Sandra Fluke Argued for Mandatory Coverage for Sex-Change Surgery
The Fluckster is sure generous with other folks' money isn't she? On the other hand, a sex change operation is the ultimate contraceptive, so maybe she thinks it ought to go with the other freebies.
Thirty years ago this fall, on October 18, 1981, a charismatic academic with rather limited government experience and with a one-word slogan, “Change,” was elected prime minister of Greece. His name was Andreas Papandreou. Greeks may now wish that 30 years ago they had had a Tea Party movement. Things could have turned out differently.
Thirty years ago, Greece was in an enviable position on the matter of national debt, with its debt just 28.6 percent of GDP. Few advanced countries can manage that kind of debt-to-GDP ratio. By the end of Papandreou’s first term in office, that ratio had nearly doubled, with debt at 54.7 percent of GDP. By the end of his second term, the figure was in the mid 80s.
The 1980s in Greece were a time of dramatic expansion of government. Papandreou and his Socialist party created a new government-run health-care system, dramatically expanded employment in the public sector, nationalized failing companies, and increased government handouts of every shape and form.
Just change a few names and dates and you have the disastrous Obama regime in the USA. Hit the link for many more uncanny similarities, but one of my favorite parts is:
Finland may have the best educational system in Europe, but its ratio of students to teachers is double that of Greece, which has one of the worst educational systems.
Cue the US teachers union hacks wailing about "the children."
You knew this was coming didn't you? Obama Health Plan to Cover 12 Million Illegals:
On Friday, Democrats moved one step closer to giving free health insurance to the nation’s estimated 12 million illegal aliens when they successfully defeated a Republican-backed amendment, offered by Rep. Dean Heller, R-Nev., that would have prevented illegal aliens from receiving government-subsidized health care under the proposed plan backed by House Democrats and President Barack Obama.
Of course, the Donks won't admit that they want to make the taxpayers give a medical care entitlement to illegal aliens - they just won't do anything to prevent it: It's like the Democrat position on illegal aliens voting: they claim not to support it, but won't do anything to stop it.
Democrats had insisted throughout the health-care reform debate that illegals would be ineligible for the so-called public option plan that is to be subsidized by taxpayers.
"We're not going to cover undocumented aliens, undocumented workers," Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, told reporters in May. "That's too politically explosive."
Republicans, however, point out that the Democrats, by refusing to accept the Heller amendment, would deny health agencies from conducting simple database checks to verify citizenship. Many states give illegals driver licenses, which will be sufficient to get free health care under the plan.
Welcome the "new neighbors" and hand them your charge card - it's the Democrat way.
Golly, Hussein's health care plan looks swell to me. Better yet, if you don't mind wearing a red jumpsuit, you'll have guaranteed employment for life. Or until the whole house of cards collapses.
If you were wondering about all those savings that Barack is promising for Obamacare, our clown-in-chief is taking to the campaign trail again to splain it:. It's not real clear (like most of Hopey Changey's prattling) but it seems to involve alternative medical treatments. I can't wait!
I don't know about you, but I'm plenty excited by the prospect of an Obama designed Health Administration Bureau:
The only puzzling thing is why the Democrat party is trying to ram Obamacare through Congress with a separate healthcare plan for Members of Congress attached. Republican Rep. John Fleming is puzzled too and has introduced a resolution in the House of Representatives to change it:
Under the current draft of the Democrat healthcare legislation, members of Congress are curiously exempt from the government-run health care option, keeping their existing health plans and services on Capitol Hill. If Members of Congress believe so strongly that government-run health care is the best solution for hard working American families, I think it only fitting that Americans see them lead the way. Public servants should always be accountable and responsible for what they are advocating, and I challenge the American people to demand this from their representatives.
Together we will work to ensure that any plan that is good enough is for American families is good enough for every member of Congress.
Meanwhile over in the Senate, Tom Coburn had a little fun too:
Republican Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma called bluff on the Democrats' support for their own health care bill by challenging his colleagues on the Senate health committee to vote in favor of joining the program once enacted.
