Scott Spiegel

“This president is a real slow learner.” – Oscar Goodman, Mayor of Las Vegas

Speaking of gambling, President Obama has subpoenaed weary Democrats and disgusted Republicans to a Blair House summit tomorrow for a day-long policy-palooza to be broadcast on C-SPAN for Americans who didn’t get enough of the health care reform debate last year.  Obama has decided to wager what little respectability he has left on the hope that the American people will be charmed by his vision of health care reform, will develop amnesia, and will forget everything they hate about the bills passed by Congress last year.

The Associated Press announces that the new proposal released by the President “is important, but not as critical as the political skill Obama can apply to an impasse that seems close to hopeless in a pivotal congressional election year.”

Hmm…  Let’s tally up the campaigns Obama has fought and lost using his “political skill” over the past four months: securing the 2016 Olympics for Chicago, electing Creigh Deeds governor of Virginia, reelecting John Corzine governor of New Jersey, getting UN members to agree to a climate change accord in Copenhagen, and electing Martha Coakley Senator in Massachusetts.  And of course his year-long crusade to sell Congress’s health care plan to the public, which resulted in voters increasing their opposition to the plan in direct proportion to the number of syllables Obama emitted in his attempts to explain it.

Obama views the populace as a huddled mass of slow learners to whom he must explicate Congress’s monstrous health care legislation over and over until it penetrates their thick skulls.

In fact, it is Obama who is the slow learner.  Americans have learned about the bill, debated the bill, and rejected the bill; implicitly and explicitly, at townhall meetings and in polls and at the ballot box; over and over, for a year.

But Obama promises us he has a new proposal that incorporates the best of the House and Senate bills.  The White House posted Obama’s proposal online Monday morning to allow the public to see what bold, fresh ideas the President has to offer.

The verdict: Obama might as well have taken the Senate version of the health care bill and stuck Groucho Marx glasses, nose, and mustache on it.

Obama has been trying to entice Republican lawmakers to attend the summit by boasting that there are “Republican elements” in his proposal—by which he means that there are Democratic elements in it that a few liberal Republicans have been caught on tape saying might be tolerable, if dealt with in isolation, if massively reworked from their present form, and if included only in conjunction with real free-market reforms.

Even AP admits that Obama has nothing new to offer: “Realistically, he’s just hoping to win a big enough slice to silence the talk of a failing presidency.”

Obama’s one significant innovation is increasing the federal government’s power to regulate insurance premiums: “[H]ealth insurers must submit their proposed premium increases to the State authority or Secretary for review…  [I]f a rate increase is unreasonable and unjustified, health insurers must lower premiums, provide rebates, or take other actions to make premiums affordable.  A new Health Insurance Rate Authority will be created to provide needed oversight at the Federal level.”

So Obama proposes to improve on a massive, bloated bill that explodes government intervention in the private sector and is hated for that very reason by… adding more government intervention.  Sounds like a winner!

Even Democrats aren’t on board with the ideas in this proposal, at least to the degree that they were when the House and Senate passed their versions of the legislation last year.  Congressmen up for reelection this fall received the message sent by Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts loud and clear.  The only federal officials who still want to ram this thing through are Obama, Senators not up for reelection, Senators up for reelection who know they’re going to be lose, and Representatives from insanely liberal districts that will boot them if they don’t vote for the bill.

And even Democrats don’t really believe anything will come of Thursday’s meeting.  Every time the media asks Democratic Congressional leaders about their goals for the Blair House summit, they respond with the same bromides about how they believe Thursday’s meeting will help “provide affordable, accessible, quality health care to all Americans.”  How, specifically, will it do that?  Specifically?

If anything is to be passed, it will have to be through budget reconciliation—and many commentators say Democrats don’t even have enough votes for that anymore.

The Chicago Tribune recently called the House and Senate legislation “zombie” bills, noting that neither chamber likes the other’s version, the public hates both, and the only reason the bills are still floating around is that Congressional leaders are hinting that they will try to merge them through reconciliation.  The Tribune condemns reconciliation as “convoluted.  Confusing.  And unnecessary.  The Democrats need to reconcile themselves to what Americans are telling them about these health care bills: They’re too complicated and too expensive.”

Obama isn’t the only slow learner in Washington.

Yesterday Democrats suffered a mortifying trouncing in Massachusetts’ special Senate election, in which Republican Scott Brown zoomed from 17 points behind Democrat Martha Coakley in the polls less than two weeks ago to winning by a handy 5%.

As AP reported, “Brown’s victory was so sweeping, he even won in the Cape Cod community where Kennedy, the longtime liberal icon, died of brain cancer last August.”

To be fair, Coakley did manage to capture 84% of Cambridge, Amherst, and Provincetown, which tend to serve as bellwethers for—well, themselves.

Coakley’s complaint that her poll numbers started to drop right after the Senate passed its version of the health care bill on Christmas rang a bit hollow, given that she campaigned vociferously to vote for that very health care bill if elected to Congress.

In the wake of the clear message sent to them by the people of Massachusetts, Democrats are slowly backing away from their suicidal insistence on passing a bill only 33% of Americans favor, considering more bipartisan/free-market solutions, and resolving to address healthcare reform in a more piecemeal fashion.

