Excerpts/articles of significance:
American Family Association:
Here is a copy of the ObamaCare health plan. You better read it because you will be forced to live with it!
July 31, 2009
Here is an overview of the ObamaCare health care bill (HR 3200) which Congress is about to force every citizen to live under, except members of Congress. Members of Congress will be exempt from being forced into this plan. They will have their own. The liberals, Democrats and some Republicans - while forcing you to join the plan - refuse to include themselves. Members of Congress will have a better plan which gives them freedom you will be denied. You can read an updated and revised overview of HR 3200 compiled by Liberty Counsel. Or, go to the full text of HR 3200 and read directly from the government website what this bill does!
Washington Times:
Obama rebuts 'phony claims' about plan
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President Obama used his weekly radio address Saturday to directly address and shoot down myths and distortions that are flying around the Internet about the pending health care proposal.
Mr. Obama said health care is important and that makes it no surprise there is an engaged debate going on in America over the plans.
But he added, "It should be an honest debate, not one dominated by willful misrepresentations and outright distortions, spread by the very folks who would benefit the most by keeping things exactly as they are."
"Let's start with the false claim that illegal immigrants will get health insurance under reform. That's not true," he said, a few days after his former campaign apparatus now run by the Democratic National Committee started a Web site to combat that and other rumors.
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Mr. Obama ticked off the other falsehoods such as that the bill would establish "death panels," and said contrary to rumor nothing will alter the ban on using taxpayer money for abortions.
"These are phony claims meant to divide us," he said.
The president said "it's not true" that the plan would amount to government takeover of health care, adding the source of that fear is confusion over a public insurance option he wants included in the bill.
"This is one idea among many to provide more competition and choice, especially in the many places around the country where just one insurer thoroughly dominates the marketplace," he said. "This alternative would have to operate as any other insurer, on the basis of the premiums it collects. … It would be just an option; those who prefer their private insurer would be under no obligation to shift to a public plan."
He said the health care proposal would help families and said the final plan would make coverage more affordable and portable and that insurers would no longer be able to deny people due to preexisting conditions. The plan would require insurers to cover routine checkups and preventive care such as mammograms and colonoscopies, he said.
Mr. Obama also offered his refrain of late that the most important changes are tough to accomplish.
"It has never been easy, moving this nation forward," he said in closing. "There are always those who oppose it, and those who use fear to block change. But what has always distinguished America is that when all the arguments have been heard, and all the concerns have been voiced, and the time comes to do what must be done, we rise above our differences, grasp each others' hands, and march forward as one nation and one people, some of us Democrats, some of us Republicans, all of us Americans."
The president spends Saturday at Camp David before heading to Martha's Vineyard for a weeklong vacation with his family.
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Pelosi Says House Health Measure Needs Public Option (Update1)
By Kristin Jensen and Catherine Dodge
Aug. 21 (Bloomberg) -- House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said legislation to revamp the U.S. health-care system won’t get through her chamber unless it creates a government-run insurance program to compete with the private industry.
“There’s no way I can pass a bill in the House of Representatives without a public option,” the California Democrat said at a press conference in San Francisco yesterday.
Pelosi drew a line in the sand on one of the most contentious issues surrounding the health-care overhaul after Obama administration officials earlier suggested the White House might be willing to back away from the public option to win broader support. Republicans and even some Democrats have said the idea is a nonstarter in the Senate.
“The government-run plan would turn into a bureaucratic nightmare,” Senator Mike Enzi, a Wyoming Republican, wrote in a USA Today opinion piece on Aug. 19. “In the finance committee, six of us leading the negotiations are working from the premise that there will not be a government-run plan.”
Enzi last night joined in a call with the five other senators in a group led by finance committee Chairman Max Baucus that’s trying to craft a health-care plan. The panel is the only one of five congressional panels with jurisdiction over health care that is attempting to find a bipartisan compromise.
They’ll Meet Again
“Our discussion included an increased emphasis on affordability and reducing costs, and our efforts moving forward will reflect that focus,” Baucus said in a statement last night after the telephone meeting. He said the six senators plan to convene again before coming back to Washington in September.
