Republicans Are Offering Better Solutions to Lower Health Care Costs
John Boehner
Saturday, October 31, 2009

Time after time, Republicans have reached out to President Obama and congressional Democrats to work together on common-sense solutions to lower health care costs for families and small businesses. President Obama promised the American people a bipartisan process.  Unfortunately, Democrats have chosen a partisan, go-it-alone approach.  It’s yet another broken promise, and it defies the will of the American people.

Through the month of August, the American people let Members of Congress from both parties know that they didn’t want a government takeover of health care. But instead of listening to Americans’ concerns, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and House Democratic leaders ignored them and wrote a bill behind closed doors designed to appease the liberal special interests.

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Next week, Speaker Pelosi will attempt to ram through her 1,990-page government takeover of health care through the House of Representatives. This bill will raise the cost of Americans’ health insurance premiums and add to our already skyrocketing debt; it will kill jobs with tax hikes and new mandates; and it will cut seniors’ Medicare benefits.

For the sake of struggling middle-class families, small businesses, and seniors, Republicans are going to do everything we can to fight this monstrosity. We will stand on principle in opposing this bill, and we will offer a better solution to lower costs for families and small businesses.

In the national Republican address today, I am outlining Republicans’ plan for common-sense health care reform our nation can afford, emphasizing four common-sense reforms that will lower health care costs and expand access to quality care without a government takeover of our nation’s health care system that kills jobs, raises taxes on small businesses, or cuts Medicare for seniors.

Here are four smart, fiscally-responsible reforms that we can implement today to lower costs and expand access to quality care:

· Number one: let individuals and families buy health insurance across state lines.

· Number two: allow individuals, small businesses, and trade associations to pool together and acquire health insurance at lower prices, the same way large corporations and labor unions do.

· Number three: give states the tools to create their own innovative reforms that lower health care costs.

· Number four: end junk lawsuits that contribute to higher health care costs by increasing the number of tests and procedures that physicians sometimes order not because they think it’s good medicine, but because they are afraid of being sued.

You can learn more about these and all the health care initiatives Republicans have supported by visiting http://healthcare.gop.gov and you can watch the video of the address HERE. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DKDdVXsC2I.

Looking for evidence of Obama’s past, Fox News contacted 400 Columbia students from that period but none remembered Obama.
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Wayne Allyn Root was, like Obama, a political science major at Columbia who also graduated in 1983. In 2008 Root says of Obama, “I don’t know a single person at Columbia that knows him, and they all know me.  I don’t have a classmate who ever knew Barack Obama at Columbia .. Ever!
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 Nobody recalls him. I’m not exaggerating, I’m not kidding.” Root adds that he was also, like Obama, “Class of ’83 political science, pre-law” and says, “You don’t get more exact than that. Never met him in my life, don’t know anyone who ever met him.
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At the class reunion, our 20th reunion five years ago, 20th reunion, who was asked to be the speaker of the class? Me. No one ever heard of Barack! Who was he, and five years ago, nobody even knew who he was… the guy who writes the class notes, who’s kind of the, as we say in New York, the macha who knows everybody, has yet to find a person, a human who ever met him. Is that not strange ? It’s very strange…”
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Obama’s photograph does not appear in the school’s yearbook, and Obama consistently declines requests to talk about his years at Columbia , provide school records, or provide the name of any former classmates or friends while at Columbia .

The Pelosi Blueprint for Government Run Health Care
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The new House health care bill (H.R. 3962) unveiled by Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) yesterday clocks in at 1,990 pages and about 400,000 words. As written, the bill purports to cost only $1.05 trillion over the first ten years and is paid for by over $700 billion in tax increases and cuts to Medicare Advantage and Medicare prescription drug payments. But as troubling as those numbers are, the scariest thing about the bill is the solid foundation it lays for a complete government take over of the health care sector of our economy.
 

The Washington Post describes the bill as “creating an expensive new entitlement program (subsidies to purchase health insurance) and dramatically expanding an existing one (Medicaid).” This is true by itself, but the Post later dismissively adds: “If you’ve noticed that we haven’t talked about the public option in the House bill, that’s not an oversight. For all the fury over the issue, it doesn’t matter that much; the CBO estimates that the government-run plan would actually have slightly higher premiums.” This is a breathtakingly naive statement by the Post and demonstrates that they have not yet fully grasped how all the different elements of the bill are designed to interact to produce President Barack Obama’s desired outcome.

The Medicaid Expansion: Under current law the CBO projects that only 35 million Americans would be on Medicaid by 2019. The House bill massively expands the Medicaid program by raising the upper income cutoff to 150 percent of the federal poverty line (FPL). As a result, the CBO now estimates some 50 million Americans will be enrolled in the program at a ten year cost to the federal government of $425 billion. This does not include the $34 billion in increased Medicaid costs that state governments will have to spend.

The Insurance Subsidies: The House bill also creates a Health Insurance Exchange through which individuals without employer based coverage could purchase insurance. The bill also provides “affordability credits” to people who are below 400% FPL. However, the bill also denies access to the credit for all people who are “eligible” for Medicaid. In essence, therefore, the House bill forces all Americans below 150% FPL to enroll in Medicaid or pay the individual mandate fine. The CBO explains why the Democrats chose this route: “The estimated costs of providing subsidies through the new insurance exchanges are now lower for several reasons: the larger expansion of Medicaid means that fewer people would be eligible for coverage through the exchanges.” In other words, it’s cheaper to force people into Medicaid then to give them subsidies high enough to buy private insurance. Furthermore, individuals are only allowed to enroll in the cheapest (”basic”) plans for the first two years. After that, they can only choose more expensive plans or the government run plan.

