X-raying bruised Obamacare shows multiple fractures
by Bob Hoig, Publisher
Midlands Business Journal
Among the campaign promises Barack Obama must have made with his fingers crossed was the one to conduct the most transparent administration in history.
Congressional bills were to be posted 48 hours in advance of any significant actions. Ample time was to be given for the public to understand proposed legislation. The White House would work with Republicans and Independents in post-partisan ambience.
Come again?
It is impossible to imagine a less transparent American president than Obama has proven himself in his first six months.
Nothing is transparent. Everything is partisan. Democrat majorities in House and Senate operate with Obama on his rebranded mantra – “We won!”
With this backdrop, trillions of dollars worth of budget deficits have sailed through Congress with the most perfunctory committee attention – TARP bills, other pork-laden stimulus spending, Detroit auto resurrection and other bailouts.
The Obama cap and trade bill stalled a bit in the House, but still squeaked by and now rests with the Democrat-majority Senate. Critics, including this writer, complain that capping carbon emissions will do nothing but drive up U.S. electricity costs, lower manufacturing competitiveness, cost jobs and raise budget deficits, while China, India, some allies, and the entire developing world go their way, in defiance of Al Gore and all he stands for.
Reporters have yet to find one senator or representative claiming to have read these monstrosities they have passed.
Now comes President Obama’s health care bill, setting up a government takeover of health care and, with it, one fifth of the U.S. economy.
And everything must happen in two weeks.
Obama himself doesn’t even know what is in his own health proposals.
Why two weeks? Because unless Congress stays in session beyond the traditional dates of its August recess, Americans would have at least another month to absorb the implications of “Obamacare.” That was the classic mistake of the Clintons, giving the public time to digest “Hillarycare.” They threw it up.
A month’s delay now won’t hurt anything since the act would not even go into effect until 2013. Giving the public time would help Obama uncross his fingers on that one segment of “transparency” he once promised.
Redeeming the Democrat-dominated Senate of the United States is harder. Its majority members have already flubbed their cherished title of “world’s greatest deliberative body.” They deliberate nothing. They don’t even read.
The House of Representatives under Speaker Nancy Pelosi has yet to make claims on deliberative greatness, so nothing is lost there.
A bumper sticker is on the way: “If they won’t read ’em, we don’t need ’em.”
It would be a foolhardy corporate board that would show up at one of those congressional committee hearings the Democrats like to throw and try to defend key policy sign-offs with excuses that “It was too bulky. The board didn’t have time to read it.” Or, “The CEO said we had to sign right now!”
Well, the American people are the stockholders. Congress is the board. President Obama is the CEO.
On health care legislation, there is a way to slow things down.
Members of Congress and of the federal bureaucracy have always had gold-plated, private health care plans. Not for them will be the rationing or the green-eyeshade civil servants and actuaries making the call on procedures and medications they live by or their lives preserved or forfeited as defined under Obamacare.
If America is to go socialist, let the politicians and bureaucrats join the rest of us and squirm under the same socialized medicine we are forced to “enjoy.”
July 2009