Gotcha!  Actually, Democrats are considering a number of insane, Mission Impossible-style workaround strategies to thwart the will of the people and pass their health care bill without a filibuster-proof Senate.  These include:

•    Forcing the House to pass the Senate bill, word-for-word, with nary a change in punctuation.  This option would throw out all of the heatedly negotiated agreements between the two chambers conducted in the past few weeks, including the major union employee exemption to the excise tax on “Cadillac plans.”  It would also ignore many of the other differences between the bills for which Democrats in the House say they cannot accept the House version as is, such as language on abortion funding.  House Democrat Bart Stupak, author of the Stupak Amendment, reported on Monday that “House members will not vote for the Senate bill.  There’s no interest in that.”  He added that when the notion was proposed at a caucus meeting among Democrats, “It went over like a lead balloon.”

•    Tricking the House into passing the Senate bill and promising them that it will be morphed into a bill more to their liking “later.”

•    Using the byzantine budget reconciliation process to ram the bill through.  This would subject weary Americans to several more months of reports of Democrats using sneaky, behind-closed-doors, parliamentary procedures no one understands to get their way—a surefire Democratic victory strategy for the midterm elections in November.

If these tactics don’t work, it is conceivable that Democrats may try any of the following makeshift schemes (I hate to give them any ideas, but it’s probably best that we be forewarned):

•    Abolishing the filibuster.  Democrats would of course reinstate the filibuster in time for the November elections, when they will lose one or both chambers of Congress and will need it as protection against devious, heavy-handed Republicans.

•    Concocting some fake scandal involving Scott Brown, or another Republican from a state with a Democratic governor, that forces him to resign, thus allowing the governor of said state to appoint a Democratic replacement Senator.

•    Crowning Olympia Snowe Queen of the Senate and letting her rewrite the bill to her specifications, including funding for her own blueberry farm and stock options in L.L. Bean.

•    “Packing the Senate” à la FDR’s court-packing scheme in the 1930s.

•    Kidnapping Republican legislators and replacing them with genetically engineered Manchurian candidate clones who have been brainwashed to vote for the bill.

Think these scenarios are outlandish?  Democrats have demonstrated that, as House Minority Leader John Boehner noted, “They are going to try every way, shape, and form to shove this bill down the throats of the American people.”

House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi commented that the special Senate election is not a referendum on the health care bill, because—get this—Massachusetts already has universal coverage.  She elaborated, “Massachusetts has health care.  The rest of the country would like to have that too.  So we don’t say a state that already has health care should determine whether the rest of the country should.”  No, I think a state that has already suffered its own version of Obamacare is trying to do us all a favor by warning us about what a nightmare it would be.

Democrats have made it through the town hall gauntlet, they’ve cheated death in squeakers of votes in both chambers, they’ve gone on record in the past 48 hours insisting that they will get health care reform “one way or another” and that “health care will pass no matter what.”  Why should they stop now?

I have one more suggestion for Democrats, which they are less likely to consider than any of the ideas above, including the kidnapping plot, but which might just save some of their skins.

Listen to the American people and kill the damn bill.

Each of the two ratified versions of the health care bill currently waiting in Congress was barely passed, by virtually the slimmest margin possible, in a hectic last-minute stampede.  Dozens of harsh compromises had to be hammered out to cobble together the fragile framework now standing in each chamber.

The two bills are like delicate Jenga towers, swaying nerve-wrackingly in the breeze, that must now be reassembled by a team of 535 clumsy attention-seekers into a tower twice as tall.  But legislators across the two chambers—and even within them—are not even speaking the same language.

Here are a few of the myriad discrepancies legislators must reconcile to ensure that their monument to Obama’s greatness doesn’t fall:

In the House version of the bill, a government-run insurance exchange is created on a national level and includes a public option.  In the Senate version, exchanges are created on the state level and do not include a public option.  Virtually identical!

The House completely bans the practice 0f charging those with preexisting conditions higher premiums.  The Senate allows insurers to offer unlimited discounts for customers who engage in subjectively defined wellness activities: say, exercising, eating healthy, “not having contracted lung cancer”…

Insurance exchanges are implemented in 2013 in the House bill and 2014 in the Senate bill.

In the House version, employers are forced to provide insurance for their employees and pay a fine if they do not.  In the Senate version, employers are not required to provide insurance, but pay a fine for employees who opt for government-run insurance and receive federal subsidies.  The House has higher penalties than the Senate.

The House version funds the bill by imposing a surtax on families making over $1 million a year.  The Senate version establishes a tax on those with “Cadillac” plans, which includes not only many union members, but millions of families who will unexpectedly find themselves unlucky Cadillac owners over the next 10 years due to the non-inflation-adjusted nature of the provision.

The House version does not tax insurance offered by employers; the Senate version taxes employer insurance above a threshold.

The House version charges older people a maximum of twice the premiums as younger people; the Senate version sets a maximum ratio of three-to-one.  The House offers fewer insurance subsidies for the middle class than does the Senate.  The Senate offers weaker measures to limit out-of-pocket costs than does the House.

The House bill covers 5 million more people than the Senate bill by expanding Medicaid to those earning up to about $2,000 more than in the Senate bill.

