Committee Votes 14-9 in Favor of Baucus Plan

The Senate Finance committee has voted in favor of the Baucus-Obama Health Care Plan, with all 13 Democrats and one Republican, Senator Snowe, voting for the bill; the nine other Republicans vote against it.

The bill imposes a 40 percent tax on health-insurance plans. This is a particularly interesting component of the plan given Obama's emphatic and oft repeated promise: "I can make a firm pledge. Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 per year, will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes."

No word on how Democrats plan to explain to their constituents why they support the plan to break Obama's tax pledge.

Via Memeorandum

More

Artificial Stupidity: How the Democrats Got Their "Reduces the Deficit" Claim

Snowe: Yes on Finance Committee Healthcare Plan

Olympia Snowe…ruin health care in your own state…and leave me alone.

Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) said today she would vote to approve the healthcare bill before the Senate Finance Committee.

The Washington Post found that Snowe has voted with her party only 58.4 percent of the time over the course of 308 votes. She crossed party lines on the $787 billion stimulus bill. Only Susan Collins (R) had a lower party unity score (58.1 percent).

With Snowe's support on the Health Care plan, Democrats can claim a bipartisan product heading into the floor debate. According to the New York Times, Democrats seemed a bit more chipper after hearing Ms. Snowe’s decision.

Snowe's empty rhetoric: "Is this bill all that I would want? Is it all that it can be? No. But when history calls, history calls."

With Republicans like this, who needs Democrats?

Via The Hill

Via Memeorandum

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Senator Roberts likens Baucus Plan to an instrument of death, killing elderly parents

The Baucus plan appears to take a “Lizzie Borden ax” to lop off various Medicare payments, amounting to a “big shell game.”

Olympia Snowe and the Consequences of a ‘Yes’ Vote

Snowe's healthcare vote puts her top Commerce perch at risk.

Lieberman Opposes Baucus Plan

LCR: Olympia Snowe Yes on Obamacare

New Health Care Talking Points: Updated 10.12.09

The health care debate is on fire again. Here are some hard-hitting talking points with links to the best information gleaned from the interwebs. Feel free to email, tweet, fax, post in a blog, or disseminate in any way, shape or form. Modify as you see fit. Send to conservatives, liberals, friends, enemies, Senators and Reps. Let's get this information out.

• ObamaCare: A trillion dollar experiment that leaves 25 million uninsured http://bit.ly/3kECOk

• 40% tax on health-insurance plans: This will hit the middle class like a heart attack! http://tr.im/Ba6I

• "Reform" means you pay more—Healthcare costs will go up 111% http://bit.ly/mD8Xd

• The Health Care Freedom Plan Insures More Americans in Half the Time at No Cost http://bit.ly/W6YK4

• Obama said: "Government-run health care with higher taxes…is wrong." http://3.ly/teW

• New ObamaCare Taxes: Middle Class Pays 87%! http://tr.im/BzoO

• CATO: The Real Cost of the Baucus Plan: $2 Trillion+ http://3.ly/x5x

• Democrats' Healthcare Plan Would Increase Family Premiums by $4,000 per Year http://is.gd/4fCCF

• Pew Poll: 34% Favor ObamaCare, 47% Oppose. http://tr.im/B94j

• By a 57% - 37% margin, voters say Congress should not approve a health care overhaul with only Democratic votes http://3.ly/wUk

• ObamaCare…creative accounting: Immediately hitting Americans with higher taxes, but delaying benefits for at least 2½ years http://3.ly/ZNk

• Tort reform would reduce federal budget deficits by roughly $54 billion http://3.ly/BV8

• Contact Olympia Snowe. Just do it. It only takes a few minutes, and it could make a difference. http://tr.im/B8N3

• If your family earns less than $250K a year…you will not see your taxes increased a single dime…I repeat…Not one single dime http://3.ly/CL5

• Baucus plan: expensive…breaks Obama's tax pledge…based on insane expectations…leaves millions uninsured http://tr.im/B88q

