Getting Rich Off The H1N1 “Pandemic”

Who profited from the so-called pandemic of H1N1 flu? Why drug companies, of course.

So far, the dreaded flu has killed a confirmed 14,711 around the world. The exact total in the U.S. is unclear, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirming 4,000 deaths, but estimating up to 16,500 in case of underreporting. These numbers are not only smaller than what was predicted but also are far less than the normal mortality rate for ordinary flu seasons.

The one thing that was up last year was earnings for makers of H1N1 vaccines. CSL Limited saw its profits rise 63% above 2008 levels by June 2009, while GlaxoSmithKline enjoyed a 30% jump by the third quarter. Roche, maker of the preventive Tamiflu, enjoyed a twelve fold leap in profits from the second quarter of 2008 to the same period in 2009.

These would be the same folks that the Obama administration cut a sweetheart deal with to get them on board his health care “reform”.

Was this the change you were hoping for? Big payouts for the drug companies?

When Bureaucrats Decide

A glimpse into what the future will look like under ObamaCare: Bureaucrats decide, you suffer:

The Government’s drugs rationing body, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice), has provisionally said that it does not intend to recommend the use of the drug, called Tocilizumab, or Roactemra.

Nice claims that the £9,000 a year drug, for rheumatoid arthritis, has not proved that it is cost effective.

But patients in Scotland are to receive the treatment after it was recommended by the body which regulates drugs on the Scottish NHS, the Scottish Medicines Consortium (SMC).

The move will reopen accusations of medical ‘apartheid’ within Britain.

It follows an outcry after patients in Scotland were given access to expensive cancer drugs denied on the NHS in England and Wales.

Note that the nameless, faceless bureaucrats making these decisions never have to face the voters. They decide, you suffer.

This is what health care looks like when the government runs it. Were these the chains you were hoping for?

A Dagger Aimed At America

From within. Mark Steyn:

That’s why I believe America’s belated embrace of government health care will be far more expensive and disastrous than the Euro-Canadian models. Whatever one’s philosophical objection to the Canadian health system, it is, broadly, fair: Unless you are a Cabinet minister or a big-time hockey player, you’ll enjoy the same equality of crappiness and universal lack of access that everybody else does.

But, even before it’s up and running, Pelosi-Reid-Obamacare is an impenetrable thicket of contradictory boondoggles, shameless payoffs and arbitrary shakedowns. That’s why Nebraska’s grotesque zombie Sen. Ben Nelson is the perfect poster boy for the new arrangements and not just another so-called Blue Dog Democrat spayed into compliance by a massive cash injection.

There is no reason on earth why Nebraska should be the only state in this union to have every dime of its increased Medicare tab picked up by the 49 others. So either that privilege will be extended to all or to favored others, or its asymmetry will be balanced by other precisely targeted lollipops hither and yon.

Whatever happens, it’s a dagger at the heart of American federalism, just as the bill’s magisterial proclamation that the Independent Medicare Advisory Board can only be abolished by a two-thirds vote of the Senate strikes at one of the most basic principles of a free society – that no parliament can bind its successors.

This monstrosity kills American Liberty. Better start calling, folks. Time is running out. The only way this is going to be stopped is if enough members of Congress fear for their political existence. These “reforms” to health care are anything but.

Don’t stand for this, America.

Democrats Screwing The Middle Class

Jennifer Rubin points out that even the leftward leaning are beginning to wake up to the fact that ObamaCare is a rotten deal:

How could Democrats come up with such a scheme? Well, as Herbert points out, the idea is that those “Cadillac” plans will get slashed and changed, thereby avoiding the excise tax. But alas, “it makes a mockery of President Obama’s repeated pledge that if you like the health coverage you have now, you can keep it.” And if the the “Cadillac” plans become Kia plans after they’ve been cut down to size, what happens to the planned $150B in revenue the excise tax was supposed to generate? It gets fuzzy at that point. Herbert suggests that most of that revenue was supposed to come ”from the income taxes paid by workers who have been given pay raises by employers who will have voluntarily handed over the money they saved by offering their employees less valuable health insurance plans. Can you believe it?” In a word, no.

Herbert is actually quite caustic about it.