Mr. Coburn said, "what's good for the goose is good for the gander," and that "if Congress thinks a government-run plan is safe and effective for Americans, they should prove it with enrolling."
All the Republicans on the committee, except for New Hampshire Sen. Judd Gregg, voted for the amendment, but only three of the panel's 13 Democratic caucus member joined them. The 10 others voted "nay," though the amendment thus passed by a 12-11 vote.
The Democratic senators who voted against it were Sens. Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, Kay Hagan of North Carolina, Tom Harkin of Iowa, Jeff Merkley of Oregon, Patty Murray of Washington, Jack Reed of Rhode Island and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island. Sen. Bernard Sanders of Vermont, an independent but a member of the Democratic caucus, also opposed the bill.
Democrats who voted in favor of the amendment were: Sens. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut and Barbara A. Mikulski of Maryland.
Gosh, why would those 10 Democrat Senators turn down a chance to participate in Obamacare? Maybe it's because they are older than dirt and don't want their medical care rationed along with the rest of the senior citizens? As for the 3 Donks who voted for it, I'd like to think it was the courage of their convictions, but since we are talking Kennedy, Dodd, and Mikulski I suspect it was their conviction that the amendment will get dropped in the House-Senate conference committee plus enough liquid assets to buy whatever medical care they need.
But don't worry, Obamacare is a streamlined government program:
So don't worry, Granny. With any luck you will be scheduled to see a doctor within a year. And if not, well you are old and really aren't going to live that long anyhow.
Mickey Kaus spots my favorite shortcoming of the Obamacare plan to spend a trillion dollars to screw up US medical care:
Dick Morris is right twice a day, and this could be one of those times: If I were a Hill Democrat, I'd be very worried about this possible line of attack. ... It's a proven killer, and Obaman Dems, with all their talk of bending cost curves and denying treatments and reducing Medicare spending by 30%, have rendered themselves wide open to it.
I tend to agree with Kaus about Dick Morris, but this time he is right on the money:
Obama’s health care proposal is, in effect, the repeal of the Medicare program as we know it. The elderly will go from being the group with the most access to free medical care to the one with the least access. Indeed, the principal impact of the Obama health care program will be to reduce sharply the medical services the elderly can use. No longer will their every medical need be met, their every medication prescribed, their every need to improve their quality of life answered.
It is so ironic that the elderly - who were so vigilant when Bush proposed to change Social Security - are so relaxed about the Obama health care proposals. Bush’s Social Security plan, which did not cut their benefits at all, aroused the strongest opposition among the elderly. But Obama’s plan, which will totally gut Medicare and replace it with government-managed care and rationing, has elicited little more than a yawn from most senior citizens.
I expect most of the senior citizens can't really believe it is happening and their favorite news sources on the TV networks sure aren't telling them nor are the erstwhile watchdogs at the AARP who are busy giving Obama a tongue bath. Besides senior citizens tend to vote Republican so killing them off is a double win for Obama because ACORN and the local Democrat machine will have them voting Democrat as soon as they die.
(Shovel ready graphics from The People's Cube)
Guess what! it turns out that Obamacare is really about the taxpayers providing better funding for illegal aliens health care. (We're already paying for them, of course, but Obamacare would provide full health care insurance for illegals.) But it's even better than that - they want to limit treatment of elderly citizens so that there is enough money to give illegal aliens high quality care. Let's listen as the folks from La Raza and the "Children's Defense Fund" plot Obamacare propaganda strategy with a rep of US Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ):
... they started the conference out by saying "America does not need health care reform, but Latino immigrants need health care reform."
