What the (Bleep) Just Happened?

by Monica Crowley

  Pelosi and Reid also barred the minority Republicans from much of their corrupt process, prohibiting them from participating in closed-door sessions, debate, and adding amendments to the bill. This was the Democrats’ idea of “compromise” when they held big majorities in Congress. Republicans, like children, were to be seen but not heard. Along with the GOP, the leftists also dissed the opinions of the American people, who were growing increasingly infuriated with the content of the legislation and the perverse process the Democrats were using to get it done.

  In August 2009, thousands of Americans packed the town hall meetings of members of Congress, demanding answers: If I have health insurance now, will I be able to keep it? How is this going to affect my relationship with my doctor? Will government bureaucrats be making my health care decisions based on cost? Why is Chuck Schumer now performing circumcisions at my local hospital? Can I opt out? What do you mean there is an individual mandate requiring me to carry insurance? What if I want to choose not to have insurance? Then I’ll have the IRS on my tail, enforcing a fine? What? When I’m close to kicking the bucket, are you going to kick it for me? Barbara Boxer is not a real boxer, so why is she speed-bag training with my colostomy bag? How is the country going to pay for this? Isn’t this stripping away more of my freedom to choose my own doctor/hospital/treatment? This is what they have in socialized countries, isn’t it? Why are you destroying the best health care system on earth? By the way, why is Al Franken now my wife’s ob-gyn?

  Rather than answer these pointed questions, many Democrats either ducked them or canceled their scheduled town hall meetings altogether. When some of them did confront their constituents, they never revealed their true motive to build a Euro-style health care system. Obama gave scores of speeches in defense of his plan, including one before a joint session of Congress in September 2009 during which he made the preposterous claims that it was “not a government takeover,” that “no government bureaucrat would come between you and your doctor,” and that it would be “deficit neutral.” All ludicrous lies, and he knew it.

  At one point, Obama even turned the most routine ailments into wildly disingenuous examples of rampant greed among doctors. “You come in and you’ve got a bad sore throat, or your child has a bad sore throat or has repeated sore throats,” he said in July 2009. “The doctor may look at the reimbursement system and say to himself, ‘You know what? I make a lot more money if I take this kid’s tonsils out.’”

  A few days later, he ramped up his attack on doctors by insinuating that many of them are amputating limbs willy-nilly in the dogged pursuit of money: “Let’s take the example of diabetes,” he said. “If a family care physician works with his or her patient to help them lose weight, modify diet, monitors whether they’re taking their medications in a timely fashion, they might get reimbursed a pittance. But if that same diabetic ends up getting their foot amputated, that’s thirty thousand, forty thousand, fifty thousand dollars immediately that the surgeon is reimbursed.” Here comes Dr. McDreamy to take your blood pressure. Whoops! There goes your arm!

  In trying to argue that warped pay incentives might encourage some physicians to order unnecessary tests and procedures, especially in Medicare—a legitimate point—Obama clumsily insulted doctors by suggesting that many are greedy pigs performing unneeded surgeries to rob their patients blind. The hyperbole and lies were part of the orchestrated campaign, if not to win public opinion for their vision of “reform,” to at least reduce the public’s resistance to it.

  One Republican representative could not contain his outrage at being lied to yet again about ObamaCare. During Obama’s September 2009 address to Congress, Joe Wilson of South Carolina shouted, “You lie!” after Obama stated that illegal immigrants would not receive free coverage under his plan. On the substance, Wilson was right; the bill mandated that businesses provide health insurance to all employees, with no exemptions or provisions to screen out illegals, many of whom obtain jobs by using false identities. The practical effect is that millions of illegals would be covered under the law. Obama and Pelosi knew this too, but feigned outrage when Wilson inartfully pointed it out. The thing that scared Obama and Pelosi the most was the possibility of Joe Wilson’s shout heard ’round the world becoming a trend because, if that started, from then on, you’d have two or three hundred congressmen and senators screaming “Liar!” for the duration of every speech Obama would deliver for the rest of his presidency.

