Health Care This and That: Barney Frank Lets the Truth Slip About the Public Option, and Much More…

Lets get started… First up here’s a great video of Congressman Barney Frank letting the truth about the so called “Public Plan” slip:

Yes you heard him right, a public plan will lead to a government takeover of health care… While your at it be sure to check out this video from Naked Emperor News of Pres. Obama in his own words taking about how  his health care plan would eliminate private insurance.

Second, Keith Hennessey provides a  great counterpoint to President Obama’s health care reform email:

Dear Taxpayer,

If you’re like most Americans, you like the health insurance you have today but think the system needs improvement.  You would like things to work better, but are aware of the threats that arise from politicians who promise you something for nothing.

President Obama is correct that the underlying problem with health care is rising costs.  Because of this problem, your paycheck grows more slowly, millions of Americans cannot afford to buy health insurance, and the escalating costs of Medicare and Medicaid will force enormous tax increases onto you and your children.  The President wants to slow the growth of health care spending, and so do I.

Congress has gone in the opposite direction.  Rather than changing incentives to reduce the cost of health insurance, they are trying to shift those costs onto someone else:  you.  The facts are not in dispute.  The bill being developed in the House of Representatives would mean:

• No reduction in the growth of average private health insurance premiums;
• More than $1 trillion of new government spending over the next decade;
• $239 billion more debt in the short run, with ever-increasing additions to the deficit forever; and
• More than $500 billion of tax increases, including higher income tax rates on successful small businesses.

Read the rest…

Third, the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) provides a list of 10 Surprising Facts about American Health Care:

Fact No. 1: Americans have better survival rates than Europeans for common cancers.[1] Breast cancer mortality is 52 percent higher in Germany than in the United States, and 88 percent higher in the United Kingdom.  Prostate cancer mortality is 604 percent higher in the U.K. and 457 percent higher in Norway.  The mortality rate for colorectal cancer among British men and women is about 40 percent higher.

Fact No. 2: Americans have lower cancer mortality rates than Canadians.[2] Breast cancer mortality is 9 percent higher, prostate cancer is 184 percent higher and colon cancer mortality among men is about 10 percent higher than in the United States.

Fact No. 3: Americans have better access to treatment for chronic diseases than patients in other developed countries.[3] Some 56 percent of Americans who could benefit are taking statins, which reduce cholesterol and protect against heart disease.  By comparison, of those patients who could benefit from these drugs, only 36 percent of the Dutch, 29 percent of the Swiss, 26 percent of Germans, 23 percent of Britons and 17 percent of Italians receive them.

Fourth, the Telegraph reports on one of the side effects of government run health care:

Patients forced to live in agony after NHS refuses to pay for painkilling injections

Tens of thousands with chronic back pain will be forced to live in agony after a decision to slash the number of painkilling injections issued on the NHS, doctors have warned.

By Laura Donnelly, Health Correspondent
Published: 7:45AM BST 02 Aug 2009

Tens of thousands with chronic back pain will be forced to live in agony after a decision to slash the number of painkilling injections issued on the NHS, doctors have warned.

The Government’s drug rationing watchdog says “therapeutic” injections of steroids, such as cortisone, which are used to reduce inflammation, should no longer be offered to patients suffering from persistent lower back pain when the cause is not known.
Instead the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) is ordering doctors to offer patients remedies like acupuncture and osteopathy.

Specialists fear tens of thousands of people, mainly the elderly and frail, will be left to suffer excruciating levels of pain or pay as much as £500 each for private treatment.

Finally, Lee Cary, has a terrific series of articles at American Thinker on the questions you should be asking your Congressperson about Obamacare:

Here’s the first installment in a series of questions you might ask your member of the House of Representatives concerning H.R. 3200 – also known as Obamacare.

The two-thousand, five-hundred and forty-one (2,541) sections of the bill can be found here. The emailed version my congressman’s office sent me covers 1,026 pages and is written in the typical legislative labyrinth of gobbledygook, replete with multi-layered, mind-numbing, cross references. There must be a software program called Obfuscate 2Max that cranks this stuff out.