The group’s effort is getting more complicated as lawmakers face protests at home and as proposals such as the public option draw fire. Supporters say a government plan is the best way to bring down costs and insure more people; opponents say it would expand the role of government too much and undercut the market for companies such as Indianapolis-based WellPoint Inc.
Obama yesterday reiterated his support for the proposal.
“If we have a public option in there, that can help keep insurers honest,” he told a group of Democratic Party community organizers in Washington.
Continuing the push for his top domestic priority, Obama asked the activists who helped his 2008 campaign to organize neighbors to support the health-care effort and urged them not to “lose heart as we enter into probably our toughest fight.”
Ratings Fall
Obama’s approval ratings have fallen as the health-care debate has intensified in contentious town-hall meetings held by Democratic lawmakers across the U.S. Obama, who spoke at three town halls last week, told supporters their help is needed to correct misperceptions.
The president said he’s willing to work with Republicans, while adding “there are some people who for partisan reasons just want to see this go down.”
A Washington Post-ABC News poll released today found that half of Americans oppose changes to the health system based on what they know about the proposals, compared with 45 percent who support them. Still, when asked about whether they would support a government-run option, 52 percent of poll respondents said they would, compared with 46 percent who wouldn’t.
The fissures between the chambers and the parties raise the possibility that Democrats might try to use their majorities in the House and Senate to pass legislation on their own. In the Senate, that means they would likely have to use a process known as reconciliation, which is designed for budget issues and requires only a majority of votes for passage.
‘Never Stopped Talking’
“We’ve never stopped talking about reconciliation,” Senator Ben Cardin, a Maryland Democrat, said in an interview. “It’s by far not the preferred option.”
Obama and top congressional Democrats say they favor a bipartisan approach yet have pledged to pass the legislation by the end of the year.
“We will not make a decision to pursue reconciliation until we have exhausted efforts to produce a bipartisan bill,” Jim Manley, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, said on Aug. 19. “‘However, patience is not unlimited and we are determined to get something done this year.”
Senators have started conferring with their parliamentarian about potential problems with reconciliation, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer told reporters on a conference call today.
Finance Panel
The Senate finance panel is the only one still working on a plan. Three committees in the House and one in the Senate have approved their versions of the legislation on party-line votes.
Unlike those committees, the finance group is leaning against a mandate on employers to cover workers or pay a penalty. Instead of a public option, the senators on the panel are considering allowing the creation of nonprofit cooperatives with government seed money.
There’s also the question of how to pay for a plan that may cost $1 trillion over 10 years. House Democrats want to increase taxes on the wealthiest Americans; the Senate negotiators are weighing a tax on the most-generous health plans.
“Something as big and important as health-care legislation should have broad-based support,” Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, the top Republican negotiator, said Aug. 19. “So far, no one has developed that kind of support, either in Congress or at the White House. We should keep working.”
Besides Baucus, Grassley and Enzi, the Senate negotiators include Republican Olympia Snowe of Maine and Democrats Kent Conrad of North Dakota and Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico.
House Changes
Hoyer, a Maryland Democrat, today said House leaders are considering changes to their plan, including raising the threshold for a proposed surtax on the wealthy to those earning at least $500,000 a year from $350,000. He sounded a different note on the public option than Pelosi.
“I’m for a public option, but I’m also for passing a bill,” Hoyer said. “We believe the public option is a necessary, useful and very important aspect of this, but you know we’ll have to see because there are many important aspects of the bill.”
Pelosi yesterday said lawmakers have to pass a comprehensive bill rather than a watered-down compromise.
“Frankly, I don’t know when we’d do it if we don’t take that giant step now,” she said.