And someone from Menendez' office [Ed.: Sen. Robert Menendez, D-NJ] promised that he would make sure that "the useless barriers of citizenship would not be in this bill" and that he would make sure that they would use keywords like "streamline"...... Yes [they said they would get free health care for illegal aliens], these are my notes, Mark. They actually got up and said "Latino children need health care more than whites". And then they would say things like "you must go out into your communities, use words like 'streamline', use phrases like 'all workers' and 'all families'," because they said -- and I quote -- "If the American people find out that this bill is about giving health care to non-citizens, they will rise up against it."
... One of the quotes they said was, "We want to make sure we take care of barriers like verification, but we can streamline programs to the more affluent" and, quote, "Useless treatments for the elderly can be gone because we don't need to spend money for people who are going to die anyway."
...And they also said that 75% of the children who will be picked up in this will be non-citizens and that 44% of the uninsured are non-citizens and they can't possibly allow the American people to know this."
Such a deal - we install a massive bureaucracy, pay 1.5 trillion additional dollars in taxes, and ration healthcare to the elderly so that everyone who sneaks across the border gets great medical care. Why not cut down on wear and tear on the Border patrol and just pay for all medical care for everyone in the world. I'm sure the US taxpayers would mind too much.
Barack Obama certainly has quite a plan to solve the nonexistent healthcare problem. Major features:
Massive tax increases and benefit cuts:
Health-care overhaul legislation being drafted by House Democrats will include $600 billion in tax increases and $400 billion in cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel said.
Democrats will work on the bill’s details next week as they struggle through “what kind of heartburn” it will cause to agree on how to pay for revamping the health-care system, Rangel, a New York Democrat, said today.
Even getting "Chuckles" Rangel to cough up all the taxes he has been evading isn't going to fill this black hole.
Asked whether the cost of a health-care overhaul would be more than $1 trillion over a decade, Rangel said, “the answer is yes.” Some Senate Republicans, including Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, say the costs will likely exceed $1.5 trillion.
...
Rangel said Democrats are still considering options for tax increases that might be in the bill, including a possible end to the income tax exclusion for employer-paid health benefits.
That's certainly a a bummer, but don't worry if you are a union member, Since your leadership has Barack Obama in their collective hip pocket, you won't be affected:
Mr. Baucus, the Finance Committee chairman who is helping lead the Obama health effort, is still deciding what to include in the bill. But his far bigger headache remains how to pay for this blowout. He and other Democrats have been inching toward the taboo benefits-tax, putting them on a collision course with liberal special interests like unions. Mr. Baucus's newest solution? A union payoff.
...
Mr. Baucus officially floated his plans for a tax this week, only with a surprising twist: His levy will not apply to union plans, at least for the duration of existing contracts. In other words, Mr. Baucus intends to tax the health-care benefits only of those who didn't spend a fortune electing Democrats to office.
And the second class citizens can pound sand, I guess. Still, we'll all be in the same manure pile when it comes to rationing of healthcare which Obama's flying monkey bloggers are already trying to turn into a benefit:
Democratic blogger Ezra Klein appears to be positioning Dem health care reforms as a way to cut costs, on the grounds that a reformed system will be able to make "hard choices" and "rational" coverage decisions, by which Klein seems to mean "not providing" treatments that are unproven or too expensive--when "a person's life, or health, is not worth the price." Matthew Yglesias' recent post seems to be saying the same thing, though clarity isn't its strong suit. (He must have left it on Journolist.)
Isn't it an epic mistake to try to sell Democratic health care reform on this basis? Possible sales pitch: "Our plan will deny you unnecessary treatments!" Or maybe just "Republicans say 'yes.' Democrats say 'no'!" Is that really why the middle class will sign on to a revolutionary multi-trillion dollar shift in spending--so the government can decide their life or health "is not worth the price"? I mean, how could it lose?
Even better, of course, is the observation that it's mostly old folks that need medical care and so what Obama and his pals are proposing is really, "Let the Boomers Die!" Why not just give each one of the Baby Boomers an expiration date? That would sure solve the money problem.