The Senate version gives $100 million to Nebraska for indefinite coverage of all new Medicaid enrollees in the state (to buy Ben Nelson’s vote).  The Senate bill gives $300 million to Louisiana for Medicare increases (for Mary Landrieu’s vote); $10 billion to Vermont for new public health centers (for Bernie Sanders’ vote); billions to Nebraska and Michigan to waive nonprofit insurers’ excise taxes (for Ben Nelson and Carl Levin’s votes); millions to Massachusetts and Vermont for Medicaid; and millions to Florida, New York, and Pennsylvania for Medicare Advantage.  None of these provisions is in the House bill.

The Senate version includes, per the insistence of construction unions, an important exception to the employer mandate.  As an article in the New York Times titled “In Health Bill for Everyone, Provisions for a Few” reports, “Under the Senate bill, businesses with fewer than 50 employees would be exempt from the penalties in every industry but construction.”  In the construction industry, the mandate holds for employers with as few as 5 employees.  The House includes no such provision.

Restrictions on abortion funding are tight in the House, with no federal funding allowed; and loose in the Senate, with mere separation of federal and private money, and states allowed to make up whatever rules they want regarding abortion funding.

Coverage for illegal immigrants is not disallowed in the House; it is explicitly banned in the Senate.

It should be sobering for Democrats to realize that if just one Senator or two Representatives decide they can’t tolerate the alternative version of even one of these provisions, that will be enough to topple the whole health care reform edifice.

It’s no wonder, then, that Congressional Democrats now plan to merge the bills behind closed doors, shutting out all Republicans from discussion of the reconciliation process and preventing them from using parliamentary procedures to slow consideration of the bill and allow the public to digest the proposed changes.  Talking Points Memo cites one Democratic House aide who proudly admits, “This process cuts out the Republicans.”  The House will simply take the Senate’s bill, amend it, vote on it, and send it to the Senate; who will then amend the bill, vote on it, and send it to the House; and back and forth until some hideous, lopsided, structurally unsound blueprint garners enough votes in both chambers.

If Democrats had to merge these two bills in a public conference committee—never mind on C-SPAN, as previously promised and recently offered by the network’s CEO—it would take about five minutes for the cacophonous clatter surrounding their health care Tower of Babel to bring it crashing down.

In their quest to pass health care reform legislation, Democrats have been cheating death, robbing Peter to pay Paul, taking candy from babies, lying through their teeth, moving the goalposts, and burning the candle at both ends.  It is all about to catch up with them.

If I were an editorial cartoonist, I’d depict Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi as Tarzan and Jane, swinging through the forest, dangling a ragtag bundle of Congressional Democrats in a net trap, eking their way from one tree to the next as each vine snaps behind them, nearly sending them to their death in the jaws of lions below.

Here are a few of the nine lives Congressional Democrats have used up in recent months:

(1)    The House version of the health care bill passed in a squeaker of a vote, 220-215, three weeks ago.  Two Democrats voting the other way would have killed the bill (not 3, since Republican Representative Joseph Cao cast his vote for the bill only once he was sure it would pass without him).

(2)    The Senate agreed to begin debate on its version of the bill in another squeaker of a vote this weekend, which was preceded by a $300,000,000 payoff to Senator Landrieu for her state of Louisiana (thanks for the revised figure, Mary!).  As Dana Milbank noted, this sum is 20 times the price of the original Louisiana Purchase, which bought us 14 states.  As The New York Post observed, based on Louisiana Representative William Jefferson’s recent 13-year sentence for accepting a $100,000 bribe, Landrieu should spend the next 39,000 years in jail.

(3)    Pelosi violated her pledge to post the final version of any legislation online for 72 hours.  Instead, she and Reid have been finishing their handiwork on Friday night and ramming through their votes on Saturday night.  Defeating these bills would be hard enough if the public had time to digest them and hold politicians accountable for supporting them, but now congressmen can claim that they were unaware of ornery provisions slipped in at the last minute, because they were unable to speed-read 300 pages of legalese an hour.

(4)    Leaders of both houses have been inserting, modifying, watering down, or removing passages to get approval for the bill or beginning debate, when they know full well that crucial blocs of defectors will never vote for current legislation in the final vote.  These holdouts will demand that all changes be unmade, which will cause even larger chunks of the Democrats’ fragile majorities to drift away.  For example, Pelosi banned federal funding of abortion in the House bill, a restriction that a dozen representatives will never accept in the final bill.  Reid reinserted in the Senate bill a public option, which had been absent from all committee versions, when he knows that every Republican and at least four Democrats would filibuster a vote on such a bill.

(5)    Reid bought holdout votes from centrist Democrats by making minor concessions tailored to their districts’ concerns.  To support the final bill, these and other Democrats are demanding much bigger concessions, which conflict with each other and with demands made by those in the House.  It is not physically possible to satisfy all of these lawmakers’ requirements at once, which is why Reid and Pelosi have barely been able to do it with 12 different versions of the bill over a period of several months.

(6)    Democrats are willing to slash funding for Medicare, which Jay Cost calls “the most significant fiscal policy ‘achievement’ of the Democratic Party in the last seventy years” [scare quotes mine].  Doing so has cost them the support of seniors, who oppose the bill even more comprehensively than the general public.

