Democrats' Criminalization of America's Health Care

ARRA News Service -Yesterday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other House democrats rolled out their health care plan called "America’s Affordable Health Choices." Part of their plan would force employers to offer workers health coverage or face severe fines. Also it would forcw individuals to participate in a health insurance plan or face penalties that would generally vary with their income level. Maybe it should have been called "Criminalizing of America's Health Care" or the "Destroy Individual Choices in Health Care."

The Heritage Foundation is reporting the cost of the bill at $1.3 Trillion. The bill is 1,018 pages and comes to $1.264 billion per page. It even includes universal abortion coverage at taxpayer expense. The Congressional Budget Office, not a conservative "right minded" think-tank, reported that the health care reform plan proposed by House Democrats on Tuesday will add more than $1 trillion ($1,042 billion) to the national federal budget deficit over 10 years (2010–2019) . And, this is only their preliminary estimate of the damage.

The CBO report states that its cost estimates are not comprehensive. They are only preliminary as administrative and other costs are not yet projected. Heritage advises, "But even this analysis understates the true costs of the bill. The CBO only scores bills on a ten-year time frame, and House Democrats have designed their bill to obscure the catastrophic long-term fiscal path on which it places our country."

Heritage identifies that according to the CBO, the cost for the first four years is just $84 billion, but then it accelerates sharply. By 2019, the new entitlement is set to cost American taxpayers $254 billion. So while many Americans may look at the $1.3 trillion price tag over ten years and conclude the plan will cost $130 billion a year, in reality it will cost nearly double that. By backloading all the spending, the House is hiding the true cost of their plan from the American people. Between 2018 and 2019, federal costs for the new entitlement and the enlargement of Medicaid would increase by a combined 8.9%.

Last week CNS News reported that Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY) introduced legislation calling for a $540-billion tax hike to pay for the health plan that President Barack Obama insists will be “deficit neutral.” This tax is a new surtax on households earning $350,000 and above. It starts at 1%, bumping up to 1.5% at $500,000 in income and to 5.4% at $1 million. Since many small business owners fall within this income range, this surtax will also be a huge job killer.

The Washington Post writes: [T]here is no case to be made for the House Democratic majority’s proposal to fund health-care legislation through an ad hoc income tax surcharge for top-earning households. …There is simply no way to close the gap by taxing a handful of high earners. … Pretending that “the rich” alone can fund government, let alone the kind of activist government that the president and Congress envision, is bad policy any way you look at it.

Summary: President Obama, Democrats in Congress, powerful special interests and influential lobbyists are hard at work in Washington, D.C. trying to drastically change our current health care system. They are seeking to replace it with a "nationalized health care " system where the politicians and government officials will dictate the kind of medical services you and your family receive and the rules under which you access care and coverage. Read : Patients First - Vote No on Government Run Health Care and then take action.

Holding the Left Accoubtable on Energy Prices

ARRA News Service - Conn Carroll, The Foundry, Morning Bell: The most important thing to remember as the debate over energy prices becomes a major issue in 2008 is that liberals want Americans to pay higher energy prices. That is why they sue to stop natural gas drilling in Wyoming, new refineries in South Dakota and coal power plants nationwide . The whole purpose of the Lieberman-Warner carbon capping bill was to increase the cost of energy to force Americans to use less of it. But now Americans are beginning to catch on to the left’s game, and they are not happy.

According to Rasmussen Reports, 67% of voters believe that offshore drilling should be allowed, and 64% believe lifting the ban on offshore drilling will lead to lower gas prices. A new Reuters poll found that 60% of Americans favor more domestic drilling and refinery construction to cool record prices. Facing an American public increasingly hostile to their energy policy, liberals in Congress are scrambling to find new arguments and policy proposals that can provide them with a patina of political cover. They include:

Lifting bans on domestic oil production will not lower energy prices. This liberal argument comes in two forms: 1) developing X oil well will not lower the price of gas and 2) it will take 10 years for the increased supply to lower prices. These arguments are especially pernicious because applied to each oil project today, they are technically true. However, if the test for developing any single oil field was whether it alone would lower the price of gas, then no oil field would ever be developed. Drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge will not lower gas substantially by itself, but there is so much more oil currently banned from production. Also, as the Washington Post’s Steven Pearlstein points out: “In energy, as with all commodity markets, prices are set at the margin — based on the last transaction — and short-run demand doesn’t change much in response to price fluctuations. In such markets, even small changes in supply can have a big impact on price.” Finally, liberal complaints that lifting domestic drilling bans today would take years to increase supply are completely unpersuasive since liberals have been making the same argument in support of oil production bans for decades now.

Oil companies leave billions of acres of already leased land idle. This incredibly deceptive argument is new to the left’s anti-energy arsenal. It is true that, as the left claims, oil companies already have 33 billion acres of offshore leases they are not currently drilling on. But these lands are far from idle. Oil production takes time and requires years of exploration and permitting. Oil companies are already paying billions of dollars every year for land they are exploring, and under current law, if they do not begin drilling by the time their lease is up, they lose their right to drill. This does not mean there are not billions of barrels of more profitable oil in banned areas. The Department of the Interior estimates that their are 19.1 billion barrels of oil and 83.9 trillion cubic feet of gas in the banned areas Outer Continental Shelf alone.

Speculators are to blame for the high price of gas. When all else fails, blame the moneychangers. This argument predates not only the environmental movement, but the country itself. As American Enterprise Institute scholar Kevin Hassett points out, Milton Friedman dealt with this specious claim in 1953: “If speculators know that the price of something is going to go up a month from now, they buy today. If they are correct, they make money, and the price change is smoothed by the higher demand today. … If speculators are, as is popularly believed, brilliant tacticians who are making a killing, then their activities are stabilizing. Speculation is good.”

Already there are cracks in left’s unity on the drilling issue. Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA) has co-sponsored a bill with Sen. John Warner (R-VA) to lift the ban on natural gas production off the coast of Virginia. More importantly though, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is refusing to even allow the House to vote on lifting the offshore drilling ban. She must know many from her own party would vote for the measure. After all, they would only be responding to the fact that their constituents are eager to hold them accountable on the issue. [Source]