A survey of business executives by Mercer, a human resources consulting firm, found that only 16 percent of respondents said they would convert the savings from a reduction in health benefits into higher wages for employees. Yet proponents of the tax are holding steadfast to the belief that nearly all would do so.

That good, old magical thinking. The fact is that the “Cadillac” money will NEVER materialize, making another, substitute tax on the middle class necessary in the near future. So the screwing will be continuous. You’ll lose the coverage you like and your employer will pocket the money they save. You will be an indentured servant to insurance companies – with no hope of ever breaking free.

None of the money projections – costs or revenues – stands up to even cursory scrutiny.  That should scare the living heck out of you, regardless of your political bent.

Arrogance, Corruption And Stupidity

United States Senator – and physician – Tom Coburn:

This vote is indeed historic. This Congress will be remembered for its arrogance, corruption and stupidity. In the year of 2009, a Congress ignored the coming economic storm and impending bankruptcy of our entitlement programs and embarked on an ideological crusade to bring our nation as close to single-payer, government-run health care as possible. If this bill becomes law, future generations will rue this day and I will do everything in my power to work toward its repeal. This bill will ration care, cut Medicare, increase premiums, fund abortion and bury our children in debt.

This process was not compromise. This process was corruption. This bill passed because votes were bought and sold using the issue of abortion as a bargaining chip. The abortion provision alone makes this bill the most arrogant piece of legislation I have seen in Congress. Only the most condescending politician can believe it is appropriate to force Americans to pay for other people’s abortions and to coerce medical professional to take the lives of unborn children.

Everything about this health care “reform” is a lie. Top to bottom, not one bit of it is true. It does not – and cannot, as it is structured – control costs. It will not bring down the cost of insurance, instead it will cause those costs to increase. It will not insure every American. It will not increase access to care, rather it will bring rationing. It is not deficit neutral, taxes will rise sharply, bureaucrats will control you and yours. You will be indentured to insurance companies, forced to pay them for what they will be allowed to “give” you in benefits.

There is literally nothing in this bill worth having for the people of the United States.

Turn every member of Congress who votes for this out of office. Or try hard to do so. Or your children will be less free than you have been.

The First Wave Of Taxes

A comprehensive list of taxes the Senate plans to impose now that Harry Reid bought Ben Nelson includes this gem:

Tax on Indoor Tanning Services (Page 373 of Manager’s amendment/$2.7 billion/July 1, 2010): New 10% excise tax on indoor tanning salons.

You think this is where they will stop?

Get ready, here it comes.

A Hollow Victory?

If – and it is a big if, still – the Democrats manage to pass their desperate “Any Bill Will Do” health care reform, they may be committing political suicide in the process:

O, the irony: The Democrats — who run the Congress and the White House — have to pass health care to prove they can govern. If it falls apart, after all this time, they will look weak and ineffectual. Yet while they toil long days and nights trying to put together the votes, the bill itself has morphed into something the public fears. So passage could well become a short-lived political victory.

Some numbers: According to CNN polls, almost 8 in 10 believe it will add to the deficit. When asked whether the Senate bill would help your family a resounding 75 percent said no. And will it increase your taxes? Eighty-five percent said you bet it will.

So why not have a GOP candidate in Kentucky inject health care into a state senate race? “Keep the big hand of government out of our personal health care decisions,” one Higdon ad warned ominously. One Democratic strategist familiar with the race says the ad didn’t matter much since not enough people saw it to have a real impact.

Beyond Kentucky, the Democrats also protest on health care: The issue is misunderstood, they say. We are just losing the spin war and that will change, they say. Even if all of that is true, there’s something else to understand: Once health care passes, it’s still going to be unpopular. At least until the Democrats can prove why it works, and that could take a very long time.

I pointed out another analyst making the same point last night. The American public is not misunderstanding the intent and the impact of this bill, contrary to the Democrat’s assertions. They can see a bad deal and a power grab very clearly. They can see the coming loss in quality and quantity of health care. They can see the tax increases looming. They can see the bureaucratic meddling in their most personal affairs. They can see the severe economic damage. They can see the vast increase to an already unmanageable deficit.

They can see the disaster coming.

And they will know who to blame. They will know who to punish. They will know who to exile to the wilderness.

