More than 100 staff members appointed by three Minnesota congressmen who serve as chairman or ranking member on powerful House committees appear to be exempt from a key requirement in the controversial health care reform bill recently passed by Congress and signed into law.

If I had a dollar for every time some tool during the health care debate brought up how “we’re the only industrialized” nation in the world without socialized health care I’d have a lot of money. Why, I could even retire from my current job of poisoning the environment and taking advantage of the working man. I could, you know, relax.

Even the U.K., the drones blather, has government run health care. I guess they think we can identify better with the U.K. because they’re mostly white and speak English. I don’t know. I won’t waste any time trying to figure out the left’s thought process. Doing so would be as dangerous and pointless as trying to decipher the Necronomicon.

Invoking the U.K. as a model should, naturally, have the opposite effect on the American psyche. I hate to bring it up, but we kinda fought a war a couple hundred years ago to insure that we were NOT just like England. We already had the English life. We were right there and we rejected it.

Think of all the things we missed out on, only to aspire to end up in the same place. Our fish and chips are inferior. Guinness served over here is never quite as fresh. We don’t have tea time. I really like tea. We also ditched the cool accents. I mean seriously, I could have sounded like Ian McKellan or Sean Connery if it wasn’t for those clowns Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.

Thanks to the American Revolution we can’t claim Led Zepplin, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Arctic Monkeys, The Smiths, Blur or the Spice Girls as our own. James Bond is not our brother. Neither is Dr. Who. On top of it, I would probably be a Lord or Earl or something. Damn it, Lord Leigh Scott of Wauwatosa sounds freaking awesome! Thanks a lot Thomas Paine.

Jerks.

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Sunday, the House passed Speaker Pelosi’s vision of healthcare in America. Here is why I voted “no” and why the American people should re-examine the Democratic leadership of our nation.

First, I do not accept the premise that it is necessary to upend the health coverage currently available to all Americans for the sake of covering those who are uninsured. Expanding access to insurance is far less complex and far less costly than Democrats would have you believe. It does not involve a government takeover of 1/6th of the American economy. It involves insurance market reform but it also and more significantly involves providing choice and competition. The bill I support, the Patients’ Choice Act, provides the framework for such an effort. However, my views were not considered nor were the views of other lawmakers who sought to improve the system we have today. That’s because Nancy Pelosi and her liberal associates intend to destroy private healthcare with the ultimate goal of a Washington centered government healthcare monopoly.

Even before this monopoly takes its final form, the Democratic bill will speed our nation into financial crisis. Simply put, we can’t afford a new government healthcare program—a fact acknowledged by the President and Congressional Democrats. This is why they claim their reforms cost nothing; that it will actually reduce the debt. In truth, the bill conservatively spends a trillion dollars and the final toll on our budget will be many times greater than the initial cost. In their urgency to enact their plan, Democratic leaders papered over the financial problems we face with new government agencies and creative accounting gimmicks. Ultimately, the mechanisms created by this new law will force federal bureaucrats to ration benefits to control spending—a practice that is already common in government programs such as Medicaid.

Unchecked federal spending and the new entitlement just created should concern every American.

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Below is the just-released text of the House Reconciliation Bill. In the strange, ‘through the looking glass’ world that is the House Democrat Leadership, they will vote for these “fixes” to the Senate passed health care bill. In voting for these fixes, the House will ‘deem’ that the Senate Health Care bill is passed. See, the Democrats can vote for the fixes without having to vote for the bill that is being fixed.We already knew they don’t have to read bills to pass them. Now, they don’t have to vote for them either.

The Senate, then, will dutifully enact all of these “fixes,” by using elaborate procedural tricks and at least a couple votes to override the Senate Parliamentarian. Right, like that is going to happen.

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Via Roll Call

The Senate Parliamentarian has ruled that President Barack Obama must sign Congress’ original health care reform bill before the Senate can act on a companion reconciliation package, senior GOP sources said Thursday.

The Senate Parliamentarian’s Office was responding to questions posed by the Republican leadership. The answers were provided verbally, sources said.

