All-Time High: 60% Support Repeal Of Obamacare

As Obama’s numbers go down, support for repealing his signature legislation goes up.

Support for repeal of the health care reform bill is at its highest level in over a month, while the number of voters who believe repeal will be good for the economy has reached a new high.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of Likely Voters shows that 60% at least somewhat favor repeal of the health care reform law, while 36% oppose repeal.

Those numbers include 50% who Strongly Favor repeal and 26% who Strongly Oppose it. Platinum Members can see state-by-state results from across the country.

The number that favors repeal is up five points from last week and is the highest level measured since July 1. The number that Strongly Favors repeal also ties the highest level ever – first measured in mid-April.

More proof of pending doom for the Democrats who forced this unconstitutional monstrosity down our throats.

Palin Fires Back At White House

Via Hot Air

Earlier today the White House responded to Palin’s WSJ op-ed with this:

On Gov. Palin’s Attacks

Every non partisan organization that has looked at her claims say they are false. And the ideas in her op-ed are both scary and risky. Eliminating Medicare and giving our seniors vouchers instead is a bad idea that we shouldn’t adopt.

Palin responded and is not backing down a bit:

I’m pleased that the White House is finally responding to Republican health care ideas instead of pretending they don’t exist.[1] But in doing so President Obama should follow his own sound advice and avoid making “wild misrepresentations”.[2] Medicare vouchers would give everyone on Medicare the chance to decide for themselves which health plan to use, rather than leave that decision to government bureaucrats. Such proposals are the kind of health care reform that Republicans stand for: market-oriented, patient-centered, and result-driven.

The White House talking points leave the rest of my arguments unanswered. They don’t respond to the idea that all individuals should get the same tax benefits received by those who get coverage through their employers; that we must reform our tort laws; and that we should allow Americans to buy insurance across state lines. The White House also fails to respond to the Nyce/Schieber study indicating that wages will fall if the government expands coverage without reducing health care inflation rates.

One last thing: after President Obama’s speech tonight, listen for which pundits use the words “false”, “scary”, and “risky” in describing the proposals I put forward. That’s how you’ll be able to tell who the White House counted as “allies” worthy of receiving its talking points.

I’d say that round went to Palin.

Obama’s ObamaCare Speech

I don’t have a full text yet, but his plan includes forcing Americans to purchase insurance, creates an “exchange” and preserves the public option. (I think).

More updates and text coming.

Update #1:

Full text here.

I noticed this retooling of the “you can keep your doctor and health and insurance if you like it” lie.  Now he says this:

“Let me repeat this: nothing in our plan requires you to change what you have.”

Nothing requires you to change what you have.  But nothing is stopping your employer from dumping your plan and forcing you onto the public option.

Nothing but nuance, kids.

Update #2 – “He’s dropped the period.”

AP noticed the change in phrasing the uninsured number in this fact check:

WASHINGTON – The change was subtle, but significant. In his speech to Congress on Wednesday night, President Barack Obama gave a more accurate — and less reassuring — account of the impact of his proposed health care overall than he has done in the past. It went by in a blink.

He told Americans that nothing he is proposing will force businesses or consumers to change their existing insurance coverage. That much is true.

It’s also true that nothing in his plan guarantees that policies people have now will continue to be available in the same form. In earlier accounts, he spoke with unmerited certainty in saying people who are happy with their current insurance can simply keep it.

Other parts of his speech repeated some of the oversimplified claims that have marked his salesmanship. A look at some of his assertions Wednesday night:

OBAMA: “Nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change the coverage or the doctor you have. Let me repeat this: Nothing in our plan requires you to change what you have.”

THE FACTS: That’s correct, as far as it goes. But neither can the plan guarantee that people can keep their current coverage. Employers sponsor coverage for most families, and they’d be free to change their health plans in ways that workers may not like, or drop insurance altogether. The Congressional Budget Office analyzed the health care bill written by House Democrats and said that by 2016 some 3 million people who now have employer-based care would lose it because their employers would decide to stop offering it.

In the past Obama repeatedly said, “If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan, period.” Now he’s stopping short of that unconditional guarantee by saying nothing in the plan “requires” any change.