They will know how to get this monstrosity killed by unelecting the ones who pass it and electing a Congress that listens instead of dictates.

The Gilded Age Returns

Jay Cost:

Amazingly, this bill has produced the broadest political coalition I have seen in my lifetime. Peruse the liberal blogs and you’ll discover widespread disgust at this corporate boon. Cruise over to the conservative sites, and you’ll encounter much the same thing. Then, check out the opinion polls and you’ll find a mass public that is staunchly opposed to this bill.

And yet Democrats in the Senate have decided that all of us – left, right, and center – are wrong. We need this bill.

Welcome to the new gilded age. The original hope behind the 17th Amendment – the direct election of senators – was to get the upper chamber out of the pocket of mega-industries that could buy and sell senators. So much for that, I suppose. This has to be one of the biggest giveaways to corporate interests in the nation’s history.

Andrew Jackson must be spinning in his grave this evening. The Democratic Party was founded in opposition to “corrupt bargains” among entrenched interests that Democrats believed were undermining the will of the people. Today, such interests are called “stakeholders.” They are to be wooed, bought off, and neutralized. Can’t afford a K Street lobbyist? Sorry, you’re not a stakeholder. Don’t like this bill? Eh…you don’t know what’s good for you. You’re either a tea-bagging moron or a gutless liberal who will fold sooner or later.

Like I said, Jackson must be spinning.

I have no idea what RPM Andy is up to at the moment, but Cost is dead right in his assessment: This is going to be politically bloody for the Democrats. If they pass this monstrosity, the payback for them is not going to be manageable and will be quite possibly irrecoverable. As in a permanent damage to the brand.

I’m fully aware that politicians like Pelosi feel invincible in their deep-blue seats, but the rest of the Democrats will be – frankly – in very, very bad shape.

The true cost of this bill will be much, much higher than anything the Democrats have publicly touted. One only has to look at the true costs of every Federal program – and the rapidly rising salaries of Federal officials – to understand that they are lying about the costs.

Spending like this and taxing as they must to try to pay for a sliver of what this is going to cost will inevitably cause long-term damage to the economy of this nation.

Forcing private citizens into purchasing some form of bureaucrat approved insurance from a corporate entity – with the full might and power of the government enforcing the purchase. Didn’t we settle the issue of involuntary servitude a long time ago? We have a constitutional amendment and everything.

The voter backlash will be positively biblical.

Cannibal Boomers

A truly disturbing opinion piece by Bill Frezza over at Real Clear Politics. The boomers are eating their young.

My 26 year old son got the most extraordinary letter from the Social Security Administration last week. In plain English it admitted that the system was a Ponzi scheme destined for bankruptcy more than a decade before he reaches retirement age. It warned that if he is to have any hope of retiring he’d better start saving on his own. Anyone who wasn’t personally hypnotized by FDR knows this to be true. Yet I was still surprised that such a frank government confession didn’t make national news.

The two-page pamphlet entitled “What young workers should know about Social Security and saving” reminds us that 50 million, or one in six, Americans will collect more than $614 Billion dollars in Social Security benefits this year. It informs young people that the Security Taxes they now pay go into a “Trust Fund” that is used to pay current beneficiaries. Paying off early investors with funds taken from later investors is precisely how Wikipedia defines a Ponzi scheme. The pamphlet advises that the Social Security Board of Trustees estimates that the “Trust Fund” will be depleted before my son’s 54th birthday. Because people are living longer and the birth rate is low, it goes on, taxes paid by workers in the future will not be enough to pay the benefits promised in his personalized retirement account statement enclosed with the pamphlet. Imagine what hell would break loose if Schwab or Fidelity Investments enclosed a confession like this when they mailed investors their 401(k) statements.

Add on the incredibly generous pension benefits that most government employees get that allow them to retire in their 50s and pretty soon we’re talking serious money.  The younger workers suffer – and will suffer even more under health care “reform” where they will be forced to subsidize the boomer’s fun retirements.

But let’s expand on Frezza’s thoughts and reflect on the devil’s bargain the boomers are making. The younger workers will, inevitably, be the very bureaucrats who decide what health care the older people get.

