Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion

Afghanistan is one issue around which there should be bi-partisan support. The consequences of the Taliban taking over the country and giving al-Qaeda and other radical Islamist groups a home base is too much to risk.

Obama seems to have a profound sense that the stakes are greater than the latest poll numbers. The strategy he is pursuing is yet to be fully defined, but it appears that he is taking into consideration the strategic advice of the military rather than the strategic advice of his pollsters. Whether Obama picks a good strategy and whether he shows the determination to see it through remains to be seen.

The one thing which is clear, however, is that Obama needs the support of the country. Unlike Obama's other weak or counter-productive foreign policy positions (Honduras and Iran, as examples), Obama understands that weakness in Afghanistan will lead to disaster.

Obama seems to have learned the right lessons from the Iraq surge, which is not necessarily to send more troops, but that failure cannot be a policy.

The Democrats in Congress who declared Iraq lost and the surge sure to fail (including Obama himself at the time) cannot be trusted with national security now anymore so than in the past. The Democrats in Congress still are fighting George Bush. The rest of us are fighting against an ideology of death.

The supporters of the people who flew planes into the World Trade Center would do it again in a heartbeat if given the chance. At least Obama seems determined not to give them that chance, and for that he deserves our support.

UPDATE: Supporting Obama on Afghanistan does not meaning we stop asking hard questions, such as Four Marines Dead: Who Changed the Rules of Engagement?

--------------------------------------------
Recent Posts:
Charles Johnson and Robert Stacy McCain
Brits Want Their Own Tea Party
It's Still All About Him, Except That It's Not
Senate To Fix Joe Wilson's Imaginary Loophole

Follow me on Twitter and Facebook

A movement is growing in Britain to slash government spending rather than impose tax increases, according to the Sunday Times:

Voters are overwhelmingly in favour of cutting public spending rather than tax rises to close the budget black hole, a Sunday Times/YouGov poll finds today.

Sixty per cent want to shrink the size of the state to curb the £175 billion deficit amid mounting government disarray over the public finances.

British citizens face a prevailing political party completely in bed with public employee unions, just like here:

The prime minister is understood to have told union bosses during a private Chequers meeting last Friday that public sector jobs would be safe under a future Labour government....

George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, said: “This weak, isolated Labour leader is telling his election paymasters what they want to hear. In doing so, he leaves his cabinet split on . . . public spending and international confidence in the British economy undermined.”

As here, the answer is for the Brits to throw out the politicians who put political fundraising allegiances ahead of the financial security of the nation.

But the Brits couldn't exactly call it a Tea Party movement, could they now.

Any suggestions?

--------------------------------------------
Related Posts:
Tea Parties Are Sooo Scaaary
Looking At Tea Parties Through Binoculars, Like On Safari
Liberal Doughboys Afraid of Tea Parties

Follow me on Twitter and Facebook

Oliver Willis compares Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty's statement that Pawlenty would consider whether the 10th Amendment allows a state to opt out of a potential federal health care plan with to George Wallace standing in the doorway to bar blacks from the University of Alabama.

Here is the quote from Pawlenty that gave rise to Willis' over-the-top analogy:

"Depending on what the federal government comes out with here, asserting the 10th Amendment may be a viable option but we don’t know the details. As one of the other callers said, we can’t get the president to outline what he does or doesn’t support in any detail. So we’ll have to see. I would have to say that it’s a possibility."

Doesn't sound like Pawlenty had a racial motivation for being willing to consider what was best for his state to the extent permitted under the U.S. Constitution. In fact, a Governor would be derelict in duty not at least to consider what constitutional options a state had to oppose a misguided federal policy.

So why use the George Wallace analogy, with photo and all, except to smear Pawlenty and others who oppose Obama's health care proposals as racists.

Will the use of the race card never stop? Have people like Willis never heard of the concept and consequences of crying wolf?

Politicized accusations of racism are so commonplace at this point as to have lost all meaning. Happy now?