(7)    Rasmussen reported on Monday that support for the bill has fallen to a new low of 38%.  Some Senators have been jeopardizing their reelection in 2010 by their support for their bill, and at least one—junior Senator Michael Bennet—has been bragging about it.

(8)    Senator Chuck Schumer is now resorting to bald-faced threats, which should go over wonderfully with the public; recently he declared on behalf of all of Congress, “We’re not going to not pass a bill.”

All of this is already starting to take its toll on Democrats: witness the retreat of Republican Senator Olympia Snowe, who voted not to allow debate on Reid’s bill to proceed, when formerly she had been trumpeted as giving the bill a bipartisan veneer by supporting the Senate Finance Committee’s version.  Democrats think they can pass a bill by tossing concessions left and right to keep the ball rolling through each stage, but their momentum is eventually going to grind to a halt.

On a more general note, anyone trying to do something impossible—in this case, have government take over a sixth of the economy and provide better, more widespread care at lower costs than the private sector, with no sacrifices required from anyone—necessarily fights a harder battle than his opponents, because reality is not on his side.  Republicans, as ineffective and mealy-mouthed as some of them have been in making the case against Congress’s bill, possess the inherent advantage of the truth.  The American people and a vigilant alternative media can discover the truth if no one else will.

Congressional Democrats up for reelection next year for one of 535 seats are about to experience a whole new type of rationing.

The Democrats’ health care legislation, as is or in very similar form, cannot be passed.  Every choice point they encounter from this stage on leads to an internal contradiction or a dead end.  To use a mathematical metaphor, their situation is overdetermined: there are too many conflicting restrictions; there is no solution to their dilemma.  (To use a liberal metaphor: It’s a slam dunk!)

Democratic proponents of health care reform have the following major goals:

(1)    Create a federal public health insurance option to “compete with” private insurers, or

(2)    Set up state cooperatives to “compete with” private insurers on a state-by-state basis;

(3)    Prevent discrimination by insurance companies based on preexisting condition—i.e., forbid insurance companies from “providing insurance”;

(4)    Limit the ratio of high-to-low insurance premiums by age group.

Whether pursuing any of these goals is the government’s business—and it isn’t—Democrats need to enact some combination of these proposals in order to fulfill their aim of turning us into Canada; the Congressional Budget Office estimates that this will cost about $1 trillion.

Democrats have proposed numerous bad ideas for paying for their legislation, all of which lead to intractable circumstances that they cannot tolerate politically with the general electorate, even if they were able to figure out a way to cobble together, rush through, or force the votes in Congress to pass them.  These funding ideas include:

(1)    Increase the deficit: This would violate Obama’s promise that health care reform will be “dime”-neutral.

(2)    Make taxpayers subsidize the public option: This would keep the government plan from having to cut costs or be efficient to attract and retain customers, as any private insurance company must.  It would therefore eventually force those who are satisfied with their current plans to pay higher premiums or get less for their money.

(3)    Cut $500 billion in Medicare: This would upset seniors, and anyone who plans to be a senior at some point in his life, who fear rationing of care.

(4)    Tax high-cost plans at a 40% rate: This would anger emergency workers and union members, and huge numbers of people who will hit the non-insurance-adjusted premium threshold for this level of taxation in the next 10 years.

(5)    Impose fees on insurance and pharmaceutical companies: These costs would simply be passed on to doctors, who would in turn dump them on to patients.

(6)    Cap deductions for health savings accounts: This would increase out-of-pocket medical expenses.

(7)    Force everyone to buy government-approved health insurance by charging a penalty for not having coverage: If the penalty were low, in order to avoid making it burdensome, then people would wait to get coverage until they became sick, then drop coverage after they recovered, which means the penalty would be useless.  If the penalty were high, in order to make it effective, then the public would be infuriated over the imposition of a costly penalty for not buying something that should be optional.

(8)    Cover fewer uninsured people: This would involve turning the nation’s health care system upside down while failing to fulfill the basic aim of the plan.

In case Democrats are interested, there are provisions to which they could agree, all previously proposed in legislation by House Republicans, which would actually pay for the proposed plan.  These steps should be taken anyway, and should be pursued instead of the Democrats’ aims, but just for the record, they include:

(1)    Medical liability tort reform: This would reduce settlement amounts and lower doctors’ malpractice insurance premiums.

(2)    Tax deductions for health insurance premiums, medical expenses, and prescriptions: This would allow people to decide how to allocate their earnings toward medical expenses, which they can do more efficiently than Kathleen “Jolly Roger” Sebelius.

(3)    Vouchers for opting out of Medicare: This would allow people to decide how to spend their money on medical care in old age.

(4)    Interstate provision of private insurance: This would allow for greater competition and cost-cutting.

Despite conservatives’ nail-biting uncertainty over their ability to defeat HR 3200, they have one advantage: the truth.  All the arguments conservatives have advanced against liberals’ bad ideas are informed by it, whereas liberals must disguise it, distort it, downplay it, or lie about it to persuade anyone that their impossible legislative feat and fevered social engineering fantasy can be achieved.  There are plenty of voters and legislators who are content to ignore the truth and stumble down dead ends, but enough may turn out to be smart and honest enough to see through these efforts and find their way out of the labyrinth.

