"Notes and Quotes"

One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man. - Elbert Hubbard

Friday, September 11, 2009

The Public Option

09/09/09
By Matt Schwartz

As the Democrats scramble to sell their misguided health care reform package, they are trying to convince Americans that a public health care option is great for Americans because it merely offers them yet another choice in health care insurance in what is now a severely limited market of suppliers. A video of Robert Reich (former Secretary of Labor under President Clinton) is now circulating on YouTube and other social media wherein he explains simply that right now, a consumer has but a few insurance companies from which to choose for health care. By adding a public option to the mix, we are merely giving people another choice for their health care insurance provider, and if they don't like the government plan, they don't have to use it. He then goes on to explain that anyone else who opposes this ostensibly innocuous benefit is either aligned with the evil insurance and pharmaceutical companies or they simply want to obstruct the president for purely political purposes, that is to say, for no "legitimate purposes". (Understandably, Mr. Reich does not mention whether he, as a Democrat, may have a political incentive for SUPPORTING this health care bill regardless of its efficacy, like say, an interest in not having President Obama fail in his most important political pursuit to date thereby jeopardizing his bid for a second term, let alone jeopardizing a bunch of Democrat congressional seats in the next election cycle. At a minimum, Mr. Reich's argument should therefore be considered with the same level of skepticism and cynicism as those proffered by detractors of the bill).

Here is precisely what is wrong with a Pubic Option: Americans should take the Democratic leadership (President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, Harry Reid, et al.) at their word -- As they have repeatedly reassured their Far Left constituency, these Democrats regard a public option as the best and quickest route to a "single payer system." This is why they are so keen for a public option at any cost. It is a means for obtaining their Single Payer System objective. Now, a single payer system is a euphemism for a "government monopoly over health care", which is a euphemism for "Socialized Medicine", which is a euphemism for "the absolute worst thing that could possibly happen to our freedom -- forced dependence on the government for our vital needs".. Not to mention the fact that the history of socialized medicine around the world is one of tragic, moribund failures with no exceptions. But Left wing ideologues are so invested in their dystopic dreams of an omnipotent but benevolent government taking care of everyone that they experience crippling cognitive dissonance -- and they are incapable of even considering rudimentary red flags such as the absence of any Socialism success stories, the economic realities that prevent successful socialized medicine and the severe loss of liberty in totalitarian societies that implement Socialism.

So why do these Democrats believe that a public option is the best route to a single payer system? Because the government makes the rules. And the government would be making the rules while it would be "competing" simultaneously with private insurance companies. Naturally, the government would impose all kinds of onerous regulations and requirements on the insurance companies trying to compete while exempting itself from those costly rules and regulations. In short, the government will unfairly rig the game. Not only do the Democrats know this, but they are
COUNTING on it. Because once they rig the game, the private insurance companies will be forced to drop out of the health care insurance market altogether, one by one, leaving only one single payer -- the government. Voila... Socialized Medicine.

So when a guy like Robert Reich tells you that the Democrats are merely trying to give the people another insurance option, he is being terribly disingenuous (or terribly naive). He says that Americans only have A, B, and C insurance plans from which to choose now, but by adding a public option, the people will also have D to choose. What he is
NOT telling you is that it will only be a matter of time before A, B and C are forced out of the health care insurance industry altogether due to poor profit performance, and so this is actually a deceptive plan to ELIMINATE choices -- not expand them. Ask any Obamaphile -- if Democrats really want to expand choices, why are they feverishly pushing a "single payer" system? They are definitely not interested in choices. They are only interested in total government control. Any other spin version of their end game, Like Robert Reich's, is a complete lie.

If the Democrats wanted to truly give Americans more choices in health care insurance, they would join Republicans in seeking to eliminate the laws that prohibit interstate insurance sales. Americans have few choices in health care plans because insurance companies are currently NOT ALLOWED TO COMPETE in interstate commerce. If we remove that barrier, Americans will not just be able to choose from A through D as Mr. Reich sheepishly proposes -- they will have choices that extend well beyond Z. This much more competition would, without question, help to drive policy costs down while improving service quality. And it would comport with American values of free enterprise, independence, moral competition and limited government.

In fact, the Democrats are not just being disingenuous about their desire to eliminate choices for the American people, they're being disingenuous about how they are framing the entire debate. They argue as if there is only one thing we can do regarding our health care insurance problems -- Accordingly, thy claim we can either socialize medicine or keep the status quo which everyone agrees is unacceptable. But they refuse to consider, let alone explore, the myriad free market-based reforms proposed for health care including real increased competition, better fraud enforcement initiatives, updating to paperless systems and tort reform. They won't even touch tort reform because the Democrats are bankrolled by the trial lawyers associations, and those folks like to sue because it makes them rich.

