Posted on 08/12/2009 10:51:30 AM PDT by smoothsailing
Obama's Hoof-In-Mouth Disease
Larry Kudlow
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
It’s hard to know why President Obama said what he said at Tuesday’s health-care town hall in New Hampshire. He actually stated, “If you think about it, UPS and FedEx are doing just fine. It’s the Post Office that’s always having problems.”
Oops. Freudian slip? Subliminally speaking, was the president inferring that private health insurers are doing just fine?
Government insurance is what’s in trouble today. Medicare is in the hole by about $40 trillion on a discounted present-value basis over the next 40 or 50 years. And if we’re going to equate government care to government mail, according to Steve Hayes of the Weekly Standard, the U.S. Postal Service is going bankrupt with a $7 billion net loss this year. With 633,000 career employees, the Post Office won’t be able to make $5.4 billion in retiree health-benefit payments. How many of these federal employees will populate the new government-backed insurance plan if it passes?
So it’s something of a mystery why the president went down the FedEx/UPS/Post Office turnpike. Perhaps the inner Obama is a free-enterprise guy. Maybe in the heat of battle his private-sector FedEx/UPS endorsement kind of, well, slipped out unconsciously.
Some will be skeptical of this reasoning. But having once had dinner with the man, along with other conservative pundits, and knowing how carefully he parses his words, it’s hard to understand how he let this free-market blessing slip out. Perhaps he’s secretly competing with Joe Biden to win the hoof-in-mouth-disease contest.
Obama’s health-care gaffes are mounting. At a press conference a few weeks back, the president let fly with an attack on doctors who remove tonsils instead of handing out allergy pills. Since doctors are very popular in America, and with many Obamacare protesters opposed to putting government central planners between doctors and patients, this was a big mistake. Worth noting, at that same presser, Obama also put his foot in it by attacking the Cambridge police officer at the center of the Henry Louis Gates affair. More hoof-in-mouth.
Obama’s response in New Hampshire to the so-called death-board issue also was revealing. Some say these boards are tantamount to euthanasia for the elderly. Placards outside the meeting read: “Obamacare, Down the Chute Granny.” (Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin is spearheading this protest.)
Obama’s response? He says reform “would not basically pull the plug on grandma because we decided that it’s too expensive to let her live anymore.” But the House bill comes dangerously close to giving unelected health boards the power to pull that plug. And as policy students know, it’s not always the precise wording of legislation that counts, but the regulatory interpretations of laws that are made by federal and state officials.
So, in a sense, Obama’s denial was a non-denial denial. He should have unequivocally demanded that the death-board language be removed from any bill. But he didn’t -- perhaps because he agrees with it. In interviews earlier this year, the president said that while he would have fought for his own grandmother’s hip replacement, clinically he can see how these expensive decisions should not be made.
Grandma may indeed represent Obama’s biggest political problem right now. As Team Obama attempts to placate concerns at the CBO that health reform is a budget-buster, seniors are rightly worried that the Medicare program on which they depend will be ravaged by cost cuts.
Rasmussen now reports that elderly folks over 65 are against Obamacare by 56 to 39. That’s a bad number for Democrats who rely on seniors to maintain their governing coalition. Incidentally, polls also show that about 75 percent of Americans are satisfied with their health-care services, while 80 to 90 percent are happy with the whole U.S. health-care system.
It’s still tough to know whether this behemoth government takeover of heath care will actually pass. But two key markets are betting against it. First, over at the Intrade pay-to play online-betting parlor, the bid for the U.S. government health-plan contract is only 38 cents. That’s down from 50 cents in late July. Second, the share prices of big private health insurers have rallied in recent weeks. UnitedHealthcare is up 13 percent; Humana is up 12.4 percent; and Aetna is up almost 10 percent. These firms will be decimated if the government insurance plan passes. But investors are now predicting it won’t.
For the sake of economic freedom, liberty, and fiscal sanity, let’s hope the markets are right.
Copyright © 2009 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved.
It was a very disjointed, inarticulate and ignorant performance.
And people say Sarah Palin is the dummy?
post office is great example of what will happen with gove healthcare.....they cant manage money just like our government.....
Here’s the actual video clip of the Post Office comment:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2009/08/11/obama_the_post_office_is_always_having_problems.html
This freudian slip makes me believe that alleviating health care problems is not “the Messiah’s” goal, but bringing down America is.
Remember the last time you went to the post office?
Imagine what it would be like if that person was taking care of you in the hospital.
It’s part of the end of life plan. It will be so miserable you’ll be looking forward to end of life.
I think this townhall was a bigger disaster than his last not-ready-for-prime-time prime time show.
NOT TRUE. That protest was well underway before Sarah spoke up. Does she share the sentiment? you betcha. Is she perhaps the best-recognized person speaking out? ditto. Is the outrage being expressed against the death option organized? not so much. Sure, there are groups that picked up the rallying cry but there is NO TOP DOWN in this protest. God Bless her for speaking out but we know the left will use every opportunity to smear her and it does no good to pick up and use their language.
