A couple days ago I notedthe disconcerting failure of leadership(disconcerting to Democrats, anyway) shown so far by the president on the health care bill, which is after all one of his signature initiatives; I found it puzzling. Yesterday, Michael Barone offered an explanation that makes sense, and one that dovetails withsomething I’ve written before: Barack Obama isn’t leading the legislative process becausehe doesn’t know how. And why should he? He’s never done it. He’s had thetitleof a legislator, but he’s never reallybeenone.
He served as a legislator for a dozen years before becoming president, but was only rarely an active one. He spent one of his eight years as an Illinois state senator running unsuccessfully for Congress and two of them running successfully for U.S. senator. He spent two of his years in the U.S. Senate running for president. During all of his seven non-campaign years as a legislator, he was in the minority party.
In other words, he’s never done much work putting legislation together—especially legislation that channels vast flows of money and affects the workings of parts of the economy that deeply affect people’s lives. This lack of experience is starting to show. On the major legislation considered this year—the stimulus, cap and trade, health care—the Obama White House has done little or nothing to set down markers, to provide guidance, to establish boundaries and no-go areas.
The administration could have insisted that the stimulus package concentrate spending in the next year. It didn’t. It could have insisted that the cap-and-trade bill generate the revenue that was supposed to underwrite health care. It didn’t. It could have decided either to seek a bipartisan health care bill or to insist that a Democratic bill be budget-neutral. It didn’t—and it still hasn’t made this basic policy choice.
I worried, during the campaign, about electing someone with no real record of substantive accomplishment—someone who knew how to talk about ideas but not how to realize them, who had no real experience getting things done; now, I think, we’re seeing the fruit of that. When his agenda runs into trouble, all he knows how to do to push it forward is talk; that’s why, asPolitico‘s Carol Lee pointed out,
He’s been in office only six months, but already there’s a strong sense of déjà vu around the way Americans are seeing and hearing from PresidentBarack Obama.
The president keeps returning to the samecommunications tacticsover and over, and all the pages of his PR playbook have one thing in common: a big dose of Obama.
His prime-time news conference Wednesday night, one of the standbys, brings his total to four. That’s the same number that George W. Bush did—in eight years as president.
To be fair to President Obama, he is handicapped by having to work with Nancy Pelosi, who’s proving a remarkably,perhaps historically, ineffective Speaker of the House. But every leader has to work with and rely on lieutenants who are less than they ought to be; effective leaders get the most out of those folks that they can and try to avoid putting them in a position where they can derail things. So far, anyway, that’s not Barack Obama. I’ve been saying that he’s a smart man and he’s bound to figure it out, but so far, he hasn’t; so far, all he’s managed to do is prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that you can’t spell “president” without “PR”—and he has the diminishing returns to prove it.
Heidelberg Catechism
Q & A 9
Q. But doesn’t God do us an injustice
by requiring in his law
what we are unable to do?
A. No, God created humans with the ability to keep the law.1
They, however, tempted by the devil,2
in reckless disobedience,3
robbed themselves and all their descendants of these gifts.4
Note: mouse over footnote for Scripture references.
After having considered the greatness and the extent of man’s sinfulness, disobedience and wretchedness, the Catechism concludes this division on human guilt by suggesting three possible objections. . . .
The initial objection concerns the Creator himself. Is not God unjust? . . . Is it right for God to require what man cannot do? But what is it really that God requires—a series of regulations and commandments and ordinances? Let us remind ourselves again that the entire law is summarized in one word: love! If man now has become a sinner, must God now say that it is no longer necessary for the sinner to love him? Of course not; God remains the same. His requirements do not change. But supposing this to be correct, can man fulfill the requirements of the law? The answer is No, but the answer was Yes! God created man able to perform and to do all the good pleasure of God. But Adam deliberately turned his back on God and disobeyed.
Dr. De Jong elaborates on this with the example of a contractor who agrees to build a home, then takes the money for materials and spends it on a drinking binge; he asks, reasonably enough,
Is it unjust for the original party to demand that his home be built? Can the contractor claim immunity because of his weak character? The contractor was given the means with which to build the house and willfully squandered them.
To be sure, asKuyvenhovenadmits (32), this doesn’t exhaust our objections on this point:
Still, we bristle in self-defense: That temptation happened . . . millennia ago. Why should we be doomed for what none of us remembers?
