Bonnie Erbe

Americans Are Cluing In to Obama's Healthcare Reform Problems, Polls Show

July 6, 2009 RSS Feed Print

By Bonnie Erbe, Thomas Jefferson Street blog.

The American public seems to be waking up to the mess that President Obama has created as he tries to revamp the nation's health care system. According to Bloomberg:

As Congress returns this week to craft the legislation, Obama's push to revamp an industry that makes up 17 percent of the nation's economy will need support from American families earning between $50,000 and $100,000 a year, a group that pollsters define as middle class and which makes up about a quarter of the electorate. That backing is shaky, polls show.

...Obama's problem is that if middle-class voters are concerned that his plan focuses more on the estimated 46 million uninsured than on reducing their own costs, they may oppose significant changes in health care, analysts say.

Last month, 58% of American adults told CNN pollsters they are "very concerned" that current efforts to reform the health care system will reduce the quality of health care they receive.

It's about time, America! There are several problems, here. There's President Obama's repeat problem that he's trying, with this reform, to please everyone and in the process he's pleasing no one. He sent an amorphous plan to Congress, in the hope members would compromise in a bipartisan spirit which dissipated 15 years ago, to produce a plan the public would support.

Mr. Obama also broke his promise not to raise taxes on the middle class (whose tax-free health insurance premiums may now be taxed in the Obama reform effort).

He needs to lead more and rely on nonexistent bipartisanship less.

Tags:
healthcare reform,
Barack Obama,
healthcare

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My focus is the text and subsequent discussion. ,

Miss88 of WA 6:26AM October 22, 2009

Obama’s attack on our free market economy began long before the current crisis. The following legal documents, news articles, and videos show his part in causing this crisis over the past fifteen years. Now he uses it as an excuse to do even more damage. To him, our free enterprise system is a giant merciless beast that he and his allies have succeeded in wounding. In a free market, your choices as a consumer, select against society’s losers, which he represents. This is why the Obamabots, having won, are still seething with hatred for their opponents. Having wounded the beast they are now closing in for the kill. The recovery of our free market economy is not their objective. They would rather replace it with something else. So their policies are only making matters measurably worse. They want revenge for the unfairness they perceive in the free market.

These legal documents show Barack Obama suing Citibank under the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) from 1994 to 1998, where he and other lawyers got $950,000 in legal fees without finding any evidence of wrongdoing:

http://clearinghouse.wustl.edu/chDocs/public/FH-IL-0011-9000.pdf

http://clearinghouse.wustl.edu/chDocs/public/FH-IL-0011-0007.pdf

This was part of a legalized protection racket perpetrated on our nations banks, and part of a widespread systematic shakedown, described in detail in this article published in the year 2000: "The Trillion-Dollar Bank Shakedown That Bodes Ill for Cities":

http://www.city-journal.org/html/10_1_the_trillion_dollar.html

The New York Times reported on this in 2003, and explained what additional regulatory action the Bush administration tried to initiate to protect the banks, in "New Agency Proposed to Oversee Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae", only to be blocked by Democrats in congress:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/11/business/new-agency-proposed-to-oversee-freddie-mac-and-fannie-mae.html?sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1

Obama, ACORN, Bill Clinton, the Clinton Administration, and members of congress explain what happened here in their own words in these videos:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hN31-nKndg8&NR=1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-TyH6Yupso

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lr1M1T2Y314

This video connects the dots:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RZVw3no2A4&feature=iv&annotation_id=event_597487

Thomas Sowell summarized it all in his column, "Do Facts Matter?":

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NGRjODM1MTJlOGZiZDk2ODI4NTUzMWMxYjgwMjliMGQ

The Washington Post provides additional detail: ("Where Was Sen. Dodd? Playing the Blame Game On Fannie and Freddie"):

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/11/AR2008091102841.html

The Wall Street Journal provides additional detail: ("Blame Fannie Mae and Congress For the Credit Mess "):

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122212948811465427.html

This pattern of behavior must be stopped to protect the economic future of our country.

Barry of CA 3:33PM August 03, 2009

Soon Medicare will face a moment of truth. The previous positive cash flow has already gone negative. The baby-boomers are about to retire to draw money out of the system instead of paying into it. They will also begin drawing money out of their retirement plans instead of paying into them, reducing the capitalization of our economy. Please read this congressional testimony from a year ago:

“Significant uncertainty surrounds long-term fiscal projections, but under any plausible scenario, the federal budget is on an unsustainable path—that is, federal debt will grow much faster than the economy over the long run. In the absence of significant changes in policy, rising costs for health care and the aging of the U.S. population will cause federal spending to grow rapidly. If federal revenues as a share of gross domestic product (GDP) remain at their current level, that rise in spending will eventually cause future budget deficits to become unsustainable. To prevent deficits from growing to levels that could impose substantial costs on the economy, revenues must rise as a share of GDP, or projected spending must fall—or some combination of the two outcomes must be achieved.

. . .

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that total federal Medicare and Medicaid outlays will rise from 4 percent of GDP in 2007 to 12 percent in 2050 and 19 percent in 2082—which, as a share of the economy, is roughly equivalent to the total amount that the federal government spends today. The bulk of that projected increase in health care spending reflects higher costs per beneficiary rather than an increase in the number of beneficiaries associated with an aging population.”

http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/93xx/doc9385/06-17-LTBO_Testimony.pdf

This inescapable reality says we will have to pay more for less benefits. But politicians are promising just the opposite, to people who believe that they should get even more benefits, much sooner, without paying anything. Such demands cannot be met.

Seeing how our government is handling a much smaller crisis in the banking industry, failing to correct course before it collapsed the housing industry, and the automobile industry, I worry that no one in our nations capital is prepared to avoid this massive iceberg that will sink our ship. Instead people continue to demand more benefits to be paid by younger generations, as if Chinese lending is a bottomless well. Do you have grandchildren? Look what you are doing to them.

Below I provided details showing Obama’s past approach to dealing with our banking industry, over the last fifteen years, in an attempt to help sub-prime borrowers, and how that effort backfired to hurt the very people it was supposed to help. This gives us a context, to understand his approach to the current financial crisis, which is counter-productive.

Barry of CA 5:29PM July 29, 2009

Bonnie Erbe

Bonnie Erbe

Bonnie Erbe is a contributing editor at U.S. News & World Report and hosts PBS's weekly news analysis program, To the Contrary with Bonnie Erbe. She also writes a weekly syndicated newspaper column for Scripps Howard News Service.

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