The Great ObamaCare Melodrama: Act 1

This week, President Obama and the Democrats are producing a five-day Health Care Melodrama.  Liberty Works will provide updates as each act and scene unfolds.

ObamaCare

Last year the House and Senate each passed a version of ObamaCare.  This morning the Obama version of ObamaCare was posted on the White House website as promised.

BUT, it isn’t written in the form of legislation that Congress can act upon.

Instead, it’s a campaign style marketing piece, a summary of promised benefits and results, with none of the legal fine print or financial details that would enable a genuine analysis.  In sales they call this selling the sizzle rather than selling the steak.  Withholding the details is the strategy for this week’s melodrama because Obama does not want to get bogged down in a substantive debate.  This week is about emotion and TV visuals.

The Marketing Piece called “The President’s Proposal” includes some of the same promises we’ve heard from Obama for a year:

1. Gives tens of millions of Americans the same insurance choices members of Congress will have;
2. Offers “insurance” to people who are already sick (pre-existing conditions). This scheme lets the President and the Democrats play the role of heroes for providing medical services to uninsured sick people and transfers the responsibility for extracting the money to pay for their generosity from the tax collector to the insurance companies who will have to raise premiums on everyone else to cover the cost.
3. Keeps premiums down
   
4. Reduces the federal deficit

Obviously it’s impossible for all four of these results to come from the same legislation.  Insurance companies can not accept every who is already sick without raising premiums.  Members of Congress are on the federal employee insurance program which is more generous and thus costs more than most private sector plans.  So private sector employers will have to pay more to give employees the same choices.

But the fact that 1 – 4 are above are impossible to achieve won’t stop Obama from asserting that Republican ideas are unworthy of consideration because they won’t accomplish 1 – 4 above.

More from the Obama version Marketing Piece:

• Obama promises subsidies to individuals for the purchase of health insurance.  The subsidies would be administered through the IRS tax system enabling the President to deceptively label them as “tax cuts” or “tax credits.”  Its not clear how these subsides would be funded.
• In future years the Medicare program will cost Trillions more than the current medicare payroll tax generates in revenue.  So the President proposes to, for the first time, apply the medicare tax to non-payroll income including rents, royalties, dividends, and interest.  But the additional revenue won’t be applied to the increasing cost of Medicare.  It will be used to fund other, new benefits included in the President’s plan.
• New taxes on drugs and medical devices.  In a marketing piece with no details and no real numbers the President can promise anything.  In this case he promises to make health care more affordable for all of us by imposing new taxes on the companies that provide drugs and medical devices!
• Closing tax loopholes.  The President claims some taxpayers are exploiting unintended loopholes in the tax code.  He promises to raise more tax revenue by closing the loopholes, which are unrelated to health care, but only if Congress passes this vast new health care power grab.

So, the curtain closes on Act 1 of the Great Health Care Melodrama.  We’ll bring you the next act as it happens.