--------------------------------------------
Related Posts:
Saturday Night Card Game
"Race" As Political Weapon
Beck Boycott A Defining Battle In Racial Politics
When Bush Was President, Secession Talk Was Cool

Follow me on Twitter and Facebook

First it was the Senate Gang of Six who took it upon themselves to fix Joe Wilson's imaginary loophole, the one which caused Wilson out of frustration to accuse Barack Obama of lying as to whether Democratic health care proposals included illegal aliens. And caused the left-wing spin machine and blogs dishonestly to tag Wilson as "the liar."

Now the White House has announced that it too is fixing Joe Wilson's imaginary loophole:

A White House spokesman, Reid Cherlin, said that the president’s proposals would bar illegal immigrants from purchasing private insurance through the new government marketplace, known as an exchange, and that verification of immigration status would be required for anyone seeking to purchase coverage.

Hand it to Joe Wilson. While we can dispute whether he should have shouted out during a speech by a President to a joint session of Congress (because Democrats never did that to George W. Bush), just two days after the shout out we know Wilson was right on the substance.

More important, it is amazing what can be accomplished by shouting-out the truth. Maybe the problem in Washington is not that politicians in the House of Representatives are too frank, but that they are servile to their party leadership and not free to speak their minds.

And one other thing. We know that when President Obama referred to his "plan" over a dozen times during the speech, Obama wasn't really referring to his "plan":

Although Mr. Obama in his speech referred to his “plan,” the White House has not developed a written legislative health care proposal and does not intend to do so, instead relying on committees in Congress, which have drafted several versions of the bill, some running more than 1,000 pages.

So Obama wasn't being literally correct when said things such as:

• "Here are the details that every American needs to know about this plan."
• "Nothing in our plan requires you to change what you have."
• "What this plan will do is make the insurance you have work better for you."
• "[W]e've estimated that most of this plan can be paid for by finding savings within the existing health care system"

You see, it depends upon what the meaning of "plan" is. Clintonian.

Democrats have received a bounce in the polls as a result of Obama's speech about his non-existent plan, although it remains to be seen how long it lasts when the details of the "plan" are put into legislative language.

As for Joe Wilson, he is about to be reprimanded by the Democrats in the House for his outburst. I hope that Charlie Rangel and Barney Frank introduce the resolution on the floor of the House so we can see what fine, upstanding citizens we have running this country. And drafting the details of Obama's "plan."

--------------------------------------------
Related Posts:
Shocking Lack of Respect
The "Section 246 Proves Joe Wilson Is A Liar" Lie
Senate To Fix Joe Wilson's Imaginary Loophole

Follow me on Twitter and Facebook

With the politics which seems to dominate all our lives, it is easy to lose sight of what matters most.

This afternoon the Cornell University community lost one of our undergraduate students to swine flu. As the father of three college-age students, my heart goes out to the family.

As someone also sidelined with swine flu myself, I implore you not to take the symptoms lightly.

I thank the Obama and Bush administrations for the advance planning for an outbreak.

Be smart and safe. And say a prayer.

--------------------------------------------
Follow me on Twitter and Facebook

If critics are to be believed, South Carolina Republican Rep. Joe Wilson "is the liar" about whether illegal aliens could receive benefits under the various pending Democratic health care restructuring proposals.

In response to this supposedly imaginary problem, the Senate "Gang of Six" bipartisan group is fixing Joe Wilson's imaginary problem:

In the Senate, Democrats in the so called "Gang of Six," a group of bipartisan Senators on the Senate Finance Committee which is the last panel yet to release its bill, began moving quickly to close the loophole that Wilson helped bring greater attention to.

"We absolutely assure that those who are here illegally would not get the benefit of any of these initiatives," Sen. Kent Conrad said.

