PoliticalAction.com Blog

Montana Prevents Obama From Rigging Town Hall Audience

Friday, August 14, 2009 12:00 PM

By: Matthew Mosk, Washington Times

There is no guarantee that President Barack Obama will be able to avoid critics of his healthcare proposal when he hosts a town hall meeting in Belgrade, Mont., on Friday.

Local officials in Belgrade and neighboring Bozeman personally oversaw the handing out of passes Thursday in much the same fashion that a venue would dole out tickets to a rock concert. Hundreds of people seeking to attend the president’s event began lining up Wednesday afternoon, and camped out overnight in the parking lots of the two local municipal buildings.

Karen Semerau, the Bozeman official who helped oversee the distribution, said some people brought their dogs, others put up tents, and but for a brief rain shower, those in line appeared to be upbeat about the chance to hear from, and question, the president about his plan.

“I couldn’t tell by looking at people if they were for the president’s plan or against it,” Semerau said. “But I can say that the group was totally mixed – college kids, older folks, all walks of life.”

According to Politico.com, 70 percent of all tickets are reserved for the public, with the remainder reserved for local politicians and area VIPs. In all, Obama officials expect about 1,400 people to attend Friday’s town hall at Gallatin Field Airport hangar. Another 500 are expected to protest outside the venue.

Tickets for Friday’s event were distributed on a first-come, first-served basis, according to Politico. That’s a break from Obama’s past town halls, which required ticket requests to go through the White House Web site.

The White House has reacted strongly to questioning about whether the administration took steps to rig the audience at his last town hall, in Portsmouth, N.H., after those denied tickets complained that the audience seemed unusually friendly to his point of view.

Press secretary Robert Gibbs said repeatedly that the administration made no effort to exclude the sorts of vocal opponents who have inflamed congressional town hall events elsewhere in the country.

There is no evidence that the White House did anything to screen the crowd. But many of the protesters outside the New Hampshire event said they found it disturbing that, even when the president explicitly sought out skeptics in the audience, the majority of questions thrown his way were softballs.

Gibbs said he believes the media have been disappointed that there were no fireworks at the president’s town hall. He also made clear that, while the president does not welcome the sort of belligerent hecklers that have surfaced at numerous congressional town halls, he is holding his events to address what he says is misinformation that he thinks is fanning much of the opposition.

“I do think that people have questions,” Gibbs said Thursday. “I think that’s why – I mean, the president isn’t out doing town hall meetings just for his health. I mean, he wants to – I think he understands the need to address concerns or misconceptions out there.”

Both the White House and a number of labor and advocacy groups have been ramping up campaigns to correct those misconceptions, including a Web site and a chain e-mail written by the president’s top political adviser, David Axelrod, which began circulating this week.

Marilyn Foltz, a city official in Belgrade, said she believes the Montana residents who waited overnight for tickets in queues that she said snaked like the lines at Disney World, “just want to hear what the president had to say.”

“There was no effort,” Foltz said, to skew the audience for the president’s benefit. “It was very truly first-come, first-served. The tickets were dispensed until they were gone.”

© 2009

Copyright 2009 The Washington Times All Rights Reserved

News from the American College of Surgeons
Releases: August 12, 2009

CHICAGO—The American College of Surgeons is deeply disturbed over the uninformed public comments President Obama continues to make about the high-quality care provided by surgeons in the United States. When the President makes statements that are incorrect or not based in fact, we think he does a disservice to the American people at a time when they want clear, understandable facts about health care reform. We want to set the record straight.

Yesterday during a town hall meeting, President Obama got his facts completely wrong. He stated that a surgeon gets paid $50,000 for a leg amputation when, in fact, Medicare pays a surgeon between $740 and $1,140 for a leg amputation. This payment also includes the evaluation of the patient on the day of the operation plus patient follow-up care that is provided for 90 days after the operation. Private insurers pay some variation of the Medicare reimbursement for this service.

Three weeks ago, the President suggested that a surgeon’s decision to remove a child’s tonsils is based on the desire to make a lot of money. That remark was ill-informed and dangerous, and we were dismayed by this characterization of the work surgeons do. Surgeons make decisions about recommending operations based on what’s right for the patient.