Anyway, below is the first in a series of questions you might ask your congressperson if they’re either undecided about Obamacare, or support it.

Question 1: According the Section 113(b)(1)(C)&(D), “The Commissioner (appointed by the President) in cooperation with the Secretary of Health and Human Services and the Secretary of Labor, shall conduct a study of the large group insured and self-insured employer health markets. Such study shall examine the following:

(C) The financial solvency and capital reserve levels of employers that self-insure by employer size.

(D) The risk of self-insured employers not being able to pay obligations or otherwise becoming financially insolvent.”

SO, self-insuring companies will be subject to government auditing of their books to adjudicate their ability now, and in the future, to self-insure?  Will that information be made available to the Department of the Treasury, including the Internal Revenue Service?

You can read the full seven part series starting with part one here. Part two is here, parts 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 are  here, here, here, here and here respectively.

Barney Frank’s Bad Idea

From the Wall Street Journal:

Back when the housing mania was taking off, Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank famously said he wanted Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to “roll the dice” in the name of affordable housing. That didn’t turn out so well, but Mr. Frank has since only accumulated more power. And now he is returning to the scene of the calamity — with your money. He and New York Representative Anthony Weiner have sent a letter to the heads of Fannie and Freddie exhorting them to lower lending standards for condo buyers.

You read that right. After two years of telling us how lax lending standards drove up the market and led to loans that should never have been made, Mr. Frank wants Fannie and Freddie to take more risk in condo developments with high percentages of unsold units, high delinquency rates or high concentrations of ownership within the development.

Fannie and Freddie have restricted loans to condo buyers in these situations because they represent a red flag that the developments — many of which were planned and built at the height of the housing bubble — may face financial trouble down the road. But never mind all that. Messrs. Frank and Weiner think, in all their wisdom and years of experience underwriting mortgages, that the new rules “may be too onerous.”

Here we go again… Umm, congressman you do remember we how got into this mess don’t you? On the off chance you’ve forgotten it was, among other things, lowered lending standards that helped inflate the housing market to unrealistic levels.The last thing we thing we should be doing is repeating the mistakes that got us here.

Simply put Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are political creature and they have no better friend than Barney Frank. Congressman Frank needs to explain why he pushed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into underwriting loans to people who couldn’t afford them and then resisted every attempt to to tighten oversight of Fannie and Freddie.

Until he’s called to account for his actions in helping to create this mess he’s free to keep pushing the same bad ideas over and over.

NYT: Dear A.I.G., I Quit!

I hope Barack Obama, Timothy Geithner, Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, Chris Dood, Andrew Cuomo, Richard Blumenthal and all the pundits who have lead the AIG lynch mob are happy now:

The following is a letter sent on Tuesday by Jake DeSantis, an executive vice president of the American International Group’s financial products unit, to Edward M. Liddy, the chief executive of A.I.G.

DEAR Mr. Liddy,

It is with deep regret that I submit my notice of resignation from A.I.G. Financial Products. I hope you take the time to read this entire letter. Before describing the details of my decision, I want to offer some context:

I am proud of everything I have done for the commodity and equity divisions of A.I.G.-F.P. I was in no way involved in — or responsible for — the credit default swap transactions that have hamstrung A.I.G. Nor were more than a handful of the 400 current employees of A.I.G.-F.P. Most of those responsible have left the company and have conspicuously escaped the public outrage.

After 12 months of hard work dismantling the company — during which A.I.G. reassured us many times we would be rewarded in March 2009 — we in the financial products unit have been betrayed by A.I.G. and are being unfairly persecuted by elected officials. In response to this, I will now leave the company and donate my entire post-tax retention payment to those suffering from the global economic downturn. My intent is to keep none of the money myself.

I take this action after 11 years of dedicated, honorable service to A.I.G. I can no longer effectively perform my duties in this dysfunctional environment, nor am I being paid to do so. Like you, I was asked to work for an annual salary of $1, and I agreed out of a sense of duty to the company and to the public officials who have come to its aid. Having now been let down by both, I can no longer justify spending 10, 12, 14 hours a day away from my family for the benefit of those who have let me down.