I wonder what other imaginary problems can be fixed in the Democratic health care restructuring proposals. How about these for starters:

• The IRS will be the health care mandate enforcer by gathering information about taxpayer health care coverage
• Dozens of new bureaucracies will be created
• Hospital readmission policies will focus on overall hospital ratios rather than specific patient criteria
• The dispute resolution requirements will lessen if not eliminate patient ability to purchase services and products and later seek reimbursement
• Patient cost-sharing limits may lead to the elimination of popular Medicare add-on insurance
• The nature of taxation will be changed and for the first time people will be taxed for not doing something.
• Food providers will have to meet ridiculous food nutrition disclosure requirements, including extensive signage at drive through lanes and in vending machines.
• The IRS, never known for its big heart, will be restricted in its ability to excuse good faith taxpayer mistakes
• The IRS will be given the ability to set the tax rate to compel compliance with the health care mandate (why is no one talking about this?)

But there is one imaginary problem that no amount of penmanship can change:

• The entire thrust of the Democratic proposals is to move this country away from free market health care competition and individual independence, and towards socialized medicine at exists in Britain, with all the disastrous imaginary consequences.

--------------------------------------------
Follow me on Twitter and Facebook

South Carolina Republican Rep. Joe Wilson called Barack Obama a liar for claiming that Obama's health reform proposals do not apply to illegal aliens.

As I pointed out before, whether Wilson or Obama is right on the subject depends upon which health care bill one looks at.

But one thing that struck me is how quickly defenders of Obama on the blogosphere picked up the meme that Section 246 of the House Bill "proved" that Obama was right. Section 246 deals with "affordability credits," which help people who cannot otherwise afford coverage purchase government-run public option insurance on health care exchanges. Section 246 does not permit the payment of these affordability credits to illegal aliens (emphasis mine):

Nothing in this subtitle shall allow Federal payments for affordability credits on behalf of individuals who are not lawfully present in the United States.

Section 246, dealing with a specific type of credit, does not change the fact that under the House Bill as written -- and as Obama wanted it passed before the August recess -- illegal aliens would have been full participants in the nationalized health care system.

Illegal aliens would be required to purchase insurance under the mandate requirements, could buy into the public option coverage (which while nominally self-sustaining inevitably would require government subsidies), and could benefit from almost all of the programs created under the bill.

Having forced illegal aliens to purchase insurance, it would have been inevitable that some financial assistance would be offered to those who could not afford to purchase even the public option, although in fairness there is nothing in the House Bill which says so. Republican attempts to amend the House Bill to exclude illegal aliens from the national health care system were rejected by Democrats, which confirmed Republican suspicions that imposing a mandate on illegal aliens to purchase insurance was opening the door to eventual subsidies.

People can debate whether bringing illegal aliens into a nationalized health care system is good or bad, but what is not debatable is that the House Bill would have brought illegal aliens into the system almost completely. The politically contentious issue of outright subsidies for illegal aliens would have been left for another day, but the ground work was being laid. Now that Obama is rejecting such an approach at least nominally that debate is over, although it will be interesting to see how Obama's words are put into legislative writing.

Given that Section 246 so clearly is narrow and so clearly does not prove that Obama was correct in his speech, I wondered how it was that, within hours of Obama's speech, blog comment sections and blog posts were being plastered by people quoting Section 246 as "proof" that Obama was right and Wilson was wrong. Even my own blog post received comments from people quoting Section 246.

Realistically, how many people had dug into the 1018 pages of the House Bill to find Section 246?

The answer is that at 9:51 p.m. on the night of Obama's speech Media Matters, the Democratic media operation, issued an Action Alert claiming that Section 246 was "Proof That "You Lie!" Was A Lie" and that "in reality, Rep. Wilson is the liar."

In addition to Media Matters' other distribution methods, that Action Alert was sent out by Media Matters via Twitter [to over 1700 followers] and re-tweeted over 200 times.

