Buy Health Insurance...Or Else?

Interesting comments from Gary Bauer's End of Day report....I can't imagine the uproar if the "mandate" part of the Baucus bill gets passed...great opportunity for some civil disobedience....can you imagine a bunch of us sitting in jail because we wouldn't buy healthcare? One is tempted by the idea...

Here are a few excerpts:

Senator Max Baucus' latest “bi-partisan” healthcare bill has been criticized by Republicans and Democrats alike. The liberals in Congress are upset because it does not provide for a public option, while conservatives are upset that it still amounts to a government takeover of healthcare and forces individuals to buy healthcare coverage whether they like it or not. A large percentage of younger workers in our country are healthy and would prefer not to pay for healthcare coverage. Also, many wealthy Americans, who can afford to pay their own bills, don’t want to be forced to buy a policy they don’t need.

But what, under the Baucus plan, would happen to people who refused to buy health insurance? The bill states that a $1,900 “excise tax” would be assessed. Senator John Ensign (R-NV) asked what would happen to someone who refused to pay the tax. He was told by Tom Barthold, Chief of Staff for the Senate’s Joint Committee on Taxation, that the person could be charged with a misdemeanor, face up to one year in jail and a fine of up $25,000.

During the 1994 healthcare debate, the mandate issue was at the forefront. At the time, the Congressional Budget Office called the individual mandate “an unprecedented form of federal action.” In the history of the United States, the federal government has never legally forced people to purchase any service or good. If this bill is passed, history will be made.

More “Buyer’s Remorse” On Obama More and more, voters who supported Obama last November are having second thoughts now. Richard Cohen, the very liberal Washington Post columnist, wrote this morning that Obama was “appearing promiscuously on television and granting interviews like the presidential candidate he no longer is.” He added, “The trouble with Obama is that he gets into the moment and means what he says for that moment only.” 

 

Here's the rest of Cohen's article Time to Act Like a President. Pretty harsh, coming from an Obama-man...

On Obama's Speech to the United Nations: A Collection of Conservative and Liberal Reactions

Listening in on both conservative and liberal reaction to the president's speech (NRO editors called it his "confession"). 

Here's a smattering of commentary from the "right"...

Victor Davis Hanson (National Review Online)

The key question is at what point will the American people sense that the Obama feel-good magic comes at the expense of long-term American interests — and that making some unsavory characters like our president now will mean only trouble ahead for the country itself and its friends abroad.

Charles Krauthammer (blog)

This speech hovered somewhere between embarrassing and dangerous. You had a president of the United States actually saying: “No [one] nation can or should try to dominate another.” I will buy the "should try to" as kind of adolescent wishful thinking. But “no [one] nation can dominate another”? What planet is he living on? It is the story of man. What does he think Russia is doing to Georgia?

Obama's speech is alarming because it says the United States has no more moral right to act or to influence world history than Bangladesh or Sierra Leone. It diminishes the United States deliberately and wants to say that we should be one nation among others, and not defend the alliance of democracies that we have in NATO, for example, or to say — as [did] every president who goes before Obama — that we stand for something good and unique in the world.

Anne Bayefsky (senior fellow with the Hudson Institute and executive director of Human Rights Voices) reporting from the U.N.:

President Obama had the audacity to speak at length about his commitment to standing with the oppressed. While he spoke inside the U.N., hundreds of protesters from Iran were outside refuting his words...President Obama has offered an outstretched hand to the man who is responsible for the terrible fate of Iranian dissidents. Every Iranian demonstrator in New York today said loud and clear that they believe President Obama’s policy on Iran to be an outrageous abandonment of democratic values....Instead of leading, the president sounded confused and relativistic....The president’s deliberate ambiguity on the nature of democracy was well-received at the U.N., but it did nothing to enhance America’s moral stature and leadership capacity in the world today. ...This speech ought to send shockwaves through the United States and our European allies. We have the weakest president in modern times ensconced in Washington, a man who will run away from saying what has to be said, if it doesn’t appeal to an audience rife with demagogues.

Rich Lowry (excerpts from his column in the New York Post)

President Obama yesterday did his best impression of a high-school sophomore participating in his first Model UN meeting… Obama hopes that all our self-effacing niceness will catalyze the world into ending its "bickering about outdated grievances." No wonder he twice had to deny that he was being naive.

And from the "left..."

The New York Times editorial board, taking the requisite swipe at George W. Bush, writes that Obama “took another step toward repairing America’s battered image,” while the Los Angeles Times focused mostly on the power of Obama’s personality. Commending Obama for his ability to “palpably reduce global tensions,” the L.A. Times wrote that “some delegates were so awed by the American president that they couldn't resist snapping pictures during his Wednesday speech.”

