These two individuals, in their own ways, used Razzle Dazzle for the common good. They used their voices and their platforms to reach others and made a united point: the government is out of control and it has to stop. The impact of these two people, a blogger and a TV commentator, sent shock waves through the nation that are still being felt in Washington and all over the world. This is what each of us must do: creatively raise our voices to defend American freedom whenever it is attacked, and draw as many to our cause as possible. This is the Razzle Dazzle capable of moving mountains and hearts.
CHAPTER 4
YOU’RE THE NEXT GOVERNMENT TAKEOVER
Only a month into his presidency, Barack Obama traveled to Fort Myers, Florida, for a town hall event. Among the thousands who arrived early for “ringside” seats was Henrietta Hughes, a sixty-one-year-old homeless breast cancer survivor. She knew this was her moment and did her best to get recognized. Her perseverance paid off. She caught the president’s eye.
“Okay, this young lady has been standing here very patiently, and making me look a little guilty,” the president, pointing to her, said. “Go ahead.”
Henrietta covered her mouth as if Bob Barker had just called her to “come on down” as the next contestant on The Price Is Right.
“I first want to say, I respect you and I’m grateful for you, been praying for you,” she began, her voice quivering with nervous excitement. “But I have an urgent need—um, unemployment and homelessness, a very small vehicle for my family and I to live in, we need urgent—and housing authority has two-year waiting lists, and . . . we need something more than the vehicle and the parks, we need our own kitchen and our own bathrooms. Please help.”
Without skipping a beat, the empathizer-in-chief asked, “Well, listen, what’s your name?”
“It’s Henrietta Hughes.”
“Okay, Ms. Hughes. We’re going to do everything we can to help you, but there are a lot of people like you, and we’re going to do everything, all right?” he said, and kissed her cheek. “I’ll have my staff come up to you after the town hall. All right?” Her prayers answered, Henrietta shook her head appreciatively, slowly mouthing, “Thank you, thank you.”
Afterward, reporters and others from the audience swarmed around Henrietta, who had suddenly become Queen for a Day. She told the scrum she had maxed out on her government benefits and that local charities were not forthcoming. She was showered with business cards, job offers, even cash. Eventually she was given the keys to a new house—all because she begged the president for help on national television.
Of course, we should be happy when Americans who hear stories of loss and poverty are moved to help other Americans like Henrietta. But in this case, she was rewarded because she begged for the government (Obama) to rescue her. Henrietta was, in a sense, one of Obama’s first bailouts. The manner in which he handled Henrietta’s “domestic policy challenge” was emblematic of the Obama agenda to come. If someone or some industry has a problem, Obama’s knee-jerk response is “write a check” (courtesy of U.S. taxpayers).
Obama should have used the town hall moment not to patronize, but to apologize to Henrietta. After all, she suffers from the entitlement mind-set created and incentivized by Obama’s political heroes and mentors. In the warped mind-set that is modern-day liberalism, panhandling in front of a national audience is now acceptable and encouraged behavior.
THE DIARY OF PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA
AIR FORCE ONE
February 10, 2009
I’ve got to hand it to Axe. He pulled off something today at our town hall in Fort Myers that was brilliant. For weeks he’s had staff scouring Florida looking for a destitute person with a heartbreaking story to parade before the cameras during our big event. He found a winner! This Henrietta Hughes was right out of central casting. She tearfully begged me for a car and a house and everything. So I blessed her with a kiss. It was great TV!
I told Axe we need to do one of these at the end of every town hall. First off, it makes me look like Santa Claus (only with nuclear codes and snappier clothes). And secondly, it teaches the people that if they work really hard (to get to my rallies) they can take home some great swag. I was even thinking we could turn this into a regular town hall contest. I’ll pick names of two poor folks from a lottery bin and let them compete for prizes: cars, homes, scholarships, and high-end medical treatments. Whoever can name the schools I attended and the places my mother lived, gets a prize. The other contestant receives a signed picture of me. So everyone’s a winner—and they’ll learn something, too.
Obama and his forefathers have advanced a vision where government assistance is a lifestyle choice. They have wrecked economies, sapped initiative from the people, and lowered our national expectations. If we keep following Obama’s lead, we’ll all be begging politicians for houses and cars. Which is exactly what he wants. Obama instinctively believes that every problem has a government solution. This heavy-handed autocratic approach was most apparent in his obsession to “reform” health care.
ONE NATION, UNDER OBAMACARE . . .
We know we spend a huge amount of money in that last year of life. . . . The most important thing we can do with end-of-life care right now is to encourage people to look at hospices as a legitimate option.
—BARACK OBAMA IN AN INTERVIEW WITH DR. JON LAPOOK ON CBS’S THE EARLY SHOW, JULY 16, 2009
Once upon a time, in a faraway land called America, there was a health-care system beloved by its patients and admirers from around the world. These clever Americans somehow managed to find cures for horrible diseases and save more lives than any other health-care system in the world.
