Right Again

The President recently held a health care ‘summit’ to try to come to a bipartisan consensus on his tanking health care reform. At least, that is what he said. In reality, this pseudo-summit was just a glorified PR stunt. This comes hot on the heels of Obama’s new plan for Obamacare, a nasty little proposal that just came out of the White House. The plan now is to cram this new breed of Obamacare into law through the reconciliation process.
Obama started the conference saying that the important issues are “figuring out how can we control the huge expansion of entitlements” and “the exploding costs of Medicare.”
How do these words come out of his mouth? Control expansion? This is one of the largest expansions of government ever. How is that control?
Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus even said, “The main point is: we basically agree.”
To this I can only say: No. No, we don’t.
Obamacare is irresponsible, incredibly expensive, socialist and divisive to the American people. Obama may claim that it is Republican obstructionism that is to blame for all the delays and obstructions that faced the bill, but we all know that is crap. For a long time the Democrats had a super-majority in the Senate and large majority in the House. They didn’t need the Republicans at all. The thing is, Obamacare is such a stepping-stone to socialism that they couldn’t even get all the Democrats to toe the party line. It was something so absolutely mad that the only thing that has ever been bipartisan about it is the opposition. What is so surprising, though, is that even after public opinion has turned very much against Obamacare (Scott Brown, anyone?), Obama is still trying to push this. People do not want the higher premiums, reduced choice, higher taxes and incredible cost that Obamacare will bring down on them.
So what does Obama go and do? He issues a proposal that takes the worst aspects of both the House and Senate versions of Obamacare and smashes them together.
Obama’s new proposal increases the very aspects of the bill that the American people object to. Taxes, lack of choice, spending and subsidies all go up. Obama has made it clear that he doesn’t care at all about unity or bipartisanism despite what he says. Obama is going to take this proposal and try to use the reconciliation process —  which is only meant to implement fiscal policy changes and not major changes in the structure of our country — to pass a bill and bypass the American legislative process.
The take-away message here is that the President has finally made it clear that he has absolutely no intention of making any sort of compromise. There will be no meaningful discussion or debate. Obama has made his choice about what he thinks should happen and he couldn’t care less what the rest of us think about it.
Obama will do whatever he can to force this through Congress on a narrow, completely partisan vote using a cheap technicality (the reconciliation process) to bypass our legislative process.