Here again, it’s a matter of perspective. We protest like individualists. But the Bible says that the very fact that we are able to think of ourselves as unrelated, disunited individuals presents evidence of our sinful perspective. God’s revelation views the human race not as a pile of gravel but as a giant tree. We are not pebbles thrown together but twigs and branches on a tree, all organically united.
We form a corporate unity. In many respects you and I have never doubted it. The national debts . . . are your and my debts. Yet when the debts were incurred, some of us were not yet born and none of us were asked. Similarly, the debt of the human race is yours and mine.
It’s an interesting illustration, since nobody really does deny our liability for the national debt; perhaps it’s because the corporate unity represented by the nation is visible, tangible, and human-created. It’s a reminder that, however hard we may try to avoid the fact, our responsibility in life goes beyond merely that for which we want toadmitresponsibility.
from a former president of the American Medical Association, Dr. Daniel Johnson Jr.:Memo to My Fellow Physicians: We Have Reached the Moment of Truth. It’s well worth your time, because he knows what he’s talking about and doesn’t hesitate to call a spade a spade; I found his thumbnail history of the debate over nationalized health care particularly interesting. Here’s an excerpt:
Now, with elderly, poor, women, and children covered, all that is left is a segment of the population outside of those groups that is reasonably self-sufficient and most of which has private insurance. Those folks will be forced into government coverage because of a “public option” plan that all intellectually honest observers, including both proponents and opponents of single payer, realize is a Trojan horse for a Canadian-style single-payer system. Once private insurance is crowded out by the unfair competitive tactics of the federal government intruding into an already flawed marketplace, it will be a simple matter to consolidate all of these different groups into one single entity.
What does this mean to physicians and their patients? “Clinical effectiveness research,” when operated by government instead of the medical profession, will become “cost effectiveness” restrictions on what care is available and to whom—determined by the federal government. It will only be a matter of a short time before Americans will enjoy the pleasures of “quality adjusted life years” wherein people my age will be denied services from which they might benefit because of their age and/or some other infirmity.
We don’t have to make this stuff up: It is already the law of the land in some other developed countries, such as the United Kingdom, and has been long advocated here in the U.S. by voices from the left, including major media outlets. The federal government will exert total control over payment for all medical services.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to imagine what will happen when the payment-control mechanisms used by Medicare are extended to the entire private sector. The occasional inability of Medicare patients to find physicians who are willing to provide for their needed care at a loss will become the standard experience when the cost shortfall can no longer be shifted to the private sector.
Practicing physicians in the U.S. have become accustomed to the continued availability of ever better diagnostic and treatment innovations created by our academic and research colleagues. In my own specialty field of diagnostic imaging, the pace and breadth of scientific innovation to help us help clinicians be more effective in the management of sick and injured individuals or in the early detection of life-threatening illness, such as breast cancer, has been amazing. Yet I remember only too well the mid 1970s when the federal government and all but two states (Nebraska and Louisiana) did everything in their power to deny the American people access to the technology of computed tomography because of cost. As sure as the night follows the day, we will see that same kind of limitation imposed, but on a much larger scale. But in contrast to the ’70s, total federal control will prevent physicians and patients from overcoming the stricture as we were able to do back then.
Read the whole thing, and remember, this man is a good doctor: take his diagnosis and prescriptions seriously.
Much easier to do this back in my office with my books to hand, so I can add a few things to my post last night.
One, the plural ofbamahinIsaiah 14:14—to which the person who did the video refers in order to justify his back-translation ofbamah—is indeedbamatey; or better,bāmātê, since theyodh there isn’t functioning as a consonant but rather as a vowel marker. (Actually, the root word should really be writtenbāmâ, since the closinghēisn’t really a consonant either, but also just a vowel marker.)
Two, now that I’ve had the chance to sit down with theNew International Dictionary of Old Testament Theology & Exegesis(NIDOTTE to its friends), I can say with confidence that this conjectured back-translation is completely wrongheaded. The wordbāmâis used in several places in the OT in the stereotyped phrase “to tread/ride on the heights of,” as NIDOTTE says, “to express God’s absolute sovereignty over land and sea”; Isaiah puts this phrase in the mouth of the king of Babylon to express his arrogant presumption. The word isneverused to denote Heaven, the place where God dwells, however, and never would have been, since the primary meaning ofbāmâwas a place of worship (the “high places” that the kings of Israel/Judah are criticized throughout the middle OT for not taking down); the word for “heights” thatisused in this way ismārôm. Besides, if Jesushadusedbāmâ, we wouldn’t have to guess, since it actually passed into NT Greek in the formbēma.