How will MSNBC cover it...hmmm... How bout..Ha Ha hey it was a joke...Good thing we have a President who is so human and like us..Ha Ha, giggle giggle. yuk yuk.
That would be this morning, when I almost got into an argument with a sloth-like clerk who tried to blame me for not having earlier picked up a certified letter that they (allegedly) tried to deliver repeatedly to my house between the hours of 9 am and 3:30 pm several weekdays. When will the PO learn that it's not 1955 anymore, and most people are not home during the day?
WHAT is she doing???
Hoof-in-mouth disease states it beautifully. If it’s not written down for him to read he has a very hard time getting the words out and when he does he makes himself the fool in many instances.
The president let it out that he ultimately wants to destroy America. He certainly does not want what is best for America, nor does he want to support the strengths of our country. After the Gaffe Master take. What I initially posted was my second take.
That NH town hall meeting wasn’t packed? That hall was so “packed”, they got every black person living in NH to stand in the crowd behind Obama for the cameras. All seven of them. If that was supposed to be a true representation of the state’s population based on race, it was definitely rigged. Less than 2 out of 100 in NH are black. LOL, so if that wasn’t representative, which it clearly was not, why should we believe them when they say nothing was rigged?
Thanks for the link. I heard it played on Roger Hedgecock’s show last night. Not much of a lawyer, if this is the best he can do making his case!
Obama Sells Health Care “Public Option” with Bankrupt Post Office Analogy
PORTSMOUTH, New Hampshire, August 11, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - President Barack Obama reassured Americans gathered at a town-hall style gathering in New Hampshire on Tuesday that a public-option in health care would not lead to the death of private insurance and rationing by telling them that private mail carriers, like UPS and Fed-Ex, have done just fine against the US Post Office. But comparing the government plan to a bankrupt postal service may not help a President who just slipped today under 50 percent approval in one poll.
“If you think about it, UPS and FedEx are doing just fine. It’s the Post Office that’s always having problems,” Obama told a questioner, who expressed concern that the public option would run private insurers out of business. Obama said that the public option would have to pay for itself and not through tax-increases leveled on the middle-class.
However, the US Post Office is having serious problems lately and that analogy could raise alarms about the future of government run health-care. The Post Office, which does not raise revenue through taxes, faces a $7 billion loss for this fiscal year, and is slated to close approximately 700 or more offices across the country.
[snip]
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2009/aug/09081108.html
http://www.classicalideals.com/HR3200.htm...As heard on Rush Limbaugh an hour ago.
Obama beats all I’ve ever read or seen with a President since the founding of this nation. He is one incredible person.
obama did NOT say he would have fought for his own Grandmother’s hip replacement. He was very ambivalent- only when he picked up signals he was getting onto thin ice, did he say “I would have paid for it out of my own pocket because she was my grandmother” (BS. Look at his noninvolvement in helping his own impoverished african kin)
READ THE INTERVIEWS. Obama as candidate and now as President, has philosophized that such decisions should NOT be made on emotion, but by a board of “stakeholders” (HR 3200 language) based on practicality to society.
THIS IS COLD TO THE CORE. A watershed in how Govt “owns” decisions about individual life and its value ot the collective.
Excerpt from AARP article (!):
The Painful Side Effects of Obama’s Healthcare Reform http://bulletin.aarp.org/yourhealth/medicare/articles/the_painful_side_effects_of_obamas_healthcare_reform.htmlSide
“The scarcity of resources to pay for expensive medical procedures will only increase under a plan to extend medical benefits at federal expense to the 47 million Americans who lack health insurance. So why not save billions of dollars by killing off our own unproductive oldsters and terminal patients, or — since we aren’t likely to do that outright in this, the 21st century — why not simply ensure that they die faster by denying them costly medical care? The savings could then subsidize care for the younger and healthier.
Sound too draconian? Enter the ghost of Obama’s late maternal grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, who died of cancer at age 86 two days before her grandson’s election to the presidency. Dunham’s health issues first surfaced in a New York Times interview with the president on May 3. There, Obama questioned the appropriateness of a hip replacement that his grandmother had undergone after falling and breaking her hip shortly after being diagnosed with terminal cancer last year. The alternative to such surgery is typically excruciating pain and opiate dependency. Obama made it clear that he loved his granny and would have paid for the surgery out of his own pocket if he had to, but he said there ought to be a “conversation” over whether “sort of in the aggregate, society making those decisions to give my grandmother, or everybody else’s aging grandparents or parents, a hip replacement when they’re terminally ill is a sustainable model.” Obama suggested that such decisions be made not by patients or their relatives but by a “group” of “doctors, scientists, ethicists” who are not part of “normal political channels.”
Obama brought up his grandmother’s hip replacement a second time in his June 24 town hall event on healthcare on ABC. The “question was,” Obama said, “does she get hip-replacement surgery, even though she was fragile enough they were not sure how long she would last?” At that point I was thinking: If he says, “No hip replacement for you, Grams” one more time, it’s going to be a drinking game.