Americans should be extraordinarily wary about handing over an unprecedented
1/6 of the national economy to a government that cannot even run a successful "cash for clunkers" program.

Take careful note... Our current president has stated that he wants to "fundamentally transform the country", and he deliberately surrounds himself with radical advisers (including outright communists like Van Jones) who elude traditional vetting and senate confirmation. These people are completely out of touch with mainstream America and yet they are helping to shape national policies for all of us. Obama has taken over banks and nationalized one of the largest private companies in the country (GM). He aligns himself with communist dictators like Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro and the ousted Honduran president while rebuking the rest of the recently liberated Honduran government for abiding by its own constitutional and Supreme Court authorities. He spent 20 years in the flock of a racist, Marxist theologian (Jeremiah Wright), and he was entirely too friendly with an admitted communist terrorist (Bill Ayers) and distributed $millions of educational grants on Ayers' behalf to radical left wing causes. It appears that he is now using public money (illegally) through the National Endowment of the Arts to promote his Far Left political agenda in films and other visual media. He is partners with the radical Left Wing organization ACORN and follows the tenets of its communist godfather, Saul Alinksy. (
Interestingly, the term "community organizer" was coined by Alinsky himself in his book, "Rules for Radicals." A community organizer is not some garden variety volunteer who helps folks get jobs -- a Community Organizer is a person who is trained to rile up the proletariat against the Bourgeoise and instigate class warfare. But don't take my word for it. Read "Rules for Radicals".) Obama's mother was a suspected communist, and the man she shacked up with for 8 of Obama's formative years, Frank Marshall Davis, was also a card carrying member of the Communist Party. Obama was a member of the "New Party" (an offshoot of the Democrat Socialist Party) in Chicago in the early 1990's. And now, can anyone claim to be surprised to learn that he seeks to socialize medicine?

President Obama certainly has all the trappings of a Marxist who is pretending
NOT to be a Marxist as he foists Marxist initiatives on the country. But Marxism by any other name is equally pernicious, and the American people are finally recognizing what this guy is really all about.