So the younger ones, enslaved by the older ones, will have little incentive to prolong the happy, well-funded lives of the older cannibal class.

Sleep on that thought. Sweet dreams.

ObamaCare – wrong for everyone.

Cold Hearted Care

The cold heart of ObamaCare:

To call the dangers of this legislation “death panels” obscures the real-life consequences to Americans, not only the elderly, of a federal government-run health care bureaucracy. In the Senate bill, for instance, Medicare doctors whose treatments each year of certain, mostly elderly, patients costs more than a set government figure will be punished by losing part of their own incomes…

…In this country, bureaucrats keeping tabs on patients – without actually seeing them and their condition – will mean, as Tanner notes, that “every time a doctor decides on a treatment, he or she would have to ask: ‘Does the government think I’m doing this too much? Will I be penalized if I order this test?’” (Disclosure: As a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, I have access to its continuing research.)

Nameless, faceless bureaucrats will be between you and your doctor. They will decide what treatments you may – and may not -  have. Ultimately, they will decide when you die. Is this the change you hoped for? Lured by a false promise of reform into surrendering your life and liberty to the state? Go read the whole piece and be afraid.

Then start calling. Time is running out.

A Belief In Magic…

…Is no way to run a country. Matthew Continetti, writing at The Weekly Standard, explains the magical thinking the Democrats have engaged in for the past year:

Next time you run into a group of Democrats, offer to splash water on their faces. They’ve spent 2009 in a dream state, and it’s time they wake up. They’re convinced that they can subsidize health insurance for millions of people while also “bending the cost curve” of health care spending. They want to sign us up for the political equivalent of one of those three-step “eat more to lose weight” diets. Step one: Pile on the expenditures, regulations, taxes, and fees. Step two: Close your eyes. Step three: Pray it all works out in the end.

Sorry, it won’t. Entitlements cost money, and they almost invariably cost more than the government’s initial predictions. When you increase demand for a product and the supply remains fixed, the price rises. Thanks to the individual mandate, the Democratic health care bills lasso Americans into a heavily regulated health insurance oligopoly. All these new consumers will wander through the government-run “exchanges,” buying the plans they can afford with taxpayer subsidies. As demand for health care increases, so will the cost.

There is nothing, literally nothing, that the Federal government runs without gross inefficiencies, waste and, all-too-often, fraud. Yet they want to get their mitts on a huge chunk of the American economy and promise that this time the magic will be there.

If you believe that, I have some really great real estate for you to buy. Small, unmarked bills only.

If you believe a power-mad Pelosi, a bumbling Reid and the world’s only Superbower* will end up cutting health care costs with their program, you seriously need your medication adjusted. Just don’t count on it happening under ObamaCare.

This bill will cripple the American economy, increase health care costs and cut the quality of care. Magical thinking will not change those things.

* Thank you Mark Steyn for a wonderful moniker for Obama.

What ObamaCare Will Bring

No, the Democrats will not be smarter or better with their schemes for health care. They will drag us right down a road others have already traveled.

And you and yours will pay for it.

The scandal of filthy and inadequate NHS hospitals deepened yesterday as figures revealed more than 3,000 patients could be dying needlessly every year.

Death rates are abnormally high at a fifth of trusts in England, with some 3,145 excess deaths at 26 hospitals during 2007/08.

The figures come at a time of collapsing public confidence in the NHS after two reports within 24 hours revealed high numbers of needless deaths at hospitals.

Yesterday, the chairman of Colchester Hospital in Essex, Richard Bourne, was sacked after it emerged that death rates were a massive 12 per cent higher than expected last year.

It means that there are likely to have been dozens of excess deaths at the trust, where regulators said safety was a low priority and patients had to wait months for treatment.

These are “flagship” medical trusts in Britain. These are as good as it gets under Britain’s socialized medicine.

This is what Obama and the left are gung ho to impose on America. This is what a “public option” looks like in the wild, so to speak.

How’s that hopeandchange working for you, folks?

