Post-American Presidency (37 page)

Yet despite the fact that, as Gray noted, “when Wolf Blitzer posed this question to David Axelrod, one of your top advisors, even Mr. Axelrod could find no objection,” such a suggestion will gain no traction with Obama.
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That’s because Obama’s health-care reform plan was not really about improving America’s health-care system. Obama was not searching dispassionately for a plan that he would endorse simply on its merits, because it solved more problems with the existing system than did other plans. No, he was not doing that, because reforming health care was not really the point.

The point, rather, was controlling one sixth of the American economy. Obama’s health-care proposal had little to do with improving health care and everything to do with control. It offered no genuine fixes to the weaknesses in an exemplary health-care system, the envy of
the world. Obama’s plan was not about making health care healthier; it was about seizing 20 percent of the American economy.

But in response to this unprecedented power grab, for the first time in modern American history tens of thousands of hitherto nonpolitical Americans were taking to the streets, to town hall meetings, and to the Mall in Washington, D.C., to protest against the “stimulus” program and Obamacare. They were derided, dismissed, and summarily ignored—at best. It was a uniquely un-American response to a uniquely American moment. It was a turning point for America.

Interestingly enough, the Democrats’ health-care strategy appeared to be the brainchild of Robert Creamer, former head of Citizen Action/Illinois, and yet another Alinskyite socialist in the Obama camp. While serving time in federal prison for bank fraud and tax evasion, Creamer wrote a political manifesto entitled
Listen to Your Mother: Stand Up Straight! How Progressives Can Win
. The book carries an endorsement from, among other top Democrats, Obama aide David Axelrod, who said it provided “a blueprint for future victories.”

In the book, Creamer lays out a ten-point plan to compel the American people to accept socialized health care:

• “We must create a national consensus that health care is a right, not a commodity; and that government must guarantee that right.”
  
• “We must create a national consensus that the health care system is in crisis.”
  
• “Our messaging program over the next two years should focus heavily on reducing the credibility of the health insurance industry and focusing on the failure of private health insurance.”
  
• “We need to systematically forge relationships with large sectors of the business/employer community.”
  
• “We need to convince political leaders that they owe their elections, at least in part, to the groundswell of support of [
  sic
  ] universal health care, and that they face political peril if they fail to deliver on universal health care in 2009.”
  
• “We need not agree in advance on the components of a plan, but we must foster a process that can ultimately yield consensus.”
  
• “Over the next two years, we must design and organize a massive national field program.”
  
• “We must focus especially on the mobilization of the labor movement and the faith community.”
  
• “We must systematically leverage the connections and resources of a massive array of institutions and organizations of all types.”
  
• “To be successful, we must put in place commitments for hundreds of millions of dollars to be used to finance paid communications and mobilization once the battle is joined.”
  

And: “To win we must not just generate understanding, but emotion—fear, revulsion, anger, disgust.”
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This has, of course, been exactly the Democrats’ plan of action.

But the American people were in no mood to go gently into the night. This cynical plan was met with informed and passionate opposition.

SARAH PALIN AND THE DEATH PANELS

The Republican Party’s 2008 vice presidential candidate, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, quickly emerged as the most trenchant and effective critic of the Obama administration in its first year.

She embodied the angry patriot fighting for her beloved country. She gave voice to the voiceless. She bypassed a hostile, mendacious
media and posted her positions directly to her Facebook page, where no left-wing propagandist editor could slice and dice her remarks.

She embarrassed the post-American president by pointing out that his health-care plan included what came popularly to be known as “death panels”—tribunals that would decide whether elderly and disabled people merited health care at all.

On August 7, 2009, she pointed out that nationalized health care would lead to health-care rationing: “The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.”

Palin said that the stakes couldn’t be higher: “Nationalizing our health care system is a point of no return for government interference in the lives of its citizens. If we go down this path, there will be no turning back. Ronald Reagan once wrote, ‘Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.’”
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Obama shot back three days later with a response out of the Alinsky playbook, laced with ridicule: “The rumor that’s been circulating a lot lately is this idea that somehow the House of Representatives voted for death panels that will basically pull the plug on grandma because we’ve decided that we don’t… it’s too expensive to let her live anymore.” He said that such fears were completely groundless: “It turns
out that I guess this arose out of a provision in one of the House bills that allowed Medicare to reimburse people for consultations about end-of-life care, setting up living wills, the availability of hospice, etc. So the intention of the members of Congress was to give people more information so that they could handle issues of end-of-life care when they’re ready on their own terms. It wasn’t forcing anybody to do anything.”
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Palin, however, replied that the section of the House bill to which Obama was referring, Section 1233 of HR 3200, entitled “Advance Care Planning Consultation,” authorized “advanced care planning consultations for senior citizens” that would ultimately have a “coercive effect.” She said that it was understandable that “senior citizens might view such consultations as attempts to convince them to help reduce health care costs by accepting minimal end-of-life care.” She quoted New York state senator Ruben Diaz, a Democrat and chairman of the New York State Senate Aging Committee: “Section 1233 of House Resolution 3200 puts our senior citizens on a slippery slope and may diminish respect for the inherent dignity of each of their lives.… It is egregious to consider that any senior citizen… should be placed in a situation where he or she would feel pressured to save the government money by dying a little sooner than he or she otherwise would, be required to be counseled about the supposed benefits of killing oneself, or be encouraged to sign any end of life directives that they would not otherwise sign.”
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Palin wasn’t the only one concerned about the death panels.
The
Wall Street Journal
backhandedly agreed with her, noting in an editorial that “elderly Americans are turning out in droves to fight ObamaCare,” and that while it believed that “claims about euthanasia and ‘death panels’” were “over the top,” nonetheless, “senior fears have exposed a fundamental truth about what Mr. Obama is
proposing: Namely, once health care is nationalized, or mostly nationalized, rationing care is inevitable, and those who have lived the longest will find their care the most restricted.” The
Journal
acknowledged that “Mrs. Palin has also exposed a basic truth. A substantial portion of Medicare spending is incurred in the last six months of life. From the point of view of politicians with a limited budget, is it worth spending a lot on, say, a patient with late-stage cancer where the odds of remission are long? Or should they spend to improve quality, not length, of life? Or pay for a hip or knee replacement for seniors, when palliative care might cost less? And who decides?”
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In Barack Obama’s socialist America, the government would decide. Benevolent Big Brother would take your life in his hands.