We agree with the President that the best thing for patients with diabetes is to manage the disease proactively to avoid the bad consequences that can occur, including blindness, stroke, and amputation. But as is the case for a person who has been treated for cancer and still needs to have a tumor removed, or a person who is in a terrible car crash and needs access to a trauma surgeon, there are times when even a perfectly managed diabetic patient needs a surgeon. The President’s remarks are truly alarming and run the risk of damaging the all-important trust between surgeons and their patients.

We assume that the President made these mistakes unintentionally, but we would urge him to have his facts correct before making another inflammatory and incorrect statement about surgeons and surgical care.

About the American College of Surgeons
The American College of Surgeons is a scientific and educational organization of surgeons that was founded in 1913 to raise the standards of surgical practice and to improve the care of the surgical patient. The College is dedicated to the ethical and competent practice of surgery. Its achievements have significantly influenced the course of scientific surgery in America and have established it as an important advocate for all surgical patients. The College has more than 74,000 members and is the largest organization of surgeons in the world.

Web site: www.facs.org

Eight things we can do to improve health care without adding to the deficit.

By JOHN MACKEY

“The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out
of other people’s money.”

—Margaret Thatcher

With a projected $1.8 trillion deficit for 2009, several trillions more in deficits projected over the next decade, and with both Medicare and Social Security entitlement spending about to ratchet up several notches over the next 15 years as Baby Boomers become eligible for both, we are rapidly running out of other people’s money. These deficits are simply not sustainable. They are either going to result in unprecedented new taxes and inflation, or they will bankrupt us.

While we clearly need health-care reform, the last thing our country needs is a massive new health-care entitlement that will create hundreds of billions of dollars of new unfunded deficits and move us much closer to a government takeover of our health-care system. Instead, we should be trying to achieve reforms by moving in the opposite direction—toward less government control and more individual empowerment. Here are eight reforms that would greatly lower the cost of health care for everyone:

• Remove the legal obstacles that slow the creation of high-deductible health insurance plans and health savings accounts (HSAs). The combination of high-deductible health insurance and HSAs is one solution that could solve many of our health-care problems. For example, Whole Foods Market pays 100% of the premiums for all our team members who work 30 hours or more per week (about 89% of all team members) for our high-deductible health-insurance plan. We also provide up to $1,800 per year in additional health-care dollars through deposits into employees’ Personal Wellness Accounts to spend as they choose on their own health and wellness.

Money not spent in one year rolls over to the next and grows over time. Our team members therefore spend their own health-care dollars until the annual deductible is covered (about $2,500) and the insurance plan kicks in. This creates incentives to spend the first $2,500 more carefully. Our plan’s costs are much lower than typical health insurance, while providing a very high degree of worker satisfaction.

• Equalize the tax laws so that employer-provided health insurance and individually owned health insurance have the same tax benefits. Now employer health insurance benefits are fully tax deductible, but individual health insurance is not. This is unfair.

• Repeal all state laws which prevent insurance companies from competing across state lines. We should all have the legal right to purchase health insurance from any insurance company in any state and we should be able use that insurance wherever we live. Health insurance should be portable.

• Repeal government mandates regarding what insurance companies must cover. These mandates have increased the cost of health insurance by billions of dollars. What is insured and what is not insured should be determined by individual customer preferences and not through special-interest lobbying.

• Enact tort reform to end the ruinous lawsuits that force doctors to pay insurance costs of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. These costs are passed back to us through much higher prices for health care.

• Make costs transparent so that consumers understand what health-care treatments cost. How many people know the total cost of their last doctor’s visit and how that total breaks down? What other goods or services do we buy without knowing how much they will cost us?

• Enact Medicare reform. We need to face up to the actuarial fact that Medicare is heading towards bankruptcy and enact reforms that create greater patient empowerment, choice and responsibility.

• Finally, revise tax forms to make it easier for individuals to make a voluntary, tax-deductible donation to help the millions of people who have no insurance and aren’t covered by Medicare, Medicaid or the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.

Many promoters of health-care reform believe that people have an intrinsic ethical right to health care—to equal access to doctors, medicines and hospitals. While all of us empathize with those who are sick, how can we say that all people have more of an intrinsic right to health care than they have to food or shelter?

