With the country teetering on the brink of enactment of the Democrats’ massive government intrusion into what millions of Americans consider the finest healthcare system the world has ever known, here is a recap of what Newsmax commentators and other trusted voices say is at stake.
Renowned former adviser to Bill Clinton
Dick Morris told Newsmax, “This package isn’t only terrible for healthcare, but for the economic health of the country.” In Morris’ judgment, “the individual mandate that lies at the heart of this bill is unconstitutional.” He warns that doctors will be driven out of the practice of medicine, and that Americans will be denied necessary treatments. “Those people are going to die,” according to Morris. “This is basically a bill for government-sponsored euthanasia.”
Washington Post columnist
Charles Krauthammer painted a comic picture of why the liberals’ health reform gets more unpopular the more people learn about it. “Imagine a bill granting every American a free federally delivered ice cream every Sunday morning,” he wrote two weeks ago, just after the health summit. “Provision 2: steak on Monday, also home delivered. Provision 3: a dozen red roses every Tuesday. You get the idea. Would each individual provision be popular in the polls? Of course.”
Then came Krauthammer’s punch line: “However (life is a vale of howevers) suppose these provisions were bundled into a bill that also spelled out how the goodies are to be paid for and managed -- say, half a trillion dollars in new taxes, half a trillion in Medicare cuts (cuts not to keep Medicare solvent but to pay for the ice cream, steak and flowers), 118 new boards and commissions to administer the bounty-giving, and government regulation dictating, for example, how your steak is to be cooked. How do you think this would poll?”
Newsmax analyst and former Oklahoma Congressman
Ernest Istook notes that at the C-SPAN health summit last month, President Obama was forced to admit that many Americans would pay 10 percent to 13 percent more in their health premiums. What the president touts as a “middle-class tax cut” is, according to Istook, really money “taken from taxpayers before a part would be given back as a subsidy. Yet that is what Obama calls ‘savings’ for consumers.’” Istook’s conclusion: “Sleight-of-hand is too kind a term for that process.”
Fox News megastar
Bill O’Reilly, noting the Medicus survey in the New England Journal of Medicine of over 1,000 U.S. physicians showing that 55 percent believe the quality of healthcare will decline under Obamacare, remarked that “Medical people simply do not want federal pinheads telling them how to treat their patients. The medical profession attracts intelligent, assertive people who are motivated to help others. This is not a docile crowd.” O’Reilly added that “Obamacare does nothing to bring down the outrageous expense of medical malpractice insurance, and it is likely to cut Medicaid and Medicare reimbursements. Doctors can do the math. Their expenses remain high, their incomes decline.”
Cable TV star
Larry Kudlow in National Review recently wrote that the Democrats’ “government takeover of healthcare will cripple one of our most productive job-creating sectors.” Kudlow noted how “Over the deep two-year recession, while overall corporate payrolls fell by about 7.5 million, private health-care firms created almost 700,000 new jobs.”
According to the Reagan Administration budget economist, “the healthcare industry is one of our fastest-growing, most technologically advanced areas. With constant breakthroughs in biotech, pharmaceuticals, medical equipment, and diagnostics, the growing demand for more healthcare could elevate this prosperous job-creating sector to a third of the economy in the decades ahead. What’s wrong with that?” Kudlow asks. “Why crush it?”
Columnist and bestselling author
David Limbaugh noted that Barack Obama has hijacked the rhetoric of the right, calling it “very clever – and reminiscent of his street-agitating mentor Saul Alinsky – for Obama to adopt the anti-government language of conservatives to use against insurance companies. They are ‘rationing’ care, he says. No, they enter into contracts with individuals and groups to provide insurance coverage as defined in the contract.”
According to the Maharushi’s brother, “Obama has no qualms about violating the contracts clause of the Constitution and interfering with private contracts, but that’s not the way it’s supposed to work in America. For him to suggest that insurers must be forced to cover pre-existing conditions is tantamount to saying the government is going to convert them from insurance companies to unconditional guarantors.”
Newsmax commentator and former Green Beret Lt. Col.
Geoff Metcalf fumes that “The president promised he would make this bill process transparent, so the American people can see how good of a bill and how good of a policy this is. Instead, unable to dazzle us with brilliance, he persists in baffling us with B.S., garnished with a smarmy ‘Trust me!’”
Columnist
Mark Steyn, appearing on the Hugh Hewitt radio show, said he believes “we’re in banana republic terrain here … You can’t present this even in terms of progressive utopianism. It’s dirty, it stinks from the beginning, and I think that is going to be impossible for Obama and his commissars to cover up.”
Steyn added that “the Obama cool, the post-partisan healer, the whole shtick he ran on – that’s dead and gone forever.” Obamcare “is something that will, I think, actually bankrupt America, and a lot quicker than anybody thinks,” Steyn said. “If you look at what’s happened in Massachusetts, it’s led to all the features of a classic socialized system, longer waits in emergency rooms, more shortage of doctors, doctors quitting the profession, plus
Massachusetts residents pay 27 percent more than people in the rest of the country. I think that’s what we’ll see here, and very quickly,” he predicted.
Columnist
Michelle Malkin exposed the Democrats’ manipulation lurking behind the Congressional Budget Office’s optimistic deficit reduction scoring of their health reform bill, describing it as “Garbage in, garbage out.” The CBO’s “weary number-crunchers know they are just more stage props in the Oba-Kabuki healthcare theater,” Malkin charged. “Like the president’s partisan donor-doctors dressed up in their White House-supplied lab coats, the CBO’s statistical authorities are being exploited to lend credibility and solidity to the Democrats’ legislative vaporware.”
Scholar and author
Thomas Sowell issues a warning of dire fiscal consequences regarding the plan to take funds from Medicare to finance the Democrats’ massive new entitlement program. “On paper, you can treat Medicare like the hypothetical rich uncle who is going to leave me enough money to buy a Rolls Royce. But only on paper,” Sowell cautions. “In real life, you can’t get blood from a turnip, and you can’t keep on getting money from a Medicare program that is itself running out of money.”