There are links between terrorist attacks, job losses, and the health care legislation that is being completed behind closed doors: 1) A massive failed bureaucracy didn’t protect Flight 253 from a would-be bomber, so why expect that an even-larger bureaucracy can protect our health? 2)With 10% unemployment and 85,000 more jobs lost during the Christmas buying season, why pass a health care bill that promises to be a huge job-killer?
The common factor is that big government cannot efficiently guarantee homeland security or job security, much less health security. Big government is killing the economy by making it too risky for companies to create jobs.
While terrorist attacks and the suffering job market push health care out of the headlines, the threat of government-run health care moves ahead stealthily behind closed doors. Its hallmarks are exorbitant costs, extreme bureaucracy, and no help for the 85% of Americans who have coverage they find satisfactory (but just wish didn’t cost so much). But the legislation is no longer about them.
As one writer observed, “What started as a plan to find ways to cover people who don’t have insurance transformed into thousands of pages of new regulations, mandates, prohibitions, oversight and general central control.”
Both House and Senate bills would retain an army of existing health bureaucrats, and add a new bureaucracy under the “health czar”—formally known as the “Health Choices Commissioner”–with far more intrusive regimentation of your life than any airport screening system.
Adding more taxpayer-funded bureaucracy was President Obama’s announced response to a failed security system, and he’s applying that same approach to health care, just as he does to jobs.
When the Labor Department announced the loss of 85,000 more jobs, President Obama’s “solution” was to subsidize the creation of a claimed 17,000 “green” jobs by giving $2.3-billion in subsidies to wind and solar energy. That works out to $135,295 in taxpayer per money per job, but will also kill more jobs than it creates, by displacing current energy sector jobs.
Reality doesn’t work the way Obama claims. We already have 7.7-million fewer jobs than Obama promised we’d have if we passed if we passed his $787-billion “stimulus” package. And most jobs “saved or created” were government jobs.
Voters are not fooled. According to Rasmussen Reports, “Half of voters nationwide (50%) say increases in government spending hurts the overall economy. Just 28% says increased government spending helps the economy.”
So why make the job market worse by passing President Obama’s health care plan? As The Heritage Foundation has assessed, the pending health care legislation—with its taxes, regulations and mandates—will cost hundreds of thousands of jobs.
Big government is what is holding back the economy. More big government is the disease, not the cure.
As one business analyst tells the media “Unemployment is at 10 percent and all these businesses see are higher costs in the future from health care and other policies — so they are hoarding cash. They’re making money, but why logically would any businessman use this money to expand if he doesn’t know what all his costs will be because of the expansion of these government programs?”
Our biggest job-creators, small businesses, are especially skittish. As NFIB (National Federation of Independent Businesses) reports, after its latest national survey of small business, the problem is the uncertainty caused by big government:
The horizon is filled with cost unknowns, from healthcare to cap and trade to yawning deficits and the need to come to grips with them, from paid family and medical leave to card check, from expiration of the Bush tax cuts to state decisions about their finances. Washington cannot expect small business owners, facing difficult economic circumstances anyway, to commit themselves to investing in new employees or equipment and vehicles without acknowledging and revealing the policy-inspired costs that will be imposed on them. It is all about uncertainty and confidence.
A similar and detailed description was also offered in the Wall Street Journal by economic scholars from Stanford and the University of Chicago (including Nobel Prize winner Gary S. Becker), who summarized the stifling threat as “changes that could radically transform the American economy.”
As President Ronald Reagan so often reminded us, government is not the solution . . . it’s the problem.
Like a desperate last-minute Christmas shopper who will grab any gift and pay any price, Congress may rush through a hasty and ill-conceived rewrite of health care legislation. President Obama’s message to Senators seems focused more on party loyal and an appeal to desires for glory than on what Americans want or need.
With public support collapsing all about them (61% in opposition according to CNN’s December polling), Democrats may be motivated by a feeling that they’ve gone too far to turn back now, even if it’s in the wrong direction. They could invoke Benjamin Franklin’s aphorism that “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”
Franklin, however, had a much nobler purpose in mind—independence from government tyranny.
What’s in the final bill may become immaterial in this Christmas rush. That’s dangerous because the ultimate language remains a mystery after earlier efforts ran afoul of multitudes of objections. The 11th-hour rewrite of the bill will be major version Number Nine since varying editions began surfacing during the summer. With or without a co-called “public option,” it’s certain that the bill will displace millions of Americans from their current private insurance, put Washington in charge of all health care and insurance, and expand the number of people who depend on taxpayers to pay for their coverage.
Bureaucrats such as the new “Health Choices Commissioner” would be granted czar-like powers to impose what would function as a federally-controlled single-payer system. That power would extend over everyone, even those who think they still have private insurance.
“It’s now or never” sums up the White House message as President Obama asks his fellow Democrats to disregard the public opposition and pass Obamacare anyway. White House operatives told Politico this is the “last chance” and “last train leaving the station” as time runs out for the Senate to act before Christmas.
Previewing the message, Vice President Joe Biden said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”: “If health care does not pass in this Congress … it’s going to be kicked back for a generation.”
The appeal to unity and glory is an echo of the argument Obama used to rally final votes for the House version of the legislation. As ABC News said about that House meeting, Obama used an argument based on political calculation: “At the end of his speech, Obama got a rousing ovation for saying, “I am absolutely confident that when I sign this bill in the Rose Garden, each and every one of you will be able to look back and say, ‘This was my finest moment in politics.’”
This appeal to political vanity is very different from the claims that the President makes about his proposals in public meetings. So it’s no wonder that Obama has abandoned his campaign pledge to conduct health care negotiations publicly and on C-SPAN. As he said in 2008, “I’m going to have all the negotiations around a big table. We’ll have doctors and nurses and hospital administrators. Insurance companies, drug companies — they’ll get a seat at the table, they just won’t be able to buy every chair. But what we will do is, we’ll have the negotiations televised on C-SPAN.”
As Byron York writes, the fact that they’ve already overreached is “why Democrats continue to push health care, even if it kills them.”
Those wishing to commit political suicide will suffer the consequences at the hands of the voters. The problem is that damage won’t end there. Dramatic new costs will be imposed on 160-million Americans who already have health insurance. Unfair adverse consequences will abound, such as a $3,000 penalty on businesses that hire low-income workers. It will be costlier than ever to create new jobs or to buy insurance (except for those who are granted new government subsidies at the expense of taxpayers).
Rather than appealing to party loyalty and political vanity, President Obama and others need to slow down and consider the best interests of the country. But they show no signs of doing that.