House Democratic leaders have been searching for a way to ensure that any move they make to approve the Senate-passed $871 billion health care reform bill is followed by Senate action on a reconciliation package of adjustments to the original bill. One idea is to have the House and Senate act on reconciliation prior to House action on the Senate’s original health care bill.

Information Republicans say they have received from the Senate Parliamentarian’s Office eliminates that option. House Democratic leaders last week began looking at crafting a legislative rule that would allow the House to approve the Senate health care bill, but not forward it to Obama for his signature until the Senate clears the reconciliation package.

This just confirms what I’ve been saying all along: the House vote is the final vote.

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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is bluffing here when she says:

“Yes,” Pelosi said when asked if she believed the House would end up having the votes to approve healthcare.

“If we took it up today, yes,” the speaker quickly added.

The speaker still cautioned, though, that the timing and actual vote count on the bill couldn’t be entirely set in stone until the final legislative language was finalized and until the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) delivers its score of the bill’s impact.

There is no chance Pelosi has the votes to pass ObamaCare and she knows it. If she did have the votes, she would have already had the vote and wouldn’t need the “Slaughter Solution.”

House Rules Chairwoman Louise Slaughter is prepping to help usher the healthcare overhaul through the House and potentially avoid a direct vote on the Senate overhaul bill, the chairwoman said Tuesday. Slaughter is weighing preparing a rule that would consider the Senate bill passed once the House approves a corrections bill that would make changes to the Senate version. Slaughter has not taken the plan to Speaker Pelosi as Democrats await CBO scores on the corrections bill. “Once the CBO gives us the score we’ll spring right on it,” she said.

The Slaughter Solution has one very large obstacle–the Constitution Article I, Section 7–which states:

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The other day I exposed the fact that Harry Reid switched the language in the House-passed H.R. 3590 Service Members Home Ownership Tax Act of 2009 and inserted the Senate version of the healthcare bill via a manager’s amendment in order to meet the requirement that all legislation raising taxes must originate in the House.

The Senate passed the revised bill with the healthcare language in it, and now the House must revote on the deceptively gutted changed bill because, according to the Constitution, the identical bill must pass both the House and Senate in order to be signed into law.  And, once the Senate Health Care bill pass the House, President Obama will sign it right away.

The threat of reconciliation in the Senate is hollow. There isn’t going to be any reconciliation.

On January 31, 2010, before the House was set to take up the Senate bill, WH Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, during an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union” stated:

“If the House would take up the Senate bill then that bill would go to the president’s desk,” Gibbs said.

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Disgusted by President Obama’s liberal agenda, voters in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts went to the polls and replaced Democrats with Republicans to send a message to Washington. That message is: Stop.

Stop the rampant spending that threatens to send our country spiraling toward insolvency. Stop the rapid expansion of government that continues to encroach on our essential freedoms. And most of all stop trying to shove a radical health care “reform” bill designed to fundamentally restructure the U.S. economy down our throats.

The American people have spoken. The White House hasn’t heard their message.

Now Harry Reid is promising to pass a health care bill through the Senate in sixty days. President Obama is continuing to arrogantly push this radical legislation in the hope of creating a new entitlement program that will continue to nurture America’s dependency on Big Government. When America’s leadership has become so disconnected from Americans’ interests, the American people must stand up boldly in defense of their livelihoods and their liberties.

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Attempting to enact his big-government health care scheme, President Obama and his supporters frequently claimed that a “majority” of doctors supported his health-care plans.  When the American Medical Association – which had opposed HillaryCare – signed onto Obama’s plan last year, the organization seemed to make the President’s case.  Most people assumed that the AMA represented most of the doctors in the country.  But in fact, the AMA represents less than 20 percent of all physicians in the United States.  And yet as the organization’s leadership moved more to the left, it held a near monopoly on media attention on issues pertaining to public health.   No longer.

As the AMA has become increasingly politicized in recent years – issuing a statement in support of climate change, for example, in 2008 – a new group of doctors has risen to challenge them.  Like other anti-statist groups that have risen in opposition to the Obama-Reid-Pelosi agenda, Docs4PatientCare are challenging the AMA’s stranglehold on health care matters, just as other groups once challenged the right of the left-leaning American Bar Association to determine what judges are and are not qualified for the United States Supreme Court.  How Docs4PatientCare managed to barge its way into the closed-door meetings of Washington offers a lesson to other groups seeking to have a voice in their federal government.