RATIONING HEALTH CARE

The “death panels” weren’t by far the only problem with Obama’s health-care plan, nor the only sign that under the post-American president’s plan, health care would be rationed. In November 2009 the Heritage Foundation pointed out that “both the House and Senate versions of Obamacare create detailed new federal regulations that micromanage all health insurance decisions.” Fundamental to this micromanagement would be “cost control rationing,” which would be “the very heart of Obamacare’s promise to control health care costs.” This would necessitate the rationing of basic services; even before Obama’s plan became the law of the land, in that same month “the United States Preventive Services Task Force issued new guidelines recommending that women in their 40s no longer have annual mammograms and that women ages 50 to 74 have them only every other year, instead of annually.” According to the Heritage Foundation, this was in line with
the classification of mammograms as a “C” service (not recommended) rather than an “A” or “B” service (recommended).
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It was becoming increasingly clear that Sarah Palin had been right all along: Obama’s health-care plans would mean the rationing of basic health-care services, so that its cumulative effect would be not the extension of health-care benefits to all Americans, but rather their restriction from people who had once had access to them.

Obama’s “reforms” would cripple the health-care system and the American economy in general.

HEALTH-CARE REFORM BUT NO TORT REFORM?

Palin also observed that while many Americans favored health-care reform, “current plans being pushed by the Democratic leadership represent change that may not be what we had in mind—change which poses serious ethical concerns over the government having control over our families’ health care decisions. In addition, the current plans greatly increase costs of health care, while doing lip service toward controlling costs.” She pointed out that much of the high cost of medical care stemmed from the cost of the malpractice insurance that doctors had to buy to protect themselves from (often frivolous) lawsuits.

“Excessive litigation and waste in the nation’s current tort system,” said Palin, “imposes an estimated yearly tort tax of $9,827 for a family of four and increases health care spending in the United States by $124 billion.” Therefore, “you would think that any effort to reform our health care system would include tort reform, especially if the stated purpose for Obama’s plan to nationalize our health care industry is the current high costs. So I have new questions for the president: Why no legal reform? Why continue to encourage defensive
medicine that wastes billions of dollars and does nothing for the patients? Do you want health care reform to benefit trial attorneys or patients?”
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The answer was clear. Obama included no legal reform in his health-care plan because he didn’t care about improving health care for ordinary Americans at all.

JAIL FOR HEALTH-CARE DISSENTERS

Socialism is coercive by its very nature. The only way economic equality can be achieved in any population is through force. And Obama’s health-care plan, true to its thoroughgoing socialism, was ready to use that force in the name of the “basic human right” of health care.

The plan that the House of Representatives passed in November 2009 contained provisions for penalties of up to five years in prison for Americans who refused to buy health insurance that had been approved by the government. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that jail for health-care miscreants would be “very fair in this respect.”
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Asked about this, Obama saw nothing wrong with it, either: “What I think is appropriate is that in the same way that everybody has to get auto insurance and if you don’t, you’re subject to some penalty, that in this situation, if you have the ability to buy insurance, it’s affordable and you choose not to do so, forcing you and me and everybody else to subsidize you, you know, there’s a thousand dollar hidden tax that families all across America are—are burdened by because of the fact that people don’t have health insurance, you know, there’s nothing wrong with a penalty.”
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In saying that, Obama reversed himself on a position he had taken during his campaign. In a debate with his rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton, Obama said in 2008: “And I think that it is important for us to recognize that if, in fact, you are
going to mandate the purchase of insurance and it’s not affordable, then there’s going to have to be some enforcement mechanism that the government uses. And they may charge people who already don’t have health care fines, or have to take it out of their paychecks. And that, I don’t think, is helping those without health insurance.”
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But Barack Obama disagreed with Hillary Clinton only in order to curry favor with certain voters. Once elected, he changed his mind about mandates.

THE CULT OF PERSONALITY

Socialist states from the Soviet Union under Stalin and Communist China under Mao to Hitler’s National Socialist Germany are more often than not constructed around a cult of personality. The socialist paradise has to have a socialist hero, the perfect man who fully and completely embodies the ideals of the state.