Barack Obama exemplifies one side of the increasing divide between the two real parties in American politics: liberals and elitists. His press conference tonight made that clearer than ever.
Obama’s world is full of people who aren’t doing things the right way. If only we’d listen to him! He said as much at his latest press conference designed to salvage his dying health care scheme — and seems thankfully doomed.
Obama is among the socialist elite, so of course he thinks this way. What’s amazing is how unashamed—for a politician—he is about patronizing us poor "ignorant" masses.
Without going back and looking at the transcript, it’s safe to say that Obama’s press conference tonight was a disaster, at least from the standpoint of what he wanted to get from it.
Obama scheduled this presser last week, sensing (rightly) he needed to convince the public he knows what he’s doing and they should trust him to shepherd a complete overhaul of America’s health care system RIGHT NOW!!!! On that score the presser was a failure, a disaster. And I couldn’t be happier (and not just because of the red pill/blue pill Matrix gaffe).
It is clear that Obama is running out of tricks. Not that the questions were particularly tough (though some were), but the MSM is not falling for the Jedi Mind Tricks anymore. He’s been in office for six months. He has a 38-seat majority in the House and a filibuster-proof Senate. It is clearly his government now. For him to blame Republicans for the failure for his health care plan to gain traction — just days after he and his spokeshole call out Jim DeMint — was embarrassing. I almost felt sorry for him. Obama’s problem is that Democrats don’t want to be on the hook for this horrible plan and face voters in two (or four) years. This impending and glorious political failure is not the doing of Republicans — though they are doing a good job opposing it in the only way they can, rhetorically. And Obama just made the job easier tonight.
All of Obama’s answers were rambling. I presume Obama likes to ramble because he has such confidence in his rhetorical abilities that he figured the longer he talked, the more effective he’d be. The opposite was the case. Obama is actually a quite poor orator when he’s not reading his trusty teleprompter. That’s why one of the take-aways from this presser was Obama suggesting doctors schedule tonsillectomies when patients come into the office with simple sore throats to pad their bank accounts. And another being how people shouldn’t have to pay for things that don’t make them healthier. (As Mary Katherine Ham quipped on Twitter: "Where is my Quarter Pounder w Cheese refund, yo?" Speaking for myself, I could retire right now on Quarter Pounder refunds.) Obama revealed himself as a man who has no idea how the America’s health care system (or the world) really works — yet he has supreme confidence in his ability to micromanage it.
Obama’s world is full of people who aren’t doing things the right way. Doctors give an old lady a hip replacement when all she really needs are painkillers. Families with SUVs don’t really need them, but should take public transit, or cram their kids into a more expensive and smaller hybrid car. It’s just not right that bankers, as Obama said tonight, collect "unwarranted compensation." That’s a phrase, coming from the head of an ever-more bold and powerful government, that sent a chill down this spine — and strikes me as un-American. Only in my dreams, the American Dream, do I aspire to Obama’s brand of "unwarranted compensation." And he’s had more than his share.
We’re supposed to forget that our moralistic, scolding president was made a millionaire for his navel-gazing autobiographies. That he signed a contract — just under the wire as it comes to taxes — for what a cynic like him might decry as "unwarranted compensation" for a children’s book version of "Dreams From My Father" that he will have ghost-edited while in office. That Mrs. Obama gained what the president might call "unwarranted compensation" sitting on the board of a Chicago hospital. (Michelle got quite the raise once Obama’s political career took off. What a coincidence!)
Well, I guess the Obama family got theirs. Let’s forget all that in the name of economic justice and screw everyone else.
Am I just being negative because I’m a registered Republican? Am I just being unreasonable in opposing Obama’s plans — especially when it comes to health care? Is it unfair for me to question the wisdom of Obama when he says the greatest health care system in the world has to be turned over to state control RIGHT NOW!!!! Perhaps. But that puts me in the company of esteemed Democratic strategist Susan Estrich:
We’re only talking about our health and our kids’ health, the things my mother, may she rest in peace, told me a thousand times are the only things worth caring about. If you have your health, you have everything. And if you don’t, what in the world matters more than the best health care in the world, which is found right here?
Not by everybody, mind you, and not cheaply, for anybody. No one’s suggesting for a moment that there aren’t major problems with both access and cost. But the best health care in the world is still here, and before we take steps that could make things much worse, I’d like to be very certain that they will indeed make things much better.
Obama did nothing tonight to make the Congress or the public believe that his plan will make things much better. That Obama’s powers of persuasion are waning is a great thing for America.
Speaking as a socialist elitist, I must tell you that you have got it wrong: Obama is not a socialist elitist.
And if Obama were poor, or even _hadn’t_ taken advantage of every possible advantage, you would then mock him for being a Big Fat Loser, and hating capitalism because he couldn’t do well by it. You might be concerned because someone more successful at a system than you are is calling it into question—sometimes being at the top and looking downward without superiority at the people below you will reveal to you that they aren’t in any way worse or lesser persons than you, hence Wm Gates III and Mssrs Buffett and Soros.
The 40 million figure appears to be a complete distortion of the facts. That number includes millions of illegal aliens, wealthy people who prefer no coverage of any kind and the like. The remainder are alleged now to be uncovered by the new government program so there’d be no change.
For anyone who tries to argue in favor of this impending fiasco I have one question: do you want your hospital to be run by the people who bring you the D.M.V.??
Thanks for your comment, Peter. American standards for health care treatment are much higher than those of other countries; even Obama and the Democrats admit our quality is high. Their first concern was access, and now they’ve dropped that and taken up an emphasis on the price of health insurance. The clear conclusion is that they just want to take over the health care system because they are elitists and fancy they know better than we do how we should spend our money.
But there are indeed big flaws with our health care delivery system. And they are all caused by government. Every last one of them.
There are 40 million uninsured because coverage mandates placed by state governments force insurance prices radically higher than they otherwise would be, several times more expensive than the market would charge in many cases. Obama and the congressional Democrats could stop that in a minute by allowing the selling of insurance policies across state lines, thus allowing real competition. But they haven’t done that because they want to grab more power, not help consumers get better and fairer prices.
And prices of services increase rapidly because the federal government’s decision not to tax employer-provided health insurance–while taxing other uses of health care–removes consumer control and decision-making that would force economies that would keep prices down. Plus the enormous amounts of taxpayer money spent on Medicaid and Medicare add huge amounts of demand to the system and force prices up. Plus Medicaid and Medicare don’t pay nearly the full value of the services they force health care providers to give to the indigent and elderly, which pushes up the cost of insurance and other care for the rest of us because providers have to make up the difference by charging us more.
That’s why prices are too high and keep going higher. The answer is not a government takeover, not by any means. The solution is to get government out of the equation and allow consumers and providers to agree on the real value of the services provided. That will bring costs back down to the levels they were before these government intrusions were introduced during World War II and after, and it will allow prices to fall further by enabling providers to benefit from innovations in service delivery.
Want better health care? Get the socialist elitists out of Congress.
If it’s the greatest health-care system in the world, why are American standards so much lower than those of other countries? Why are 40 million people uninsured? By those two metrics, the system is a failure, yet America spends more on health care than any other country. So, less people are healthy for more money than everyone else, and it’s the best system?