  Furthermore, in mid-2011, Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services announced it was transferring $28.8 million in ObamaCare funds to sixty-seven community health centers. Of that amount, “approximately $8.5 million will be used … to target migrant and seasonal farm workers,” and grant recipients will not be required to check the immigration status of people seeking health services. “You lie,” indeed!

  Obama and the leftists also lied about the most fundamental elements of the bill. Its projected costs were manipulated through accounting gimmicks such as double counting, directing taxpayer funds to ObamaCare while shielding that same money for Medicare, Social Security, and other programs. If you tried using the same $100 bill twice for different things, you might be measured for an orange jumpsuit. But when they used such fraudulent techniques to make Obama-Care seem fiscally reasonable, those lies were simply considered the necessary means to an end. The Congressional Budget Office issued ten-year cost projections that varied from close to a trillion dollars to over a trillion dollars, but it could only process whatever numbers were handed to them. Junk numbers in, junk numbers out. By mid-2011, even Obama’s chief health care kook, Health and Human Services secretary Kathleen Sebelius, was forced to admit to the fraudulent double counting. And neither she nor anyone else responsible for ObamaCare could or would tell us if the more than $500 billion in proposed Medicare cuts to help pay for it would ever materialize, or if the “doctor fix”—a hike in Medicare reimbursement rates—which was dropped to game the CBO score, would be restored. The truth is that nobody knows for sure how much ObamaCare will actually cost, although ten-year estimates now range from about $2 trillion to over $5 trillion. Given the explosive costs of government-run health care programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, it’s safe to assume that the higher-end estimates are more accurate. As the European examples have proven for decades, socialized medicine neither contains costs nor improves quality of care, but it transfers wealth really well.

  As public opposition to the bill grew more heated and the cost projections jumped all over the map, the leftists tried to leverage the emotional component of health care by spinning tall tales about “health insurance victims,” the most famous of whom was Obama’s own mother. Obama often cited the example of Stanley Ann Dunham as he made the case for his government takeover. Tightly gripping the podium in front of him, he would make the case for a ban on preexisting exclusions by insurers by recalling his mother’s deathbed fight with her insurer. “There’s something fundamentally wrong about that,” he’d say.

  What was “fundamentally wrong” was Obama’s version of events. In a biography of Mrs. Dunham Obama Soetoro, author Janny Scott revealed that her health insurer had in fact reimbursed her medical costs without incident. The actual dispute took place over a separate disability-insurance policy. This example proves that Obama is a particularly adept liar. You start with a political agenda, you fabricate a story to fit your message, and then you make sure the person in question isn’t around to dispute the tale. Obama made up his mother’s health coverage story, as well as numerous others, in order to get people feeling his health care “reform” rather than thinking about it.

  When the fabricated sob stories failed to move public opinion, Obama tried more Kafkaesque absurdity. During his autumn 2009 speech before the joint session, he claimed that if they did not pass his plan, “people will die.” And as the cliff-hanger vote on it approached in the Senate, Obama ludicrously claimed that if Congress failed to act, the federal government “will go bankrupt.” Let’s
review the logic: we needed to spend an estimated $2.5 to $5 trillion on a government takeover of health care, or the country will go bust?

  Other players in the theater of the absurd chimed in with hilarious attempts of their own to justify their Frankenstein bill in what turned out to be some classic kook moments. In the first classic kook moment, when asked under what constitutional authority the individual mandate was permissible, Democratic congressman John Conyers replied, “Under several clauses, the good and welfare clause, and a couple others.” Of course! The “good and welfare” clause. Article I, Section Nonexistent. Somewhere, the Founding Fathers are slapping their foreheads. John Adams is turning to Thomas Jefferson, saying, “You big dummy! How could we have left out the ‘good and welfare’ clause?” Perhaps the Founders did not include a “good and welfare” clause because they were too busy providing for the common defense. Or because they knew that such an open-ended phrase would be used by kooks like Conyers to justify unconstitutional stuff like socialized medicine.

