Quote of the Day
God creates out of nothing.
Wonderful you say. Yes, to be sure,
but he does what is still more wonderful:
he makes saints out of sinners.
Wonderful you say. Yes, to be sure,
but he does what is still more wonderful:
he makes saints out of sinners.
Soren Kierkegaard
Sunday Talk Soup:
A Rant on Jake Tapper, Obama and Health Care
A Rant on Jake Tapper, Obama and Health Care
Jake Tapper is an ABC News reporter whom guest-hosted Sunday's ABC This Week and is often called upon at Presidential news conferences. "Tap-Tap" is a semi-regular guest on comedian/conservative Dennis Miller's radio show, and I frequently listen to Miller's podcasts while working on other things. (Miller occasionally includes guests with liberal/mainstream media views, such as Tapper, Deepak Chopra and Joe Trippi. As an academic whom has done interdisciplinary research and is intellectually curious, I often check out what the opposition is saying.)
But I dislike misleading rhetoric and uncritical thinking. In particular, Tapper was talking about the health care reform and repeated some of Obama's talking points. Tapper made reference to the point that hospitals have to pass along the bills of deadbeat patients to the insured. So, he reasons, it's only fair to recapture those costs from outside the insured population (e.g., through a mandate). There are a number of obvious things wrong with that perspective. First, Tapper is ignoring the fact that the providers pass along costs of doing business (including the risk of uncollectible bills) across all customers--including those whom pay for medical services on an a la carte basis. If anything, government-sponsored patients (e.g., Medicare/Medicaid) are not reimbursed at full cost but are subsidized by an unsustainably shrinking number of private-sector plan patients. Second, Tapper is not challenging the far more critical assumptions between the health care law: Medicare has a much closer date of insolvency than social security but instead of using revenue/cost fixes to shore up Medicare, they are being used to fund an entirely new entitlement--never mind the fixes themselves are unprecedented and highly unlikely. Moreover, given the notorious, historical fact of blown estimates (e.g., in terms of Medicare), Tapper should be far more skeptical of the ObamaCare Ponzi scheme funding. Let's just take the simple fact of the "doc fix". The "doc fix" cost was arbitrarily excluded from ObamaCare estimates. The "doc fix" has been regularly passed to offset automatic cuts in doctor payments (as part of a cost-saving requirement). Does Tapper think that promises of unprecedented Medicare savings underwriting ObamaCare are any more reliable than the planned cost savings resulting in doc fixes?
Moreover, you would expect Tapper to be more skeptical that the Obama Administration, which will add more to the national debt in 3 to 4 years than the Bush Administration added in 8 years, can "fix" health care costs; where does this confidence come from--the ability of Nixon, Ford, and/or Carter to fix inflation through wage and price controls? What about the fact of a growing baby boomer retirement population enrolling into Medicare, an aging population rapidly expanding beyond the ability of a shrinking labor force to support them? Of course, the Democrats also want to raise eligibility for Medicaid into the middle class. And, of course, the Democrats want you to believe that it can use "Obama money" to fund "free" annual physicals and prescription drug "doughnut holes"--and dump millions of patients onto an already inflation-bound health care system and make aggregate costs SHRINK?
Oh, but Jake Tapper did go on. What a magnificent gesture Obama has made--to invite Republicans into a Leibnizian "come, let us calculate" reform of health care reform! How could anyone argue with that? PLEASE: There is a reason that the Democratic Party Health Care Law passed without a single GOP vote in either chamber of Congress. Republicans wanted deregulation of the marketing of health care insurance across of states, medical malpractice tort reform, cooperatives of small business across states with the same scalability as large companies to attract premium discounts and/or rights to self-insure; they wanted fewer mandates on policies or in purchasing policies; they talked about properly funding high risk pools. Democrats have fought these reforms tooth-and-nail.
It's all politics, political spin, but Tapper is confusing rhetoric with substance. In fact, Obama has no intention of allowing substantive changes to his program. Instead, he thinks he can co-opt the GOP House by offering modest changes of the things he's already decided to fix (like the 1099 reporting requirement of $600/above transactions)--and he's not about to deal away the individual mandate or the unilateral changes imposed on states by the federal government. That's not negotiation; Obama wants capitulation on terms he unilaterally decides. What makes this even more incredulous from my standpoint is that Obama has played the same old same old song, and Jake Tapper doesn't seem to have caught on. The GOP have been there, done that. What exactly is Tapper basing his analysis on? A one-day health care summit where Obama repeatedly interrupted and "corrected" GOP participants? The only time Obama ever did negotiate with the GOP was after the Senate Republicans blocked the House's class warfare tax cut extension in the lame duck session--and Obama did it because it was the only way he could ensure keeping his own "middle-class tax cut" promise. It was never about the $70B in projected incremental revenue from the higher tax brackets, which were dwarfed by the middle-income tax cut extension (never mind the unemployment compensation side agreement).
Shifting to a different interview, I have mostly not commented on Bill O'Reilly's Super Bowl Day interview with Barack Obama, but there was one point in particular which annoyed me: Obama implied that ObamaCare was little more than catastrophic health insurance, i.e., that this was meant to keep families from having to file for bankruptcy due to infeasible medical costs. So the reason we're doing ObamaCare is because the bankruptcy courts are already doing their job? In fact, if Obama wanted to deal with the problem of preexisting health conditions or lifetime limits, he could have proposed subsidies for high-risk policyholders, catastrophic health care insurance and/or some reinsurance concept for lifetime caps. In fact, Obama's health care law goes far beyond catastrophic expenses: the Democrats are describing things like annual exams, contraceptives, and other expenses, which I consider ordinary, easily handled out of pocket, through a health savings account or say, within the context of a high-deductible health care policy.
A Follow-Up Note on the Gerson Op-Ed
In yesterday's post I took on non-Catholic Gerson's rant on Catholic conservatives or Republicans, all but suggesting that we are ignorant of or abandoning our Church's teachings (e.g., social justice). I pointed out that certain progressive policies were arguably counter-productive from a Christian standpoint: if they interfere with the self-actualization, self-reliance of an individual, they diminish human dignity.
Is there a role for government within a Christian conservative/libertarian perspective, and if so, what is it? I want to respond from a global perspective: protection of life, liberty and property. (The Lockean distinction is found in his Second Treatise on Government; there are several posts which reference Jefferson's substitution of the "pursuit of happiness" for property in the Declaration of Independence, e.g., here, but the traditional natural/unalienable rights are explicitly listed in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution.) I have probably discussed the difference between negative and positive rights. A negative right means that other parties (e.g., criminals or police) must cease and desist from taking any actions against my relevant interests. A positive right reflects what others must do for my relevant interests, say, provide me with a free basic education, legal counsel if I'm destitute and charged with a crime, or an income if I'm physically unable or too old to work.
Conservatives/libertarians emphasize negative rights and a limited, contractual nature of positive rights. We believe in a relatively small government footprint, view diminishing returns for incremental positive rights, and see the Bill of Rights as an equal protection, indispensable defense against the tyranny of the majority. A small government footprint enables individuals to maximize their morally accountable judgments.
Political Humor
A few originals:
- President Obama decided to write a follow-up book to his best-selling children's book Of Thee I Sing: The Little Super Train Engine That Could. When asked by the kids whether the President could get the train past the GOP, Obama said, "I think I can! I think I can!" To which Speaker Boehner responded, "He thought he could! He thought he could!"
- President Obama explained how he economized in this year's budget. For instance, if you buy 4 super-trains from China at regular price, they'll throw in a fifth super-train at 10% off....
The Bee Gees, "Holiday"
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