The Media Matters meme about Section 246 has been picked up by many bloggers, including Jason Linkins at Huffington Post, who cited Media Matters as having proved that "what's been completely glossed over by the press is the fact that the 'You Lie!' was itself built upon a lie." A blogger at DailyKos declared "Healthcare Bill, HR 3200 Sec 246 proves Wilson a liar."

But of course, the fools in the blogosphere who either did not read the words of Section 246 or chose to ignore the fact that Section 246 only applies to "affordability credits" were not to be outdone.

Keith Olbermann, the Fool-in-Chief, went on a rant last night on MSNBC about how Joe Wilson was a liar and wrong. The proof? Section 246!

Here's the video (starting at 3:00), notice how Olbermann mumbles over the words "for affordability credits" when he reads (at 3:45) the language of Section 246:


Olbermann yelled at Wilson: "When are you going to apologize for your lack of being right?" How ironic.

As I have said, I don't think Obama's being wrong on the House Bill proves that he is a "liar." The House Bill is dense and hard to understand.

But Media Matters' successful campaign to spread the fiction that Section 246 "proves" that Obama was correct and that Wilson was "a liar" shows how effective Media Matters can be at shaping an issue. Particularly when there are gullible or deceitful fools willing to listen.

--------------------------------------------
Related Posts:
Shocking Lack of Respect
The House Bill Does Cover Illegals

Follow me on Twitter and Facebook

There was a shocking lack of respect displayed at Barack Obama's health care speech last night. President Obama spent most of his speech calling opponents of Democratic health restructuring plans liars. South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson called Obama a liar in response.

A shocking lack of respect all around.

Not for the first time. Like when George Bush was booed at Obama's inauguration.



UPDATE: One of the commenters argues that last night was different because it was members of Congress doing the shouting. So, I link to the Democratic Media Matters compilation of news reports on George Bush's 2005 State of the Union address, reflecting the disruptive behavior of Democrats in Congress who booed and hissed throughout the speech:

TED KOPPEL (ABC host): When the president talked about the bankruptcy of Social Security, there were clearly some Democrats on the floor who thought that that was taking it too far. And they did something that, apparently, no one at this table has ever heard before. They booed. [ABC, Nightline, 2/2/05; Koppel's panel consisted of former Bush adviser Mary Matalin, former Reagan chief of staff Ken Duberstein, and former Clinton speechwriter Michael Waldman]

JOHN ROBERTS (CBS White House correspondent): At a couple points in this address, it looked more like the British Parliament than the United States Congress. I've never heard the minority party shout at the president during the State of the Union address. [CBS, post-speech coverage, 2/2/05]

JOE SCARBOROUGH (former U.S. representative (R-FL) and MSNBC host): After the Democrats booed and hissed, Republicans were on the floor saying, you know, we never once did that to Clinton. So every time he would talk about Social Security, the roars got a little louder. And they got behind their president. [MSNBC, Hardball, 2/2/05]

BOB BARR (former U.S. representative (R-GA) and CNN contributor): It will be a very, very difficult battle as we saw by the unprecedented and, I think, highly improper virtual booing of the president when he simply said that the system is going to be bankrupt and the time is now to fix it. [CNN, Inside Politics, 2/3/05]

JOE WATKINS (radio host and CNN substitute host): Did you hear it? Certainly not the polite protocol usually practiced when a president speaks to Congress. If a Democrat one day delivers a State of the Union address, I hope the Republicans won't lower themselves to such a disrespectful level. I hope last night's behavior by a few lawmakers doesn't set a new precedent, that both parties can agree to remain civil, even when voicing disagreements.[...] PAUL BEGALA (CNN host): Let me correct your history -- 1993, I was with President Bill Clinton in that House chamber when he addressed a joint session of Congress. And Republicans heckled him when he cited Congressional Budget Office statistics about the deficit. [CNN, Crossfire, 2/3/05]