  In a second classic kook moment, as Christmas Eve 2009 approached, the bill’s Senate passage looked a bit uncertain. Democrats began desperately invoking the name of the recently deceased senator Edward Kennedy, a longtime champion of government-run health care. “Win one for Ted!” they cried. With public opposition running high and Republican opposition unanimous, Democrats resorted to propping up a dead Kennedy like a scene in Weekend at Bernie’s.

  They also laughably tried to blame the Republicans for the closeness of the vote. Democrats controlled the White House, a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, and a huge majority in the House, and they were still whipping their votes until the last minute. Some Democrats were unsure, not because they weren’t part of the kook brigade—all of them proved to be—but because they were worried about their own political skins. In the end, of course, there proved to be no such thing as “moderate Democrats” as they all fell in line.

  The third classic kook moment came when Pelosi stood before a legislative group and the American people and said, “We have to pass the bill so you can find out what’s in it, away from the fog of controversy.” Very few, if any, of the Democrats supporting the bill took the time to read it, including the Speaker. It didn’t matter to them what was actually in the bill, as long as there was a bill that razed the existing health care system and replaced it with a “spread the wealth around” one. Who needed to read the bill? Details, schmetails!

  Meanwhile, back in the part of the country where the Constitution was still relevant, Republicans and others recognized the need for genuine reform of a system in which costs were spiraling out of control, and they had advanced a number of health care reform ideas that would have addressed the cost issue without nationalizing one-sixth of the economy. They included permitting insurance to be sold across state lines to encourage competition and thus reduce costs, allowing easier access to and formulation of health savings accounts, instituting tort reform, equalizing the tax laws so that employer-provided health insurance and individually owned insurance had the same tax benefits, repealing government mandates on what insurance companies were required to cover, enacting sweeping Medicare reform, and encouraging cost transparency so consumers would know what treatments cost.

  They were all commonsense ideas that had broad support among business owners and the public at large, and yet—with the exception of tort reform, to which Obama tossed rhetorical kisses but was too intimate with trial lawyers to actually carry out—none of them were considered. Not applicable under the “good and welfare” clause, apparently.

  As with the debates over spending and debt, the Republicans were coming at it in good faith, full of pro-American, pro-growth solutions, and the kooks were on a different playing field entirely. If they had allowed any of the market-based proposals, the entire redistributionist mission would have been undermined. They could not permit it.

  The final 2,500-page bill was a socialist’s wet dream, with thousands of onerous new regulations on doctors, hospitals, and other health care providers; over $570 billion in dozens of new taxes; hundreds of new bureaucracies; provisions for cost-based rationing, including the euphemistically termed “end of life counseling” (otherwise known as “death panels,” the accurate term first used by former governor Sarah Palin); the establishment of a fifteen-member Independent Patient Advisory Board (IPAB, not to be confused with your iPad), which will be accountable to no one as it metes out treatment decisions (again, “death panels,” anyone?); massive new fines for noncompliance; and a vesting of enforcement with the Internal Revenue Service. Obama packed and stacked the legislation like a juicehead who’s constantly at GNC, buying powders, pills, and supplements to grow larger and larger until he looks like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.

  On March 23, 2010, the Orwellian maze hilariously known as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act became law—without a single Republican vote. Before its final passage in the House, a group of Democrats led by Speaker Pelosi made a dramatic entrance into the Capitol. Pelosi wielded the cartoonishly big gavel used to pound another massive redistributionist program, Medicare, into law. As they carried out their macabre procession, they were confronted by thousands of Americans, whom the kooks tried to smear as “racist” Tea Partiers but who were, in fact, regular citizens terrified about the rights and freedoms they were about to lose. We actually haven’t seen that giant gavel since that day. Rumor has it Pelosi sleeps in bed with it when her husband, Paul, is out of town. I wonder if Nancy knows that this gavel doesn’t require batteries.

  Here’s a tip-off that ObamaCare was a world-class socialist disaster of tyrannical proportions. On the day it became law, Obama received congratulations from Saudi king Abdullah, who funnels money to terrorists who use it to attack and infiltrate our country; United Nations secretary-general Ban Ki-moon, whose institution is so anti-American that it’s trying to undermine us in some way every day; and Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, who took a break from his busy decades-long schedule of hating us to endorse ObamaCare. Up next, valentines for ObamaCare from Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, and Russia’s Vladimir Putin! The tyrants of the world love ObamaCare because it’s the biggest single destroyer yet of American exceptionalism.

