Forget “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” All Mrs. Martin had to do was stay in her seat, and she landed another blow against Obamacare.

Mrs. Martin, aka Ingrid, is an unemployed health care professional from Ohio. A friend took her along to see President Barack Obama’s “Health Care Hallelujah” speech in Strongsville Monday, where she wound up in the front row, listening in disbelief.

“I crossed my hand and bit my lips a couple of time, and when he made his Medicare claim I said ‘no, no, no,’ ” she told me yesterday.

While she kept her reactions more in line with Justice Sam Alito’s, the president must have noticed. As he shook hands after the speech, he asked her, “Are you OK?”

“ ‘Yes, sir, I’m fine,’ I told him. ‘I just don’t support your bill,’ ” she said. “And at that point, security and everyone stopped.”

And so it came to pass that, for two minutes, Obama and an informed citizen who doesn’t support his plan shared some straight talk. Well, Martin talked straight, anyway.

“He asked me what I would do, and I said the problem is that he’s doing insurance reform, but the problem is really the cost of medical care itself. I said we should fix things that are driving costs up, like defensive medicine and the need for tort reform,” she said. “He told me the bill handled all that, and I said ‘Well, I don’t believe it.’ ”

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Alexander: Health Care Bill is a Disaster Waiting to Happen

WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Rep. Rodney Alexander, R-Quitman, today delivered the following remarks on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives in opposition to the anticipated vote on the Senate-passed H.R. 3590 and reconciliation package:

“Proponents of this health reform package are misleading the American public into believing that you can raise baselines and reduce spending at the same time. You cannot expect to expand coverage to millions of individuals and curb costs.

“The Medicaid program already pays doctors and hospitals at levels well below those of Medicare and private insurance – and most of the time below actual costs. As a result, many doctors do not accept Medicaid patients, and cuts may further discourage participation in the program.

“The most devastating cuts to states’ federal Medicaid match have been deferred because of relief from the stimulus package, but that deferment expires at the end of December.

“The health care bill we are expected to vote on is a disaster waiting to happen, and an expansion of an already broken program.”

U.S. Rep. Rodney Alexander, R-Quitman, represents the 5th Congressional District and serves on the House Appropriations Committee.

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By: Peter Ferrara and Bob McEwen

In his health overhaul speech last Wednesday, President Obama accused his critics of spreading “misinformation” and “bogus claims,” of “demagoguery and distortion,” and of using “scare tactics” instead of honest debate. Ironically, all of that can be found in his own speech.

President Obama said that his health overhaul plan includes no Medicare cuts, telling seniors: “[D]on’t pay attention to those scary stories about how your benefits will be cut.” He continued, “The only thing this plan would eliminate is the … unwarranted subsidies in Medicare that go to insurance companies–subsidies that do everything to pad their profits but don’t improve the care of seniors.”

What Obama is talking about here is $177 billion in cuts for Medicare Advantage–the private insurance options that almost one-fourth of seniors have chosen for their coverage under Medicare. Republicans enacted this choice for seniors, and close to 10 million retirees have chosen one of these private insurance options because they get better benefits from it than from standard Medicare.

At a minimum, Obama’s cuts will force these plans to cut back on their benefits for seniors. Or the Medicare Advantage plans may just go out of business altogether, dumping all the seniors who have made that choice because they think they are getting a better deal from those plans. Does Obama’s quote above regarding this component of his health plan honestly explain to you what is involved? Or does it seem calculated to deceive you?

Obama’s health overhaul plan also includes cuts in “hundreds of billions of dollars in waste and fraud” in Medicare. What Obama is talking about here is over $300 billion in additional Medicare cuts, for a total of $500 billion, for payments to doctors and hospitals. In response, doctors and hospitals will cut back on the services and care they provide to seniors. This is the beginning of the health care rationing in Obama’s plan. Calling these just cuts in “waste and fraud” is again a calculated deception.

Obama promises seniors in his speech “not a dollar of the Medicare trust fund will be used to pay for this plan.” But what Obama doesn’t tell us is that only Medicare payroll taxes are devoted to the Medicare trust fund. In addition, Medicare is heavily financed by general revenues, and Medicare cuts could provide general revenue savings that do not involve taking money out of the Medicare trust fund. Such general revenue savings wouldn’t be put into the trust fund in the first place. Again, does Obama’s discussion of this sound like calculated deception?

