RUTHFULLY YOURS

Obama and his supporters emit a fog of equivocation and euphemism.

“If you like your plan, you can keep it.” That assertion, repeated with small variations, was Barack Obama’s central pledge when he was campaigning for president and then for the enactment of health-care “reform.” The pro-Obama New York magazine has assembled a 95-second video montage of the future and current president making the assertion two dozen times between 2008 and 2010.
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Obama in 2008: “You can keep your plan if you are satisfied with it.” Associated Press

Surely this is the clearest example of a broken presidential promise since George H.W. Bush’s “Read my lips: no new taxes.” In Bush’s defense it may be said that political exigencies–a Democratic Congress, a foreign-policy crisis–forced him to accede to a tax hike. Similarly, Obama in 2008 opposed the idea of an individual mandate to purchase health insurance, but agreed to it because his preferred options, the “public option” (in which the government would compete with private insurers) and “single payer” (in which the government would be the only insurer) were political nonstarters even with an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress.

But the you-can-keep-your-plan promise was not a sacrifice to political necessity. The ObamaCare law included a grandfather clause permitting the continuation of existing plans even if they aren’t compliant with ObamaCare’s mandates. But as we noted Tuesday, the administration applied that provision narrowly, so as to maximize the number of cancelled policies.

What do you call a political promise delivered repeatedly and emphatically only to be broken deliberately? David Firestone, an editorialist at the New York Times, calls it an “unfortunate blanket statement.” We suppose another example of an unfortunate blanket statement was “I am not a crook.”

Euphemism is only one way of attempting to fog up the debate so as to escape accountability. Another is equivocation–the informal logical fallacy of using ambiguous language in an effort to mislead. The classic political example is Bill Clinton’s claim “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.” Clinton was using “relations” in the narrow sense of “intercourse,” even though most people understood him to be making a blanket (heh) denial of hanky-panky.

According to Obama and his defenders, what he meant by “plan” or “insurance” is something different from what you might have thought he meant. Former Clinton operative James Carville, asked by Fox News Channel host Bill O’Reilly if Obama “lied in the runup to ObamaCare,” answered as follows:

Well, I think he could have said, I think the more accurate statement would have been that you will keep your coverage unless you are an individual market and have a so-called insurance policy that doesn’t meet the basic requirements. You know, just calling something health insurance doesn’t make it health insurance.

You see the game Carville is playing here. If you liked your plan and it was cancelled on account of ObamaCare, it’s not that Obama failed to keep his promise, it’s that the promise didn’t apply to you because your plan wasn’t a plan at all.

What he doesn’t spell out is that the legal definition of “health insurance” is part of the ObamaCare legislation. So the Obama pledge qualified by the Carville equivocation is a tautology: If your plan is one that ObamaCare permits you to keep, you can keep your plan.

hat sure was a blockbuster ruling Thursday from the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, staying a federal judge’s decision against New York City’s “stop and frisk” police practice and tossing the judge off the case. The ruling throws a curve into the last week of New York mayor’s race and complicates the liberal campaign to block police practices that have greatly reduced crime.

The shocker came as the Second Circuit hears New York City’s appeal of Judge Scheindlin’s ruling, in which she declared that stop and frisk violated the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment. New York police have for years stopped, questioned and searched for weapons if they have reasonable cause to believe someone may be connected to a crime. Cheered on by a liberal media campaign, Judge Scheindlin declared it illegal. She also appointed a panel of liberal worthies to micromanage New York’s finest, an affront both to the police force and self-government.

The Second Circuit panel is a long way from judging the merits of the appeal. But the three judges noted in their ruling Thursday that “upon review of the record in these cases, we conclude that the District Judge ran afoul of the Code of Conduct for United States Judges, Canon 2 (‘A judge should avoid impropriety and the appearance of impropriety in all activities.’)”

Specifically, the court said Judge Scheindlin had “compromised” the appearance of partiality by improperly inviting a stop-and-frisk suit. In a December 21, 2007 hearing on an earlier case, Judge Scheindlin stated: “[I]f you got proof of inappropriate racial profiling in a good constitutional case, why don’t you bring a lawsuit? You can certainly mark it as related.”

The Obama Administration has been claiming that insurance companies will be competing for your dollars under the Affordable Care Act, but apparently they haven’t surveyed the nation’s top hospitals.

