The Problem With Obama

Gover­nor Sarah Palin writes the following:

Last week­end while you were prepar­ing for the hol­i­days with your fam­ily, Harry Reid’s Sen­ate was mak­ing shady back­room deals to ram through the Demo­c­rat health care take-​over. The Sen­ate ended debate on this bill with­out even read­ing it. That and mid­night week­end votes seem to be stan­dard oper­at­ing pro­ce­dures in D.C. No one is cer­tain of what’s in the bill, but Sen­a­tor Jim DeMint spot­ted one shock­ing rev­e­la­tion regard­ing the sec­tion in the bill describ­ing the Inde­pen­dent Medicare Advi­sory Board (now called the Inde­pen­dent Pay­ment Advi­sory Board), which is a panel of bureau­crats charged with cut­ting health care costs on the backs of patients – also known as rationing. Appar­ently Reid and friends have changed the rules of the Sen­ate so that the sec­tion of the bill deal­ing with this board can’t be repealed or amended with­out a 2/​3 super­ma­jor­ity vote. Sen­a­tor DeMint said:

“This is a rule change. It’s a pretty big deal. We will be pass­ing a new law and at the same time cre­at­ing a sen­ate rule that makes it out of order to amend or even repeal the law. I’m not even sure that it’s con­sti­tu­tional, but if it is, it most cer­tainly is a sen­ate rule. I don’t see why the major­ity party wouldn’t put this in every bill. If you like your law, you most cer­tainly would want it to have force for future sen­ates. I mean, we want to bind future con­gresses. This goes to the fun­da­men­tal pur­pose of sen­ate rules: to pre­vent a tyran­ni­cal major­ity from tram­pling the rights of the minor­ity or of future congresses.”

In other words, Democ­rats are pro­tect­ing this rationing “death panel” from future change with a pro­ce­dural hur­dle. You have to ask why they’re so con­cerned about pro­tect­ing this par­tic­u­lar pro­vi­sion. Could it be because bureau­cratic rationing is one impor­tant way Democ­rats want to “bend the cost curve” and keep health care spend­ing down?

The Con­gres­sional Bud­get Office seems to think that such rationing has some­thing to do with cost. In a let­ter to Harry Reid last week, CBO Direc­tor Dou­glas Elmen­dorf noted (with a num­ber of caveats) that the bill’s cal­cu­la­tions call for a reduc­tion in Medicare’s spend­ing rate by about 2 per­cent in the next two decades, but then he writes the kicker:

“It is unclear whether such a reduc­tion in the growth rate could be achieved, and if so, whether it would be accom­plished through greater effi­cien­cies in the deliv­ery of health care or would reduce access to care or dimin­ish the qual­ity of care.”

Though Nancy Pelosi and friends have tried to call “death pan­els” the “lie of the year,” this type of rationing – what the CBO calls “reduc[ed] access to care” and “diminish[ed] qual­ity of care” – is pre­cisely what I meant when I used that metaphor.

This health care bill is one of the most far-​reaching and expen­sive expan­sions of the role of gov­ern­ment into our lives. We’re talk­ing about putting one-​seventh of our econ­omy under the government’s thumb. We’re also talk­ing about some­thing as inti­mate to our per­sonal well-​being as med­ical care.

This bill is so unpop­u­lar that peo­ple on the right and the left hate it. So why go through with it? The Sen­ate is plan­ning to vote on this on Christ­mas Eve. Why the rush? Though we will begin pay­ing for this bill imme­di­ately, we will see no ben­e­fits for years. (That’s the trick that allowed the CBO to state that the bill won’t grow the deficit for the next ten years.)

The administration’s promises of trans­parency and bipar­ti­san­ship have been bro­ken one by one. This entire process has been defined by mid­night votes on week­ends, closed-​door meet­ings with indus­try lob­by­ists, and pay­offs to politi­cians will­ing to sell their prin­ci­ples for sweet­heart deals. Is it any won­der that Amer­i­cans are so dis­il­lu­sioned with their lead­ers in Washington?