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$2,000,000,000,000. That’s the amount by which the Obama administration raised its ten-year estimate of the nation’s budget deficit from the one it made only a few months ago. Now, $2 trillion is a lot of money. But even more significant is the fact that this revision represents almost a 30 percent increase — no tiny percentage of the earlier $7 trillion figure. It seems that expenses are higher — up 24 percent this year, the largest increase since the height of the Korean War — than originally estimated, and revenues are lower. The resulting deficit, says Peter Orszag, Obama’s budget director, is “higher than desirable”. He might have added that the administration’s critics had it right when they claimed that the earlier estimate represented a turn around the dance floor with that old seductress, Rosy Scenario.

There’s worse: the new estimate assumes that Medicare and Medicaid spending will be cut by $622 billion, even though Congress has made it know that it is reluctant to make any such cut. Then there is the $600 billion in revenue included for the sale of emission permits, despite the fact that the House has given away so many permits in order to buy support for the cap-and-trade emission-reduction that the program will produce at most $450 billion. Those two items alone come to almost another trillion dollars in red ink. Throw in another trillion-plus for Obamacare, and it is no surprise that senior economist Bill Gale, at the liberal Brookings Institute, says that the 
deficit will hit over $10 trillion over the next decade, a figure he finds “deeply alarming”.

This year, the deficit will come to 11.2 percent of GDP, and by 2019 the debt will be equal to 76 percent of the value of the nation’s output of goods and services, almost double the 41 percent when Obama took control of the nation’s finances. No problem, say White House economists. Unsustainable, says Warren Buffett, among others.

Which brings us to Martha’s Vineyard and Beijing. A tie-less President took time off his vacation on Martha’s Vineyard to praise and reappoint an also tie-less Ben Bernanke to another four-year term as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. The lack of neckwear could not conceal a certain tension. The president was trying to divert attention from the very bad news about his burgeoning budget deficits, and the chairman was trying to reassure the markets that notwithstanding his reputation as “Helicopter Ben”, the man who would fight recessions by dropping cash from the skies, he would indeed rein in all that extra liquidity when the right time comes. Given that his new term runs until the end of January, 2014, Bernanke can with impunity tighten just as Obama launches his 2011 campaign for a second term. Recall that it was just such a tightening and consequent slowing of the economy by Alan Greenspan that George Bush the elder still feels handed the 1992 election to Bill Clinton. For good central bankers, gratitude at reappointment does not trump sound policy.

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Tens of Thousands Don’t Like the Health Care Overhaul

Elaine Guardiani has been with AARP for 14 years, and said, “I’m extremely disappointed in AARP.”

Retired nurse Dale Anderson has 12 years with AARP and said, “I don’t wanna be connected with AARP.”

Many are switching to the American Seniors Association, a group that calls itself the conservative alternative as CBS News Investigative Correspondent Sharyl Attkisson reports.

Last week alone, they added more than 5,000 new members. Our camera was there Friday when the mail came.

Letters were filled with cut-up AARP cards.

“I think that probably the seniors are most upset with cuts in Medicare,” said ASA President Stuart Barton.

The American Seniors Association is flat-out against President Obama’s plan, which calls for $313 billion dollars in Medicare cuts over ten years. The AARP is widely viewed as supporting the President.

Last week, Obama told a town meeting in Portsmouth, NH, “We have the AARP on board because they know this is a good deal for our seniors.”

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Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Ca.), the ranking Republican on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, yesterday released a Staff Report  on the enormous fraud and waste in the Medicare system.  The report points out that H.R. 3200, the Democrats’ government-run health care bill that has been reported out of three jurisdictional committees, does not address the systemic failures that facilitate the fraud but replicates these same faulty mechanisms for fraud and waste.

From the report:

“According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), improper payments in the Medicare Fee-for-Service (FSS) and Medicare Advantage programs were estimated to be $17.2 billion for fiscal year 2008,” the report said.  “GAO estimates that as much as 10% of overall health care spending is lost to fraud. More troubling, the ‘America’s Affordable Health Choices Act’ will apply the same ineffective anti-fraud and abuse protections to the public insurance plan that the Medicare program uses, leaving the door open to the same types of waste and fraud as those currently plaguing Medicare.”

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