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"Notes and Quotes" Archive

  • **“Nothing can destroy a government more quickly than its failure to observe its own laws, or worse, its disregard of the charter of its own existence.” – Justice Tom C. Clark (1899-1977) US Attorney General, 1945-1949
  • **"If the Constitution no longer matters, then the federal government no longer exists. The same document that restricts the federal government is also the document that created them and gives them their authority. Either it is in effect, or it is not." Gary Henderson
  • **"The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who, in the time of moral crisis, maintain their neutrality." Dante
  • **“When anyone gets something for nothing, someone else gets nothing for something.” -Anonymous
  • ** "My desire to be well-informed is currently at odds with my desire to remain sane" Author unknown
  • ** “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” — Peter F. Drucker
  • ** “If getting employer benefits without paying union dues is BAD, why is getting government benefits without paying taxes GOOD?”
  • ** “It's not that ‘the rich’ aren't paying their ‘fair share,’ it's that America isn't. A majority of the electorate has voted itself a size of government it's not willing to pay for.” - Mark Steyn
  • ** "One of the penalties of not participating in politics is that you will be governed by your inferiors." ~ Plato
  • **"Fathom the hypocrisy of a Government that requires every citizen to prove they are insured...but not everyone must prove they are a citizen."
  • **If it matters, measure it: How do you know how much you’ve slipped or improved in an area unless you measure it? How do you take something “to the next level” if you don’t know what level you’re already at? How do you set concrete goals without a sense of where you are and where you want to go? If the success of your venture depends on it, you need to find a way to measure it.
  • **The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them. - Mark Twain
  • **Political correctness is an approved form of censorship.  Based on emotional appeals at the expense of reason, political correctness mandates that inconvenient truths or facts be swept under the carpet.  Or else. Free speech, guaranteed to all Americans under the First Amendment, is on its way to becoming moot.  The political, media, and intellectual elites who control the terms of national debate and the rules of civil society have succeeded in censoring opposing views, limiting debate, and demonizing dissent.  Perception is on its way to becoming our new reality. Nancy Morgan
  • **Ronald Reagan once defined an economist as somebody who sees something working in real life and wondering if it will work in theory.
  • **"Fathom the odd hypocrisy that Obama wants every citizen to prove they are insured, but they don't have to prove they are citizens." ~ Ben Stein
  • **“America is the greatest, freest and most decent society in existence. It is an oasis of goodness in a desert of cynicism and barbarism. This country, once an experiment unique in the world, is now the last best hope for the world.”--Dinesh D'Souza
  • **No politician has any business talking about tax increases until ObamaCare is repealed. It’s the most comprehensively failed legislation of the modern era. Like a taxi that runs on plutonium, it’s costing us a fortune, and making us sick, even while it’s sitting there and doing nothing. Sold with fanciful promises and fraudulent cost estimates, it’s another expensive scheme to buy votes with taxpayer money, ending with a planned crisis the government will be only too happy to step in and “solve” by seizing even more of our wealth and liberty. Its passage stymied serious attempts at real improvements to our health-care system, including tort reform and allowing the interstate sale of insurance plans to increase competition. As with so many other delusional Big Government programs, the opportunity cost of passing ObamaCare, and passing up on reasonable plans that enhance individual liberty, rivals its staggering price tag. We’ll come trillions closer to a balanced budget by shredding it. -- Dr. Zero
  • **'If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more violence. If the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no more Israel' -- Benjamin Netanyahu
  • ** This is almost unbelievable. Barack Obama is more concerned about Jews building homes in Jerusalem than about Iran building a nuclear weapon. --Ben Stein
  • ** I hope we have once again reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There's a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: as government expands, liberty contracts. --Ronald Reagan
  • ** "As an American I am not so shocked that Obama was given the Nobel Peace Prize without any accomplishments to his name, but that America gave him the White House based on the same credentials." - - Newt Gingrich
  • ** An ideal Federal government in our country wouldn't take much from you, do much for you, or get in your way . --John Hawkins
  • ** The banking crisis wasn't caused by a lack of regulation. It was caused by regulation that pushed banks to make bad loans. --John Hawkins
  • ** An ideal Federal government in our country wouldn't take much from you, do much for you, or get in your way . --John Hawkins
  • **Not too long ago, two friends of mine were talking to a Cuban refugee, a businessman who had escaped from Castro, and in the midst of his story one of my friends turned to the other and said, "We don't know how lucky we are." And the Cuban stopped and said, "How lucky you are? I had someplace to escape to." And in that sentence he told us the entire story. If we lose freedom here, there's no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth.--Ronald Reagan
  • ** A final word on Tea Party numbers.  The Obama Inauguration left in its wake 100 tons of trash on the Mall that required herculean efforts by the District and the Park Service to clean up.  And it devastated the grass surfaces of the Mall that necessitated budgeting millions of dollars to repair.  Saturday’s Teapartyers left behind a west lawn and Mall that could be used for the U.S.Open.   The sparse trash that was left was neatly stashed in and closely around the too few receptacles provided.  And police reported zero arrests.-- William Campenni
  • ** There is no distinctly Native American criminal class...save Congress. --Mark Twain
  • ** What this country needs are more unemployed politicians. --Edward Langley
  • ** To be born a U.S. citizen is, as Cecil Rhodes once said of England, to win first prize in the lottery of life.
  • **"Free speech does not include the right to deceive". --Author unknown
  • ** Although racism certainly exists in this country, it has become blessedly rare and marginalized. Some of the best evidence you can find for that is Barack Obama's election as President. Only in a country as colorblind as America could a black man easily win the Presidency when 75% of the votes were cast by white Americans. --John Hawkins
  • **I think we need a Constitutional Amendment that says: 1.  Congressional salaries are tied to increased jobs, per capita income and increased GDP. 2.  Any raise for any member must be approved by a super majority in his/her home district or state. --Tom Hall