  A massive tangle of spending, taxing, redistributing, and general leftist weirdness, ObamaCare was an explosion of long-pent-up kook ambitions. Perhaps even the kooks were stunned by the magnitude of their achievement.

  Five days after it was rammed through, Senator Charles Schumer appeared on Meet the Press and said, “As people learn what’s actually in the bill, that six months from now, by election time, this is going to be a plus because the parade of horribles, particularly the worry that the average middle class person has that this is going to affect them negatively, will have vanished and they’ll see that it’ll affect them positively in many ways.”

  Six months later, Democrats lost their majority in the House and their filibuster-proof advantage in the Senate, in large part because of the “parade of horribles” that became more evident every day. For starters, Pelosi had stated that ObamaCare would “create 4 million jobs, 400,000 jobs almost immediately.” The reality, however, was much different.

  The hundreds of billions of dollars in new taxes, the Byzantine new regulations, and the incalculable costs associated with implementing ObamaCare immediately formed a dark cloud of uncertainty over businesses of all sizes. Why would a company hire someone today when it had no idea what it was going to cost it to have that employee on its books tomorrow?

  That uncertainty choked off hiring and killed in the cradle the nascent economic recovery. In the summer of 2011, the Heritage Foundation released a report comparing the rate of net job growth before and after the bill’s passage. January 2009 was the low point of the recession, as 841,000 jobs were shed in that one month alone. Over the next fifteen months, however, employers began hiring again, peaking in April 2010 when 229,000 new jobs we
re added. ObamaCare was passed in late March, and from that moment job creation came to a screeching halt. In fact, pre-ObamaCare, employers were hiring at an average rate of 67,000 (net of layoffs), but post-ObamaCare, that number dropped to a mere 6,500. There were many economic factors contributing to anemic job growth, but the adoption of ObamaCare was a major reason for the stalled recovery.

  Obama and his ilk told us repeatedly that the law would bring down health care costs and save us money. The opposite has been true. In addition to the huge grab bag of new taxes on everything from medical devices to indoor tanning (which set off Jersey Shore’s Snooki), premiums have skyrocketed. Medicare’s own actuary, Richard Foster, told the House Budget Committee in January 2011 that it probably would not hold costs down. He also laid bare one of Obama’s favorite lies, that if you like your current insurance, you will be able to keep it. That, he said, would be “not true in all cases.”

  Related to Foster’s statement about loss of coverage, several large benefits consultants, such as McKinsey and Company and Towers Watson, estimated that between 10 percent and 50 percent of employers might do cost-benefit analyses and decide it was cheaper for them to eliminate coverage, pay a fine, and push their employees off onto a government-run program.

  This is what Harkin meant when he said that ObamaCare was a “starter home.” The kooks want employers to drop private coverage and move more and more Americans into government plans. Ultimately that’s how they will achieve their cherished single-payer system. Indeed, in 2011 the SEIU, which had helped to draft the bill and supported it enthusiastically, dropped health insurance coverage for 6,000 children. Rationing has already kicked in as well, including: new Food and Drug Administration recommendations limiting the use of the expensive late-stage breast cancer drug Avastin; new government recommendations through the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force that women get Pap tests every three years instead of every year and healthy men forgo routine prostate exams; the reduction in Medicare payments to hospitals where too many patients are readmitted after treatment for heart attacks, heart failure, or pneumonia; and states sharply limiting hospital stays under Medicaid. The Democrats gutted Medicare by over $500 billion to help pay for ObamaCare, so the cuts have begun there as well, hitting frontline hospitals and some of the sickest patients first. If the IPAB judges Grandma’s heart treatment to be too expensive, she is @$%&! outta luck. Ironic, isn’t it, after decades of hearing Democrats lie about Republicans wanting to “throw Grandma in the snow”? Today, Democrats actually want to help Grandma meet her maker in order to get their tax-greedy hands on her estate.