Arrogant, Audacious and Authoritarian Government

Politicians try to intimidate real world companies that can’t support the ObamaCare fantasy.

The campaign for Congressional enactment of ObamaCare was a classic exercise in deception and manipulation of public perception.

President Obama learned from polling and focus group data that most of us were concerned about his enormous deficits. So, his public communication, always targeting people who lack the time or inclination to go around the establishment media and dig out the truth, sought to implant in the public mind the notion that deficits were the only potential downside of a government take-over of health care.

Democrat leaders in Congress did their part.  They contrived fiendishly opaque funding mechanisms with one goal in mind: to trap the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) into projecting deficit reduction during the first ten years of a program that will add at least $1 Trillion in new spending.  The budgetary gimmicks include:

• Projected savings in Medicare from a 21% cut in fees paid to physicians that everyone in Congress agrees is not going to happen.
• Projected tens of billions in reduced expenditures by eliminating fraud in Medicare and Medicaid.  If  these programs are indeed paying out such huge sums in fraudulent claims Congress has a duty to clean them up first, before committing taxpayers to funding yet another huge program, inviting more of the same kind of fraud.  But if they did that they couldn’t count the projected savings against the massive cost ObamaCare.
• Projecting a profit to the the Treasury from a government take-over of the student loan business.  Obviously, this has nothing to do with health care, and the notion that the Department of Education can profitably operate a lending business is dubious.  But because it was written into the health care legislation the CBO had to “score” it as health care revenue, offsetting health care expenses.
• Scheduling several tax increases to begin immediately, but starting the programs that will drain the treasury in years four, five and six.  Thus CBO had to base its projections on ten years of revenue offsetting only six years of expenses.
  

Within a week of enactment of ObamaCare several major corporations reported, in filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, that because they will have to pay one of the immediate tax increases their earnings will be less than expected.  Securities law requires them to report changes to their earnings outlook.  Failure to report is a federal crime.

Well, President Obama and the Democrats were not pleased by this public hurling of cold water on ObamaCare just when they had planned to indulge in the afterglow of legislative victory.

Representative Henry Waxman, Chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, took the news as a threat to his supremacy and immediately went on the offensive.  He sent letters to several CEOs “requesting” them to testify before one of his kangaroo court style Congressional hearings.  The letter Waxman sent to the CEO of AT&T who reported that his company would suffer $1 Billion in increased taxes this year appears below.  Here’s an excerpt:

The new law is designed to expand coverage and bring down costs, so your assertions [that the tax increase will cost AT&T more] are a matter of concern.  They also appear to conflict with independent analyses.

But the “independent analyses” were done by the CBO, the garbage-in-garbage-out process described above.  AT&T doesn’t need an “independent analysis” to tabulate the amount of the tax increase it will have to pay.  Unlike Congress, private companies, in the real world have to balance their books and pay their bills with real money.  They can’t pretend to change the immutable laws of mathematics with an “analysis” based on fiction.

More from the Waxman letter:

The Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations will hold a hearing on April 21 at 10:00 AM…to examine the impact of the new law on AT&T and other large employers. We request your personal testimony at this hearing.

This chilling invitation is an obvious attempt to intimidate companies Waxman sees as unwilling to play along with the ObamaCare fantasy.  The letter goes on to “request” that AT&T provide, by April 9:

• any analyses related to the projected impact of health care reform on AT&T;
• any documents, including email messages sent to or prepared or received by senior company officials related to the projected impact of health care reform on AT&T;

The question that immediately occurs to us is who will demand such information from Congress?  Who will demand to see all the emails between Congressmen, Senators and their staffers as they contrived deceptions like ten years of tax revenue to offset six years of expenses?  Where is the “oversight and investigation” body that will take the ObamaCare legislation apart, piece by piece, and compare reality with extravagant political promises?

Unfortunately, no such body exists.  A thorough examination of the 3,500 pages of dense legalese, including hundreds of changes to other laws that would have to be studied, would require scores of lawyers and accountants, would cost millions of dollars, and would produce thousands of pages of analysis that very few citizens could possibly read and comprehend.  ObamaCare is the ultimate example of bureaucratic tyranny, and a painful lesson in the folly of deliberately violating Constitutional limits on government power .

Nobody knows what all the consequences of ObamaCare, intended and unintended, will be.  But we do know that the political media establishment is prepared to use all of its considerable power to persuade voters that any undesirable consequences are blamed on businesses, rather than imperious politicians.