With less than a month to go before President Obama is required by law to submit a budget to Congress (February 6th), Mr. Obama’s decision today to make Jack Lew White House chief of staff leaves deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Heather Higginbottom to take Mr. Lew’s place as the director of OMB.

As The Hill newspaper reports, Ms. Higginbottom has only served one month in her present role as deputy director of OMB and is considered a “controversial appointee” due to her thin–some would say “nonexistent”–budgetary resume.  Prior to becoming deputy director of OMB, Ms. Higginbottom was a deputy policy adviser to President Obama and worked on his campaign as a policy director.

But it was Ms. Higginbottom’s lackluster performance during a March Senate Budget Committee hearing that raised Republican concerns about whether Ms. Higginbottom was even qualified to serve as deputy director of OMB.

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From The Hill:

More than two-thirds of voters say the United States is declining, and a clear majority think the next generation will be worse off than this one, according to the results of a new poll commissioned by The Hill.

A resounding 69 percent of respondents said the country is “in decline,” the survey found, while 57 percent predict today’s kids won’t live better lives than their parents. Additionally, 83 percent of voters indicated they’re either very or somewhat worried about the future of the nation, with 49 percent saying they’re “very worried.”

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I’m going to take the death panel end-of-life planning conundrum down one point at a time to make this very clear for Americans to understand what the Pelosi-led Democrats have done to your healthcare and their attempt to take cover under a Bush-era law–the Medicare Improvement for Patients and Providers Act of 2008.

The Hill reported that the Obama White House attempted to calm Americans’ fears of the dreaded death panels:

The Medicare policy will pay doctors for holding end-of-life-care discussions with patients, according to the Times. A similar provision was dropped from the new healthcare reform law after Republicans accused the administration of withholding care from the sick, elderly and disabled.

However, an administration spokesman said the regulation, which is less specific than the reform law’s draft language, is actually a continuation of a policy enacted under former President George W. Bush.

“The only thing new here is a regulation allowing the discussions … to happen in the context of the new annual wellness visit created by [healthcare reform],” Obama spokesman Reid Cherlin told The Wall Street Journal.

In 2003, Medicare added a consultation visit for seniors new to the program, according to the Journal. Another 2008 law, enacted under Bush, said the visit can include “end-of-life” planning discussions.

However, what The Hill’s Jason Millman forgot to mention in his article was that President Bush VETOED the 2008 bill and the Democrats, along with some “good-willed” Republicans OVERRODE Bush’s veto forcing him to sign the legislation into law.  The bill dealt with doctors’ reimbursements and more, but the Democrats slipped in the end-of-life planning by opening up the Social Security Act, which I have stated many times is dangerous. Once the act is changed, it is difficult to amend again and allows for tinkering with the Medicare fee schedule and covered services definitions and requirements

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The Hill is reporting that Senator Tom Harkin, chairman of the Senate Health Committee, stated that negotiators from the White House, Senate and House reached a final deal on healthcare reform days before Scott Brown’s win in Massachusetts.

From the article:

Labor leaders had announced an agreement with White House and congressional representatives over an excise tax on high-cost insurance plans on the Thursday before the special election.

Harkin said “we had an agreement, with the House, the White House and the Senate. We sent it to [the Congressional Budget Office] to get scored and then Tuesday happened and we didn’t get it back.” He said negotiators had an agreement in hand on Friday, Jan. 15.

Harkin made clear that negotiators had reached a final deal on the entire bill, not just the excise plans, which had been reported the previous day, Jan. 14.

Harkin said the deal covered the prescription-drug “donut hole,” the level of federal insurance subsidies, national insurance exchanges and federal Medicaid assistance to states.

This cannot be right.

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Transparency be damned.  It seems as if many of the elites in Washington, D.C. were for transparency before they were against it.

President Barack Obama, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid all promised and pledged transparency as part of a covenant with the American people to allow them to take power.  Those promises have been broken.  One Senior Congressional Staffer tells Big Government that “for elected officials that promised the most transparent Congress ever, I never believed them, but it is stunning how fast they are going back on their promises as if they think the voters are too dumb to remember things they said 3 years ago.” (more…)