Instead, looking at the semantic field, the word Jesus would have actually used would have beenšāmayim(or its Aramaic cognate), which is the word that actually means “heaven” (it’s paralleled with other words that mean “height,” “sky,” “firmament,” etc., but those words aren’t used by themselves to mean “heaven”). As such, evenkībārāq min-ûbāmātê, as little as that sounds like “Barack Obama,” is clearly not what Jesus actually said; the likeliest back-translation of the words “I saw Satan fall like lightning from Heaven” into Hebrew, rather, would behāzâ(orrā’â)ha-śātān kībārāq min-vešāmayim.
All of which is to say, the idea that Jesus said “I saw Satan as Barack Obama” is utterly unsupported by the facts, and unsustainable on the basis of any real understanding of Hebrew; it’s contemptible nonsense to fool the credulous and pre-deceived, nothing more.
Update:Shane VanderHart’s post on thison his blog,Caffeinated Thoughts, is also well worth checking out, as he adds some good points.
Ordinarily, I just ignore things like this; but for some reason, this idiot really irks me. (HT: Allahpundit)
This guy doesn’t even fall into the “knows just enough Hebrew to be dangerous” category, because he doesn’t actually know any Hebrew at all—or, indeed, much of anythingabout Hebrew. For all his pompous statement “I will report the facts. You can decide,” he’s precious short on facts andlongon false assertions. Watch the video if you want to, and then let’s go through it, if you’re interested. (If you aren’t, don’t bother to click “Read More,” just scroll down to the next post.)
One: “Aramaic is the most ancient form of Hebrew.” That’s about like calling French the most ancient form of Portuguese. Aramaic isn’t a form of Hebrew, it’sa different language—closely related, another Northwest Semitic language, but a different language.
Two: he relies on back-translations, which are necessarily conjectural, but presents them as if they were proven fact. Sloppy. Very sloppy.
Three:barackis the Arabic cognate of Hebrewbarak, which is also used as a name (so see Judges 4-5; “Barak” is the name of Deborah’s general).Barakmeans “he blesses” or “he kneels”; the wordbaruch, which we also know as a name, means “blessed” and is the noun form of this verb.Baraqmay sound the same, but it’s a completely different word, with a completely different root (beth-resh-qophinstead ofbeth-resh-kaph); the similarity in sound is meaningless, nothing but a red herring.
Four: the person who made this video is clearly unaware that the Hebrew alphabet does not have any vowels. During the post-biblical period a group of scholars called the Masoretes added pointing (a system of dots) to indicate vowels, to preserve the reading of the text of the Hebrew Scriptures, but these are not original to the text. A couple consonants,yodhandvav, wereused in the original Hebrew to indicate certain vowels(hēwas also used this way at the end of words, much as we end words with “-ah” and “-oh”); the Masoretes included notations in their pointing system to indicate when these consonants were being, essentially, used as vowels.
Five: even ifbamah(or rather its Aramaic equivalent) was in fact the word Jesus used inLuke 10:18, as this video suggests, it would have been plural, not singular, and quite different in form (bamatey, I think; I don’t have my language tools with me at the moment, and Hebrew was never my strong suit).
Six: the individual who did this video declares, “the Hebrew letterwaw[orvav] is often transliterated as a ‘U.’ Some scholars use the ‘O’ for this transliteration. It is primarily used as a conjunction to join concepts together.”
This is wrong.
As I noted above, one of the ways in which Hebrew used thevav(and also theyodhand the he) was to indicate certain vowels; when the Masoretes came along to add vowel pointing to help people know how to pronounce the text, they came up with special points to indicate when, say,vavwas being used as a “u” (sureq) or an “o” (holem-vav), as opposed to when it was simply a consonantal “v.” (The technical term for those ismatres lectiones, or “mothers of reading.”) It is incorrect to say thatvav“is often transliterated as a ‘u’,” and still more incorrect to say that ‘o’ is a different transliteration used by “some scholars.” Rather, sometimes when the consonantvavis in the text, it’s serving as a “u,” and sometimes it’s serving as an “o.”However, this isdifferentfrom the use ofvavin the Hebrew conjunction, which is the prefixve-.