• CBO score based on unrealistic assumptions, e.g., doctor-reimbursement rates would be cut by 25% http://bit.ly/1Gx90v

• The Baucus Bait & Switch http://bit.ly/12dQ4j

• Democrats to cut Medicare by $404,000,000,000 http://tr.im/B7e7

Discussion: Goomba News Network

Baucus Plan: Fantasy & Broken Promises

The Baucus health care plan is expensive, it breaks Obama's tax pledge, it is based on insane assumptions and it leaves tens of millions uninsured. Putting those considerations aside, it's a fantastic plan.

A Trillion Dollar Plan

Democrats are ecstatic. The CBO (after having been subjected to presidential arm-twisting) has declared that the $829 billion Baucus plan is essentially deficit neutral, with the potential to reduce the deficit by $8 billion per year (peanuts). Would that it were so. But even if it were true, let's not forget that $1 trillion is massive amount of wealth...this is a very expensive scheme.

Yes, New Taxes

The Baucus plan will be paid for with massive new taxes, including $201 billion in new taxes on insurance plans, and taxes on the uninsured (a cruel breach of another Obama pledge). The Baucus plan also calls for new taxes on a whole array of medically related goods and services including hip, knee, and ankle prosthetics, mammograms, dentures, breast pumps and contact lenses. These new taxes will hit the middle class like a heart attack. Please recall Obama's emphatic and oft repeated promise:

"I can make a firm pledge. Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 per year, will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes."

Here's a question for your Senators and Congressperson: "Do you intend to send Obama a health care bill that will lead him to break his promises?"

False Assumptions, Laughable Claims
In order to create the illusion of deficit neutrality and cost effectiveness, the Baucus plan makes assumptions that the CBO has described as insane (in more tactful terms). Here are some of the more egregious abuses of reality:

• Most of the plan's funding is supposed to be coming from $404 billion in cuts to Medicare and other government insurance programs. Democrats say they will reduce waste but they won't hurt recipients' benefits. [Can we can trust a government that created $404 billion in waste to find and eliminate said waste? What have they been waiting for? An alternate reality, perhaps?]

• Doctor-reimbursement rates supposedly would be cut by 25%. [Not happening. Doctors would retire, opt out, or go bankrupt.]

• The plan creates a rosy fiscal illusion by immediately hitting Americans with higher taxes, but delaying benefits for at least 2½ years. [This makes the plan look more cost effective than it actually is.]

• The CBO has understated the major impact of a weakened individual mandate:

Amendments approved during the Senate Finance Committee mark-up eviscerated the individual mandate – completely eliminating it in 2013, significantly lowering penalties to the point that it will only represent about 15 percent of the cost of a premium by 2017. Further, many individuals would be exempt from the penalties altogether. This is likely to result in millions of people foregoing coverage.

A weak mandate, as included in the amended Senate Finance Committee bill, would encourage people to wait until they are sick to purchase coverage. This will drive up premiums for everyone.

On close inspection, the Baucus plan looks less like the best of all possible worlds, and more like the biggest of all possible lies.

Tens of Millions Uninsured
So we go bankrupt...at least we will get health insurance coverage for the overwhelming majority of the uninsured, right?

Wrong. Only about half of the uninsured will be covered. In 2019, 25 million would still be uninsured.

Via: Memeorandum, ABC, WSJ

Discussion: LCR

Penalizing Those Who Serve The Most Vulnerable

The Baucus/Obama health care bill will financially penalize physicians who provide care for the sickest patients. A provision in the bill punishes doctors whose treatment plans put them in the top 10% of national annual Medicare costs per patient.

This means that all doctors treating older people will constantly be driven to try to order the least-expensive tests and treatments for fear they will be caught in that top 10 percent. Note that this feature operates independently of any considerations of quality, efficiency or waste. If you authorize enough treatment for your patients, however necessary and appropriate it may be, you are in danger of being one of the 1 in 10 doctors who will be penalized each year.