He’s dropped the “period.”

Charlie Rangel Throws Down The Race Card

This is getting old.

First it was Gov. Paterson. Now the dean of New York’s congressional delegation has played the race card — and just as the governor did, he’s using President Obama to do it.

Rep. Charles Rangel said Tuesday that “bias” and “prejudice” toward Obama are fueling opposition to health-care reform.

Those incendiary comments came on the heels of Paterson’s controversial comments about race that also mentioned the nation’s first black president.

“Some Americans have not gotten over the fact that Obama is president of the United States. They go to sleep wondering, ‘How did this happen?’ ” Rangel (D-Manhattan) said Tuesday.

Give it up, Charlie.  You and your race baiting friends used up all of your desperate race cards during the election.  Perhaps you should be concentrating on your own problems.

Senate panel approves health care bill without one Republican vote

The vote was 13 to 10.

Voting on strict party lines, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee approved a bill on Wednesday to revamp the nation’s health care system, as Democrats said that the legislation held the promise of more universal health coverage and more effective and affordable medical care while Republicans argued that the measure was unaffordable and would lead not to better care but to the denial of it.

The committee vote was 13 to 10.

The acting committee chairman, Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut, had made clear from the start that his panel would bend little when it came to the top priorities of Senate Democrats and the Obama administration, including on a provision to create a government-run health insurance plan to compete with private insurers that Republicans insisted was a deal-breaker.

In the end however, Republicans held their ranks. In his closing statement, Senator Michael B. Enzi of Wyoming said that Republicans had been forced to offer more than 100 amendments to the bill because Democrats had largely shut them out of the drafting process. And he said that the $1 trillion, 10-year cost of the measure would simply drive the nation further into debt, while denying many Americans the choices for health care providers that they now enjoy.

Mr. Enzi, with a hint of sarcasm, noted that the bill’s title was the “Affordable Health Choices Act.”

“With its trillion-dollar price tag,” Mr. Enzi said, “this bill is anything but affordable.”

Committee Chairman Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, thanked Mr. Dodd and other committee members in a quickly issued statement that commended the bill’s passage and urged for bipartisanship going forward.

“It is a cause that can and should unite us all as Americans,” he said in a statement issued from Hyannis Port, Mass., where he is battling brain cancer. “As we move from our committee room to the Senate floor, we must continue the search for solutions that unite us, so that the great promise of quality affordable health care for all can be fulfilled.”

How nice for Ted Kennedy to have the luxury of extolling the virtues of a health care system under which he would have been told to go home and die with his diagnosis at age 77 .  This coming after he received the best possible treatment on the planet with a health care plan that members of Congress will not have to worry about losing should this nightmare of a bill ever pass.

Healthcare legislation includes billions for jungle gyms and streetlights

They call it an effort to improve the nation’s “health infrastructure.”  I call it pork.  Didn’t someone mention something about lipstick on a pig awhile back?

WASHINGTON – Sweeping healthcare legislation working its way through Congress is more than an effort to provide insurance to millions of Americans without coverage. Tucked within is a provision that could provide billions of dollars for walking paths, streetlights, jungle gyms, and even farmers’ markets.

The add-ons – characterized as part of a broad effort to improve the nation’s health “infrastructure’’ – appear in House and Senate versions of the bill.

Critics argue the provision is a thinly disguised effort to insert pork-barrel spending into a bill that has been widely portrayed to the public as dealing with expanding health coverage and cutting medical costs. A leading critic, Senator Mike Enzi, a Wyoming Republican, ridicules the local projects, asking: “How can Democrats justify the wasteful spending in this bill?’’

But advocates, including Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, defend the proposed spending as a necessary way to promote healthier lives and, in the long run, cut medical costs. “These are not public works grants; they are community transformation grants,’’ said Anthony Coley, a spokesman for Kennedy, chairman of the Senate health committee whose healthcare bill includes the projects.

Pretty soon Queen Nancy will be shrieking from the House floor that this bill is all about JOBS JOBS JOBS JOBS.

Axelrod dances around Obama’s no tax-hike vow

Who can forget Obama’s campaign pledge not to raise taxes on families making less than $25o,ooo?  It was part of every stump speech, all of the debates and was oft repeated by his surrogates.