Now, that said, one of the oddities of Hebrew is that beforebeth,mem, andpe, the conjunction changes fromveto asureq, becoming a “u” sound, which is no doubt what the person behind this video is trying, however ineptly, to say. Again, though, “heights” is plural, and so even if his assumption thatbamahunderlies the Greek text is correct, it would not be in the singular form bamah, but in a plural form.
Thus, it is simply wrong to assert that Jesus, in talking about Satan falling from heaven like lightning, would have saidubama; it’s wrong even if you assume that Jesus would have used bamahto denote heaven, which is unproven. Thus, the last name of our president isn’t in the text of Luke 10:18 in any way. As for our president’s first name, while Jesus might have said baraq, that’s not the same asbarak. Plus, the person behind this video has forgotten that Jesus didn’t say, “I saw Satan fall lightning heaven,” but “likelightningfromheaven”—there’s a preposition before, and another one in the middle, and rest assured the one in the middle isn’t “Hussein.” It would be, rather, the Aramaic equivalent to the Hebrewmin-. The one before would be the equivalent to the Hebrew prefixki-.
As such, the closest to “Barack Obama” that Jesus could have spoken would have been something likekibaraq min-ubamatey. . . and that just isn’t good enough to support this farrago of nonsense that Jesus told us that Barack Obama is the Antichrist.
Update:I’ve added a few key points to this argumenthere. I hate it when people misuse Scripture to their own ends; this is a particularly egregious example.
As thevitriol,invective, anddishonest attacksagainst Sarah Palincontinue to come from the Left, demonstrating thattheir determination to destroy herremains high—and as she continues to refuse to fight hatred with hatred and vitriol with vitriol, which is one of the reasons I support her as strongly as I do—I can’t help thinking yet again of what a disease hatred has become in our politics in this country. It’s hard to believe, from a rational perspective, that this is really what our politics has come to, that some people in this country hate others because they don’t like their views on tax policy, or immigration, or foreign policy, or gay marriage; but sadly, it has.
I can remember, more times than I can count, hearing people denounce George W. Bush as a thief, a liar, and an abuser of presidential authority, but most of the folks who made those accusations didn’t dislike him for those reasons. Sure, there were probablysomewho did, but for most, it was the other way around. That’s why is why people who wrote off President Clinton’s perjury then waxed furious against President Bush for lying to the American people—which if true put him in the company of FDR and Lincoln, among others—while others who wanted President Clinton impeached turned around to defend President Bush; it’s also why many who spent 2001-08 screaming bloody murder about “the imperial Presidency” and declaiming that the president should be impeached for “destroying the Constitution” are now perfectly happy as Barack Obama continues to expand executive power. If you want defenders of congressional prerogatives (outside Congress itself, anyway), you’ll have to look on the Right. The hypocrisy here—which is not confined to one side, by any means—is enough to make you gag.
The key thing about all these charges and denunciations is that people’s views of them tend to be defined by their politics, not the other way around. That’s why criticizing Clinton’s character never worked for the Republicans, and it’s why accusing Bush of lying didn’t work for the Democrats (it was the specter oflosingin Iraq, combined with the Katrina fiasco, that killed his administration): in our current political climate, for far too many people,only the politics matter.
Those on our side (whichever one that is) are the white hats who can do no wrong, and we love them; those on the other side are the black hats who do everything from evil motives, and we hate them. If the other side lies, cheats, and steals, we proclaim it from the housetops. If our side does, well, the other side reporting it just proves what rotten people they are. Not everybody takes this approach, of course—to give conservatives credit, the reaction to the Ensign and Sanford scandals has been encouragingly different in many quarters—but more often than not, this is American politics in the early 21st century.
Of course, this is nothing new; much the same could have been said about American politics across much of the 19th century, which gave us our first presidential assassination and most of the dirtiest presidential elections in our history. For that matter, it was nothing new then, either; so it has been, I expect, in pretty much every society or group thathaspolitics, at least some of the time. I’m not accusing contemporary America of any sort of new or different sin. But that doesn’t mean we don’t need to do something about it—hatred is a sickness that could eat our country hollow from the inside, if we let it.