In a sane world Jake DeSantis’s letter would shame those who have lead the charge to unfairly tar and feather the many good people at AIG… The sad reality is none them will even understand its significance.

Related

• Drive to Tax AIG Bonuses Slows – Wall Street Journal
• Resigned – Mark Steyn
• When they came for AIG – Powerline
• I Hope They Are Happy – Jennifer Rubin
• AIG Executive Resigns, Says Why – Red State
• Going Galt at AIG – Hot Air

Barney Frank: This Week’s Biggest Idiot on Capitol Hill

From CNSNews.com:

Mindless Republicans are heeding the iron discipline of conservative talk radio hosts Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh, House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) told reporters after President Barack Obama’s address to the nation on Tuesday.

“I don’t think we found any Republican minds today,” Frank told a reporter minutes after the president had finished his speech. “[T]hey shut their minds down. That they are so afraid of being yelled at by Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity that they won’t even clap for him [Obama] when they agree with him.”

Umm, Congressman Frank could it be that they just honestly disagree with his policies???

Lets not forget 57 million Americans voted for the John McCain so I think it’s a fair to say that a sizable percentage of the population disagrees Pres. Obama’s vision.

By the way I seem to recall a large number of Democrats sitting on their hands during Pres. Bush’s State of the Union speeches. Were they afraid of being yelled at by liberal talk radio hosts or did they simply disagree with his ideas?

In Their Own Words: What They Said About Fannie & Freddie

The Wall Street Journal has a long history over covering the abuses of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac today  they’re naming names and calling out the Democrats who helped cause our financial crisis.

House Financial Services Committee hearing, Sept. 25, 2003:

Rep. Gregory Meeks, (D., N.Y.): . . . I am just pissed off at Ofheo [Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight] because if it wasn’t for you I don’t think that we would be here in the first place.

And Freddie Mac, who on its own, you know, came out front and indicated it is wrong, and now the problem that we have and that we are faced with is maybe some individuals who wanted to do away with GSEs in the first place, you have given them an excuse to try to have this forum so that we can talk about it and maybe change the direction and the mission of what the GSEs had, which they have done a tremendous job. . .

Ofheo Director Armando Falcon Jr.: Congressman, Ofheo did not improperly apply accounting rules; Freddie Mac did. Ofheo did not try to manage earnings improperly; Freddie Mac did. So this isn’t about the agency’s engagement in improper conduct, it is about Freddie Mac. Let me just correct the record on that. . . . I have been asking for these additional authorities for four years now. I have been asking for additional resources, the independent appropriations assessment powers.

This is not a matter of the agency engaging in any misconduct. . . .

Rep. Waters: However, I have sat through nearly a dozen hearings where, frankly, we were trying to fix something that wasn’t broke. Housing is the economic engine of our economy, and in no community does this engine need to work more than in mine. With last week’s hurricane and the drain on the economy from the war in Iraq, we should do no harm to these GSEs. We should be enhancing regulation, not making fundamental change.

Mr. Chairman, we do not have a crisis at Freddie Mac, and in particular at Fannie Mae, under the outstanding leadership of Mr. Frank Raines. Everything in the 1992 act has worked just fine. In fact, the GSEs have exceeded their housing goals. . . .

Rep. Frank: Let me ask [George] Gould and [Franklin] Raines on behalf of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, do you feel that over the past years you have been substantially under-regulated?

Mr. Raines?

Mr. Raines: No, sir.

Mr. Frank: Mr. Gould?

Mr. Gould: No, sir. . . .

Mr. Frank: OK. Then I am not entirely sure why we are here. . . .

Rep. Frank: I believe there has been more alarm raised about potential unsafety and unsoundness than, in fact, exists.

While we’re on the topic of calling out Democrats for their part in creating our financial crisis someone needs to hold Harry Reid accountable for the remarks he made to reporters yesterday.

