Department of Offense

Three Reasons Why Government Can’t Run Health Care
by  Newt Gingrich 
08/26/2009Three Reasons Why Government Can’t Run Health Care
by  Newt Gingrich
08/26/2009Facta, non verba.
For those of you who have forgotten your Latin, it means “deeds, not words.”
There’s been a lot of overheated rhetoric about health care reform, but this saying is one that all Americans should return to when considering plans for a government-dominated health system.In other words, we should judge government, not by its words, but by its deeds.
With this simple principle in mind, what follows are three examples why government can’t – and shouldn’t – run our health care system (at least not any health care system you or I would want to be dependent on).

Reason No. 1: Government Can’t Be Trusted With a Credit Card
Every family knows about making a budget and living within its means. Government, to put it bluntly, does not.
What if your husband had come home last Friday night and announced that he had racked up almost 30 percent more debt on the family credit card – including the mortgage and car loans – than he had told you about just a month ago?
Would you trust him to go out and start spending money to remodel the kitchen? And do you think he could get a loan to do it?
But that’s exactly what the Obama Administration did with their weekend news dump. They announced late Friday that the amount of money they don’t have but are nonetheless planning on spending over the next ten years isn’t the astonishing $7 trillion they estimated in May but is instead an astounding $9 trillion.
Add this to the fact that, after the administration sold its health care reform proposal on the grounds that it will reduce costs to the Treasury, the independent Congressional Budget Office determined that the House plan will actually cost an astounding $1 trillion-$1.5 trillion in the next ten years, which will be added directly to the federal debt. The director of the CBO testified before Congress last month that “[i]n the legislation that has been reported we do not see the sort of fundamental changes that would be necessary to reduce the trajectory of federal health spending by a significant amount. And on the contrary, the legislation significantly expands the federal responsibility for health care costs.”
Which do you have more faith in, the government’s happy talk of “bending the cost curve” or its record of out-of-control spending?
Deeds, not words.

Reason No. 2: Government Can’t Even Give Away Money Effectively
As the inimitable Andy McCarthy of National Review put it, “Compared to the infinite complexity of healthcare and health-insurance, cash-for-clunkers is kindergarten stuff. You trade in your old car for a new one that gets (slightly) better mileage and the government gives you money – between $3,500 and $4,500. How hard is that?”
Too hard for government bureaucrats, it turns out.
Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has boasted that the cash-for-clunkers program provided “a lifeline to the automobile industry, jump starting a major sector of the economy and putting people back to work..”
But look at the deeds, not the words.
Last week, cash-for-clunkers ended in a bureaucratic morass of red tape, failed promises and unanticipated costs.

Air Traffic Controllers Manning the Cash-for-Clunkers Hotline
Only a government bureaucracy could mess up a program designed to give away free money.
The government wizards who set up cash-for-clunkers initially budgeted to sell 250,000 cars in three months.
The program sold that many in four days.
And because the central planners who think they can provide government “competition” to the private health insurance market failed to accurately estimate how many government workers it would take to administer cash-for-clunkers, they had to take employees from the FAA – air traffic controllers, no less – to help manage the demand.
And what about the car dealerships the program was supposed to help in the first place? Even though the rebates were supposed to be paid within 10 days, only 7 percent of federal promises under cash-for-clunkers have been paid so far, leaving dealers with millions of dollars in unfunded government promises.

More Than Bureaucratic Incompetence, Political Business as Usual
But there’s more to the cautionary tale of cash-for-clunkers than just bureaucratic incompetence.
This is a case study in what happens when politicians get involved in the marketplace.
Despite all the rhetoric of jump starting the auto industry, politicians’ priorities are to give free goodies to their constituents. So as far as they’re concerned, cash-for-clunkers has been a resounding success.
Forget the fact that they’re spending money they don’t have, or that car dealerships are left holding millions of dollars in empty government promises. They’re not concerned with the long-term, just the next election.
So tell us again why should we think bureaucrats and politicians will perform any better with our health care?Reason No. 3: Government Would Rather Pay Crooks Than Manage Efficiently
There’s been a lot of worrying about the inevitability of government rationing health care under the Democratic reform bills in Congress.
Economists have known about this inevitability for a long time. Well, Americans can stop worrying. Government is rationing care already – and doing it in a particularly stupid way.
Studies have shown that early use of home health care after hospitalization – allowing patients to go home and be visited by a nurse to manage their care – saves Medicare billions of dollars.
So here is a case where an innovative government program actually saves the government money. Home health care is both more compassionate and more efficient. It reduces the likelihood a patient will be readmitted to a hospital by allowing her to heal in a more familiar setting.