This will pressure doctors to avoid taking responsibility for the oldest and sickest (i.e., most vulnerable) patients. And every year, the pressure could intensify as a brutal cycle is set in motion:

There will always be top a 10 percent, no matter how far down the total amount of money spent on Medicare is driven. Say that in 2015, the top 10 percent is anything over $10,000 per patient. In 2016, most doctors will scramble to hold down the treatments they authorize to avoid breaking that limit.

But the real possibility, as a result, is that the total annual amount of that limit will drop. So next year, doctors will try to avoid being in the penalty box for anything they authorize over $9,500.

As tough as this will be for physicians, patients will be the real losers.

As the doctors struggle with the continually falling limit of the money they can authorize for their contingent of patients, consider what those patients will lose in the quality of their treatment.

This is what happens when politicians design health care systems.

h/t: Green Room

Health Care by Government Force: Outrageous, Egregious, Preposterous...

Contra Obama

Obama's mandate for individual health insurance is irresponsible, unfair...and unconstitutional. Don't take my word for it, here's how Team Obama disparaged individual health insurance mandates, circa 2008:

"[The] Plan forces everyone to buy insurance, even if you can't afford it... and you pay a penalty if you don't."

"...the way [the plan] covers everyone is to have the government force uninsured people to buy insurance..." [emphasis mine]

...Or as Jackie Chiles might say, "It's Outrageous, egregious and preposterous!"

But Obama has come a long way since those halcyon days of yesteryear. Now the uninsured are in his crosshairs. If you dare to go without health insurance, watch out. Obama knows where you live:

"The problem is, such irresponsible behavior costs all the rest of us money. If there are affordable options and people still don’t sign up for health insurance, it means we pay for those people’s expensive emergency room visits. If some businesses don’t provide workers health care, it forces the rest of us to pick up the tab when their workers get sick, and gives those businesses an unfair advantage over their competitors. And unless everybody does their part, many of the insurance reforms we seek – especially requiring insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions – just can’t be achieved. That’s why under my plan, individuals will be forced required to carry basic health insurance."

There's a small problem with all of this — the Constitution:

The elephant in the room is the Constitution. As every civics class once taught, the federal government is a government of limited, enumerated powers, with the states retaining broad regulatory authority.

It is the authority to regulate foreign and interstate commerce that—in one way or another—supports most of the elaborate federal regulatory system. If the federal government has any right to reform, revise or remake the American health-care system, it must be found in this all-important provision. This is especially true of any mandate that every American obtain health-care insurance or face a penalty.

...Of course, a health-care mandate would not regulate any "activity," such as employment or growing pot in the bathroom, at all. Simply being an American would trigger it.

...Taxation can favor one industry or course of action over another, but a "tax" that falls exclusively on anyone who is uninsured is a penalty beyond Congress's authority. If the rule were otherwise, Congress could evade all constitutional limits by "taxing" anyone who doesn't follow an order of any kind—whether to obtain health-care insurance, or to join a health club, or exercise regularly, or even eat your vegetables.

The Wall Street Journal distills the latest iteration of ObamaCare down to it's essence: "Everyone would be forced to buy these government-approved policies, whether or not they suit their needs or budget. Families would face tax penalties as high as $3,800 a year for not complying, singles $950. As one resident of Massachusetts where Mitt Romney imposed an individual mandate in 2006 put it in a Journal story yesterday, this is like taxing the homeless for not buying a mansion."

Health care by government force? ...In 2008, Obama had the sense to ask, "Is that the best we can do for families struggling with high health care costs?"

Outrageous, Egregious, Preposterous...

More

Why an individual mandate could be struck down by the courts.

Obama opposed individual health insurance mandates

The Obama-Baucus plan would make health insurance even more expensive.

ObamaCare...a return to rugged individualism? Obama: “For us to say that you’ve got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase. What it’s saying is that we’re not going to have other people carrying your burdens for anymore.” h/t: The 46