JOHN GIBSON (FOX News host): Maryanne Marsh, what did you think of those audible jeers, boos, for the president? It sounded a little like the House of Commons: that grumbling that comes from the back-benchers when they don't like something [British Prime Minister] Tony Blair said. That isn't very common for state of the union speeches, is it?MARYANNE MARSH (Democratic strategist): I don't ever remember hearing it, and was very surprised. But I have to say at least the good news is the Democrats are fighting and they're on offense. And they're more united than they've ever been against George Bush and the Republicans. [FOX News, The Big Story with John Gibson, 2/3/05]

--------------------------------------------
Related Posts:
The House Bill Does Cover Illegals
Do Unto Obama As Obama Did Unto Bush? You Betcha

Follow me on Twitter and Facebook

During Barack Obama's speech tonight, Obama said it was untrue that "the reforms I am proposing" cover illegal aliens. Someone in the audience, reportedly South Carolina Republican Rep. Joe Wilson, yelled out "liar."

Now this isn't the British parliament, so I don't agree with shouting out. Just who is lying, though, depends upon which plan is being used to determine if illegal aliens are covered.

Technically, Obama was correct that his plan does not cover illegal aliens because Obama has no plan that has been released, only concepts. So if Obama says his plan doesn't cover illegals, then by definition it does not cover illegals -- at least until we see the language in his plan. Similarly, the Senate HELP Committee bill defines an "eligible individual" in numerous places throughout the bill to include only citizens and legal residents (including for the public option, at page 111 of the bill).

So using the two measures, the non-existent Obama bill and the draft Senate HELP Committee bill which was not a full Senate proposal, Obama was correct.

But if the standard is the full House Bill, HR3200, then it appears that Obama was incorrect. There is nothing in HR3200 that excludes illegal aliens from the various coverage provisions (with a few limited exceptions). The Congressional Research Service agrees with this assessment (full report embedded below). For example, with regard to health care exchanges, the CRS found:

H.R. 3200 does not contain any restrictions on noncitzens—whether legally or illegally present, or in the United States temporarily or permanently—participating in the Exchange.

Since the Obama administration wanted a full House vote passing HR3200 prior to the August recess, Obama was okay with a bill that included illegal aliens.

Was Obama a "liar" meaning that he had knowledge of the falsehood of the statement he made at the time he made it? Hard to say. Maybe Obama was playing word games like Bill Clinton did as to the definition of "is." Or maybe Obama simply was mistaken as was George Bush on WMDs in Iraq.

UPDATE: One of the talking points I have seen in numerous comments posted around the blogosphere is that Obama was correct because Section 246 of the House Bill excludes illegals from receiving Individual Affordability Credits. That is true, and one of the few exceptions under the Bill. But it is the exception which proves the rule. As the CRS found, illegal aliens can participate in most of the critical aspects of the government health system including the health care exchanges.

Added: It also would be interesting to see how long the exclusion of illegal aliens from getting the credits lasted, since as the CRS notes, illegal aliens are subject to the health care mandate; one can anticipate the argument that if the House Bill requires illegals to have qualified health insurance, some accomodation needs to be made for those who cannot afford it.

There already are calls in reaction to Obama's speech to include illegal aliens fully in the health care coverage, credits and all:

So, tax dollars are already being spent on care for uninsured and undocumented immigrants. And hospital resources are being strained since the losses aren't fully accounted for, which can have an effect on the quality of medical care provided to the general population. Regardless of the system in place, coverage of undocumented immigrants is a problem that's going to need to be dealt with. Given that, shouldn't we be working toward a solution that's more transparent and just?

Treatment of Non Citizens in HR 3200

--------------------------------------------
Related Post:
Shocking Lack of Respect

Follow me on Twitter and Facebook

Barack Obama's speech on health care tonight was a good effort to re-frame the debate and the issues, but ultimately was a non-starter because it relied on governmental powers of coercion, a public option as to which Obama will not back down, the illusion of no increased deficits but expanded benefits, all to be funded by the pipe dream of every governmental plan:

Government will find cost savings through greater efficiencies.