Health care is a service that we all need, but just like food and shelter it is best provided through voluntary and mutually beneficial market exchanges. A careful reading of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution will not reveal any intrinsic right to health care, food or shelter. That’s because there isn’t any. This “right” has never existed in America

Even in countries like Canada and the U.K., there is no intrinsic right to health care. Rather, citizens in these countries are told by government bureaucrats what health-care treatments they are eligible to receive and when they can receive them. All countries with socialized medicine ration health care by forcing their citizens to wait in lines to receive scarce treatments.

Although Canada has a population smaller than California, 830,000 Canadians are currently waiting to be admitted to a hospital or to get treatment, according to a report last month in Investor’s Business Daily. In England, the waiting list is 1.8 million.

At Whole Foods we allow our team members to vote on what benefits they most want the company to fund. Our Canadian and British employees express their benefit preferences very clearly—they want supplemental health-care dollars that they can control and spend themselves without permission from their governments. Why would they want such additional health-care benefit dollars if they already have an “intrinsic right to health care”? The answer is clear—no such right truly exists in either Canada or the U.K.—or in any other country.

Rather than increase government spending and control, we need to address the root causes of poor health. This begins with the realization that every American adult is responsible for his or her own health.

Unfortunately many of our health-care problems are self-inflicted: two-thirds of Americans are now overweight and one-third are obese. Most of the diseases that kill us and account for about 70% of all health-care spending—heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes and obesity—are mostly preventable through proper diet, exercise, not smoking, minimal alcohol consumption and other healthy lifestyle choices.

Recent scientific and medical evidence shows that a diet consisting of foods that are plant-based, nutrient dense and low-fat will help prevent and often reverse most degenerative diseases that kill us and are expensive to treat. We should be able to live largely disease-free lives until we are well into our 90s and even past 100 years of age.

Health-care reform is very important. Whatever reforms are enacted it is essential that they be financially responsible, and that we have the freedom to choose doctors and the health-care services that best suit our own unique set of lifestyle choices. We are all responsible for our own lives and our own health. We should take that responsibility very seriously and use our freedom to make wise lifestyle choices that will protect our health. Doing so will enrich our lives and will help create a vibrant and sustainable American society.

Mr. Mackey is co-founder and CEO of Whole Foods Market Inc.

Texas Straight Talk – A Weekly Column
Rep. Ron Paul (R) – TX 14

Healthcare continues to dominate the agenda on Capitol Hill as House leadership and the administration try to ram through their big government healthcare plan. Fortunately, they have been unsuccessful so far, as there are many horrifying provisions tucked into this massive piece of legislation. One major issue is the public funding of elective abortions. The administration has already removed many longstanding restrictions on abortion, and is unwilling to provide straight answers to questions regarding the public funding of abortion in their plan. This is deeply troubling for those of us who do not want taxpayer dollars funding abortions.

Forcing pro-life taxpayers to subsidize abortion is evil and tyrannical. I have introduced the Taxpayer’s Freedom of Conscience Act (HR 1233) which forbids the use of any taxpayer funds for abortion, both here and overseas.

The most basic function of government is to protect life. It is unconscionable that government would enable the taking of it. However this is to be expected when government oversteps its constitutional bounds instead of protecting rights. When government supercedes this very limited role, it cannot help but advance the moral agenda of whoever is in power at the time, at the expense of the rights of others.

Free people should be left alone to follow their conscience and determine their own lifestyle as long as they do not interfere with other people doing the same. If morality is dictated by government, morality will change with every election. Even if you agree with the morality of the current politicians and think their ideas should be advanced, someday different people will inherit that power and use it for their own agendas. The wisdom of the constitution is that it keeps government out of these issues altogether.

Many say we must reform healthcare and treat it as a right, because that is the moral thing to do. Poor people should not go without healthcare in a just society. But too many forget the immorality of stealing from others in order to make this so. They also forget the morality and compassion that naturally exists in communities when government is not fomenting class warfare with wealth redistribution programs.

Many doctors willingly volunteer, accept barter or reduced payment from patients who can’t pay, or give away services for free. Many charities help the poor with food, housing and healthcare. These charities are much more responsive and accountable for helping people in need than government ever could be. This is the moral way that private individuals voluntarily deal with access to healthcare, but government intervention threatens to pull the rug out from this sort of volunteerism and replace it with mandates, taxes, red tape, wealth redistribution, and force.