Founded by Dr. Hal Scherz, a prominent Atlanta physician, the group of doctors expressed concern that like so many other professional groups, the AMA’s leadership have been  thoroughly “Washingtonized” – caring more about the pleadings of other lobbyists on K Street, White House invitations and Capitol Hill committee appearances than the professions they are supposed to represent.  As doctors have taken a battering over several decades from insurance companies, HMOS, and government agencies, Scherz says the AMA was a bystander.

“As the insurance companies become more and more impossible and government intrusion keeps growing, we’ve seen our delivery of care to our patients compromised and our incomes decrease,” he said.

But it was the AMA’s support for ObamaCare that really troubled Scherz and others in his field.

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Rahm Emanuel: "We were involved in the legislation all the way through."

Video by Real Clear Politics

Hours before his embattled boss gave his first State of the Union address, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel contradicted President Barack Obama’s claim made just two days before that he had nothing to do with the much maligned deal to get the vote of Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Nebraska) for the Senate’s healthcare bill just before Christmas.

Speaking to ABC News’ World News Tonight anchor Diane Sawyer in an exclusive interview on Monday, Obama denied being involved in what has come to be known as the “Cornhusker Kickback”

SAWYER: A lot of people think you must say at the end of the day, this is not who I was in 2008, these deals with Nebraska, with Florida…

OBAMA: Let’s hold on a second, Diane. I mean, I think that this gets into a big mush. So let’s just clarify. I didn’t make a bunch of deals. There is a legislative process that is taking place in Congress and I am happy to own up to the fact that I have not changed Congress and how it operates the way I would have liked. So that’s point number one.

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In Massachusetts, where 97% of us have health insurance by mandate since 2006, we have learned a few things about health care reform.

We have learned that universal coverage does not mean universal access to a doctor.  The Massachusetts Medical Society reports that there is a critical shortage of family physicians and severe shortage of internal medicine doctors.  Seven physician specialties are also operating in critical or severe physician labor markets.

A recent study by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation showed that 75% of non-emergency ER visits occurred because a regular physician was not available after hours, and half of these visits occurred because a timely appointment was unavailable.  With more than half of all the doctors trained in Massachusetts leaving the state, citing the practice environment and low salary levels, and one out of every four currently practicing doctors considering a career change, it does not appear that access issues are going to improve soon.

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Just before New Year’s, C-SPAN Chairman and CEO Brian Lamb sent a letter to Congressional leadership, requesting permission to televise negotiations around the final health care reform legislation. The letter was addressed to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, GOP Leader Rep. John Boehner, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and GOP Senate Leader Mitch McConnell.

The letter notes:

Now that the process moves to the critical stage of reconciliation between the Chambers, we respectfully request that you all the public full access, through television, to legislation that will affect the lives of every American.

C-SPAN Health Care Letter –

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From Bloomberg:

The Mayo organization had 3,700 staff physicians and scientists and treated 526,000 patients in 2008. It lost $840 million last year on Medicare, the government’s health program for the disabled and those 65 and older, Mayo spokeswoman Lynn Closway said.

Mayo’s hospital and four clinics in Arizona, including the Glendale facility, lost $120 million on Medicare patients last year, Yardley said. The program’s payments cover about 50 percent of the cost of treating elderly primary-care patients at the Glendale clinic, he said.

“We firmly believe that Medicare needs to be reformed,” Yardley said in a Dec. 23 e-mail. “It has been true for many years that Medicare payments no longer reflect the increasing cost of providing services for patients.”

Mayo will assess the financial effect of the decision in Glendale to drop Medicare patients “to see if it could have implications beyond Arizona,” he said.

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“Ever since Teddy Roosevelt first called for reform in 1912, seven presidents — Democrats and Republicans alike — have taken up the cause of reform time and time again,” President Obama said in a statement hailing the Christmas Eve Senate vote to take over 1/6 of the nation’s economy.  “Such efforts have been blocked by special-interests lobbyists who have perpetrated the status quo that works better for the insurance industry than it does for the American people.”