All Tax, No Benefit

Keith Hennessey:

1. 40% excise tax on health coverage in excess of $8,500 (individuals) / $23,000 (families).  Amounts are indexed for inflation by CPI-U + 1% – begins in 2013 – $149 B tax increase

2. Additional 0.5% Medicare (Hospital Insurance) tax on wages in excess of $200,000 ($250,000 for joint filers) – begins in 2013 – $54 B tax increase

3. Impose annual fee on manufacturers and importers of branded drugs – begins in 2010 – $22 B tax increase

4. Impose annual fee on manufacturers and importers of certain medical devices – begins in 2010 – $19 B tax increase

5. Impose annual fee on manufacturers and importers of certain medical devices – begins in 2010 – $60 B tax increase

6. Cut in half (to $500K) the amount of an executive’s compensation that a health plan can deduct from its corporate income taxes – begins in 2013 – $600 million tax increase

7. Impose 5% excise tax on cosmetic surgery and similar procedures – begins for surgery in 2010 – $6 B tax increase!

Even NPR was calling that last item the “Bo-Tax”. I rather like “Tax for the Mammaries”, myself.

And they are already moving to eliminate benefits, witness the new recommendations for mammograms that a government panel suddenly announced. Bet your life that things like that will not be “recommendations” after the government takes over health care. They will be decrees.

And we will be collectively screwed.

What I see happening if this beast of a bill escapes the Senate:

Taxes will explode exponentially – because costs will be vastly greater than what they are currently predicting.

Insurance costs will not decrease. In fact, the price for insurance will climb rapidly.

The health care system will be unable to absorb the additional load and quality will decrease.

Benefits will be steadily taken away as costs spiral out of control.

The bureaucracy will multiply faster than the swine flu and will be even more pernicious.

The government will be into every detail of every, single American’s lives.

Abortion will be funded by the tax dollars of Americans, whether those taxpayers agree with abortion or not.

Millions of early retirees who currently have bridge health insurance (until they can obtain Medicare) through their employers will lose that and they will be thrown onto the “public plan”.

Unemployment will become permanently high, probably above the 10% level, as it is in many European countries today.

And many more bad things.

Do you really want Barack Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi running your health care?

Better start calling, better start writing. This thing has to be stopped.

Disappearing Care, Rising Costs

Seniors, is this the change you hoped for?

A plan to slash more than $500 billion from future Medicare spending — one of the biggest sources of funding for President Obama’s proposed overhaul of the nation’s health-care system — would sharply reduce benefits for some senior citizens and could jeopardize access to care for millions of others, according to a government evaluation released Saturday.

The report, requested by House Republicans, found that Medicare cuts contained in the health package approved by the House on Nov. 7 are likely to prove so costly to hospitals and nursing homes that they could stop taking Medicare altogether.

Congress could intervene to avoid such an outcome, but “so doing would likely result in significantly smaller actual savings” than is currently projected, according to the analysis by the chief actuary for the agency that administers Medicare and Medicaid. That would wipe out a big chunk of the financing for the health-care reform package, which is projected to cost $1.05 trillion over the next decade.

Welcome to ObamaCare. This bill is a complete fraud. It cuts benefits, raises costs for everyone, creates huge bureaucracies, pries into the most private aspects of American’s lives and makes things worse all around.

In other words, it is government gone mad. We are in real trouble as a nation if this passes. Better start calling your Senators.

When The Mask Slips

The Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Cassidy is more honest than the politicians whose dishonesty he supports. “The U.S. government is making a costly and open-ended commitment,” he writes. “Let’s not pretend that it isn’t a big deal, or that it will be self-financing, or that it will work out exactly as planned. It won’t. What is really unfolding, I suspect, is the scenario that many conservatives feared. The Obama Administration . . . is creating a new entitlement program, which, once established, will be virtually impossible to rescind.”

Why are they doing it? Because, according to Mr. Cassidy, ObamaCare serves the twin goals of “making the United States a more equitable country” and furthering the Democrats’ “political calculus.” In other words, the purpose is to further redistribute income by putting health care further under government control, and in the process making the middle class more dependent on government. As the party of government, Democrats will benefit over the long run.

On top of that, they create a vast, new bureaucracy to run the program that they themselves are actually exempt from. That wealth of government functionaries becomes yet another power base for the Democrats.

That is really what this is all about. Not the health and welfare of the people of the United States.

The health and welfare of the Democrats.

Start calling folks. This is an economy killer as well as a liberty destroyer.