The fact that the national healthcare overhaul could force taxpayers to subsidize abortions and may even force private insurers to cover abortions is more reason that this bill and the ideas behind it, are neither constitutional, moral, nor in the American people’s best interest.

Fellow Concerned American,

Take Action! In the Hippocratic Oath I took to become a physician, the phrase “… I will keep [my patients] from harm and injustice…” remains dear to me; not only as a Physician, but now as a Member of Congress.

I have devoted my life to keeping my patients healthy and safe, and now I apply those same principles to my constituents in Georgia’s 6th District. With that said, the Democrats’ current plan in the U.S. House is detrimental to America’s well being.

Even the President wouldn’t get on board with his own plan. According to ABC News “Health Care Forum”, a doctor in the audience asked the President if he would pledge not to seek extraordinary help if his wife or kids became sick and their treatment and tests fell outside of the Public Plan offered. He refused to make such a pledge…

Under Government-Run HealthCare, Democrats would place Washington in between you and your physician. And by the sound of it, the President doesn’t even trust his own party to make such decisions on behalf of his family; so why should you?

As you heard last week from Leader Boehner, the Democratic plan is led by interest groups rather than physicians, and we must not stand for this!

Our Republican Alternative places an emphasis on two issues:

First — we agree that we must make healthcare coverage affordable for all Americans. We are working hard to create a level of coverage that makes financial sense for all Americans to be insured without government intrusion or mandates. And we plan on doing this through fundamental reform of the tax code.

Second — that coverage should be owned and controlled by those most affected by the system – patients! By placing the power in the hands of patients and their doctors, not federal bureaucrats, we will enjoy the innovation, responsiveness, accountability, and flexibility that would surely go unseen in the Democratic Plan.

Won’t you please join me in educating the public about how dangerous the passage of this plan really would be? Please take the time to call your Congressman and encourage him or her to vote ‘NO’ on the Democrat plan and not rush into another trillion dollar boondoggle.

I commit to you that I will do my very best to educate my colleagues in Congress and challenge them to prevent any harm or injustice that would make your healing more difficult, just as I would want for my patients.

Sincerely,

Tom Price, M.D.

P.S. In addition to calling your Member of Congress to tell them to oppose Government-Run Healthcare, let them know about your ideas on how to fix our healthcare system. I would also encourage you to share your thoughts with others via a letter to the editor, discussion boards, social networks or simply by word of mouth. The more people learn about the Democrats’ plan to take-over your healthcare, the more likely they are to oppose it – and support positive changes.

Doctor Alan Dappen wasn’t going to take it any more. So he got out.

Eight years ago, he decided that his office would no longer accept Medicare payments. Why? As he tells his patients, “We can’t afford to.” Medicare won’t pay for consultations by phone or email, won’t cover the full cost of a house call, and “barely pays for an office visit.”

Then there’s the regulatory burden. Dappen can’t understand a lot of the regulations. Further, as far as he can tell the folks enforcing them don’t understand many of them either. Yet the bureaucrats can audit a doctor’s paperwork and impose huge fines based on these unclear regs.

Medicare-mired physicians would be more effective if only they didn’t have to worry about complying with arbitrary regulatory dictates all the time. These rules make it harder for doctors to do their jobs. So Dr. Dappen took the risky but more satisfying path of operating in an unhampered market. And, of course, he invited his patients to join him.

Today, in the name of mandatory universal health coverage, the Obama administration wants even more restrictions on medical freedom. Shouldn’t we consider the consequences on the decision-making ability of doctors and patients of current coercive micromanagement when assessing the viability of yet newer coercive schemes?

Dr. Dappen figures he is better off with freedom. You and I are too.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

New York – I’m one of the nearly 50 million Americans who don’t have health insurance. I don’t want it, either.

But the bill the House of Representatives is debating would force me to buy it. How good can any product be if Congress compels me to purchase it?

Politicians and interest groups have been trying virtually all my life to foist medical insurance on me. But their proposals rest on mistaken and even insulting assumptions.

First, they presume that everyone wants, needs, and should have abundant medical attention. But I come from a long-lived and healthy family, I’ve been a vegetarian since childhood because I’ve never liked the way meat tastes, I don’t smoke, and I love to hike – the more miles the better.