To contact the reporters on this story: Kristin Jensen in Washington at kjensen@bloomberg.net; Catherine Dodge in Washington at cdodge1@bloomberg.net
Last Updated: August 21, 2009 14:54 EDThttp://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aFIyTVjB3cX0
Politico
Obama's Big Bang could go bust
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- Some Democrats point to a decision in June as the first vivid sign of trouble for Obama. Photo: AP photo composite by POLITICO
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Barack Obama’s Big Bang is beginning to backfire, as his plans for rapid, once-in-a-generation overhauls of energy, financial regulation and health care are running into stiff resistance, both in Washington and around the country.
The Obama theory was simple, though always freighted with risk: Use a season of economic anxiety to enact sweeping changes the public likely wouldn’t stomach in ordinary times. But the abrupt swing in the public’s mood, from optimism about Obama’s possibility to concern he may overreaching, has thrown the White House off its strategy and forced the president to curtail his ambitions.
Some Democrats point to a decision in June as the first vivid sign of trouble for Obama. These Democrats say the White House, in retrospect, made a grievous mistake by muscling conservative Democrats in swing districts vote for a cap-and-trade energy bill that was very unpopular among their constituents.
Many of those members were pounded back home because Democrats passed a bill Republicans successfully portrayed as a big tax increase on consumers. The result: many conservative Democrats were gun-shy about taking any more risky votes — or going out on a limb on health care.
The other result: The prospects for winning final passage of a cap-and-trade bill this year are greatly diminished. And, while most Democrats still predict a health care bill will pass this year, it is likely to be a shadow of what Obama once had planned.
“The majority-makers are the freshman and sophomores from conservative districts where there’s this narrative building about giveaways, bailouts and too much change at once,” said a top House Democratic strategist, who requested anonymity to discuss internal politics candidly. “There’s this big snowball building in those districts. That’s why those folks are so scared."
David Axelrod, Obama’s political architect, said it was “very clear early in the transition” that Obama would have to attack a number of festering issues simultaneously.
“The times demanded it," he said in an interview. "We didn’t have the luxury of taking things sequentially, year after year, and hoping we got there. That’s the reason that all these major issues had been deferred for decades: Change is hard.”
Axelrod said the president is “looking forward to an active fall” when he returns from next week’s vacation on Martha’s Vineyard, and is not as worried about the outlook as the denizens of Washington, where “every day is election day.”
But the “Big Bang” theory of governance, as some White House insiders called it, is not without risk and consequences.
By doing so much, so fast, Obama gave Republicans the chance to define large swaths of the debate. Conservatives successfully portrayed the stimulus bill as being full of pork for Democrats. Then Obama lost control of the health care debate by letting Republicans get away with their bogus claims about “death panels.” The GOP also has successfully raised concerns that the Obama plan is a big-government takeover of health care — and much of Middle America bought the idea, according to polls.
By doing so much, so fast, Obama never sufficiently educated the public on the logic behind his policies. He spent little time explaining the biggest bailouts in U.S. history, which he inherited but supported and expanded. And then he lost crucial support on the left by not following up quickly with new and stricter rules for Wall Street. On Friday, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman echoed a concern widely shared among leading liberals. “I don’t know if administration officials realize just how much damage they’ve done themselves with their kid-gloves treatment of the financial industry, just how badly the spectacle of government supported institutions paying giant bonuses is playing.”
By doing so much so fast, Obama jammed the circuits on Capitol Hill. Congress has a hard time doing even one big thing well at a time. Congress is good at passing giveaways and tax cuts, but has not enacted a transformative piece of social legislation since President Bill Clinton’s welfare reform of 1996. “There’s a reason things up here were built to go slowly,” said another Democratic aide.
By doing so doing so much, so fast, he has left voters — especially independents — worried that he got an overblown sense of his mandates and is doing, well, too much too fast. A Washington Post-ABC News poll published Friday found that independents’ confidence in Obama’s ability to make the right decisions had dropped 20 points since the Inauguration, from 61 percent to 41 percent.
Axelrod and others argue Obama had no choice but to tackle all of these issues at once. That might be true for a stimulus bill and the bank and auto bailouts — but that case is harder to make for energy and health care, which have been the focus of intense debate for decades past and probably will for decades to come.
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