Thanks to fierce lobbying by Congressional Democrats, the Senate Finance Committee’s version of the health care bill just passed on Tuesday with bipartisan support from (1) liberal senators, represented by Olympia Snowe from Maine, and (2) ultraliberal senators, represented by all 13 Democrats on the committee.

On Wednesday morning, GOP senator and fellow Pine Stater Susan Collins also announced that she was open to health care reform along the lines of the committee’s proposal.

Impressive as this Republican sweep is, you may recall how Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package received even broader bipartisan support last spring, inasmuch as it attracted the votes of no fewer than three Republican senators, including Snowe, Collins, and Arlen Specter, which of course means that the failure of the stimulus bill to do anything it was supposed to lies equally with Democrats and Republicans.  (Of course, Specter became a Democrat five minutes later, but right up until that moment he was planted firmly on the other side of the aisle.)

Snowe, like Collins, Specter, John McCain, and other liberal senators, has a reputation for magnanimously cooperating with the opposition party (the ultraliberals) in passing legislation that might otherwise abridge our liberty.  Legislators such as Snowe (L-ME) serve the valuable function of watering down such legislation to render its impact marginally less onerous on average Americans.

For example, Snowe opposes a “public option” in the health care reform bill—that is, unless private insurance companies don’t live up to arbitrary standards to be issued by the Secretary of Health and Human Services that will ensure such companies don’t get away with swindles like “earning a profit,” at which point the public option will kick in faster than you can say “single payer.”

It’s a shame that no other Republican congressmen will put aside their partisan differences and work with liberal and ultraliberal senators.  (Imagine how Obama would trumpet the expansive consensus of a tripartisan bill!)  As is, even some liberal senators such as Independent Joe Lieberman have expressed resistance to embracing the proposed legislation on the grounds that it will massively increase health insurance premiums for Americans—i.e., that it is self-defeating and crazy.

Some might quibble that the mere addition of one senator to a committee vote does not indicate the establishment of bipartisanship on health care.  Yet Snowe’s vote must signify a major shepherding of Republicans into the fold, in that Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus has made a host of concessions on her behalf, such as slashing by 50% the penalty for individuals who don’t buy insurance, and increasing subsidies to people whom the bill mandates must purchase insurance (i.e., everyone).  Never mind that the tiny state of Maine receives the same number of votes in the Senate as California—Snowe’s Finance Committee vote is evidently equal to the vote of 13 Democrat Senators!

The mainstream media’s critical, analytical take on this latest development on health care has been: a hearty rah! rah! for health care reformers for clearing such a grueling hurdle in such a graceful fashion.

While we’re talking about hurdles, it’s instructive to peruse an internal memo released by the Finance Committee in early June, which proposed a timetable for moving legislation through Congress.  According to this starry-eyed agenda, the Committee would pass its bill by mid-July, merge it with the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee’s wildly different bill and send it to the Senate floor for a vote by the end of July, and merge this with the House’s even more wildly different bill and have legislation ready for Obama to sign by October 1.

So the initial round of passing the bill out of committee, the slam-dunk part of the process, was supposed to take a month—and took four.  The next two rounds—merging the Senate bills, then merging the merged Senate bill with the merged House bill—will be far trickier than the initial round.  These tasks are predicted to take two-and-a-half months—by the same people who were confident Obama would have already signed a health care reform bill two weeks ago.  Based on the Committee’s previous underestimates, by my calculation Congress should get around to voting on a final healthcare bill around September 2010—two months before a third of the Senate and all of the House are up for reelection by a public that opposes every plan they’ve seen out of Congress this year.

Now that the Democrats have secured wide-ranging approval among lawmakers for their bill, I recommend that they capitalize on this groundswell of support.  Let’s hope that ultraliberals can leverage the runaway momentum created by bipartisanship from the Snowe Party to ensure swift passage of their bill.

In the event that the imminent failure of Democrats’ socialized medicine bill leads them to some soul-searching—perhaps listening to what their constituents have been telling them all summer, or taking GOP advice to start from scratch—it’s worth noting that House Republicans have introduced 32 health care reform bills since the spring, all languishing in the referral stage.

Many of these lonely bills deal with just one or several aspects of health care reform, rather than offering grand, sweeping Ten-Year Plans that will change Health Care As We Know It.  Not all the bills are knockouts; a couple are downright stinkers.  But virtually all contain some good ideas, and some of them contain nothing but good ideas—which means that no Democrat will ever for a moment consider any of them.

For those desiring ammunition to counterattack the liberal slander that conservatives criticize everything on health care they hear from Democrats but have no ideas of their own, here’s a primer on the legislation prepared by our devoted GOP servants in the House:

•    Several bills are flat-out winners, including Clifford Stearns’ Health Care Tax Deduction Act, Michele Bachmann’s Health Care Freedom of Choice Act, and Rodney Alexander’s Sunset of Life Protection Act.  These laws provide for income tax deductions of health insurance premiums and prescription drugs; medical expenses; and long-term care premiums, respectively.  That’s it.  All three bills are so short they could fit on a cocktail napkin together and still have room for a list of Obama’s failed Cabinet nominations.  This is not surprising: bills covering what individuals are allowed to do for themselves require less verbiage than bills mandating what individuals are required to do for their government.