I am disgustingly healthy, so much so that the only doctors I see – or try to: I’m near-sighted – are ophthalmologists. Could I be hit by a bus tomorrow when I head out for my daily walk? Possibly. But that’s such an unlikely disaster that I’ve chosen to spend my money on more personally pressing needs than medical insurance.

On the other hand, unlikely disasters do happen. So I might purchase catastrophic coverage if it were reasonably priced – just as I might visit doctors for lesser complaints if their care were reasonably priced.

But the government’s meddling is what helped mess-up the medical market to begin with.

The federal government perverts costs with its Medicare and Medicaid programs: Recipients of this largess have no incentive to save money since someone else pays their bills.

In fact, the incentives run the opposite way as patients demand more procedures and tests while magnifying problems I resolve out of my medicine cabinet into emergency-room runs. Doctors who get away with charging Medicare hundreds for diagnosing Grandpa’s indigestion would charge me the same.

Meanwhile, state governments shackle the insurance industry, mandating that policies cover everything from chiropractic care to hormone replacement. These launch premiums into the stratosphere. I’d much rather pick and choose the coverage I want at a price I’m willing to pay than buy the plan bureaucrats and special interests decree.

But the universal-healthcare crowd thinks it knows better than I do how to spend my money. Why can’t they leave me alone? I’m not forcing them to eat flaxseed and bike to meetings instead of hopping into their limousines. It’s time for them to return the favor.

Besides, if that bus does hit me tomorrow, I want – and will pay for – top-notch care. And that’s not what government-run medical systems dispense. Delays, expedient rather than proper treatment, and double standards of care depending on who you are and whom you know characterize universal-healthcare systems.

Which makes sense. We live in a world of finite resources and infinite desires, where medical care must be “rationed” like all other products and services.

Though we can’t choose whether goods are rationed, we can choose how they are. Either the politicians and bureaucrats who bring us long lines at DMVs, failing public schools, and the endless war in Iraq will decide who gets what kind of treatment, or the free market will.

Fans of universal healthcare deride the market: They say it’s cold and cruel because we each have to pay for the care we demand. But government healthcare can be far colder and crueler. Its care is inferior: Contrast an inferior, run-down veteran’s hospital with a general one. And it’s expensive. Dr. Jeffrey Anderson recently wrote in Investor’s Business Daily, “Since 1970 ­– even without the prescription drug benefit – Medicare’s costs have risen 34 percent more, per patient, than the combined costs of all health care in America apart from Medicare and Medicaid….”

Absent such meddling, the price of medical care would return to reasonable levels. It benefits no provider of any service to charge such astronomical fees that customers can’t afford to patronize him.

Then, too, in a market free of the state’s stranglehold, doctors and hospitals would compete with one another to lower prices and attract the ill or injured.

That doesn’t mean everyone could finally buy all the procedures they wanted or even needed – but that’s where private charity would come in. Humanitarians who send inner-city kids to summer camp and volunteer their time or money at soup kitchens would strive to ensure that needy Americans received medical care.

President Obama says, “We have no choice but to fix the healthcare system because right now it’s broken for too many Americans.” But the only fix we need is for government to get out of medicine.

Becky Akers is a freelance writer and historian.

Texas Straight Talk – A weekly column
Rep. Ron Paul (R) – TX 14

Political philosopher Richard Weaver famously and correctly stated that ideas have consequences. Take for example ideas about rights versus goods. Natural law states that people have rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. A good is something you work for and earn. It might be a need, like food, but more “goods” seem to be becoming “rights” in our culture, and this has troubling consequences. It might seem harmless enough to decide that people have a right to things like education, employment, housing or healthcare. But if we look a little further into the consequences, we can see that the workings of the community and economy are thrown wildly off balance when people accept those ideas.

First of all, other people must pay for things like healthcare. Those people have bills to pay and families to support, just as you do. If there is a “right” to healthcare, you must force the providers of those goods, or others, to serve you.

Obviously, if healthcare providers were suddenly considered outright slaves to healthcare consumers, our medical schools would quickly empty. As the government continues to convince us that healthcare is a right instead of a good, it also very generously agrees to step in as middle man. Politicians can be very good at making it sound as if healthcare will be free for everybody. Nothing could be further from the truth. The administration doesn’t want you to think too much about how hospitals will be funded, or how you will somehow get something for nothing in the healthcare arena. We are asked to just trust the politicians. Somehow it will all work out.