We need to start to fight this—and byweI don’t mean somebody out there, I meanus, the common folks, theordinary barbariansof this country. This isn’t going to be solved by politicians, or the media, or any of the rest of our country’s elite—from their perspective, that would be counterproductive; after all, as long as they canexploitthe hatred so many people have been taught to feel for their own ends, they’re going to carry right on doing so (and exacerbating it in the process). The only way to begin to break down this culture of animosity is to do it at the grassroots level,following the exampleof (of all people)David Mamet:
Prior to the midterm elections, my rabbi was taking a lot of flack. The congregation is exclusively liberal, he is a self-described independent (read “conservative”), and he was driving the flock wild. Why? Because a) he never discussed politics; and b) he taught that the quality of political discourse must be addressed first—that Jewish law teaches that it is incumbent upon each person to hear the other fellow out.
And so I, like many of the liberal congregation, began, teeth grinding, to attempt to do so. . . .
The right is mooing about faith, the left is mooing about change, and many are incensed about the fools on the other side—but, at the end of the day, they are the same folks we meet at the water cooler.
We need to do the same with those who disagree with us—not to change our minds, but to build relationships with our political opponents and listen to them respectfully, such that they know that we take their concerns seriously and with real care for what they think and feel and believe; that’s the only way we’re ever going to convince those across the political divide to do the same for us. We need to set aside the goal of changing people’sopinions—that might happen, but it shouldn’t be the purpose of conversation—and seek instead to change the way peopleholdtheir opinions, by building a spirit of disagreement in mutual understanding and respect.
The more we can do that, the worse it will be for our politicians—but the better it will be for us.
Heidelberg Catechism
Q & A 8
Q. But are we so corrupt
that we are totally unable to do any good
and inclined toward all evil?
A. Yes,1unless we are born again,
by the Spirit of God.2
Note: mouse over footnote for Scripture references.
This is the doctrine typically referred to as “total depravity,” and it’s one that confuses some people.Andrew Kuyvenhoven’s explanation(28) is helpful here:
Sin is worse than we are inclined to think, and salvation is bigger than any church can tell.
The Bible teaches that, by nature, people are “totally depraved.” This is again a technical term, and it might be helpful to say, first, what it doesnotmean. We don’t mean to say that people are as bad as they can possibly be. Most of the time, most of them are not. Neither do we mean that ordinary decent people cannot perform acts of kindness, helpfulness, courtesy, and so on. Many people do, and we thank God for the milk of human kindness and the paint of civilized surroundings.
By total depravity, we mean that sin has affected every part of every human being. . . .
The only solution to total depravity is total renewal. No person can do anything that is really acceptable to God unless he or she has a new heart.
The Christian life is a life of total dependence on the grace and the power of God. There is no “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps” here, and no suggestion that if you just work harder, you can be good enough (nor the corollary that if anything’s wrong in your life, it must mean you’re not trying hard enough); nor is there any trace of the idea that to keep your salvation, you have tokeepworking harder. Rather, there is the call to joyful acceptance of our deliverance by Jesus Christ, who set us free from our slavery to sin, who took our death and gave us life.
Rebuild the parties? On why we might be suffering from an excess of democracy, in one respect.
Reclaiming the gospel? We have a remarkable ability to get our idea of Christianity backwards . . .
A bad week for Barack Obama The most recent polls show that a lot of folks who voted for the president are now questioning their votes, whether because of the Gates affair, because he’s governed as a hard leftist, or whatever; but everything we see now was foreshadowed during the campaign, for those willing to believe it.
A matter of trust “We hear God saying, ‘Obey me, obey me, obey me’; but what God is really saying is, ‘Trust me. Trust me. Trust me.'”
One of the key facts about the push to nationalize our healthcare system is that it’s coming from people who have absolutely no intention to live under the system they’re trying to produce. Barack Obamaeven admitted as muchlast month, though the media has done its best to ignore the fact. Give Jake Tapper and Karen Travers credit, though, forrefusing to sweep the president’s admission under the rug:
President Obama struggled to explain today whether hishealth care reform proposals would force normal Americans to make sacrifices that wealthier, more powerful people—like the president himself—wouldn’t face. . . .
Dr. Orrin Devinsky, a neurologist and researcher at the New York University Langone Medical Center, said that elites often proposehealth care solutionsthat limit options for the general public, secure in the knowledge that if they or their loves ones get sick, they will be able to afford the best care available, even if it’s not provided by insurance.