With a dose of taxes on high cost insurance plans and insurers, to fill in what efficiency does not.

$900 billion over ten years. Since the plan doesn't start for 4 years, that's $900 billion over six years.

Let's see how the bill reads. The supporters of HR3200 said many of the same things, but the legislation was a monstrosity. A monstrosity that Obama was willing to sign into law had it passed Congress prior to the August recess.

A speech heavy on emotion, without noting the emotions of those who suffer when government inevitably rations care as costs escalate because people always want more of what is free. A speech laden with calls for personal responsibility by proposing a system which relies on just the opposite.

It will be an interesting fall.

UPDATE: Welcome Instapundit readers. If you want to know how the devil is the details, take a look at my posts on the role of the IRS as the health care enforcer (I beat Byron York by weeks on that one), why the Democratic proposals should be called the Bureaucracy Expansion Act of 2009 , and my series of analyses of HR3200:

Throwing Darts at HR3200 - Day 7 (Don't Wish Too Hard)
Throwing Darts at HR3200 - Day 6 (No Mulligans)
Throwing Darts at HR3200 - Day 5 (Cutting Hospital Readmissions)
Throwing Darts at HR3200 - Day 4 (Birth of a New Entitlement)
Throwing Darts at HR3200 - Day 3 (Cost Sharing Limits Gone Wild)
Throwing Darts at HR3200 - Day 2 (Enhanced Penalties)
Throwing Darts At HR3200 - Day 1

--------------------------------------------
Follow me on Twitter and Facebook

that would make a difference?

Tweak the public option, call it "competition" and expect everyone to follow?

Tweak mandates, call them "choice" and expect everyone to follow?

Tweak the dozens of new bureaucracies created, call them "helpers" and expect everyone to follow?

Tweak the taxes and penalties, call them "shared responsibility payments" and expect everyone to follow?

Tweak the inevitable rationing, call it "bending the cost curve" and expect everyone to follow?

Tweak the massive deficits, call them "downpayments for prosperity" and expect everyone to follow?

There is no amount of tweaking which can change the fundamentally foolish, destructive and self-aggrandizing nature of the Democratic proposals. None.

Compromises on the existing proposals are a fool's errand. Each and every compromise on the table moves the health care system away from empowering consumers to drive down prices on health services by comparison shopping for price and quality. Only free market competition can provide more services without rationing.

Starting over and smaller is the only alternative. If the Democrats expect everyone to follow the nonsense which erupted from the House and Senate committees, let the Democrats own it completely.

--------------------------------------------
Follow me on Twitter and Facebook

Camille Paglia nails it again:

By foolishly trying to reduce all objections to healthcare reform to the malevolence of obstructionist Republicans, Democrats have managed to destroy the national coalition that elected Obama and that is unlikely to be repaired. If Obama fails to win reelection, let the blame be first laid at the door of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who at a pivotal point threw gasoline on the flames by comparing angry American citizens to Nazis....

Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers (one reason for the hypocritical absence of tort reform in the healthcare bills). Weirdly, given their worship of highly individualistic, secularized self-actualization, such professionals are as a whole amazingly credulous these days about big-government solutions to every social problem. They see no danger in expanding government authority and intrusive, wasteful bureaucracy....

The top schools, from the Ivy League on down, promote "critical thinking," which sounds good but is in fact just a style of rote regurgitation of hackneyed approved terms ("racism, sexism, homophobia") when confronted with any social issue. The Democratic brain has been marinating so long in those clichés that it's positively pickled.

Sounds like the Democrats are self-destructing, unable to handle the power they earned through a unique confluence of events and personalities in 2008.

The Democrats self-destructing as a result of their own electoral success. Who could have thunk it possible?