Along came a man named Barack Obama, who insisted America’s old-fashioned ways were all wrong. “America’s health care costs too much,” he claimed. A trusting lot, the American people elected him president and eagerly awaited his promised savings. Immediately he started to advance his agenda, but soon ran into trouble. The people listened and decided these new ideas were not what they had hoped for and said they preferred the old way better. But the president flicked them off like a flea on beautiful Bo’s curly coat. Protests rang out across the country. The president tried quieting them, but to no avail. He pressed forward, undeterred by the pesky people and their frivolous concerns.
Americans soon discovered that patient care would no longer be the priority. The president decreed that doctors would be judged not by the number of lives saved, but by how much money they saved the government. Yet someone had forgotten to remind the president that the government of the United States had no money, so no matter how much money his new system saved, even the most basic services were suddenly unaffordable. Care deteriorated. Doctors retired early. Medical school enrollments plummeted. There seemed to be fewer elderly people around. And . . . everyone suffered miserably after all.
Thinking of the ObamaCare saga as a fairy tale helps soften the horror by making it less personal. And like all good fairy tales, perhaps there really is some small chance for a happy ending.
Obama seized on the economic downturn to make health-care reform about “lowering costs,” reducing the deficit, and reining in insurance company profits. During his innumerable sales pitches the president avoided promising that the level of care would improve after the law was passed. But how could it? Simply put, America’s health care is (or at least was) among the best in the world. According to Stanford University Medical Center’s Dr. Scott Atlas:
• Americans have better survival rates from common and rare cancers than Europeans (Lancet Oncology Study)
• Americans have better access to treatment for chronic diseases than Canadians (National Bureau of Economic Research, NBER)
• America’s impoverished receive better care on average than Canada’s (NBER)
• In the United Kingdom and Canada, patients waiting to see a specialist wait far longer (often twice as long) as Americans (Health Affairs)
• More than 70 percent of German, Canadian, A
ustralian, New Zealand, and British adults say their health systems need either “fundamental change” or “complete rebuilding” (Health Affairs)
• The vast majority of medical innovations come from the United States (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services)
With that kind of data, it is not surprising that every major poll found Americans to be overwhelmingly satisfied with the health care they were receiving. A Washington Post/ABC News poll in June 2009 found that 83 percent of Americans were either “somewhat” or “very satisfied” with their health care. Eighty-one percent felt the same about their insurance. It is rare that Americans are this unified on any issue—not that it mattered to Obama.
To bolster his thesis that health care costs too much, the president cited and relied upon one Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care study. It rated hospitals by how much they spent on patients who died while under their care. He used these “findings” to demonstrate that more money does not necessarily lead to better results. So he argued that health-care dollars should not go to places that “spend too much” on health-care services. The president ignored the two other major studies that severely undercut his main argument. In February 2010, a University of Pittsburgh report confirmed what should have already been conventional wisdom: hospitals that spend the most on tests and care generally save the most lives. The second, also in February, was a New England Journal of Medicine analysis that savaged the Dartmouth Atlas study for trying to measure efficiency by looking only at costs, not outcomes in the health of the patient. The Dartmouth Atlas Project’s Dr. Elliott Fisher basically agreed with the criticism. According to the New York Times, he insisted that “he and his colleagues should not be held responsible for the misinterpretation of their data.”
This devastating data, on top of the unrelenting town hall opposition, should have scuttled Obama’s grand health-care scheme. Many of us thought the surprise Scott Brown Senate victory in Massachusetts, which deprived the Democrats of their filibuster-proof majority, would have put the final nail in the coffin of ObamareidpelosiCare. But no. The Democrats knew that health care would be their platform for radical change. The people would have “health-care reform” whether they liked it or not.
FIRST, DO NO HARM
Unable to indict the quality of the American health-care system on the facts, Obama turned to emotional manipulation. He began peddling a series of sob stories, elevating individual tales of misfortune into national cries for action. Usually the victims went unnamed, although occasionally he revealed the identity of his campaign prop. Eleven-year-old Marcelas Owens stood at Obama’s side throughout the bill’s final week. Marcelas’s mother had died a few years earlier of pulmonary hypertension after being laid off as a fast-food manager and losing her insurance. Yet it was never clear how ObamaCare could have saved her. The truth is, her home state of Washington does offer care to the poor, and Mrs. Owens did in fact receive care throughout her illness.
Ohio cancer victim Natoma Canfield also became a late-game stump-speech addition. Canfield had written to the White House about her struggle. She had paid significantly out of pocket for care when her premiums rose 25 percent in 2008. Then in 2010 she learned rates were to rise again, and she decided to cancel her policy. Shortly thereafter, she was diagnosed with leukemia, and wrote a letter about her predicament to President Obama.
Obama used the letter as emotional evidence that his health-care bill was desperately needed. At ObamaCare rallies, he boasted of reading her letter to insurance company CEOs. Team Obama arranged for Natoma’s sister to attend his final health-care rally in Strongville, Ohio. “She was very sick,” Obama reported. “She expects to face more than a month of aggressive chemotherapy. She is racked with worry not only about her illness, but also the costs of the tests and the treatment that she’s surely going to need to beat it.” In other words, without ObamaCare, she is going to die. These people will stop at nothing.