Devinsky asked the president pointedly if he would be willing to promise that he wouldn’t seek such extraordinary help for his wife or daughters if they became sick and thepublic plan he’s proposinglimited the tests or treatment they can get.
The president refused to make such a pledge, though he allowed that if “it’s my family member, if it’s my wife, if it’s my children, if it’s my grandmother, I always want them to get the very best care.”
That’s telling. Would the president be willing to accept limitations on the care his wife and children could receive for the sake of the greater good? Dr. Devinsky asked. No, the president would not. He evaded the question for as long as he could with anon sequiturabout his dying grandmother, but when he finally came back around to answering it briefly, that was his answer: no.
And after all, he won’thaveto accept the limitations of his plan—he’s the President of the United States. He’s famous, he’s powerful, hedefineswell-connected . . . and he’s a member of a government which routinely exempts its own members from the limitations of the laws it passes. Obamacare for thee, but not for me and mine, is indeed his attitude—he’s too important and valuable a person for that. That’s only for usordinary barbarians.
If ObamaCare isn’t good enough for Sasha, Malia, or Michelle, then it’s not good enough for America. Instead of fighting that impulse, Obama should be working to boost the private sector to encouragemorecare providers, less red tape and expense, and better care for everyone.
But that’s not what he’s doing, and it’s not what he’s going to do; that’s how he wants it to work for him and his family, but not for everyone else. Unless, of course, they’re political allies whose support he needs and to whom he owes favors—thenthey can get special treatment too:
Who will decide when medical care is just too expensive to bother with? Who will be left to perish because they just aren’t worth the lifesaving effort? Well, for sure it won’t be any members of Congress or anyone that works for the federal government because they won’t be expected to suffer under the nationally socialized plan. It also won’t be Obama’s buddies in the unions who are about to be similarly exempted from the national plan, at leastif Senator Max Baucus has his way.
Insisting on standards for others to which one is unwilling to hold oneself? The word for that, I believe, is “hypocrisy”—and the forces of Obamacare are rife and rank with it. As James Lewis pointed out recently on theAmerican Thinkerwebsite, one of our leading advocates of socialized medicine makesa pretty good poster boy for it.
Senator Ted Kennedy, who is now 76 years old and wasdiagnosed with brain cancerin May of last year, is telling the world that nationalized medical care is “the cause of his life.” He wants to see it pass as soon as possible, before he departs this vale of tears.
The prospect of Kennedy’s passing is viewed by the liberal press with anticipatory tears and mourning. But they are not asking the proper question by their own lights: That question—which will be asked for you and me when we reach his age and state in life—is this:
Is Senator Kennedy’s life valuable enough to dedicate millions of dollars to extending it another month, another day, another year?
Because Barack Obama and Ted Kennedy agree with each other that they of all people are entitled to make that decision. Your decision to live or die will now be in their hands.
Ted Kennedy is now 76. Average life expectancy in the United States is 78.06. For a man who has already reached 76, life expectancy is somewhat longer than average (since people who die younger lower the national average); for a wealthy white man it may be somewhat longer statistically; but for a man with diagnosed brain cancer it is correspondingly less. As far as the actuarial tables of the Nanny State are concerned, Kennedy is due to leave this life some time soon. The socialist State is not sentimental, at least when it comes to the lives of ordinary people like you and me.
The socialist question—and yes, it is being asked very openly in socialist countries all around the world, like Britain and Sweden—must be whether extending Senator Kennedy’s life by another day, another month or year issociallyvaluable enough to pay for what is no doubt a gigantic and growing medical bill. Kennedy is a US Senator, and all that money has been coughed up without complaint by the US taxpayer. Kennedy isalready entitledto Federal health care, and it is no doubt the best available to anyone in the world. . . .
There might be a rational debate over the social utility of Senator Kennedy’s life. We could all have a great national debate about it. Maybe we should do exactly that, to face the consequences of what the Left sees as so humane, so obviously benevolent, and so enlightened.
Consider what happens in the Netherlands to elderly people. The Netherlands legalized “assisted suicide” in 2002, no doubt in part for compassionate reasons. But also to save money. . . .
There’s only so much money available. The Netherlands radio service had a quiz show at one time, designed to “raise public awareness” about precisely that question. Who deserves to live, and who to die?