--------------------------------------------
Related Posts:
Relax, The Dems Will Screw Up
Someone More Hated Than Sarah Palin
Welcome To The Real World, Professor Obama

Follow me on Twitter and Facebook

To read the left-wing blogosphere and mainstream media, one would think that the American people were victims of a vast right-wing conspiracy. As if the critics of creeping government control of the health care and economic systems somehow were misleading an otherwise liberal population into opposing Democratic liberal plans.

To the contrary, it is the Democrats who have twisted the politics so as to overstate the reality underlying the 2008 presidential and congressional elections. While Democrats won big in 2008, that win did not reflect any liberal shift in the population. The reality consistently has been that this is a more conservative than liberal society, based on how people self-identify.

The trap into which liberal Democrats have fallen is to mistake an electoral win having nothing to do with ideology for an embrace of liberalism and big government. To the extent Democrats viewed the 2008 elections as an endorsement of liberal policies, Democrats now are meeting reality.

Democrats beat the odds in 2008. Reality is beginning to sink in in 2009. Electoral politics will revert to reality in 2010, and once again reflect that is a center-right nation.

--------------------------------------------
Follow me on Twitter and Facebook

Andrew Sullivan, writing at TimesOnline (London) notes the circus of conspiracy theories sweeping the land. He ought to know.

Sullivan goes on to argue that Obama will end up with a victory on health care restructuring, although many of the controversial aspects will be dropped:

Nonetheless, I remain convinced Obama will win this fight. Not totally; not without political cost; but win it he shall. And the strategy is really very simple. The most popular elements of the bill will be kept in and the most contentious left out.

The fundamental issue of costs will be deferred. A bill that prevents insurance companies from denying coverage to people with pre-existing illnesses; that creates healthcare exchanges, where people can buy their own insurance policy subsidised by the government; that brings agreed price reductions by the drug companies in return for all these new, previously uninsured clients: this will pass and be popular. How could it not? The option of a government-run insurance plan to compete with private ones will be either dispensed with or held in reserve. If, after a few years, health costs keep soaring and the private companies have not mended their free-spending ways, it could be brought back.

Well, yeah, if Obama drops the public plan and mandates he can get some measure of health insurance reform because most people want health insurance reforms without junking the whole system. New national and regional markets for insurance helping create the conditions for individual insurance empowerment. That is a plan that can pass.

It's called the Republican plan, and it is as available now to Obama as it was six months ago. All Obama has to do is just say yes.

--------------------------------------------
Related Posts:
Psst...Don't Tell Andrew Sullivan Our Secret
Hillary Had A Mandate For Mandates
Obama Was Against Compulsory Health Insurance, Before He Was For It

Follow me on Twitter and Facebook

If Hillary Clinton were President, things would be quite different. For one, Hillary would have a mandate for health care mandates, which are the key to Democratic health care restructuring.

Everyone focuses on the public option, but the public option is a mere necessary component of a system in which everyone is forced to purchase health insurance. The public option is intended to provide a low cost product for those who cannot afford private insurance under a mandate. Without a public option there can be no mandate. The fact that a public option may undermine the private health care insurance system matters not to those seeking a mandate; all that matters is that everyone is covered.

I am against mandates and the public option, and in favor of free market reforms which empower individual consumers to shop for health care services the same way consumers shop for other services and products.

But if Hillary were President, the fight against mandates and the public option would be tougher because Hillary campaigned on a platform of mandates. Were Hillary President, she could claim with a straight face that she and Democrats in Congress had a mandate to impose mandates.

Barack Obama can claim that he has a mandate to impose mandates, but he cannot do so with a straight face. Obama campaigned on a platform of no mandates. Obama repeatedly pointed out during the primaries that the key difference between his health care plan and Hillary's health care plan was that Hillary had mandates, but Obama did not (see video below).

So the President who made a point in the campaign to argue against mandates, now is the mandate President. It doesn't work that way, as the Obama administration is finding out.



--------------------------------------------
Related Posts:
Obama Was Against Compulsory Health Insurance, Before He Was For It
IRS The New Health Care Enforcer

Follow me on Twitter and Facebook