Democrats are blazing path of destructive health care reform

It seemed for a while a really big mystery that, with the deficit at a $1.3 trillion record, members of the House would plan on treating themselves to $550 million worth of new passenger jets, but now all is clear. They need a way to get out of Dodge, and very, very quickly, if they really do foist a new health deal on the nation.

There’s evidence some such insanity could still be coming our way, for there was Speaker Nancy Pelosi in Denver the other day explaining that the proposals would not add to deficits or restrict benefits or decrease access to care, which would be more than a little hard to do considering what the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says.

Its message is and has been that none of the reform’s cost-cutting ideas will trim enough to prevent incredible new costs on top of incredible old ones — Medicare’s tens of trillions in unfunded liabilities — and that you will either have to have sky-high deficits or sky-high taxes and one will pretty much kill us economically.

Huge numbers of the citizenry seem to get that, and something else: that the government will in fact give us both big deficits and high taxes while trying desperately to save money by restricting benefits and denying care.

Hints include President Barack Obama’s plan for a Medicare panel with sweeping, if not wholly unchecked, powers to establish fees and limit treatments.  And his
purpose of less overall expense partly through new “incentive” systems for doctors at a time when he’s aiming to establish a public plan to help absorb what he sees as some 50 million new insurance beneficiaries.

A lot of us can agree that the present way of doing things has serious flaws and that steps must be taken to fix it, but it worries some that the Democrats are figuring on passing an expensive, sweeping, ill-considered, politically manipulated, reckless blunderbuss of a bill that will inevitably have unintended consequences and could do serious harm to millions of people.

This we know: Congressional town-hall meeting protesters are not un-American neo-Nazis, as the incompetent, endlessly prevaricating Pelosi has suggested, though the reaction of the White House has in fact been un-American.

The president himself has said he does not want the people “who created this mess” — meaning the present health system — to “do a lot of talking,” and the White House asked that “fishy” claims about the reform package be e-mailed to it.

The message seems to be damn the objections, full speed ahead, and if Democrats can’t then cover up the ruinous results, they can run like crazy to board new jets they purchase.

Examiner columnist Jay Ambrose is a former Washington opinion writer and editor of two dailies. He can be reached at Speaktojay@aol.com.