The Cato Institute’s Michael Tanner remarks that President Obama’s efforts to force his health-care bill on a very skittish Congress are beginning to look like an arm-twisting scene from “The Sopranos.”
Those who back his proposal receive special favors whereas, as Tanner says, “those who oppose the president can expect the political equivalent of a horse head between their sheets.” Members of Congress are being threatened with ostracism, primary challenges, and the loss of union support. Then, among other examples, there is the orchestrated assault on the ethics of Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), who has been opposing the bill’s endorsement of abortion funding.
The progressive media are ganging up with the president against the bill’s opponents. MSNBC host Rachel Maddow recently cast suspicion on the low rent that a conservative Christian organization charges Stupak for his D. C. apartment. She even mentioned suggestively that scandal-marked South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford stayed at the same building. The Daily Kos has also been hammering away at Stupak, for instance, urging pro-abortion women to “roar back” by sending him a “money bomb” (that is, by donating money to the campaign of Connie Saltonstall, who is challenging him in a primary).
Plus ça change. Media lefties have from the get-go shilled for ObamaCare. For example, as Pamela Geller has noted, last summer ABC gave the president free prime-time to promote his health-care reforms without the nuisance of any opposing views. In addition to staging this “glorified infomercial,” as Geller called it, the network rejected advertisements that offered a free market alternative to Obama’s statist health-care vision.
So uncritically have the MSM endorsed the president’s plan that they have largely glossed over predictions by experts of its dire consequences. In Sen. (also Dr.) Tom Coburn’s words, ObamaCare will cause patients “to die prematurely.” It will result in, as former New York Lt. Governor Betsy McCaughey warns, “the transfer of decision-making power from bedside to the federal government.” It will surely lead to, states Rep. Paul Ryan, an explosion of devastating medical costs, national debt, and new taxes.
Perhaps most remarkable is the avowedly egalitarian MSM’s silence about ObamaCare’s essential and egregious inequity. Where has been the outrage among these hypocrites at actions taken by the president and his cronies to spare their political supporters the destructive effects of their plan?
Exhibit One:
The MSM had little to say about the closed door, White-House-Senate-House negotiations in January that bestowed what the New York Post called “a big, fat wet kiss” on labor, teacher and government-employee unions – that is, an exemption from a proposed 40 percent tax on high-end “Cadillac” health-insurance plans until 2018. While exempting their pet groups, the pols ordained that the rest of us chumps with expansive plans that are not the result of collective-bargaining agreements start paying the tax right away. (In “Health-care reform’s sickeningly sweet deals,” the Washington Post‘s Kathleen Parker at least lamented the horrific cost to the taxpayer of this and other sweetheart deals, although not their fundamental unfairness.)
Exhibit Two:
Last fall Roger L. Simon of Pajamas Media was one of the few writers even in the alternative media to zero in on the inequity of ObamaCare, whose centerpiece at that time was a full-blown, government-run health-care “option.” The bill, he charged, required “only poor sucker citizens,” but not members of Congress, to sign on to the public plan. “Those Congressmen are no fools. They know government-run medicine hasn’t worked in Canada and the UK. You think they want their wives lining up for a mammogram?”
Exhibit Three:
But what about the fairness of ObamaCare in its latest incarnation? Unlike the irresponsible MSM, the Wall Street Journal has been trying to alert the public that the government’s current plan is to restrain costs by granting “power to an unelected committee to limit treatment and control prices by government order.” To this the American Enterprise Institute’s Scott Gottlieb adds that “only the very rich will able to buy their way out of ObamaCare,” i.e., escape from the new DC agencies and “insurance czar,” with their life-and-death power over us hoi polloi, by doing a cash-only business with many of the best doctors.
Exhibit Four:
And what of the president’s claim that his plan will give uninsured Americans access to the same coverage as members of Congress and their staffers? The only major newspaper to examine and publish the truth about the president’s sleight of hand in this matter is, again, the Wall Street Journal. Yes, the current bill would provide (at exorbitant cost to the taxpayer) such access to ordinary citizens, but – and here’s the catch – many of them would end up paying significantly more out of their own pocket than legislators or their staffers.
Moreover, ordinary citizens would not share in the special benefits Congressmen now enjoy, for instance, access to onsite physicians at the Capitol. As for poverty-level Americans on Medicaid, they most assuredly would not enjoy the same benefits as members of Congress; indeed, poor citizens will be hard pressed to find any doctor at all who accepts the less generous Medicaid coverage. (The New York Times‘ recent, belated coverage of the plight of Medicaid patients included no mention of the president’s shifty claim. Nor did it raise what the MSM obviously thinks to be the delicate matter of how his plan cuts Congressmen – as well as the president and his family – a better deal than ordinary Americans.)
A look at the current bill itself reveals even more tellingly the blatant insincerity of the president and acolytes, including those in the media. What they do not want the public to get wind of, before they shove through the proposal, are its provisions for blocking or cordoning off any possible changes in the copious health benefits that “federal employees” (Congressmen and their staffers, and their families) now enjoy under the Federal Employees Health Benefit Program (FEHBP). These six provisions (see Sec. 1334 of H.R. 3590, passed by the Senate) lock in the “continued support for FEHBP” (specifically, no “fewer financial or personnel resources” can be allocated, the current federal employees’ health benefit program would exist as “a separate risk pool” from other Americans, and more “units or offices” may be established to ensure that there is no “[interference] with [FEHBP’s] effective administration,” etc.).
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In sum, Obama and the compliant MSM have made every effort to hide the fact that ObamaCare is a blatantly unjust, two-tier, socialist health-care system, as recognized by James Lewis:
Socialist regimes reveal their true nature by the special treatment they give to their permanent ruling class; they deny such treatment for ordinary schlubs like you and me. The worst corruption in socialist regimes comes from that simple two-caste system …
Obama’s Medi-Grab will force ordinary people into a medico-legal corral. But it exempts members of the ruling left, and by creating a political monopoly over medical care, it ensures that we must all go begging, hat in hand, to the bureaucracy for our very survival.
To expose the profound deception and inequity of the president’s proposal, Lewis proposes that it be amended as follows:
Resolved: that all federal and state employees must enroll in ObamaCare …
‘All federal and state employees’ includes every member of Congress and the executive branch – those who currently have the finest medical insurance available in the country today (courtesy of you and me) …
Any violation of this amendment will be punishable by a fine, imprisonment, and/or loss of federal or state employment. Enforcement of this provision will be overseen by a popularly elected commission, whose proceedings will be open to the public via the worldwide web.
Since it is clear that the MSM are functioning as lackeys of the president and his fellow radicals in Congress, it would also seem reasonable to demand that this amendment apply also to them. Let us therefore single out these media functionaries and categorize them as “federal and state employees.” They should not be spared from suffering the full consequences of this monstrous health-care bill.
This would be altogether – to use the parlance of days gone by – meet and just.
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