the proposal would be a time-consuming process that could not be completed this week.

But back to the government being able to deny or roll back "egregious" premium increases. This is a defacto price control and economics 101 teaches us what happens when price controls are put into place: the goods and/or services that are being regulated in this manner go away. They go away because those providing the capped goods and services will not be compensated at market value and since it won’t make any financial sense to do business with those price controls, health insurance providers will a) either be forced to cut services (rationing) or b) simply go out of business altogether.

It makes sense then not to add the public option into the initial language of the legislation as that is something that people will be clamoring for once the price controls effectively drive the health insurance providers out of business.

Also, define “egregious”. Perhaps there will be a number or some sort of sliding scale that will be used as the threshold for kicking in the roll back but no matter – at the end of the day it will be decided upon by legislation (that may or may not be influenced by the headquarters address of the health insurance provider. Pickin’ winners and losers!) or by bureaucratic fiat. Either way, we lose.

Congrats to the President for finally getting off his backside and taking the lead on his legislative crown jewel, though, it doesn’t appear it’s going to be much different than the pieces of crap generated by the House and Senate.

Addendum #1: Anthem Blue Cross has agreed to a request by the California Department of Insurance to postpone their premium adjustment by two months to allow the Department additional time to review it. The new rates were filed with the appropriate regulators in November of 2009 and the news release suggests there were no problems raised by the regulators during the 3 months in the interim.

Anthem claims the steady increase in medical costs, which are not sustainable, as the reason for the rate increase. Exacerbating the situation is the increasing number of healthy young people who choose not to be covered leaving an insured pool that require more services. All current versions of health care reform legislation mandate that everyone buy health insurance from private insurers so that everyone is, you know, “paying their fair share”.

Quote of the day (UPDATED)

... with a "Person of the year" update.


“The hope that health-care reform would take care of our budget problem has evaporated.”


That from Isabel Sawhill (not pictured), a fiscal expert at the Brookings Institution of which no one will ever confuse with the Heritage Foundation or the Cato Institute.

We will also use this as an opportunity to pimp our candidate for “Person of the Year” in Douglas Elmendorf, (pictured) the top dog at the Congressional Budget Office.

Back in August, when we made our initial push for Mr. Elmendorf we reasoned that the public tide-turning against health care began in earnest when the CBO was able to start “scoring” the various health care reform bills that were circulating around the Hill. Prior to that, because of the backroom nature of the legislation-fashioning, it was impossible for the public to grasp the scope of change these bills would wrought, thus the apprehension was more a fear of the unknown rather than the known.

Splashy graphics like the one below based on the CBO scorings, finally gave the electorate some understanding of what it was that was facing them and simultaneously exposed the accounting tricks and outright lies being peddled by health care reform proponents. Lies like Harry Reid saying the Senate version of health care would only cost $849 billion and would actually reduce the deficit in the first ten years.

(click to enlarge)


As one can see, Reid is counting the first four years as part of the ten - a period where we will be taxed for health care but will not see any of the “benefits” of that taxation. An honest assessment of the cost of health care reform should then shift four years to the right (2014-2023) where the taxation to fund health care and the outlays in health care are more concurrent and which results in the Senate bill actually costing $1.8 trillion over that same period of time.

We dug up this chart at B-Daddy’s behest who has his thought on the matter here and where we agree with his assessment that the Democrats have painted themselves into a corner on this issue.

Not passing healthcare reform would represent an epic failure of the Obama administration given the legislative advantages they possess. And conversely, passage of health care reform may well doom the Democrats in the next two election cycles and the President in ’12 as the electorate, already soured on the Senate bill, realize they will be making 4 years worth of down payments before they are able to move into the house Harry and Nancy built.

(UPDATE #1):It appears we may have been far too forgiving in tabulating the cost of the Senate bill for healthcare reform. Above we covered how the taxes start immediately but the spending doesn’t kick in until much later and progressively at that.

Another budget gimmick employed by the Senate bill is the requirement for individuals to purchase insurance. We’ll let Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute explain:

When the bills force somebody to pay $10,000 to the government, the Congressional Budget Office treats that as a tax. When the government then hands that $10,000 to private insurers, the CBO counts that as government spending. But when the bills achieve the exact same outcome by forcing somebody to pay $10,000 directly to a private insurance company, it appears nowhere in the official CBO cost estimates — neither as federal revenues nor federal spending.

This is an unfunded mandate that is not accounted for in estimating the cost of health care reform. Cannon estimates that when the spending is accounted for in the years 2014 – 2023 (the true lost decade) combined with that unfunded mandate in the same lost decade, the price tag for Obamacare checks in at, gulp…. $6.25 trillion dollars.

You may not want to believe that astronomical number but believe you must that even the whopping $1.8 trillion number estimated by the CBO is a low ball considering the fact they have not factored-in the unfunded mandate that will be borne by the private sector.

H/T: Hot Air

Question of the day

How do we know stimulus is working?

Because we’ve got the signs to prove it.

You start putting up enough of these babies alongside the highways of America, you just might start distracting people from the fact that for Brazil, India, China, much of continental Europe and even that basket case, Japan, the recession has ended.

Us? Thanks, no – we’re rather enjoying our economy that shrank by 1 percent in the second quarter.

Meanwhile, we we’re checking out some stimulus projects here in San Diego County on Onvia’s excellent site here and two trends emerged. First, knowing this is a navy town, it would come as no surprise that many of the stimulus projects would be going to Navy and Marine Corps installations but we were a little taken aback that it is virtually all the stimulus projects slated for San Diego County going to such items as installing photovoltaic cells on the rooftops of various Navy/Marine Corps-occupied buildings.

And this begs the question, how many of these projects were funded already out of NAVFAC’s (people responsible for maintenance and upkeep of DON facilities) budget? We would imagine, quite a few of them. If anyone has any insight to this, do share.

Secondly, check out the delta between the CBO’s and the White House’s estimate for the number of jobs that will be funded by each project. In virtually every case, the CBO estimates about 50-60% of the White House’s far more optimistic prognostication.

But let's not linger upon these finer details for too long when we've got more signs to build.

Some early handicapping for Person of the Year

Douglas Elmendorf, director of the CBO.

There had been serious unease with various aspects of the Democrat’s healthcare plan but the plans were not made public through the spring and early part of the summer. Rhetoric was heated but the Democrats could always deny the charges made against their plan because nothing was finalized and the most heated of the attacks were along ideological lines (funding of abortion, for instance).

Then in June, the Congressional Budget Office, came out with the figures for how much Obamacare was going to cost which contradicted, directly, the cost-savings claimed by the White House and all bloody Blue Dog townhall hell broke loose.

Now, instead of rhetorical/ideological battle lines being drawn, you had numbers and geometric and exponentially-increasing debt and deficit graphs that could be easily absorbed by moderates and independents.

Look at the pretty colors



This broadened the base of support against healthcare reform and is responsible, we believe, for the uphill struggle that the Democrats now face in getting healthcare reform passed. Healthcare reform that is the centerpiece of the Obama agenda.

For not being squeezed by the Chicago boyz, we’re getting our marker in early for Mr. Elmendorf. (Incidentally, when Elmendorf was appointed the position, it was hailed as a victory for the “left-leaning Brooking Institute).

They’re long odds now, but if and when healthcare goes down, those odds will shorten dramatically and you’ll have wished you listened to us while holding your 1-5 Barack Obama ticket. See ya at the windows.