Americans who sign up for Obamacare will be getting a big surprise if they expect to access premium health care that may have been previously covered under their personal policies. Most of the top hospitals will accept insurance from just one or two companies operating under Obamacare.

[CHART: Which Top Hospitals Take Your Insurance Under Obamacare?]

“This doesn’t surprise me,” said Gail Wilensky, Medicare advisor for the second Bush Administration and senior fellow for Project HOPE. “There has been an incredible amount of focus on the premium cost and subsidy, and precious little focus on what you get for your money.”

Regulations driven by the Obama White House have indeed made insurance more affordable – if, like Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, you’re looking only at price. But responding to Obamacare caps on premiums, many insurers will, in turn, simply offer top-tier doctors and hospitals far less cash for services rendered.

Watchdog.org looked at the top 18 hospitals nationwide as ranked by U.S. News and World Report for 2013-2014. We contacted each hospital to determine their contracts and talked to several insurance companies, as well.

Obama lies in both domestic and foreign policy.
US President Barack Obama views lies as legitimate political tools. He uses lies strategically to accomplish through mendacity what he could never achieve through honest means.

Obama lies in both domestic and foreign policy.

On the domestic front, despite Obama’s repeated promises that Obamacare would not threaten anyone’s existing health insurance policies, over the past two weeks, millions Americans have received notices from their health insurance companies that their policies have been canceled because they don’t abide by Obamacare’s requirements.

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board explained that Obama’s repetition of this lie was not an oversight. It was a deliberate means of lulling into complacency these Americans who opted to buy their insurance themselves on the open market, in order to stick them with the burden of underwriting Obamacare.

In the editorialist’s words, “The [healthcare] exchanges need these customers [whose private policies are being canceled] to finance Obamacare’s balance sheet and stabilize its risk pools. On the exchanges, individuals earning more than $46,000 or a family of four above $94,000 don’t qualify for subsidies and must buy overpriced insurance. If these middle-class Obamacare losers can be forced into the exchanges, they become financiers of the new pay-as-yougo entitlement.”

Sure there is an outcry now about Obama’s dishonesty and the way he has used lying to take away from an unwilling public a right it would never have knowingly surrendered, but it is too late. There is no chance of revoking the law until at 2017, when Obama leaves office.

And by then, everyone will have been forced to accept what they consider unacceptable or be fined and lose all health coverage.

Obama’s mendacity is not limited to domestic policy. It operates in foreign affairs as well. Several commentators this week recalled Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez’s angry response to the Obama administration’s attempt to block Senate passage of sanctions against Iran in December 2011. Expressing disgust at the administration’s bad faith to the Senate, Menendez noted that before the White House tried to defeat the legislation, it first forced senators to water it down, making them believe that the White House would support a weaker bill. In the end, despite the White House’s opposition, the Senate and House passed the watered-down sanctions bills with veto-proof majorities. Obama reluctantly signed the bill into law and then bragged about having passed “crippling sanctions” on Iran.

The latest NSA flapdoodle is not to be taken seriously outside the EU. http://spectator.org/archives/2013/10/31/spy-vs-spy-vs-the-three-stooges The latest flapdoodle over intelligence gathering has bestirred a more than usually energetic reaction. Calls to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and to shackle the NSA are erupting all over the political landscape like acne on a teenager’s face. But […]

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=6157 When the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington released a report last week saying that Iran has the ability to produce enough weapons-grade uranium for a nuclear bomb within weeks, one could almost hear U.S. President Barack Obama’s heart sink. His despair was not due to the findings of the report. Rather, […]

ROGERS AND HART 1940- FROM PAL JOEY-

READ THE NEWS, HEARD THE NEWS, WATCHED THE NEWS AND ALL I CAN SAY IS

BEWITCHED, BOTHERED AND BEWILDERED AM I….