Not to disrespect the dead but while we are hearing what a great man Ted Kennedy was…here is the “other” side…

              The  Last of The Kennedy Dynasty

              As soon as his cancer was detected, we noticed the immediate
attempt at the “canonization” of old Teddy Kennedy by the mainstream media.
They are saying what a “great American” he is.  Better say, let’s get a
couple things clear & not twist the facts to change the real history.

              1.    He was caught cheating at Harvard when he attended it.
He was expelled twice, once for cheating on a test, and once for paying a
classmate to cheat for him.

              2.    While expelled, Kennedy enlisted in the Army, but
mistakenly signed up for four years instead of two.  Oops!  The man can’t
count to four!  His father, Joseph P. Kennedy, former U.S. Ambassador to
England (a step up from bootlegging liquor into the US from Canada  during
prohibition), pulled the necessary strings to have his enlistment shortened
to two years, and to ensure that he served in Europe, not Korea , where a
war was raging.  No preferential treatment for him! (like he charged that
President Bush received).

              3.    Kennedy was assigned to Paris, never advanced beyond the

rank of Private, and returned to Harvard upon being discharged.  Imagine a
person of his “education” NEVER advancing past the rank of Private!

               4.    While attending law school at the University of
Virginia, he was cited for reckless driving four times, including once when
he was clocked driving 90 miles per hour in a residential neighborhood with
his headlights off after dark.  Yet his Virginia driver’s license was never
revoked.  Coincidentally, he passed the bar exam in 1959.  Amazing!

              5.    In 1964, he was seriously injured in a plane crash, and
hospitalized for several months.  Test results done by the hospital at the
time he was admitted had shown he was legally intoxicated.  The results of
those tests remained a “state secret” until in the 1980’s when the report
was unsealed.  Didn’t hear about that from the unbiased media, did we?

              6.    On July 19, 1969, Kennedy attended a party on
Chappaquiddick Island in Massachusetts .  At about 11:00 PM, he borrowed his
chauffeur’s keys to his Oldsmobile limousine, and offered to give a ride
home to Mary Jo Kopechne, a campaign worker.  Leaving the island via an
unlit bridge with no guard rail, Kennedy steered the car off the bridge,
flipped, and into Poucha Pond.

              7.    He swam to shore and walked back to the party, passing
several houses and a fire station.  Two friends then returned with him to
the scene of the accident.  According to their later testimony, they told
him what he already knew – that he was required by law to immediately report
the accident to the authorities.  Instead Kennedy made his way to his hotel,
called his lawyer, and went to sleep.  Kennedy called the police the next
morning and by then the wreck had already been discovered.  Before dying,
Kopechne had scratched at the upholstered floor above her head in the
upside-down car.