The Employer Mandate: The bill imposes a new 8% payroll tax on employers who don’t cover specified percentages of their employees’ health insurance. In the short term this will only result in job losses and lower wages. But further down the road, the health plans would have to meet new requirements to be specified later by Obama’s new Health Czar (“Health Choices Commissioner”). If your employer’s health plan doesn’t meet those requirements (which are all but guaranteed to drive up the cost of your health plan), you couldn’t keep it.

The Public Option: As health insurance premiums keep rising thanks to all the new requirements in the current bill and the Health Czar’s future regulations, more and more people will have no choice but to depend on the government plan or face a fine. At first, only individuals and employers with 25 employees or fewer would be eligible for the government run plan. But in year two (2014) individuals and employers with 50 employees or fewer become eligible, in year three (2015) employers with at least 100 employees become eligible but starting that year, the Health Czar permitted from this year forward to expand employer participation as appropriate, “with the goal of allowing all employers access to the Exchange.” In effect, the bill makes larger sized employers explicitly eligible and still turns over authority to the Health Czar to further open it up. The goal has been, and still clearly is, to open the exchange and the public plan to everyone. As the Post notes, the CBO now projects that the government run premiums will actually be higher than private plans. The Democrats will not allow this to continue. History shows that entitlement programs like this quickly devolve into price control central planning. A less “robust” public option today will almost certainly be a more robust public option tomorrow. Look no further than the history of Medicare. Medicare was initially designed to pay private rates, but now the program has a complex formula for administered pricing.

So that’s the plan: force all Americans to buy health insurance, regulate the private plans till they are too expensive, and then slowly expand the power and size of the public option as Americans are left with no choice but to turn to government run health care. That is how Pelosi aims to achieve Obama’s goal of “Everybody in, Nobody out” government run health care. The costs are going to be staggering. Not only will health care quality and choice suffer as more and more Americans are forced onto a government plan that reimburses providers at low government set rates, but the price tag is guaranteed to skyrocket. The only way the House managed to keep their price tag as low as $1.05 trillion is by pretending that Congress would cut Medicare reimbursement rates by 20% in 2010. The full ten-year cost of being honest about the Medicare reimbursement rates would be $250 billion. Less choice, lower quality health care, and trillion dollar deficits for years to come: that is the House’s prescription for health reform.

Morning Bell: The Cap and Trade Threat to Our National Security

Posted By Conn Carroll On October 29, 2009

In poll , after poll , after poll , the American people have clearly expressed their preference for prioritizing economic growth over global warming. This is a major problem for those on the left who want to reorganize our entire economy under the guise of cap and trade climate change legislation. Tacitly admitting they have lost this argument, the left has shifted gears and is trying a new tack: global warming is a threat to national security. So Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) recently blogged  at the Center for American Progress:

Climate change injects a major new source of chaos, tension, and human insecurity into an already volatile world. It threatens to bring more famine and drought, worse pandemics, more natural disasters, more resource scarcity, and human displacement on a staggering scale. We risk fanning the flames of failed-statism, and offering glaring opportunities to the worst actors in our international system. In an interconnected world, that endangers all of us.

Kerry is 100% wrong. Heritage fellow Lieutenant Colonel James Jay Carafano (Ret.) explained why in his testimony before the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee yesterday:

Climate Change is a Permanent Feature of Human Reality: While it might feel intuitively appropriate to directly connect the dots between the changing global environment and the human response to global warming, an appropriate complex system analysis would warn against such an approach. Indeed, there are many variables other than the climate that affect how humans respond to climate change and, in turn, alter their behaviors to try to impact climate change and its consequences. For example, while the emission of greenhouse gases has been increasing across the globe for the last decade, political violence has been in decline . Furthermore, any changes in the climate, for better or for worse, will occur gradually over decades. Thus, there will be ample time to adjust national security and humanitarian assistance instruments to accommodate future demands. The global climate has always been changing. Adapting to these changes and human efforts to manage their surrounding environment is a permanent feature of human competition. The environment does not cause wars; it is how humans respond to their environment that causes conflicts.

Cap and Trade Would Do Nothing to Stop Climate Change: Even if you assume climate change is a threat to national security, proponents of cap and trade must first show that their solution would actually solve the problem. They can’t. According to climatologist Chip Knappenberger , similar legislation proposed in the House would moderate temperatures by only hundredths of a degree after being in effect for the next 40 years and no more than two-tenths of a degree at the end of the century. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson concurred, recently saying , “US action alone will not impact world CO2 levels.”

Cap and Trade Would Cripple the U.S. Economy: While there is no evidence that cap and trade legislation will halt climate change, there is strong evidence it will hurt the U.S. economy. A study by The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis on a similar companion bill proposed in the House finds that the law would make the United States about $9.4 trillion poorer by 2035. Much of this decline would be from reduced economic productivity and job loss. In particular, under the House legislation there would be 1.15 million fewer jobs on average than without a cap-and-trade bill. A collapse in U.S. economic growth would result in even more draconian cuts to the defense budget, leaving America with a military much less prepared to deal with future threats. Indeed, if America’s military power declines, there would probably be more wars, not fewer.

Inflicting cap and trade on the U.S. economy may well create the world we want to avoid. The law would ensure a steep decline in U.S. economic competitiveness and military preparedness. The consequences of a weak America would inevitably lead to a string of national security crises and an undermining of the nation’s capacity to deal with natural disasters here and abroad. At yesterday’s hearing, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) told Carafano she appreciated his testimony but that it was “misguided” since her cap and trade bill would create jobs, not cost them. Senator Boxer may want to read the testimony of Congressional Budget Office Director Doug Elmendorff who told Congress earlier this month that cap and trade would cause “significant” job loss  and slow the U.S. economy. Our national security depends on it.