But nobody debates any more about who has the power to make that decision. In socialist Europe the State does. It’s a done deal. . . .
In the socialist Netherlands Kennedy would be a perfect candidate for passive euthanasia.
Has anyone raised this question with Senator Kennedy? I know it seems to be in bad taste to even mention it. But if ObamaCare passes in the coming weeks, you can be sure that that questionwillbe raised for you and me, and our loved ones. And no,wewill not have a choice.
One set of standards for the rich and the powerful, and another for the rest of us. One set of medical options for those who write the laws (and those who influence them), and another for those of us who live under them. That’s liberalism? It seems to me there’s something seriously wrong with that.
Which is why, to my way of thinking,Rep. John Fleming (R-LA)is a hero of the fight over Obamacare. Rep. Fleming, a physician, is the author and sponsor of House Resolution 615, which he describes this way:
I’ve offered a bill, HR 615, to give them a chance to put their “health” where their mouth is: My resolution urges members of Congress who vote for this legislation to lead by example and enroll themselves in the public plan that their bill would create.
The current draft of the Democratic bill curiously exempts members of Congress from the government-run health care option: The people’s representatives would get to keep their existing health plans and services on Capitol Hill—even though the people wouldn’t.
If members of Congress believe so strongly that government-run health care is the best solution for hardworking American families, I think it only fitting that Americans see them lead the way. . . .
Congress has the bad habit of exempting itself from the problems it inflicts on the American people. From common workplace protections to transparency and accountability measures, lawmakers always seem to place themselves and their staffs just out of reach of the laws they create.
Americans don’t know that there is an attending physician on call exclusively for members of Congress, or that Congress enjoys VIP access and admission to Walter Reed Army Medical Center and Bethesda Naval Medical Center.
It is past time that we make the men and women making the laws be exposed to the same consequences as the American public.
Public servants should always be accountable and responsible for what they are advocating, and I challenge the American people to demand this from their representatives.
We deserve health-care reform that puts a patient’s well being in the hands of a doctor, not a bureaucrat.
I think he’s right on. If it’s good enough for us, it’s good enough for the members of Congress, the employees of the Executive Branch (all the way up to the POTUS and his family), and the judges and staff of our courts. If you agree, you might want to go toRep. Fleming’s official websiteand sign the online petition in support of HR 615. Well done, Rep. Fleming; trust a doctor to know a boil when he sees it, and know how to lance it—even a spiritual one.
As I noted in the previous post, there’s been a real lack of active leadership from the president on the whole issue of health care “reform,” which has been quite frustrating to his party. Unfortunately, instead of that, we’re getting more of his patented harangues. This is a bad thing because for all the praise he receives as an orator, Barack Obama is a remarkably lazy and juvenile rhetor; he has a terrible weakness for cheap rhetorical tricks, tending to lean on them heavily whenever he needs to make his case. One he particularly likes is to set up false, simple-minded dichotomies, which he can then use to either a) paint himself as offering a more enlightened third way forward, or b) portray his own position as obviously correct and that of those of us who disagree with him as obviously wrong.
With his example of the red and blue pills, and another about whether a child’s hypothetical tonsils should be removed, President Obama unwittingly presents the real problem with his plan for reform. Here is a well-meaning government official who so fails to grasp the problem in health care that he can present such absurd oversimplifications and suggest that this sort of thing is the real problem—doctors simply lack the common sense to make obvious medical decisions. President Obama wants us to solve this problem by putting himself and other government officials in charge of rescuing medicine from the medical profession. If medical doctors with a decade of schooling cannot distinguish between good cures and ineffective ones that must be discontinued, then by gosh, we’re lucky that the good folks from the government can.
President Obama thus frames the issue as a false choice between doing nothing at all and handing over to Washington complicated, case-by-case medical decisions that cannot possibly be legislated or dictated by government.
Freddoso’s wrong about one thing: “complicated, case-by-case medical decisions”canin fact be “legislated or dictated by government”—in one way, which he mentions:
There is exactly one thing that government can do to control costs in health care: it can insist on paying below cost.
Granted, he’s thinking here of government short-changing insurance companies and medical providers, which is a significant problem in our current system:
This shifts the cost burden to private insurance companies, which in turn pass along higher premiums to their patients. This is what government-run Medicare does today for many treatments, including cancer. Government will do more of this kind of “saving” when it assumes greater responsibility for funding citizens’ health care, particularly if a government-option health care plan is established.