An audience member, Jane Sturm, told the story of her 99-year-old mother, who had initially been turned down for a pacemaker on account of her age. Sturm’s mother persuaded a second physician impressed with her joie de vivre to perform the life-extending operation — and she’s still hale today at age 105. “Outside the medical criteria,” Sturm asked, “is there a consideration that can be given for a certain spirit ... and quality of life?”
Nope. “I don’t think that we can make judgments based on people’s spirit,” Obama said. “That would be a pretty subjective decision to be making. I think we have to have rules that we are going to provide good, quality care for all people.”
I think she’s braying. That old guy with the Mr. Magoo glasses on who is peering into that big mouth of hers is Justice Stevens.
Think of cross-trained TSA employees having to change your diapers...
This should be required reading for any fool who "believes" in BamBamCare.
You’re right about the no top down part, and that’s a good thing. That’s what ultimately will defeat Obamacare.
Sarah Palin is part of the grassroots effort just like the rest of us, but she does have a dandy megaphone.
Exactly!
I like this line from an article I posted last night...
“Barack Obama mastered Alinsky tactics of campaigning for power and working the crowds down to the last little letter, but he absolutely has no plan of governance, no workable solutions, and can’t even talk about such things without a live-feed teleprompter glued to each hip.”
And hey, since the PO is running low on bucks, they’ll close Saturday and stop mail delivery those days.
So a “Public Option” would just shut down its hospitals on Saturdays to cut their debt?
I heard the tickets weren’t restricted to supporters only... but, according to news sources that didn’t have a clue about what they were disclosing - they were distributed by “community organizers”.
...”If that was supposed to be a true representation of the state’s population based on race, it was definitely rigged. Less than 2 out of 100 in NH are black.”...
Guess Rahm, Axelrod, and the boys aren’t so smart after all...who’d a thunk???
Tonsillectomies aren't done for anything related to allergies AFAIK. 0bama is redefining political intellect down below the grade school level.
Sure, why not. They could also work government hours, say 9 to 5 with an hour for lunch and all government holidays, sick leave, etc.
Of course, in order to serve the public good, they will have illness schedulers to make sure you don't show up when the hospital is closed.
Obama is a walking, talking gaffe machine. But I guess he says them so smoothly, nobody notices. (smirk) Actually as conservatives know, when The Great Spreader is not reading from Totus, he has quite a few er, ahs, and halting starts mixed in with his lies.
Or health care appointments like retiree dental care back when it was available in Oklahoma in the mid 80s. Around mid month they’d open the phone lines for an hour or so that DH used to refer to as “dialing for dentures.” The lucky few who got through got an appointment. Once all the appointments were gone (usually less than an hour later) the line essentially closed. Try again next month - maybe you’ll get lucky.
Remember your lessons in parsing Clintonese. 0bama is a lawyer too. He only eliminated one specifically worded rationale for "pulling the plug on grandma." He didn't say that bureaucrats would not decide when and why to pull her plug. They will, that's how government works. Bureaucrats administer programs and do the bean counting for gov run programs. Period.
And as policy students know, it’s not always the precise wording of legislation that counts, but the regulatory interpretations of laws that are made by federal and state officials.
Which is why the wording is deliberately vague in HR 3200 so that bureaucrats can fill in all of the details later at their discretion.
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doesn’t he realize that he just admitted by default that private enterprise left to grow and nationalize itself without bounds can do anything better than the government?
IOWs we can't even take a doctor's opinion that a patient has a chance for a good prognosis (much less the patient's opinion or the family's) we should just decide based on a sterile checklist formulated by a government bean counter. One size fits all.
That is not health care. That has no place in the healing arts. That is a model for an army procurement officer running a supply depot.
Or they just ignore it and move along.
His hand picked, planted audience were too dazzled by winks to even notice.
“What an ultra- maroon...” B. Bunny
No they have to defend. They have the best criminal defense lawyers behind the scenes figuring out the “spin”.
And part of what we want to do is to make sure that those decisions are being made by doctors and medical experts based on evidence, based on what works -- because that's not how it's working right now. That's not how it's working right now. Right now doctors a lot of times are forced to make decisions based on the fee payment schedule that's out there.So if they're looking -- and you come in and you've got a bad sore throat, or your child has a bad sore throat or has repeated sore throats, the doctor may look at the reimbursement system and say to himself, you know what, I make a lot more money if I take this kid's tonsils out. Now that may be the right thing to do, but I'd rather have that doctor making those decisions just based on whether you really need your kid's tonsils out or whether it might make more sense just to change -- maybe they have allergies, maybe they have something else that would make a difference.
So you have docs being insulted like some shyster lawyers over an implausible medical scenario - pediatricians, family and general practicioners, who most likely don't have the training, doing a tonsillectomy as a therapeutic trial for more money when the diagnosis isn't certain.
The paragraphs are about ten paragraphs before the "stupidly" comment almost at the end.
I have been a pretty harsh critic of allopathic medicine and doctors for some time but those statements are absurd. Not only absurd but rambling and incoherent. I think you’re right that it sounds like a criticism of shyster lawyers. Doctors do not have the mindset to make decisions that way. Although they certainly might after everything becomes government run.
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