              The Kennedy family began “calling in favors”, ensuring that
any inquiry would be contained.  Her corpse was whisked out-of-state to her
family, before an autopsy could be conducted.  Further details are
uncertain, but after the accident Kennedy says he repeatedly dove under the
water trying to rescue Kopechne and he didn’t call police because he was in
a state of shock. It is widely assumed Kennedy was drunk, and he held off
calling police in hopes that his family could fix the problem overnight.
Since the accident, Kennedy’s “political enemies” have referred to him as
the distinguished Senator from Chappaquiddick.  He pled guilty to leaving
the scene of an accident, and was given a SUSPENDED SENTENCE OF TWO MONTHS.
Kopechne’s family received a small payout from the Kennedy’s insurance
policy, and never sued.  There was  later an effort to have her body exhumed
and autopsied,  but her family  successfully fought against this in court,
and  Kennedy’s family  paid their attorney’s bills… a “token of
friendship”?
              8.    Kennedy has held his Senate seat for more than forty
years, but considering his longevity, his accomplishments seem scant.  He
authored or argued for legislation that ensured a variety of civil rights,
increased the minimum wage in 1981, made access to health care easier for
the indigent, and funded Meals on Wheels for fixed-income seniors and is
widely held as the “standard-bearer for liberalism”. In his very first
Senate roll, he was the floor manager for the bill that turned U.S.
immigration policy upside down and opened the floodgate for immigrants from
third world countries.

              9.    Since that time, he has been the prime instigator and
author of every expansion of an increase in immigration, up to and including
the latest attempt to grant amnesty to illegal aliens.  Not to mention the
pious grilling he gave the last two Supreme Court nominees, as if he was the
standard bearer for the nation in matters of “what’s right”.  What a pompous
ass!

              10.    He is known around Washington as a public drunk, loud,
boisterous and very disrespectful to ladies.  JERK is a better description
than “great American”.  “A blonde in every pond” is his motto.

              Let’s not allow the spin doctors make this jerk a hero — how
quickly the American public forgets what his real legacy is.  Let’s keep
this going for truth, justice and the American way!
 

Aug. 18 (Bloomberg) — “UPS and FedEx are doing just fine. It’s the Post Office that’s always having problems.” — Barack Obama, Aug. 11, 2009 No institution has been the butt of more government- inefficiency jokes than the U.S. Postal Service. Maybe the Department of Motor Vehicles. The only way the post office can stay in business is its government subsidy. The USPS lost $2.4 billion in the quarter ended in June and projects a net loss of $7 billion in fiscal 2009, outstanding debt of more than $10 billion and a cash shortfall of $1 billion. It was moved to intensive care — the Government Accountability Office’s list of “high risk” cases – - last month and told to shape up. (It must be the only entity that hasn’t cashed in on TARP!) That didn’t stop President Barack Obama from holding up the post office as an example at a town hall meeting in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, last week. When Obama compared the post office to UPS and FedEx, he was clearly hoping to assuage voter concerns about a public health-care option undercutting and eliminating private insurance. What he did instead was conjure up visions of long lines and interminable waits. Why do we need or want a health-care system that works like the post office? What’s more, if the USPS is struggling to compete with private companies, as Obama implied, why introduce a government health-care option that would operate at the same disadvantage? Obama Unscripted These are just two of the questions someone listening to the president’s health-insurance reform roadshow might want to ask. Impromptu Obamanomics is getting scarier by the day. For all the president’s touted intelligence, his un-teleprompted comments reveal a basic misunderstanding of capitalist principles. For example, asked at the Portsmouth town hall how private insurance companies can compete with the government, the president said the following: “If the private insurance companies are providing a good bargain, and if the public option has to be self-sustaining — meaning taxpayers aren’t subsidizing it, but it has to run on charging premiums and providing good services and a good network of doctors, just like any other private insurer would do — then I think private insurers should be able to compete.” Self-sustaining? The public option? What has Obama been doing during those daily 40-minute economic briefings coordinated by uber-economic-adviser, Larry Summers? Capitalism Explained Government programs aren’t self-sustaining by definition. They’re subsidized by the taxpayer. If they were self-financed, we’d be off the hook. Llewellyn Rockwell Jr., chairman of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, and editor of LewRockwell.com, put it this way in an Aug. 13 commentary on Mises.org: “The only reason for a government service is precisely to provide financial support for an operation that is otherwise unsustainable, or else there would be no point in the government’s involvement at all.” Rockwell sees no “economic reason for a government postal system” and would abolish it. Of course, there’s the small matter of the U.S. Constitution. Article 1, Section 8, grants Congress the power “to establish Post Offices and Post Roads.” A series of subsequent statutes gave the USPS a monopoly in the delivery of first-class mail. Congress thought that without such protection, private carriers would cherry-pick the high-profit routes and leave money-losing deliveries in remote areas to the post office. (In those days, the USPS covered most of its expenses with revenue.) Less Bad Option It was only through exemptions in the law that private carriers, such as UPS and FedEx, were allowed to compete in the delivery of overnight mail. Short of a constitutional amendment or a waiver from Congress, we are stuck with the USPS. But back to our storyline. Everyone makes a mistake or flubs a line when asked questions on the spot, including the president of the United States. We can overlook run-on sentences, subject and verb tense disagreement, even a memory lapse when it comes to facts and figures. The proliferation of Obama’s gaffes and non sequiturs on health care has exceeded the allowable limit. He has failed repeatedly to explain how the government will provide more (health care) for less (money). He has failed to explain why increased demand for medical services without a concomitant increase in supply won’t lead to rationing by government bureaucrats as opposed to the market. And he has failed to explain why a Medicare-like model is desirable when Medicare itself is going broke. The public is left with one of two unsettling conclusions: Either the president doesn’t understand the health-insurance reform plans working their way through Congress, or he understands both the plans and the implications and is being untruthful about the impact. Neither option is good; ignorance is clearly preferable to the alternative. (Caroline Baum, author of “Just What I Said,” is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.) To contact the writer of this column: Caroline Baum in New York at cabaum@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: August 17, 2009 21:00 EDT