What he’s missing, though, is that this form of “saving” only has this particular effect when there’s still a sizeable public sector in existence to bear that burden and compensate for it with higher premiums. Kill off that private sector, as the president’s preferred approach will pretty much do, and you get a different result—which iswhat the Mayo Clinic is worried about:
Under the current Medicare system, a majority of doctors and hospitals that care for Medicare patients are paid substantially less than it costs to treat them. Many providers are therefore already approaching a point where they can not afford to see Medicare patients. Expansion of a Medicare-type plan without a method to define, measure, and pay for healthy outcomes for patients will move many doctors and hospitals across this threshold, and ultimately hurt the patients who seek our care.
You see, when the government bureaucrats need to make “complicated, case-by-case medical decisions,” they’re not going to make them on the basis of the things that truly make them “complicated” and “case-by-case”; they’re going to make them on the basis of the actuarial tables, ona cost/benefit analysis run purely from the perspective of the federal government, and thewaythey’ll make them is by telling doctors, “We won’t pay that much for that procedure” (if indeed they’re willing to pay anything for it at all). If the figure they set is low enough, the procedure won’t get done. The only variable for medical decisions will be government cost control. In his usual role as the ghoul at the party, Peter Singer has been the only one to come right out in public and tell everyone what that means:rationing of health care.
As cost issues come to dominate the government’s interest in the health care system—which is to say, as the rosy and unrealistic projections of cost savings which the Democrats are currently using to try to build public support for their plan quickly give way to reality, creating a budget crunch—this will also necessarily mean increased taxes. After all, Democrats never have the stomach for huge budget cuts (except from defense budgets), and certainly won’t be willing to embrace the kind of truly draconian rationing of medical care that would be necessary to solve that budget crunch without tax increases. That’s why, despite the promises the president made back when he was trying to get elected, the House’s health care billalready includes a significant tax on the uninsured.
As expected, the House bill would mandate that individuals and families have or buy health insurance.
But what if they don’t buy it?
Then Section 401 kicks in. Any individual (or family) that does not have health insurance would have to pay a new tax, roughly equal to the smaller of 2.5% of your income or the cost of a health insurance plan. . . .
I assume the bill authors would respond, “But why wouldn’t you want insurance? After all, we’re subsidizing it for everyone up to 400% of the poverty line.”
That is true. But if you’re a single person with income of $44,000 or higher, then you’re above 400% of the poverty line. You would not be subsidized, but would face the punitive tax if you didn’t get health insurance. This bill leaves an important gap between the subsidies and the cost of health insurance. CBO says that for about eight million people, that gap is too big to close, and they would get stuck paying higher taxes and still without health insurance.
Ed Morissey addsthat “the mandate in the bill would force people to choose between paying the taxes or paying as much as three times as much for health insurance, assuming a family plan.” Still, isn’t that better than having 45.7 million uninsured people? Not necessarily; the crowning irony to this is that,as Deroy Murdock points out, the number of people for whom lack of medical insurance is truly a serious problem is actually about . . . eight million.
Obamacare is propelled by the oft-repeated Census Bureau statistic that 45.7 million Americans lack health insurance. Even if that number were accurate, why would Washington turn the health-care industry upside down for all 300 million Americans in order to help 45.7 million? In fact, as Pacific Research Institute president Sally Pipesdemonstrates, public policy should concentrate on a far smaller group of hard cases.
From those 45.7 million uninsured, subtract 17.5 million who earn more than $50,000 annually. Though they can afford coverage, they evidently have other priorities. Of the remaining 28.2 million uninsured, some 14 million are eligible for, yet have not enrolled in, the Medicaid and S-CHIP programs. Meanwhile, as many as 10 million uninsured may be illegal aliens. All told, Pipes estimates that only about 8 million Americans are uninsured due to chronic illness or working-poor status. The latter have incomes too high for assistance and too low for insurance.
In other words: if the House bill passes, it will throw a huge amount of money at the problem of people who can’t afford medical insurance, and the result will be that the same number of people will be unable to afford medical insurance, except that they’ll be paying higher taxes for the privilege. Even for D.C., that will be an amazing accomplishment.