  • **There is a certain irony in an administration denouncing ordinary Americans who get together to express what they believe and to confront authority, when that administration is led by a man who began his career as a community organizer, whose job, as I understand it, is to take ordinary Americans, get them together to express what they believe, and express demands against the authorities. So it's unbelievably hypocritical. And, of course, as we just heard, this only happens when you have a conservative protest. It is called a mob. If it's a liberal protest, it is called grassroots expressing themselves. -- Charles Krauthammer
  • **Government does not solve problems... it subsidizes them! --Ronald Reagan
  • **When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President -- I'm beginning to believe it.’ - Clarence Darrow
  • **The liberals will give free medical care to illegal aliens who are on welfare but will deny it to American citizens who have worked all their lives and made their contributions to American society.-- Charles Hakes
  • ** Medicare is a huge, single-payer, government-run program. It ought to provide the perfect environment for experimentation. If more-efficient government management can slash health-care costs by addressing all these problems, why not start with Medicare? Let's see what "better management" looks like applied to Medicare before we roll it out to the rest of the country. -- Virginia Postrel
  • ** You can lead a man to Congress, but you can’t make him think. -- Milton Berle
  • **We do not see things as they are. We see them as we are. --The Talmud
  • **You can lead a man to Congress, but you can’t make him think. -- Milton Berle
  • **We're getting too much lip service and not enough action from the Obama administration on nuclear power, and the impression is being left that we can run this big, complex country on electricity from the wind, the sun and the earth. ...Climate change may be the inconvenient problem, but nuclear power is the inconvenient answer. -- Lamar Alexander
  • **The government may very well come up with a health insurance product that is cheaper (to the consumer) and more effective than those offered in the private sector. Think about this though ... Could that possibly be because the government will be under no pressure whatsoever to make a profit on its health insurance? When you can operate at a loss indefinitely you have no problem undercutting your competitors. When you can call on endless government subsidies you can run anyone you chose out of business. -- Neal Boortz
  • **I'd like to quote from an e-mail I recently received from a reader named J. Pyle. In response to a piece I had written ridiculing the state of higher education, he wrote: "I remember when 'Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Studies' meant trying to figure out what's wrong with those people. In fact, if your child is majoring in something that ends in 'Studies,' you better not turn their bedroom into a den, because that one is coming home after college." --Bert Prelutsky
  • **People are gushing over the late Michael Jackson. I suppose they will honor him on a postage stamp, in a new “Famous Child Molesters” series, to go with Elvis from the “Famous Drug Abusers” stamp series. Meanwhile, men and women dying to protect an America pass with little but perfunctory notice. One wonders, in the black hours of the night, if this nation deserves protecting. -- Robert Hall
  • **I sincerely hope that when the president goes in for his annual check-up, the doctors at Bethesda will do a brain scan. Surely something must be terribly wrong with a man who seems to be far more concerned with a Jew building a house in Israel than with Muslims building a nuclear bomb in Iran. --Bert Prelutsky
  • **"Even if the majority agrees on an idiotic idea, it is still an idiotic idea." Sam Levenson
  • **The most hilarious thing about the Democrats' attempt to engulf the health care industry in the inky blackness of the federal government is their primary selling point: that a government takeover will actually lead to reduced costs. How's that plan working out with Medicare so far? Oh yeah, it's on track to bankrupt the entire country. So let's expand that -- what could go wrong? Well, besides all the features that usually come along with socialized medicine: reduced quality of care, long wait times for operations, and allowing old people to die in order to cut costs. Obamacare would lead to health care with the compassion of the IRS, the competence of FEMA, and the well staffed work force of our border patrol at a much higher cost, but on the upside, you won't live as long, so you'll have less time to complain about it. -- John Hawkins
  • **President Obama wants greater transparency from businesses, banks, the government — everyone except the union movement. This clearly benefits the union leaders, who will become less accountable to their members. But it’s hardly the change Obama promised to bring to Washington. — James Sherk
  • **Being politically correct is, unfortunately, not the same thing as being correct politically.-- Bert Prelutsky
  • **If increased government spending with borrowed or newly created money is a "stimulus," then the Weimar Republic should have been stimulated to unprecedented prosperity, instead of runaway inflation and widespread economic desperation that ultimately brought Adolf Hitler to power. -- Thomas Sowell
  • **“The big mistake of Republican leadership is thinking that going through the motions of listening to their ‘base’ is the same thing as actually listening to the base. They keep trying to drag us to where they think we should be instead of joining us where we are.” -- John Hawkins
  • ** Torturing prisoners should never be our policy, both because it's immoral and because it's usually ineffective. But it's madness to declare that there can never be exceptions. Forget the argument about the "ticking bomb" and the terrorist who might have information that could save numerous lives. Let's make it personal. Whether you're left, right or in between, ask yourself this yes-or-no question: If torturing a known terrorist would save the life of the person you love most in the world, would you approve it? If your answer is "no," you're not a moral paragon. You're an abomination. And please make your position clear to your husband or wife, mother or father, son or daughter. Just tell 'em, "Sorry, honey, but I'd rather see you dead than mistreat a terrorist. It's a moral issue with me. --Ralph Peters
  • **The man who loves other countries as much as his own stands on a level with the man who loves other women as much as he loves his own wife. -- Teddy Roosevelt
  • **The prudent capitalist will never adventure his capital... if there exists a state of uncertainty as to whether the Government will repeal tomorrow what it has enacted today. -- William Henry Harrison
  • **The price of a postage stamp has gone up to 44 cents. The government says they had to raise the price because fewer people are using the mail these days. That's government thinking for you — "Hey nobody's buying our products . . . let's raise the price!" --Jay Leno
  • **If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand. -- Milton Friedman
  • **Since torture doesn’t work but waterboarding did work on KSM, doesn’t that prove that waterboarding isn’t torture?
  • **"The world is controlled by those who show up." --George Allen
  • **John Maynard Keynes, responded to a challenge about his changing views, saying, “When the facts change, I change my opinion. What do you do, sir?”