THE DIARY OF PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA
THE WHITE HOUSE
March 23, 2010
Right now, I gotta admit feeling a lot like my man LL Cool J: “Rockin’ my peers and puttin’ suckas in fear . . . explosion, overpowerin’ / Over the competition, I’m towerin’!” How you like me now, Roger Ailes!
I actually had a genius idea for the signing ceremony for the health-care reform bill. Picture this: As the crowd waits with gleeful anticipation for me to enter the room and sign this bad boy into history, that dry-ice fog starts pouring into the room. Then, lasers! Lasers flashing every which way, when suddenly Jay-Z emerges from the smoke, hyping the crowd with one of his numbers (or maybe Bow Wow—we’ll consult the charts tomorrow to see who’s the most popular). Then, the man they’ve all been waiting for—me! Except I don’t just walk to the podium, I moonwalk to the podium! In fact, why not turn this entire event into another Michael Jackson tribute? We’ve invited that little kid Marcelas, who provided us with an incredible sob story to market the bill, to attend the signing. I’m thinking he can stand beside me—like my own Emanuel Lewis! The new social secretary, Smoot, extended an invitation to Janet and Tito, but I’m not sure they’ll make it. It’s probably too much, but if Desiree Rogers were still here, she’d know how to pull it off.
A MANDATE TO MANDATE
In the law’s immediate aftermath, attorneys general in more than a dozen states filed lawsuits against Washington, arguing that the new mandate that requires every American to purchase health insurance or pay a fine is unconstitutional. Their citizens’ constitutional rights were being trampled by ObamaCare’s individual mandate. Equally troubling is the fact that this new health-care regime empowers the federal government to ration care based on “cost effectiveness,” which ultimately intrudes upon our personal medical choices and the doctor-patient relationship.
Republican Senators Pat Roberts, Tom Coburn, and Mike Enzi offered separate amendments banning the use of “comparative effectiveness research” to restrict care. Democrats shot each of them down.
THE DIARY OF
DIRECTOR OF THE OFFICE OF MANAGEMENT AND BUDGET
PETER ORSZAG
WASHINGTON, D.C.
April 8, 2010
I am now convinced that no one in D.C. really reads legislation (phew!). But since we passed the health-care bill, I figure it’s time a little credit flowed my way. During my Q&A at the Economic Club today, I shone some light on my brainchild—the Independent payment Advisory Board, the new commission created by the health-care bill. (Adhering to gibbs’s rule, I did not refer to it as a “death panel.” But how I wanted to scream to all those economists, “We got the death panel through the door and nobody even noticed!”) The power we now have via this panel is remarkable. They will set fees for doctors and hospitals, ration individual treatments and care. And best of all, the president makes the panel appointments with no congressional oversight! This is a killer panel! And I mean killer!
Every financial model indicates that the only way to restore fiscal sanity to this country is for people to die. After all, they’ve got to die sometime! This one panel will allow us to quickly and quietly shove the unfit down the hospice chute, reap a bounty of inheritance taxes, and end wasteful spending on the care of people already in the process of dying. Some reporter worriedly asked me as I left, “You mean this panel’s recommendations could alter the health care of millions of Americans—and unless Congress and the president reject it by law, the recommendations automatically take effect?” “You’ve got it,” I told him. “Ha ha ha haaaaaa.” The congressional inertia actually plays in our favor! I know once our “elder reduction program” kicks in, the pitiful stories will begin trickling out, but they’ll have to work damn hard to stop us. Keep your sob stories! We’ve got a debt to bury—and a lot of old folks, with big retirement accounts! The Huffpo can now refer to me as “Nerdy Sexy Savvy.” I better call Arianna.
Democrats love to talk about how their law will help Americans with “preventative care”—HIV tests, anti-obesity programs, and
countless other bureaucratic initiatives that are supposedly going to make us live longer, healthier lives. If only we could have a prevention initiative against bureaucracy. ObamaCare creates more than 150 new bureaucracies, each uniquely empowered to shove Americans through our new national health-care machinery. Here are just a few examples of the nanny state initiatives in H.R. 3590, the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act”:
• Section 4204: Immunizations. Grants funds to encourage more prolific immunizations, including grants to provide home visits for “education, assessments of need, referrals, provision of immunizations, or other services.”
• Section 4201: Community Transformation Grants. Provides funds to “promote healthy living”—an expansive section that specifies such activities as “creating healthier school environments, including increasing healthy food options, physical activity opportunities, promotion of healthy lifestyle, emotional wellness, and prevention curricula, and activities to prevent chronic diseases,” as well as “creating the infrastructure to support active living and access to nutritious foods in a safe environment.” (Can someone say food deserts!) Measuring Section 4201’s success will be determined, in part, by a representative of the state who monitors “changes in weight; changes in proper nutrition; changes in physical activity; changes in tobacco use prevalence; changes in emotional well-being and overall mental health; other factors as determined by the Secretary.” All of which will be reported back to the government.
The Obama Diaries Page 12