•    Marsha Blackburn’s Health Care Choices for Seniors Act and Louis Gohmert’s Patient-Controlled Healthcare Protection Act allow seniors to opt out of Medicare and receive vouchers for health savings accounts, an arrangement analogous to school vouchers (another excellent idea liberals oppose).  Edward Royce’s Flexible Health Savings Act allows individuals to carry over unused health savings account funds from year to year.

•    John Shadegg’s Health Care Choice Act eliminates restrictions on interstate governing of health insurance, the primary cause of the limited within-state competition among private insurance companies that President Obama keeps bleating about.

•    Two bills—John Gingrey’s HEALTH Act and Michael Burgess’ Medical Justice Act—enact malpractice tort reform by regulating lawsuits for health care injuries or deaths.  William Thornberry’s Medical Liability Procedural Reform Act sets up state “health care tribunals” or medical courts to adjudicate claims.

•    Several unobjectionable but minor bills extend benefits for veterans, reserve members, and their dependents.

•    A few bills would amend the State Children’s Health Insurance Program to supposedly make it more accountable; however, these bills give the costly, bloated SCHIP so much legitimacy that I’m automatically suspicious of their authors’ credibility.

•    Other bills have good intentions but will lead to more bureaucracy and regulation than they aim to prevent; for example, Thornberry’s Health Care Paperwork Reduction and Fraud Prevention Act, which proposes a “Commission on Health Care Billing Codes and Forms Simplification” to standardize billing paperwork.  No doubt the government will first need to establish a separate commission just to simplify the Commission’s name.

•    Thornberry has proposed two more bad bills (why do public officials who want to meddle in our affairs always invent so many devious ways to do it?).  One is the Partnership to Improve Seniors’ Access to Medicare Act, which subsidizes student loan repayment for doctors who accept Medicare patients; not specified in the bill is how much of our bountiful federal surplus we’ll have to dip into to cover this provision.  Another is the Patient Fairness and Indigent Care Promotion Act, which allows doctors to deduct for tax purposes any unrecouped costs from “patient bad debt”—because nothing increases accountability like providing incentives for doctors not to check beforehand whether patients can pay their bills!

Other GOP bills contain additional provisions, and many of the bills are a mixed bag; but the point is that they’re all better than HR 3200, which is putrid right down to its last period.  Considering even a few key GOP bills over the next couple of years would be a sound way to address individual components of health care reform, in a piecemeal fashion, rather than upending our economy right this minute just because Democrats insist on artificial deadlines to maximize their political gain.

In the meantime, the proper response to any liberal who claims conservatives have no ideas of their own on health care reform should be a resounding, “You lie!”

Jonathan Martin of Politico notes that, even though racism against the president is supposedly widespread, “it’s still a sensitive enough issue that the [Democratic] party doesn’t broach it directly.”  By “sensitive,” of course, he means “far-fetched, ludicrous, and laughable.”

Representative Hank Johnson (D-GA) claims that in Senator Joe Wilson’s outburst toward the president last week, Wilson “kind of winked at that element” of the U.S. that disrespects Obama because he is black.  I’m not sure what criminal statutes are on the books for “kind of winking” at an “element,” but I do know that Democrats’ charges of racism until recently have been so timid and indirect, because they know that if they made them openly, they might have to produce actual evidence of racism.

Lately some of the attempts to label opposition to socialized medicine and trillion-dollar deficits as racism have gotten more blatant.

The Reverend Jeremiah Wright was just caught on video snarling, “I think the racists in the right wing are upset because poor people are about to be helped.”  And it wasn’t even during one of his weekly sermons!

Jimmy Carter weighed in on the subject over the weekend: “[A]n overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man… [and] a belief among many white people… that African Americans are not qualified to lead this great country.”

MSNBC bloggers recently wrote, “Whether it’s fair or not, there is a perception growing that race is driving some elements of the opposition to Obama.”

Maureen Dowd wrote of Wilson in the New York Times, “[F]air or not, what I heard was an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy!”  Oh, the New York Times doesn’t need to be fair!  Stop being so hard on yourself!

According to Dowd, who was praised by liberal bloggers everywhere for finally stating openly what they believed but didn’t feel comfortable expressing, “Wilson clearly did not like being lectured and even rebuked by the brainy black president presiding over the majestic chamber.”  Note to Dowd: None of the conservatives in Congress did, and it had nothing to do with Obama’s being brainy or black—it had everything to do with his being wrongheaded and pompous.

Dowd lamented “the frantic efforts to paint our first black president as… socialist, fascist, Marxist, racist, Commie, Nazi; a cad who would snuff old people.”

I don’t know—some would say that taking over banks, car companies, and the health care industry is a bit socialist; wanting to “spread the wealth around” is a bit Marxist; having a spiritual mentor who railed against white people in church for 20 years is a bit racist; nominating former communists as czars is a bit Commie; receiving material support from groups that beat up health care protestors at townhall meetings is a bit Nazi; and planning to set up government panels to ration end-of-life care implies a willingness to snuff old people.  Then again, some don’t write for the New York Times.