Now Obama seems to be backing off of the pledge as proposals to tax health care benefits to pay for health care reform are considered.

Under persistent questioning from ABC’s George Stephanopoulos Sunday, Obama senior adviser David Axelrod declined to restate the vow and left open the possibility that the president might sign health care reform legislation that taxes high-cost, employer-provided insurance plans which some middle-class families currently receive tax free.

“The president had said in the past that he doesn’t believe taxing health care benefits at any level is necessarily the best way to go here. He still believes that, but there are a number of formulations and we’ll wait and see,” Axelrod said on ABC’s “This Week.” “The important thing at this point is to keep the process moving, to keep people at the table, to the keep the discussions going. We’ve gotten a long way down the road and we want to finish that journey.”

When Stephanopoulos asked why Obama hadn’t drawn a “line in the sand” over his tax pledge, Axelrod suggested that kind of ultimatum is at odds with the president’s effort to being a new tone to politics.

“One of the problems we’ve had in this town is that people draw lines in the sand and they stop talking to each other. And you don’t get anything done. That’s not the way the president approaches this,” the White House adviser said.

What makes this especially odious is that while Obama is hedging on his campaign promise not to tax below the $250,000 level, he is considering adopting something that he vilified John McCain for daring to propose.

Obama: Actually you may not get to keep your insurance and your doctor after all

The president has repeatedly stated that if you like your doctor and you like your insurance plan, you will be able to keep it.

Today he clarified.

When asked by Jake Tapper how he can keep that promise if employers opt to offer a public plan to its employees, Obama replied:

“When I say if you have your plan and you like it,…or you have a doctor and you like your doctor, that you don’t have to change plans, what I’m saying is the government is not going to make you change plans under health reform,”

So in other words, if your employer opts for a public plan (and why wouldn’t they if it is cheaper?)  all bets are off.

Ted Kennedy, Jr. uses family name to influence Congress

Nothing shocks me about this family, but it is disturbing to learn that Ted Kennedy, Jr. may have used his family name to influence key health care decisions and policies given that his father is the face of health care reform in Congress and has a direct line to the White House.

The Boston Herald was given an advance copy of Dick Morris’ new book and found an entire chapter on the son of Ted Kennedy’s activities.

U.S. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s son, Teddy Jr., is a Washington, D.C., “rainmaker” who “has been boldly exploiting” his family name to rake in fees from health care corporations and government pension investors, a new book by pundit Dick Morris claims.

The tome, an insider’s look at Washington that hits bookstores today, includes a chapter on Ted Kennedy Jr. that claims he took advantage of lax lobbying rules in the early 2000s when his company, Marwood Associates, worked to help pharmaceutical giant Bristol Myers Squibb keep a monopoly on a diabetes drug.

A former adviser to President Clinton, Morris writes that BMS made $3 billion off the drug in 2000 and hired the younger Kennedy solely to land a meeting with his powerful father, who sits on the Senate health care committee, according to book excerpts provided exclusively to the Herald.

Ted Kennedy Jr. did not return a call yesterday. A spokeswoman for the Bay State senior senator did not respond to several messages.

New lobbying laws ban lawmakers’ spouses and immediate family members from working for companies with business before legislators. But Morris argues that Marwood remains a behind-the-scenes player in the high-stakes world of health care.

“(Ted Kennedy Jr.) has unique access to the only person besides President Obama who will decide which provisions will be in the health care reform package,” he says of Sen. Kennedy. “Whether or not he’s a lobbyist,Ted Jr. is still a player in the Washington information game.”

I’m sure Obama will give him an exemption if he wants a job with the administration.

Obama receives boos at AMA speech

AP: Barack Obama isn’t used to hearing boos. For all the young president’s popularity, the response he got Monday from doctors at an American Medical Association meeting was a sign his road is only going to get rockier as he tries to sell his plan to overhaul the nation’s health care system. The boos erupted when Obama told the doctors in Chicago he wouldn’t try to help them win their top legislative priority—limits on jury damages in medical malpractice cases.

Not everyone loves you, Barry.