Today is the six-month anniversary of the passage of President Obama’s signature legislation, what has come to be known as ObamaCare.  The White House is feting this semi-anniversary, but few Americans are in a mood to join the celebration.

Obama, who can be thin-skinned when people disagree with him, was downright irritated when the early polls showed that a majority of Americans opposed his health care “reform” bill.  On April 1, he criticized the polls as premature, saying “So before we find out if people like health care reform, we should wait to see what happens when we actually put it into place.  Just a thought.”

The problem with his argument is that the more Americans find out what is actually in this monstrosity of a bill, the less they like it.  Polls conducted by Rasmussen Reports show that 55 percent of the public supported the repeal of ObamaCare on March 25, just two days after its passage.  Today, a half-year later, the number of those favoring repeal has grown to 61 percent.

I am not one to call the President a liar.  I have too much respect for the office held by giants like George Washington and Ronald Reagan for that.  But I do believe that much of what Obama has said about his own health care bill is simply not true.  He claimed in Maine that people could keep their own health insurance, in Maryland that people could keep their own doctors.  In Washington, DC, he promised that his plan would cut costs but would not lead to the rationing of care.  He has consistently claimed that it would not fund abortions, and that its “end-of-life visits” would not lead to euthanasia.

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Did you ever wonder exactly what evidence-based medicine is? The National Center for Clinical Excellence bases it in on the philosophy “that as much medical practice as possible ought to be carried out using proven algorithms based on empirically valid evidence from controlled scientific experiments, rather than individual clinical judgment.”

Congressional health care reform relies heavily on both Evidence-based guidelines and evidence-based individual decision making to set the standards of care for medical treatment and outcomes. In fact, House bill 3962, in an effort to control costs, creates a new layer of government bureaucracy that inserts itself between the doctor and the patient. A national health commissioner and task forces will evaluate and decide everything from what medications a physician will be allowed to prescribe for a patient, to what surgery will be approved, to what outcomes will be expected for a particular medical condition. The ‘universal healthcare Czar’ along with the task forces will also decide whether or not hospitals will be reimbursed for care rendered based on predetermined outcomes. For example, if a patient is re-admitted within a prescribed number of days after discharge, the hospital will not be reimbursed for care given. It does not take into account factors such as how ill a patient may be. This new layer of government effectively removes the power of the individual physician and patient to decide what is the best course of treatment.

Why should you care?

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So he came in as a great recruiter, a great builder, a new innovator, already with the rings on his finger, the prizes around his neck, and he was going to make everything better — but then he started losing people, right and left, and the team he built crumbled. It’s time we started asking: is Barack Obama going to end up like Charlie Weis? We’re talking health care policy on the latest edition of Coffee and Markets, a daily podcast from The New Ledger on politics, policy and the marketplace with Francis Cianfrocca, brought to you by BigGovernment.com.

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Related Links:

RCP: Long, Bitter Debate for Health Care Bill
FT: Expected Reform Savings Disappoint
WSJ: Costs Will Stay the Same or Rise for Most Individuals
WSJ: Obama Hasn’t Accomplished Nothing