Note the date of TR’s “calling” for reform. It’s 1912.  Nationalized health care was part of the platform of the Progressive Party that year and every year thereafter. Americans are more familiar with the name Theodore himself gave to that third party bid. After being shot by a would-be assassin in Milwaukee, TR said it takes more than a single bullet to stop a Bull Moose. Instantly, the colorful sobriquet was applied to the Progressive Party.

What did Theodore himself think of his new-found allies, the Progressives? He was sincerely committed to reform. And he certainly thought he had been cheated out of the Republican Party presidential nomination in 1912. After all, he had won all the state party primaries in the limited number of states that held them. But TR also recognized that some of his Progressive supporters went over the top. For them, he coined the wonderful phrase, “the lunatic fringe.”

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Across the country, families are gathering to celebrate the holidays. They will reconnect, reflect on the year past and voice their hopes and dreams for the future. At the same time, the United States Senate meets in a rare Christmas Eve session to pass legislation that, if enacted, will forever change the relationship between Americans and their government.

If you want to see how Obamacare will hit you and your family in the wallet, look no further than the inside of your medicine cabinet.  Open the cabinet door and you may see an antihistamine such as Claritin for allergies, pain relief medicine such as Tylenol or Excedrin, Pedialyte to prevent your kids from becoming dehydrated when they are sick, and prenatal vitamins if you and your spouse are expecting another one.

All of these items in your cabinet have two things in common.  One is that they are classified as “over the counter” (OTC) medicines and available without a doctor’s prescription. The other is that if you pay for any of these items with money in your flexible spending account (FSA) or health savings account (HSA) – and according to this guide from FSA administrator Benesyst , all of these are eligible expenses  — you will face an effective tax increase of up to 40 percent on these items in the health care bill that passed the U.S. House of Representatives and is poised to pass the U.S. Senate.

Both bills restrict individuals with these pre-tax accounts to buying a “medicine or drug only if such medicine or drug is a prescribed” one. And ironically, this tax that will raise health care costs substantially by creating incentives for the use of more expensive prescription drugs even when OTC drugs are just as safe and effective.

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From FoxNews:

Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson, who has faced a heap of criticism for appearing to trade his vote on health care for millions in federal Medicaid money, said he’s considering asking that the Nebraska deal be stripped from the bill. But he said other senators are looking for special treatment in light of his success.

Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson, after securing a sweetheart deal for his state as part of the health insurance reform bill, said Tuesday that three other senators have told him they want to bargain for the same kind of special treatment.

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Jeebus H. Christ, it didn’t take long for the scope of ObamaCare to swell up like the ankles of a carnival fat lady after a day at work! ObamaCare isn’t even law yet, but Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) explains it all for us plainer than Sr. Mary Ignatius ever dared.

Despite the crappy housing market, the health care reform bill currently being debated in the Senate is only a “starter home,” you see. We’ve got to leverage the country into an unaffordable McMansion ASAP. Talking to the lefty Iowa Independent, the Daniel Ortega- and bee pollen-loving senator, gives a disturbing metaphor about the real goals of this historic (hysteric?) legislation:

“What we are buying here is a modest home, not a mansion. What we are getting here is a starter home. It’s got a good foundation: 30 million Americans are covered. It’s got a good roof: A lot of protections from abuses by insurance companies. It’s got a lot of nice stuff in there for prevention and wellness. But, we can build additions as we go along in the future. It is a starter home. Think about it in that way.”

More Harkinisms here.

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Government programs almost always end up costing much more than they were supposed to. They also usually end up doing more than they were supposed to. Would ObamaCare be any different?

Some say ObamaCare would lead to death panels, even euthanasia classes. But you don’t have to side with those who warn of euthanasia classes to recognize that government programs often end up doing all kinds of things that weren’t in politicians’ original plans.

Call it mission creep. Politicians pass a program, and then the scope of the program grows and changes.

It’s happened with everything from state-level health insurance plans to the Troubled Asset Relief Program. TARP’s original mission was spelled out in its name—the government would purchase troubled assets from financial institutions. However, just over a year later TARP’s mission has exploded, and billions in TARP funds have gone to bail out General Motors, Chrysler, and struggling homeowners. TARP money may even fund another stimulus.

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