Lucid Links (090309, Morning)
Tom Daschle, the guy with the $100,000-plus in tax “problems” that kept him from becoming head of HHS, lectures us today in the Wall Street Journal about passing “meaningful health reform.”
He says that the goals “should be to expand coverage, reduce projected costs, improve health-system quality, and enhance health-care options for all Americans.”
Too bad the various iterations of ObamaCare floating around Washington meet at best about 1/3 of the first goal (per the Congressional Budget Office); definitely don’t accomplish the second (per CBO, again) or third; and are deliberately designed to eventually herd us all into a state-run plan in direct contradiction to the fourth.
As to the third, “improve health-system quality,” the former South Dakota senator brazenly lies through his teeth when he claims that our health care system is “dead last among all industrialized countries when it comes to outcomes.” Tell that to cancer patients, Puff.
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If I expect anything from President Obama’s “special” address to Congress next Wednesday, it’s that he will invoke what Warner Todd Huston described as the “newest ObamaCare messaging” — that passing ObamaCare-like health care legislation is, as the aforementioned Daschle intoned in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, “a moral imperative.”
Sorry, Barry et al, that high ground is taken, and it dictates against ObamaCare in the strongest of terms, as I detailed in “ObamaCare as a Moral Clunker” several weeks ago:
First — Virtually without exception worldwide, state-run health care has led to rationing of care and long waits for even critical services. This has led to many needless deaths and disabilities, along with greatly diminished quality of life for many who eventually do receive care. Obama and the Congressional majority have presented no evidence indicating that serious rationing will not occur under its plan. In fact, under its progenitor known as CommonwealthCare aka RomneyCare in Massachusetts, serious rationing under the guise of fixed per-patient budgets is already on the horizon. How can any compassionate person claiming to have his or her moral bearings even consider supporting this almost certain result?
Second — Virtually without exception worldwide, state-run health care has led to denial of care on age-based and so-called qualify of life criteria. The Obama administration and Congress already opened the door for this abomination in the stimulus bill passed in February when it included funding for “comparative effectiveness research.” Michael Barone has accurately portrayed this attempt at final solutions that override doctor-patient decisions as “worse than junk science—it’s inherently deceptive.” How can someone claiming to have his or her moral bearings even consider supporting this?
Finally — The Obama administration is stacked with czars, Cabinet officials, and others who are enthusiastic supporters of the first two items, and who have frighteningly ghoulish outlooks on life and humanity. Take John Holdren (please). Many of these same people and others with similar “philosophies” would take responsible positions within ObamaCare’s maze, and would no doubt stay on as long as possible regardless of who controls the White House or Congress. How can someone claiming to have his or her moral bearings even consider allowing these people anywhere near the nation’s health care system?
The exclamation point on the final item would be the views of Obama adviser “Zeke the Bleak” Emanuel.
And I didn’t even get to abortion, which is in there, or blank-check coverage of illegal immigrants, which is in there.
Thus, for overwhelming reasons, the “moral imperative” is to stop this statist power grab. There are tons of ways to improve health care — John Mackey hit a lot of the good ones a few weeks ago in the Wall Street Journal — and they mostly involve enhancing freedom, not stealing it; and more private-sector involvement, not a deliberately predestined end to it.
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The late Ted Kennedy, politicking to the end, tried to sucker the Pope into endorsing ObamaCare. Seriously:
In his private letter to Pope Benedict XVI, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy said he “fell short” as a faithful Catholic. According to excerpts read at his funeral, the late Senator wrote before his death that though he had “fallen short,” he had always believed in the teachings of the Catholic Church.
The letter, reportedly six pages long, was hand-delivered by President Barack Obama to the Holy Father last July. Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, an archbishop emeritus of Washington, D.C., revealed some of the letter’s contents late on Saturday at Sen. Kennedy’s graveside service at Arlington National Cemetery.
…. “I also want you to know that even though I am ill,” the letter continued, “I am committed to do everything I can to achieve access to health care for everyone in my country. This has been the political cause of my life.”
This looks from here to be an attempt to draw the Pope into some kind of sympathetic response that could be spun as support for statist health care.
The Pope was clearly having none of it:
Cardinal McCarrick also read during the Rite of Committal the response to the Senator’s letter from a Vatican official, who confirmed that “the Holy Father has read the letter which you entrusted to President Barack Obama” and informed the Senator that “His Holiness prays that in the days ahead you may be sustained in faith and hope, and granted the precious grace of joyful surrender to the will of God our merciful Father.”
Of course, I fervently wish that Mr. Kennedy indeed made that “joyful surrender” in his final days. That it did not occur during his public life is a well-established, inarguable fact.
