Editorial Opinion

Obama works health care shell game within stimulus bill by Bob Hoig, Publisher Midlands Business Journal The magic of the ancient shell game is getting the sucker’s eyes where you want them and away from the play. President Obama is working it to perfection on a provision creating a health care plan superstructure within his stimulus bill. The vague segment on health care was folded incongruously and without public warning or debate into the pending Obama stimulus bill. Why would a president, coasting on public trust and transparency, do this? Obama learned from Bill and Hillary Clinton, that’s why. In the 1990s, the Clintons were hungering to nudge America toward nationalized health care and socialized medicine through what derisively become known as “Hillary Care.” The problem was that they revealed themselves prematurely by putting the actual details in the proposed legislation. Predictably, the public panicked. It was easy for Joe Six Pack, the popular all-purpose figure of the time, to understand that government, through unelected bureaucrats and administration functionaries, not physicians, would be calling the shots for his health care. Obama learned that lesson well. Keep frightening specifics vague in early shell legislation. Drop the bomb later after it was too late or following a patented Obama propaganda barrage of the kind that is showing up with increasing frequency. We thank fellow writer Tony Blankley, whose Washington-based column appears regularly in our pages, for bringing the slight of hand move to our attention via a Feb. 11 appearance on Fox News Channel. Blankley had taken the time to read the 2008 work by Daschle, long honored in Democrat Party circles as a health care pundit, with special reference to his status as health care guru to Obama. Part of what Blankley said he found in Daschle’s book is the cherished socialist concept of herding public health toward a purely cost to benefit issue for society. If a patient has a little blockage in an artery, will he or she get a stent? Should a hospital be allowed to have any technology it wants, MRIs and the like? Answer: “The government will decide whether it’s worth the money wasting it on various procedures or not. If you are young, you will get treatment. If you are old, you will get less,” he said. At 55, a new hip for Granny might look like a good percentage play to a Health and Human Services bureaucrat studying life expectancy tables; at 70 maybe not. Blankley, a native of Great Britain, guesses that the health care shell legislation Obama and the Democrats have slipped in the stimulus bill is the essence of what health care reform is going to mean, namely, “some form of rationing, which is what you have in Britain.” The congressional Democrats look at the stimulus, coming as it does in one big $830 million ball hustled along with utmost urgency, as a “two-fer” for the administration. It is difficult to sort out from the mountains of pork projects in the bill. It is also camouflage for those politicians either fearful of Obama for the coming four or eight years or planning and/or hoping for socialization of health care, energy, climate control and other areas targeted by the new president. The bill is being voted on as “just a stimulus and the public will not be aroused to all the policy implications on things they might be concerned about,” Blankley said. Congressional Republicans estimate just 12 percent in the bill that Obama is poised to sign will go for the stated purpose or here-and-now job creation. That leaves a lot for long-term enterprises, some debatable and some not, like infrastructure construction and repair. Sadly, it also leaves far, far too much for pure pork projects benefiting the members and for the Democrat Party’s decade long wish list of things like condoms, polar bears, and bridges to nowhere. Still, one must ask, how is it all related to short term stimulus? Obama is smarter than the Clintons by a factor of at least 10 to 1. Snatching a certain Hillary win away in the 2008 presidential primaries was but the surface manifestation. The deeper insight into Obama’s power is the brilliance of his ability to be vague and get away with it. Moving in behind “trust” and “hope” and “change” leaves a lot of blanks for filling in later. Our stimulus motto remains, “Marry in haste. Repent at leisure.” February 2009

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