The public option puts government firmly in the middle of the relationship between patients and their doctors. If you think insurance companies are bad, imagine what happens when government is the insurance carrier, with little or no competition and no concern you'll change to another company.
In other words, the public option is just phony. It's a bait-and-switch tactic meant to reassure people that the president's goals are less radical than they are. Mr. Obama's real aim, as some candid Democrats admit, is a single-payer, government-run health-care system.
Health care desperately needs far-reaching reforms that put patients and their doctors in charge, bring the benefits of competition and market forces to bear, and ensure access to affordable and portable health care for every American. Republicans have plans to achieve this, and they must make their case for reform in every available forum.
Defeating the public option should be a top priority for the GOP this year. Otherwise, our nation will be changed in damaging ways almost impossible to reverse.
The AP reports: The Obama administration struck a delicate balance on executive pay Thursday, blaming flawed compensation packages for encouraging disastrous risk-taking but insisting it doesn't want to dictate how corporations reward their top people.
Gene Sperling, a top counselor to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, conceded to a congressional committee that imposing compensation caps on companies could lead to a flight of talent.
"I can say with certainty that nobody in the Obama administration is proposing such a thing," he said.
Yet, at the same time, he and officials with the Federal Reserve and the Securities and Exchange Commission laid out a case for how payment structures rewarded short-term gains at the expense of long-term performance and contributed to the nation's financial crisis.
The administration plans to seek legislation that would try to rein in compensation at publicly traded companies through nonbinding shareholder votes and by decreasing management influence on pay decisions.
(We've seen that we can't believe anything that the President or his Administration "says" anymore. From mirandizing terror suspects to transparency in government spending (or the lack thereof), Mr. Obama has failed utterly to keep his promises. Further, when the government can dictate how companies are run, how much an employee or executive can be paid, dictate terms of a bankruptcy in clear violation of law, then we no longer have the freedoms and liberties guaranteed to us by our forefathers. We have tyranny. Obama beat McCain with 52% of the popular vote. Hardly a mandate for the kind of overreaching governance that we're witnessing. When will the Democratic Party be held accountable for what they're doing to the Republic? - Roland)
As the health care debate heats up, the American Medical Association is letting Congress know that it will oppose creation of a government-sponsored insurance plan, which President Obama and many other Democrats see as an essential element of legislation to remake the health care system.
The opposition, which comes as Mr. Obama prepares to address the powerful doctors’ group on Monday in Chicago, could be a major hurdle for advocates of a public insurance plan. The A.M.A., with about 250,000 members, is America’s largest physician organization.
While committed to the goal of affordable health insurance for all, the association had said in a general statement of principles that health services should be “provided through private markets, as they are currently.” It is now reacting, for the first time, to specific legislative proposals being drafted by Congress.
In Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth, he assures the public that the "[global warming] debate in the scientific community is over." The Heartland Institute disagrees. On June 2nd, 2009 the Institute hosted its Third International Conference on Climate Change, touting an impressive speakers list that included scientists, economists, and politicians. Their stated mission was to challenge the "consensus" on global warming.
Dr. Richard Lindzen, a Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has spoken at the conference since its inception. Each time, he confronted the alleged scientific consensus by exposing the fundamental reason why many scientists support global warming despite so much evidence to the contrary. "Endorsing global warming just makes their life easier," Lindzen argued.
More>>> Thomas Friedman and the 'Grasshopper Generation'
This argument has always struck many people as a counterintuitive leap of faith, and yet over the past 30 years it has become the dominant economic view across the globe. After years in which the term “capitalism” was treated almost as a pejorative and the “free market” conjured up images of plutocrats and sweatshops, it became an axiom that “markets work.” China changed its financial course and set loose the fastest-growing economy in the history of the world when its post-Mao leader, Deng Xiaoping, declared, “To be rich is glorious”—a startling declaration for a Communist regime. In the United States in the 1990s, the party that had historically stood against the idea that the market should be left to work on its own was led by a President who not only embraced the idea of the free market but evangelized for it...
...American society had been for some time already organized loosely around this principle. Our tax system is progressive, which means that it takes a greater percentage from the well-to-do and an increasingly small amount from the least wealthy. The top 20 percent of taxpayers were responsible for 67.1 percent of the income-tax receipts to the federal government in 2004, up from 66.7 in 2000. The bottom 40 percent paid . . . nothing, and a substantial number of those in the lowest two quintiles actually received money from the government in the form of tax credits.
What numbers like this suggest is that private wealth generation is indeed a necessary component of social-welfare programs run by the government. It not only produces jobs, it creates a pool of money to provide the capital stock that produces the goods and services that all may consume. And not only that. The government’s ability to provide social services is almost entirely dependent on the wealth produced by the private market...
Some things in politics you can't make up, such as President Obama's re-re-endorsement Tuesday of "pay-as-you-go" budgeting. Coming after $787 billion in nonstimulating stimulus, a $410 billion omnibus to wrap up fiscal 2009, a $3.5 trillion 2010 budget proposal, sundry bailouts and a 13-figure health-care spending expansion still to come, this latest vow of fiscal chastity is like Donald Trump denouncing self-promotion.
Check that. Even The Donald would find this one too much to sell.
But Mr. Obama must think the press and public are dumb enough to buy it, because there he was Tuesday re-selling the same "paygo" promises that Democrats roll out every election.
Before the war, the paper wrote article after article -- relying on both government and non-government sources -- that assumed the presence of stockpiles. Three of its reporters even wrote a book called "Germs," in which they discussed Saddam Hussein's chemical and biological programs.
But when the stockpiles failed to appear, the paper felt used, manipulated by the "devious" Bush administration. It promised its readers greater skepticism, more scrutiny, and no more at-face-value acceptance of assertions by the Bush administration. "The problematic articles varied in authorship and subject matter," wrote the Times in 2004, "but many shared a common feature. They depended at least in part on information from a circle of Iraqi informants, defectors and exiles bent on 'regime change' in Iraq, people whose credibility has come under increasing public debate in recent weeks. … Administration officials now acknowledge that they sometimes fell for misinformation from these exile sources. So did many news organizations -- in particular, this one." Quoth the Times, "Nevermore"!
But with hard-left Democratic President Barack Obama and large Democratic majorities running both the House and the Senate, the mainstream media -- the ones that felt used and manipulated by the Bush administration -- now purr like a contented kitten after a hearty meal.
Obama bravely told the Cairo audience that 9/11 was a very nasty thing for Muslims to do to us, but on the other hand, they are victims of colonization.
Except we didn't colonize them. The French and the British did. So why are Arabs flying planes into our buildings and not the Arc de Triomphe? (And gosh, haven't the Arabs done a lot with the Middle East since the French and the British left!)
In another sharks-to-kittens comparison, Obama said, "Now let me be clear, issues of women's equality are by no means simply an issue for Islam." No, he said, "the struggle for women's equality continues in many aspects of American life."
So on one hand, 12-year-old girls are stoned to death for the crime of being raped in Muslim countries. But on the other hand, we still don't have enough female firefighters here in America.
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