Wednesday  September 9, 2009

Modified Thursday September 10, 2009 for McCain response.

A ZingerFling:

A few ideas to throw out to our readers.

“We didn’t come here to fear the future, we came here to change it.”

My Opinion:

This will go down as President Obama’s quotable moment.   Unfortunately the rhetoric soared above the content of the proposal. The President is a masterful orator but quite frankly I agree with the one Republican that shouted out “that’s a lie” when the president said the proposal never included illegal aliens. What the President says is not the problem.  He says what people want to hear.  But there is obviously a disconnect between the facts and what is being said.

President Obama offered some well agreed to options for improving health care.  But the real question of health care is how to reduce the cost, not how to compete with another insurance option.  A government program will require the same network of doctors, hospitals and other providers to support the members that enroll in the program.  The president needed to focus on specifics of how to reduce the costs. Yet, if the government is capable of cutting health care costs in Medicare, why haven’t they done it already?

Secondly, the President said that we will offer a $6,000 tax credit to those that cannot access care today.   Yet 50% of American Taxpayers pay no taxes.  If they don’t have sufficient income to pay taxes where are they going to get the money to buy insurance?  This just doesn’t make sense and the economics don’t hold up.

The President made some obvious missteps over what is in the bill.  He claims that illegals arenot in the bill, yet there was the option of including illegals in the original bill and the President spoke of the 45 million without health care.  Yet tonight he changed it and said 30million, thereby eliminating the 15 million illegal immigrants and claiming that he never covered them.  This is not true.

The President offered a demonstration project to see if tort reform will work.  How ridiculous.  If you want a demonstration project how about a demonstration project of the government's ability to cut health care costs, or a demonstration project of a public option, or a demonstration project of covering all Americans within the demonstration area.  Certainly the consequences of getting health care wrong is far greater than getting tort reform wrong.

The President has circumvented the trial lawyers by avoiding tort reform.  The President circumvented cross state competition thereby avoiding the state insurance regulators.  If the President had just addressed these two issues, we could cut health care costs almost 10% and eliminate the need for the public option.  Instead he wants to take on the big insurance industry and blame them for the predicament we are in.

The President has demonstrated a minister’s passion for health care reform.  The President has demonstrated a good understanding for the need to change health care.  But the President has demonstrated that he really does not know the details.  Blaming the Republicans fails to address the discord within the Democratic party that has sufficient votes to do whatever they want if they could get their own act together.

Lets be clear, if the government wants to make fundamental changes to the cost of health care they can do that within the current system.  If the government wants to all Americans have health care coverage, a tax credit will not do it. 

Here is Senator John McCain's response.  I include it to provide a thoughtful alternative view to President Obama's speech.  This was added after Zinger originally published this article.