While pressing for passage of the bailout bill Senator Reid told reporters one of the country’s premier insurance company’s was on the verge of bankruptcy.

“We don’t have a lot of leeway on time,” Reid told reporters in the Capitol. “One of the individuals in the caucus today talked about a major insurance company – a major insurance company — one with a name that everyone knows that’s on the verge of going bankrupt. That’s what this is all about.”

To his credit Senator Reid, is backing off that statement. According to Jim Manley, a spokesman for the Nevada Democrat “Senator Reid is not personally aware of any particular company being on the verge of bankruptcy. He has no special knowledge about [a bankruptcy] nor has he talked to any insurance company officials.”

“Rather, his comments were meant to refer to the conditions in the financial sector generally. He regrets any confusion his comments may have caused,” Manley added.

Unfortunately, the damage has already been done… As of 12:15 p.m. today the S&P Insurance 500 was down 4.5%, or $15 billion.

Bailing on the Bailout?

It looks like the bailout deal, if there ever was one, is collapsing… Democrats and Paulson are whining.

ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos Reports: Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson fears the Wall Street bailout deal is falling apart after a chaotic White House meeting, sources say.

Paulson walked into the room where Democrats were caucusing after today’s meeting at the White House and pleaded with them, “Please don’t blow this up.”

Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., chair of the House Financial Services Committee was livid saying, “Don’t say that to us after all we’ve been through!”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, “We’re not the ones trying to blow this up; it’s the House Republicans.”

“I know, I know,” Paulson replied.

Chris Dodd’s trying to pin the blame on McCain:

At a press conference earlier yesterday on Capitol Hill, Senator Dodd and his fellow negotiators claimed they had reached a bipartisan consensus on the plan.

But he claimed that Mr McCain’s involvement threw a spanner in the works.

After the hour-long White House meeting, he said: ‘What has happened here is that we have spent seven straight days to find a rescue plan for the economy.

‘What this looked like was a rescue plan for John McCain. To be distracted for two to three hours by political theatre doesn’t help.’

Democrats said the Republicans were on board with the deal until Mr McCain intervened.

There’s just one problem… McCain didn’t bring up those proposals.

Personally, the Paulson plan is a non-starter with me… I much prefer the alternatives offered by House Republicans:

• Rather than providing taxpayer funded purchases of frozen mortgage assets, we should adopt a mortgage insurance approach to solve the problem.
  
• Currently the federal government insures approximately half of all mortgage backed securities. (MBS) We can insure the rest of current outstanding MBS; however, rather than taxpayers funding insurance, the holders of these assets should pay for it. Treasury Department can design a system to charge premiums to the holders of MBS to fully finance this insurance.
  
• Have Private Capital Injection to the Financial Markets, Not Tax Dollars. Instead of injecting taxpayer capital into the market to produce liquidity, private capital can be drawn into the market by removing regulatory and tax barriers that are currently blocking private capital formation. Too much private capital is sitting on the sidelines during this crisis.
• Temporary tax relief provisions can help companies free up capital to maintain operations, create jobs, and lend to one another. In addition, we should allow for a temporary suspension of dividend payments by financial institutions and other regulatory measures to address the problems surrounding private capital liquidity.
• Immediate Transparency, Oversight, and Market Reform. Require participating firms to disclose to Treasury the value of their mortgage assets on their books, the value of any private bids within the last year for such assets, and their last audit report.
• Wall Street Executives should not benefit from taxpayer funding. Call on the SEC to review the performance of the Credit Rating Agencies and their ability to accurately reflect the risks of these failed investment securities.
• Create a blue ribbon panel with representatives of Treasury, SEC, and the Fed to make recommendations to Congress for reforms of the financial sector by January 1, 2009.

Unfortunately, I think we’ve reached the point where a bailout is necessary evil, I’m not convinced that tax payers should be the ones footing the bill though.Regardless unless they remove the foolish government regulations that effectively force banks to make risky loans we’re going to be right back here somewhere down the road.