Today was a pretty good day for the democrats and the Obamacare morons.  It appears quite a few “undecideds” are heading to the “yes” column.  It has shifted big time.  It looks like Bart Stupak and his bloc are selling out for a signature on a piece of paper that means absolutely nothing.  I sort of feel like the frog in the fable The Frog and The Scorpion.  I mean a democrat is always a democrat in the end.  No ethics or integrity.  But when you want something so bad, sometimes you just can’t see the forest through the trees.

This leads me to an excellent article in the Washington Compost by Robert Samuelson.  He’s not an economist, but he is a straight thinker and he does a good job describing Obama’s backyard of unicorns and skittle trees when it comes to healthcare and cost control:

One job of presidents is to educate Americans about crucial national problems. On health care, Barack Obama has failed. Almost everything you think you know about health care is probably wrong or, at least, half wrong. Great simplicities and distortions have been peddled in the name of achieving “universal health coverage.” The miseducation has worsened as the debate approaches its climax……

How often, for example, have you heard the emergency-room argument? The uninsured, it’s said, use emergency rooms for primary care. That’s expensive and ineffective. Once they’re insured, they’ll have regular doctors. Care will improve; costs will decline. Everyone wins. Great argument. Unfortunately, it’s untrue.

A study by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found that the insured accounted for 83 percent of emergency-room visits, reflecting their share of the population. After Massachusetts adopted universal insurance, emergency-room use remained higher than the national average, an Urban Institute study found. More than two-fifths of visits represented non-emergencies. Of those, a majority of adult respondents to a survey said it was “more convenient” to go to the emergency room or they couldn’t “get [a doctor's] appointment as soon as needed.” If universal coverage makes appointments harder to get, emergency-room use may increase……

And then this nugget of potpourri:

Unless we change the fee-for-service system, costs will remain hard to control because providers are paid more for doing more. Obama might have attempted that by proposing health-care vouchers (limited amounts to be spent on insurance), which would force a restructuring of delivery systems to compete on quality and cost. Doctors, hospitals and drug companies would have to reorganize care. Obama refrained from that fight and instead cast insurance companies as the villains.

He’s telling people what they want to hear, not what they need to know. Whatever their sins, insurers are mainly intermediaries; they pass along the costs of the delivery system. In 2009, the largest 14 insurers had profits of roughly $9 billion; that approached 0.4 percent of total health spending of $2.472 trillion. This hardly explains high health costs. What people need to know is that Obama’s plan evades health care’s major problems and would worsen the budget outlook.

0.4% of the total healthcare spending people!  0.4%.  Less than one percent.  Why are we doing this people?  Why are we turning our entire healthcare system upside down when the gains will be zero and the costs will be enormous?  Because Obama says so?  Because Stretch Pelosi chooses to violate a fundamental aspect of the constitution?  To what end?  In the past week and a half or so Obama has been going around lying through his teeth saying that if we don’t pass this cancer, the government will be deeper in debt, millions will lose their coverage, yada yada yada, rising costs, blah blah blah and small businesses will drop coverage altogether.

For one thing because of Obamacare’s requirements, any business—-in particular small business—-in order to survive and compete, will dump their health care coverage, particularly for the low, unskilled worker on you and me.  Us.  The taxpayer.  How the hell does this save costs?  The one thing Obama doesn’t do is cut or contain costs.  And he knows it, yet he still lies about it.

Obama attempts to call out the opponents of this monstrocity by minimizing our “government takeover of healthcare” claim.  As if we are out in left field on this.  If the government dictates price controls, rationing, what policies you keep, what policies you don’t, what will be taxed and how much……if the government  can send you to prison for not having a set policy and refuse to pay the tax penalty on it, if that’s not government takeover or control, what is?  What.  Is??

The middle class will be paying the freight for this system, starting at incomes at the very bottom of that class.  The only middle-class taxpayers who will see any benefit at all are ironically those who get thrown out of their existing health-care plans by businesses hoping to dump costs.  Democrats will push millions of more Americans into coverage that pays inadequate compensation for the costs involved.  It will act like a timebomb on the health-care system, driving up the demand-supply ratio and either prices or rationing along with it.  It’s like the worst of all worlds.

You have a 3000 page document filled with the word shall.  You shall do this, you shall do that, you shall not do this, you shall not do that.  He’s setting up dozens of panels and committees loaded with phony experts and bureaucratic hacks telling you what drugs to take or what procedures you can have, or when you can have them.  Who.  What.  When. Where.  How is this not government control?  What else could it be?

Obama and his minions demonize Sarah Palin and others about references to death panels.  The president’s own medical advisor, Ezekial Emanual, has discussed this very issue.  They have talked about models where a point system is given depending on age, health, disabilities, etc, etc.  How is that not government control?  Every nation that has socialized government healthcare, has caps on what they spend per person.  In the UK it is roughly 40k per person.  If that isn’t a death panel, what are they?  A life panel?  Quality of life panels?

Nothing good comes from this bill except more taxes, more control and less competition.

Oh, and then you have this:

This is such an important bill that it has to be done now.  Right now.  Yet it does nothing for at least four years.  No improvement in health care coverage for four years after this piece of crap passes.  And what will happen for four years?

Taxes.  And lots of them.