What do all of the following people (see list below)  have in common? They are “czar’s” in the Obama Administration.

What is a “czar” exactly? Wikipedia defines it this way:

Originally, the title Czar (derived from Caesar) meant Emperor in the European medieval sense of the term, that is, a ruler who claims the same rank as a Roman emperor, with the approval of another emperor or a supreme ecclesiastical official (the Pope or the Ecumenical Patriarch).

Occasionally, the word could be used to designate other, non-Christian, supreme rulers. In Russia and Bulgaria the imperial connotations of the term were blurred with time and, by the 19th century, it had come to be viewed as an equivalent of King.^[2][3]

Now to be fair, Obama did not invent the position of czar in Washington. Many Presidents have had them. However, he appears to be on the verge of appointing yet ANOTHER czar to his already large family of czar’s and in doing so will own the title of President with the Most Czar’s. As stated in the Wall Street Journal yesterday:

 The Obama administration plans to appoint a “Special Master for Compensation” to ensure that companies receiving federal bailout funds are abiding by executive-pay guidelines, according to people familiar with the matter.

The administration is expected to name Kenneth Feinberg, who oversaw the federal government’s compensation fund for victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, to act as a pay czar for the Treasury Department, these people said.

Make no mistake, he knows exactly what he is doing. This is a first-rate power grab by a power-hungry President. You see the great thing about czar’s is that they operate with impunity and they are “under the radar” when it comes to making policy. They are accountable to nobody, except the administration.

So in effect we have NON-ELECTED officials, who are backed by The White House, who are given the tools and resources to do the bidding of the President and they are accountable to NO ONE! These czar’s don’t have to undergo Senate Confirmation Hearings, they just get appointed.

So as long as we are going to be serving all of these “kings” we should at least know who they are. In case we need to bow to them at some point. The following is a list of Obama’s Czar’s/Kings:

Energy czar Carol Browner

Urban czar Adolfo Carrion, Jr.

Infotech czar Vivek Kundra

Faith-based czar Joshua DuBois

Health reform czar Nancy-Ann DeParle

New TARP czar Herb Allison

Stimulus accountability czar Earl Devaney

Non-proliferation czar Gary Samore

Terrorism (I thought they didn’t use that word) czar John Brennan

Regulatory czar Cass Sunstein

Drug czar Gil Kerlikowske

Guantanamo closure czar Daniel Fried.

So there you have it. Obama’s Kings.

Does anyone know ANYTHING about these people? Guess what? That’s the point. You don’t know them so they are anonymous. It’s easier to “get things done” when you are anonymous.

Anonymous, unaccountable, invisible.