This is about pol­i­tics, not health care. Amer­i­cans don’t want this bill. Amer­i­cans don’t like this bill. Wash­ing­ton has stopped lis­ten­ing to us. But we’re pay­ing atten­tion, and 2010 is coming.

Source: Gov­er­nor Sarah Palin, Mid­night Votes, Back­room Deals, and a Death Panel, The Governor’s Face­book page.

Gover­nor Palin writes the fol­low­ing in the Wash­ing­ton Post:

With the pub­li­ca­tion of dam­ag­ing e-​mails from a cli­mate research cen­ter in Britain, the rad­i­cal envi­ron­men­tal move­ment appears to face a tip­ping point. The rev­e­la­tion of appalling actions by so-​called cli­mate change experts allows the Amer­i­can pub­lic to finally under­stand the con­cerns so many of us have artic­u­lated on this issue.

“Climate-​gate,” as the e-​mails and other doc­u­ments from the Cli­mate Research Unit at the Uni­ver­sity of East Anglia have become known, exposes a highly politi­cized sci­en­tific cir­cle — the same cir­cle whose work under­lies efforts at the Copen­hagen cli­mate change con­fer­ence. The agenda-​driven poli­cies being pushed in Copen­hagen won’t change the weather, but they would change our econ­omy for the worse.

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Gover­nor Sarah Palin on Climategate:

The president’s deci­sion to attend the inter­na­tional cli­mate con­fer­ence in Copen­hagen needs to be recon­sid­ered in light of the unfold­ing Cli­mate­gate scan­dal. The leaked e-​mails involved in Cli­mate­gate expose the unsci­en­tific behav­ior of lead­ing cli­mate sci­en­tists who delib­er­ately destroyed records to block infor­ma­tion requests, manip­u­lated data to “hide the decline” in global tem­per­a­tures, and con­spired to silence the crit­ics of man-​made global warm­ing. I sup­port Sen­a­tor James Inhofe’s call for a full inves­ti­ga­tion into this scan­dal. Because it involves many of the same per­son­al­i­ties and enti­ties behind the Copen­hagen con­fer­ence, Cli­mate­gate calls into ques­tion many of the pro­pos­als being pushed there, includ­ing any­thing that would lead to a cap and tax plan. Pol­icy should be based on sound sci­ence, not snake oil. I took a stand against such snake oil sci­ence when I sued the fed­eral gov­ern­ment over its deci­sion to list the polar bear as an endan­gered species despite the fact that the polar bear pop­u­la­tion has increased. I’ve never denied the real­ity of cli­mate change; in fact, I was the first gov­er­nor to cre­ate a sub­cab­i­net posi­tion to deal specif­i­cally with the issue. I saw the impact of chang­ing weather pat­terns first­hand while serv­ing as gov­er­nor of our only Arc­tic state. But while we rec­og­nize the effects of chang­ing water lev­els, ero­sion pat­terns, and glacial ice melt, we can­not pri­mar­ily blame man’s activ­i­ties for the earth’s cycli­cal weather changes. The dras­tic eco­nomic mea­sures being pushed by dog­matic envi­ron­men­tal­ists won’t change the weather, but will dra­mat­i­cally change our econ­omy for the worse. Pol­icy deci­sions require real sci­ence and real solu­tions, not junk sci­ence and dooms­day scare tac­tics pushed by an envi­ron­men­tal priest­hood that cap­i­tal­izes on the public’s worry and makes them feel that own­ing an SUV is a “sin” against the planet. In his inau­gural address, Pres­i­dent Obama declared his inten­tion to “restore sci­ence to its right­ful place.” Boy­cotting Copen­hagen while this scan­dal is thor­oughly inves­ti­gated would send a strong mes­sage that the United States gov­ern­ment will not be a party to fraud­u­lent sci­en­tific prac­tices. Say­ing no to Copen­hagen and cap and tax are first steps in “restor­ing sci­ence to its right­ful place.