Universal Healthcare never quite works out the way the people are led to believe before implementing it. Citizens in countries with nationalized healthcare never would have accepted this system had they known upfront about the rationing of care and the long lines.
As bureaucrats take over medicine, costs go up and quality goes down because doctors spend more and more of their time on paperwork and less time helping patients. As costs skyrocket, as they always do when inefficient bureaucrats take the reins, government will need to confiscate more and more money from an already foundering economy to somehow pay the bills. As we have seen many times, the more money and power that government has, the more power it will abuse. The frightening aspect of all this is that cutting costs, which they will inevitably do, could very well mean denying vital services. And since participation will be mandatory, no legal alternatives will be available.

The government will be paying the bills, forcing doctors and hospitals to dance more and more to the government’s tune. Having to subject our health to this bureaucratic insanity and mismanagement is possibly the biggest danger we face. The great irony is that in turning the good of healthcare into a right, your life and liberty are put in jeopardy.

Instead of further removing healthcare from the market, we should return to a true free market in healthcare, one that empowers individuals, not bureaucrats, with control of healthcare dollars. My bill HR 1495 the Comprehensive Healthcare Reform Act provides tax credits and medical savings accounts designed to do just that.

by Doug Bandow

Last week might be the week when private health care was saved.

Obviously, the current system has problems. We spend more than we should because of perverse incentives created by government. But the American system possesses enormous strengths, including quality of care and choice by patients. We have to defend these from any government takeover.

What may have saved American health care was the Congressional Budget Office coming up with honest estimates of the enormous cost of the legislation now being proposed by leading Democrats. Reports the Wall Street Journal:

This was supposed to be a red-letter week for national health care, as Democrats started the process of hustling a quarter-baked bill through Congress to reorganize one-sixth of the economy on a partisan vote. Instead it was a fiasco.

Most of the devastation was wreaked by the Congressional Budget Office, which on Tuesday reported that draft legislation from the Senate Finance Committee would increase the federal deficit by more than $1.6 trillion over the next decade while only partly denting the population of the uninsured. The details haven’t been made public, but the short version seems to be that President Obama’s health boondoggle prescribes vast new spending without a coherent plan to pay for it even while failing to meet its own standards for social equity.

Finance Chairman Max Baucus postponed the health timeline, probably until after Congress’s July 4 vacation. His team will try to scale down the middle-class insurance subsidies and make other cuts to hold the sticker shock under $1 trillion. (Oh, is that all?) Mr. Baucus also claims he’s committed to a bipartisan consensus, yet most Republicans have been closed out of the negotiations, and industry lobbyists have been pre-emptively warned that even meeting with the GOP will invite retribution.

Useful to emphasize amid the mayhem is that CBO’s number-crunching is almost always off — predicting too much spending for market-based policies and far too little for new public programs, especially on health care. The CBO score for a new entitlement is only the teaser rate, given that the costs will inevitably balloon as the years pass and more people mob “free” or subsidized insurance.

At a time when the U.S. government is effectively bankrupt, it can ill afford to embark upon yet another complicated and expensive exercise in social engineering. Even some Democrats appear to recognize this reality. It is incumbent upon us to make sure the rest of them learn figure this out as well.

Dear Friend,

As both a defender of Liberty and a Medical Doctor, I’m very concerned about the plans the Obama Administration and many in Congress have to increase the government’s role in healthcare.

Medical decisions being made by government bureaucrats, loss of privacy of medical data, and our ability to keep our own insurance and doctors are all up for grabs once Congress starts moving on these government takeover and rationing schemes.

But the good news is you and I can fight back.

Because you’ve joined me in battle before, I wanted you to be among the first people contacted by Campaign for Liberty in their fight against this federal power grab of our healthcare.

As you may know, Campaign for Liberty is carrying the Revolution forward and is leading the fight in Congress and all across the country, mobilizing Patriots to battle.

This battle against government-run healthcare is one I sincerely hope you will join.

Please watch this video I recorded to in response to this Government Healthcare Takeover Plan.

For Liberty,

Congressman Ron Paul