 Michael Crowley, writing in his column in The New Republic, is a bit more circumspect, calling the speech “elegant if not terribly profound” and “idealistic,” and concluding that “it is the force of Obama's identity and personal experience which offers some hope that his words might have more resonance.” Yet his final statement (“In the months to come, we’ll find out”) suggests he seems willing to reserve judgment.

Comparing these contrasting views, one can’t help but feel commentary today is all about perceptions, expectations, and preferences and not necessarily about actual facts. These divergent views aren’t coming from the fringes. These are thoughtful, informed, intelligent comments about the exact same event but with widely different assessments and conclusions. Is it even possible to get at actual truth anymore, or will it always be that opinions and ideas are shaped by whose “side” we’re on?

How to Change the Subject in Two Syllables

Charles Krauthammer commenting in his blog on the latest attempt by Democrats to change the subject by calling Joe Wilson "racist":

The minute you call somebody a racist, the debate is over. You don't continue….Accusations of racism are the last refuge of the liberal scoundrel. As for Maureen Dowd, imagining a word [“boy”] that wasn't said: Well, in my previous profession, I saw a lot of people who heard words that weren't said. They were called patients. Many of them were actually helped with medication.

 Funny.

Not Sure How He Gets Away With It

The premise for B.O.'s Big Speech to Congress on health care reform had to do with what he referred to as lies and distortions emanating from those who opposed health care reform. The "time for bickering is over," he declared. He then proceeded to lay out a plan for reform that apparently contained its own share of half-truths or distortions, which two days later are now being scrutinized. But rather than focus on this, the big news of the speech was not so much what the president said but what Republican representative Joe Wilson of South Carolina did, which was to interrupt the speech and call Obama out as a liar. Rude and inappropriate behavior to be sure, not befitting the solemnity of the moment. Wilson apparently apologized later, as he should have. But too much is being made of the outburst. It's not as though the Democrats have "clean hands" in this regard. (Did they never "boo" President Bush during his addresses to Congress? If so, did they apologize later?).

What's missing in all the chiding of Wilson is the fact that his reaction was gut-level and instinctive. Mona Charen, writing in NRO today, says that "similar exclamations were heard" at her house. And Kevin Williamson, also writing in NRO, says that Joe Wilson "could use a visit from Miss Manners," but he was telling the truth about Obama. The L.A. Times published a picture of three or four Republicans wafting their own versions of health care reform in response to Obama's claim that the "other side" has not offered any good ideas. And Joe Wilson's slur was a reaction to Obama's claim that his reform plan would not pay for illegal immigrants. Yet Republicans' attempts to ensure this by requiring proof of residency were not included in the House version of the bill. Wilson understood the game that was being played up there. Words are cheap. This President can "say" anything he wants. Truth and accuracy don't seem to matter. So the irony here is that Joe Wilson is being villified for calling Obama a liar, but President Obama, who probably is "dissembling" (let's not call him a liar), is praised. It's amazing to me. How does he do it?

Here's Kevin Williamson Joe Wilson is Rude but Right  and Mona Charen Obama's Trouble With Numbers

Paglia and Ponnuru on Health Care Debacle

I always enjoy how Camille Paglia (Liberal? Democrat/Libertarian?) seems to have no compunction about slice and dicing her own party, including the venerable Barack Obama. Of course she's equally brutal on the Republicans, but that goes without saying. Here she goes again, this time on health care....you go, girl.

Too Late for Obama to Turn it Around?
(Salon)

And here's Ramesh Ponnuru from National Review skewering Obama et al on the flat out lies they're telling about health care reform, all the while accusing Republicans of spreading misinformation.

Obama's False Witness
(NRO)

I agree with Ponnuru's concluding paragraph:

Americans have increasing doubts about President Obama’s agenda but generally like him as a person. They consider him honest and trustworthy, and give him the benefit of the doubt. As the health-care debate continues, it becomes less and less clear that Obama deserves that trust.

"How Then Shall We Live?"

Always astounds me that people think they can wag their fingers at the rest of us while "living as they please" (a nice way of saying "hypocrisy"). But do the environmentalists commend George W. Bush? Nay....Al Gore gets the Pulitzer and Bush is maligned. Grrrrr.....

A Tale of Two Houses

Democrats Got Religion!

I guess it was only a matter of time before Democrats saw the light. If only the bald-faced hypocrisy weren't so glaringly obvious.

"God's Partners"
Mona Charen
National Review Online (September 1, 2009)