Dowd added, “Wilson’s shocking disrespect for the office of the president… convinced me: Some people just can’t believe a black man is president and will never accept it.”  Yes, and the “shocking disrespect” for the office of Congressman at mostly white Senators and Representatives’ townhall meetings has convinced me: Some people just can’t believe white people can be in Congress and will never accept it.

Dowd charged that Obama is “at the center of a period of racial turbulence sparked by his ascension” and that “this president is the ultimate civil rights figure—a black man whose legitimacy is constantly challenged by a loco fringe.”

For liberals, the equation is “challenged” plus “black” = “victim of racism.”

I suppose we need to inform Thomas Sowell, Larry Elder, Walter Williams, Sonja Schmidt, Mychal Massie, and other fantastic black conservative and libertarian commentators and harsh Obama critics that their opposition is based on mere black self-hatred.

It was also insinuated by major media outlets that the massive tea party held in Washington over the weekend was fueled by racist resentment of a black man in the White House.  As amply documented by photos of the event, however, signs protested the actions of not just Obama but: Bush, Congress, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Barney Frank, Steny Hoyer, Saul Alinsky, government, and the mainstream media, among many other targets.

Tea party signs protested Medicaid and Medicare’s insolvency, passing on trillions of dollars of debt to future generations, providing health care to illegal immigrants, paying for abortions through health care legislation, excessive taxes, cap-and-trade schemes, government takeover of the automobile industry, and the appointment of czars.  (Take that, NAACP!)

Finally, signs supported tort reform, health savings accounts, a flat tax, gun rights, the war on terror, and a strange, unheard-of cult called “Liberty.”

Notably absent from protest signs were calls for the repeal of the Civil Rights Act and the resegregation of water fountains.  As Obama correctly observed in one of his health care speeches this summer, “This is not about me.”

As for the occasional reference to race on protest signs, Martin writes, “Republicans see an important distinction between Obama critics who are genuinely worried about his… policies and those whose fears go beyond the president’s liberalism…  But for some Democrats, it’s difficult to make that distinction when conservative marchers take to Washington bearing images of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Obama that read, ‘He had a dream, we got a nightmare.’”  And for some Republicans, it’s difficult to make a distinction between signs comparing King and Obama that would be acceptable to liberals and those that would be branded “racist.”

As one prescient and widely photographed sign at the protest read, “It doesn’t matter what this sign says—you’ll call it racism anyway.”

President Obama is the opposite of Hamlet—he is desperately eager to do something on health care reform, right this minute, but he doesn’t particularly have any idea what it should be.

Obama spent most of July insisting that Congress had to pass a bill for him to sign before the August recess, in case they didn’t have enough political momentum by the time they got back.  Privately, Congressional Democrats fumed that Obama was offering no details on his preferred plan and was simply telling his spokespeople to assure them he would not rule out anything they decided.

Just before the recess, Obama got on TV for a Wednesday night address to the nation to “explain” the “details” of his “plan.”  The public’s reaction to his vague answers to reporters’ questions revealed as much frustration at his lack of specifics as Congress felt.

Since then, Obama has played “good cop, bad cop” with an unwilling Congress: Obama makes flowery promises—everyone who’s happy with the status quo can keep things as they are, everyone who’s unhappy can have everything completely different—while Congress is forced to work out the ugly details, like who’s going to pay for the plan.

At some point, Obama shifted away from his push for “health care reform” and began hinting that what he really wanted was “health insurance reform,” but he was too cowardly or indecisive to state his altered intention outright.

Obama similarly began to disavow the necessity of the public option when it became clear there were not enough votes in the Senate to pass a bill with one.  Rather than declare his switch in tactics openly, Obama implied that this had been his position all along, when he had clearly and repeatedly stated in the past that a public option would be necessary in order for him to sign a bill.  After the resulting backlash by House Democrats and Congressional leaders, Obama is once again on the fence about whether legislation must contain a public option or not.

Even New York Times columnists have been grumbling about Obama’s failure to make the case for health care reform.

As Bob Herbert complained, Obama “has been remarkably opaque about his intentions regarding health care.  He left it up to Congress to draft a plan and he has not gotten behind any specific legislation.  He has seemed to waffle on the public option and has not been at all clear about how the reform that is coming will rein in runaway costs.  At times it has seemed as though any old ‘reform’ would be all right with him.”

It’s obvious why dishonest politicians would choose to keep details of unpopular and impractical legislation vague in the early stages—i.e., to keep people from figuring out that it won’t work, will cost too much money, or will give the government greater control over our lives.  But at some point, leaders have to take a stand on what they will and will not tolerate, and let the chips fall where they may.  At  this point, Obama is acting as though he would be content to sign a phone book as long as the cover said “Health Care Reform Bill.”

Obama seems to think he can stay above the fray and maintain his popularity by not get involved in any messy details requiring those things we call “choices.”

But as Michael Barone notes, “The president must either insist on a ‘government option’ insurance plan or must let it be known that he will sign a bill without one…  Sooner or later the old politician’s dodge… won’t wash.”