HAPPY HALLOWEEN

There’s a certain amount of lingo that comes with the provision of health care. In most developed countries, these words are “doctor,” “nurse,” “scalpel,” “appendix,” that sort of thing. But American health care has its own unique vocabulary: “co-pay,” “HMO,” “COBRA,” “doughnut hole” . . . And we’re always adding to it. The latest word is “exchanges.” A mere twelve months ago “exchanges” were something to do with stocks or trying to get a larger size when you’re given a too-tight thong for Christmas. Now, suddenly, it’s the new health-care buzzword. You go to the federal website for the “exchanges,” if you can get through, and they redirect you to the state websites for the “exchanges,” if they’re working. In Oregon, there are some 1,700 different rules that determine eligibility for the new “exchange.” In Maryland, you’re advised that “we may share information provided in your application with the appropriate authorities for law enforcement and audit activities.” But we’re used to all that by now, aren’t we? The point is it’s going to be complicated, time-consuming, and in breach of almost any elementary understanding of privacy. That’s what makes it quintessentially American.

Most developed nations have a public health-care system and a private health-care system — of variable quality, to be sure, but all of them far simpler to navigate than America’s endlessly mutating fusion of the worst of both worlds. Obamacare stitches together the rear ends of two pantomime horses and attempts to ride it to the sunlit uplands. Good luck with that. But we should remember that this disaster has been a long time incubating. The Democrats’ objection to the pre-Obama “private” health system is that Americans wound up spending more than any other country for what they argued were inferior health outcomes. But the more telling number is revealed by Avik Roy elsewhere in this issue: In 2010 (in other words, before Obamacare), U.S. government expenditures on health care were higher than those in all but three other countries in the world. Quick, name a European social democracy full of state-suckled wimpy welfare queens: France? $3,061 per capita in public-health expenditures. Sweden? $3,046 per capita. Belgium? $3,000. In 2010 the United States spent $3,967 in public-health expenditures per person — more than anywhere on the planet except Norway, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. I am confident that, under Obamacare, we’ll be outspending even the Norwegians. But in reality our so-called private system was a public system in all but name.

By 1968, President Lyndon Baines Johnson was finally done in by his “credibility gap” — the growing abyss between what he said about, and what was actually happening inside, Vietnam.

“Modified limited hangout” and “inoperative” were infamous euphemisms that Nixon-administration officials used to mask lies about the Watergate scandal. After a while, few believed any of the initial Reagan-administration disavowals that it was not trading “arms for hostages” in the Iran–Contra scandal.

George H. W. Bush thundered during his campaign that voters should “read my lips: no new taxes,” only to agree later to raise them. Bill Clinton’s infamous assertion that he “did not have sexual relations with that woman” was followed by proof that he did just that with Monica Lewinsky.

The George W. Bush administration warned the nation about stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and never quite recovered its credibility after the WMD were not found. No one believed Bush when he told incompetent FEMA deputy director Michael Brown that in the midst of the Katrina mess he was doing a “heck of a job.”

Yet the distortions and lack of credibility of the Obama administration have matched and now trumped those of its predecessors. The public may have long ago forgotten that Obama did not close down Guantanamo as promised, or cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term, or stop the revolving door of lobbyists coming in and out of the executive branch.

The public may even have forgiven the president when the stimulus bill never lowered unemployment as promised, or when his misleading boasts about vast increases in oil and gas production came to fruition despite, not because, of his efforts.

One Quick Fix to Ease the Coming Doctor Shortage Atul Nakhasi
The White House proposes to cut on-the-job training for new M.D.s just when we need more physicians.

Ryan Scully wanted to be a doctor from the moment he began volunteering as a paramedic and firefighter during his freshman year of college. In medical school at George Washington University, he passed all of his preclinical and clinical requirements, as well as two national licensing exams required of all medical students. Just before graduation in 2012, though, he learned that he had not been accepted into a residency training program necessary for gaining his certification as a practicing physician. He would receive his M.D. degree in May with the rest of his class—but without a hospital training spot, he could not practice medicine.

Last year 1,761 M.D.s shared the same fate. And now the White House wants to set aside even less money for doctor training while reorganizing the nation’s insurance market. At a time when the new health-care law is expected to create a demand for more physicians, a proposed $11 billion budget cut over the next 10 years guarantees there will be fewer doctors. This could have a serious effect on the health of the nation.

On-the-job training of doctors is a long and complicated business, and since the introduction of Medicare in 1965 the federal government has assumed some of the cost of graduate medical education, particularly at the country’s teaching hospitals. The rationale for funding by Medicare, Medicaid, the Department of Veterans Affairs and others—nearly $12 billion a year—has been that the nation’s doctors and medical researchers will contribute to the public good, either by treating patients or contributing to advances in medicine.