Obama and his flying monkeys love to prattle on about the supposed hordes of Americans who lack health insurance, but the numbers just plain don't support that claim as any number of dispassionate observers have remarked although you won't see it in the MSM. I had been meaning to write about it, but Doug Ross provides a post by "Mister R" that does it better than I could - The '47 million' lie:
During her campaign for President, Hillary Clinton admitted in questioning that, of the 47 million, at least 25 percent could afford health insurance but choose not to purchase it (those with a household income of more than $75,000 a year). I believe the number to be slightly higher, closer to 30 percent, but let's use Clinton's number. That's 12 million.
Let's count illegal aliens. Believe it or not, illegals are counted in this number, however, statistical models vary and have ranged from 5 to 12 million. Let's take the middle. 8 million.
Then there are those who are already eligible for government programs but not participating. That number is estimated at 12 to 16 million. Let's take 12 million.
[snip - hit the link for the rest]
Add the numbers up and you get 38 million. That leaves 9 million without coverage (although they really do have coverage since the federal government, along with the states, administer Medicaid and charity care).
So the real number of [nominally] uninsured is 8-10 million. There are 300 million Americans.
So we want to break the system because 1 out of 30 people cannot afford coverage. That's absurd.
That it is patently absurd is proved by Team Obama belatedly trotting out claims that Obamacare is really about saving money for consumers. Since Barack has no plans to rein in his trial lawyer supporters who grotesquely inflate all aspects of US healthcare costs, adding a layer of government bureaucracy is only going to save money by rationing medical care just like they do in other countries with socialized medicine.
(posters from Michelle Malkin's Obamacare poster contest)
Some 40 percent of Britain's practicing doctors were trained overseas – and that percentage will increase, as older native doctors retire, and younger immigrant doctors take their place. According to the BBC, "Over two-thirds of doctors registering to practice in the UK in 2003 were from overseas – the vast majority from non-European countries." Five of the eight arrested are Arab Muslims, the other three Indian Muslims. Bilal Abdulla, the Wahhabi driver of the incendiary Jeep and a doctor at the Royal Alexandra Hospital near Glasgow, is one of over 2,000 Iraqi doctors working in Britain.It's a leftoid paradise fer sure! Who else could screw things up so massively that they have to willy nilly import Third World terrorists to be doctors?
Many of these imported medical staff have never practiced in their own countries. As soon as they complete their training, they move to a Western world hungry for doctors to prop up their understaffed health systems: Dr. Abdulla got his medical qualification in Baghdad in 2004 and was practicing in Britain by 2006. His co-plotter, Mohammed Asha, a neurosurgeon, graduated in Jordan in 2004 and came to England the same year.
When the president talks about needing immigrants to do "the jobs Americans won't do," most of us assume he means seasonal fruit pickers and the maid who turns down your hotel bed and leaves the little chocolate on it. But in the United Kingdom the jobs Britons won't do has somehow come to encompass the medical profession.
...
So today the NHS is hungry for medical personnel from almost anywhere on the planet, so hungry that the government set up special fast-track immigration programs: Mohammed Asha, Mohammed Haneef and their comrades didn't even require a work permit to come and practice as doctors in state hospitals. You don't have to be the smartest jihadist in the cave to see that as an opportunity, any more than it required no great expertise for the 9/11 killers to figure that the quickest place to get the picture IDs with which they boarded the planes was through Virginia's "undocumented worker" network. Everyone else from the Venezuelan peasantry to the Russia mafia knows the vulnerabilities of Western immigration systems, so why not the jihadists?
...
But beyond that the Glasgow Jeep story symbolizes a more basic reality. The NHS is the biggest employer in Europe, and it's utterly dependent on imported staff such as Dr. Asha and Dr. Abdulla. In the West, we look on mass immigration as a testament to our generosity, to our multicultural bona fides. But it's not: A dependence on mass immigration is always a structural weakness and should be understood as such. In the socialized health systems of the Continent, aging, shrinking populations of native Europeans will spend their final years being cared for by young Muslim doctors and nurses.