Obama’s return-from-August-recess televised address to the nation Wednesday night is supposed to make it clear where he stands on the details of the various plans offered by Congress, after several months of hands-off cheerleading on his part.  But it’s obvious that things will be no clearer after his speech than before: his handlers are already scolding curious reporters for wanting to know specifics about what he’ll say and even whether the public will know where Obama stands on the public option after his address.

In a pre-speech interview today, Obama declared that “we do intend to get something done this year,” but hedged by saying that he was still “open to new ideas.”  Open to new ideas?  This is the same guy who demanded that Congress simply had to pass a comprehensive overhaul by the end of July?

Obama and his staffers are urgently motivated to do something, anything, on health care reform, so that they will be able to say that they did—something, anything.

In anticipation of the humiliating defeat of their socialized medicine scheme, Democrats are feverishly working to get their legislation passed by cheating.

Their plan, known as “budget reconciliation,” works as follows: (1) have Senate committees expand Medicaid, cut Medicare, force individuals to buy and businesses to offer insurance, give subsidies to low-income people and tax credits to small businesses, levy new taxes, and do everything else Democrats wanted to do in their health care bill but knew would never pass; (2) lump it all into a bill; and (3) pass it with 50 votes and no filibuster.

The bill would also contain language to support enactment of a health care overhaul, but because provisions unrelated to the budget cannot legally be included, the Senate parliamentarian will likely strike these from the bill.  According to the New York Times, which favors the reconciliation swindle, it is unclear whether two key elements will be allowed in the bill: the requirement that insurance companies accept all candidates and charge the same regardless of condition, and the creation of a government health insurance exchange.

The Times eggs Democrats on to declare that these two provisions, while irrelevant to the budget, “are so intertwined with other reforms that they are [necessary] for other provisions that do affect spending or revenues.”

If that ruse doesn’t work, the Times notes, then the process could “leave the reform package riddled with holes—perhaps providing subsidies to buy insurance on exchanges that do not exist, for example.”  In this eventuality, Democrats would pass a second bill, subject to filibuster, that fills in gaps where budget-irrelevant provisions were removed.

Ignore for the moment the fact that Democrats’ chess-playing skills obviously aren’t very good: to wit, why would Republican senators support a bill to prop up the reconciliation bill, if the two bills in combination would lead to an outcome they opposed in the first place?

Ignore, too, the stipulation that the reconciliation bill may not legally cause deficits to increase, which a health care overhaul clearly would do.

There’s just the inconvenient detail that reconciliation was never designed to be used for anything remotely like what Democrats propose to use it for.

According to the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Rules, the purpose of budget reconciliation is to “fine tune revenue and spending levels.”  Admittedly, in the Obama era, adding a trillion-dollar program here or there could be characterized as “fine tuning,” but I don’t think this is what the creators of reconciliation had in mind.

Democrats have offered the following compelling argument for using reconciliation to socialize health care: Republicans have used reconciliation!

Yes, Republicans have used reconciliation—for things it was supposed to be used for, such as adjusting tax rates and decreasing entitlement spending.  Claiming that reconciliation can be used for health care because Republicans have used it is like claiming that pesos can be used at Taco Bell because Mexicans have used them.

Even the New York Times admits, “The approach is risky.  Reconciliation bills are primarily intended to deal with budget items that affect the deficit, not with substantive legislation like health care reform.”  Note the sneaky, dishonest addition of “primarily.”

As Judd Gregg explained to Norah O’Donnell, who insisted Gregg was a hypocrite because he had favored reconciliation in the past, “Reconciliation is meant to adjust already existing programs.  You adjust tax rates, or you adjust already existing programs at the margin.  What’s being proposed here is, ab initio, a brand-new, major initiative which is the total rewrite of the health care system of the United States.”

President Clinton floated the idea of using reconciliation to pass health care legislation in 1993, but Senator Robert Byrd reminded him that reconciliation was meant to be used to square away budgets, not turn us into Canada.  In 2003, Congressional Republican leaders considered, then rejected, using reconciliation to pass their prescription benefits program.

In 2005, Senate Republicans introduced a provision allowing drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, an attempt that failed when the provision was removed during reconciliation.  Whether this attempt was appropriate or not, it should be pretty clear that if we’re not allowed to use reconciliation to drill in a barren wilderness that makes up less than 0.5% of Alaska in the middle of an energy crisis and a war in Iraq, then it’s not appropriate to use budget reconciliation to take over 17% of the economy.

There’s a reason budget reconciliation was introduced as a separate parliamentary process: it was to be used to make adjustments to existing programs, not introduce massive new ones.  The total amount of debate time allowed for reconciliation is only 20 hours—about twice as long as Congress had to read the 1,600-page stimulus bill before voting, but still not very long.

By the way, I don’t fault Obama for threatening to violate the spirit of bipartisanship with the reconciliation maneuver, inasmuch as (1) I don’t favor Republicans in charge having to compromise when Democrats propose screwy ideas and (2) in order to put a halt to bipartisanship, Obama would have had to actually start practicing it first.  But it’s ironic that Congressional Democrats believe they are putting aside their longstanding, magnanimous display of bipartisanship by resorting to sleazy use of a tactic called “reconciliation.”