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Are Lobbyists Driving Obamacare?

Mark Noonan

This should make you liberals think, if you’re at all capable of it:

A strong force, perhaps as powerful in Congress as President Barack Obama, is keeping the drive for health care going even as lawmakers seem hopelessly at odds.

Lobbyists.

The drug industry, the American Medical Association, hospital groups and the insurance lobby are all saying Congress must make major changes this year. Television ads paid for by drug companies and insurers continued to emphasize the benefits of a health care overhaul—not the groups’ objections to some of the proposals.

“My gut is telling me that something major can pass because all the people who could kill it are still at the table,” said Ken Thorpe, chairman of health policy at Emory University in Atlanta. “Everybody has issues with bits and pieces of it, but all these groups want to get something done this year.” As a senior official at the Health and Human Services department in the 1990s, Thorpe was deeply involved in the Clinton administration’s failed effort.

Now, does anyone out there think that all or part of the lobbying effort is altruistically designed to ensure that Joe and Jane Average obtain good health care at a reasonable cost? If you do think this, then I’ve a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.

There are just so many things wrong with the very concept of health insurance that it’d be days just listing them. But, among the many terrible things is the fact that the people who provide insurance – whether private or government – are not in it for the people who use the insurance. Private insurers are, of course, in it for a profit – and nothing particularly wrong with making a profit, but it should make everyone wary of what the insurance companies say is a good idea…it might be a good idea, but it must be cast against the fact that it might merely be a good idea for the insurance companies.

Our liberals answer to this, of course, is the magic wand of government – just put bureaucrats in charge of it, take away the profit motive and, hey presto!, everything’s peachy. I’ll pause while all non-liberals get themselves up off the floor due to their fits of laughter at that concept…

The problem with government insurance is that the government is in it for the government – meaning that the bureaucrats who run the system are primarily interested in having the least amount of work and the highest amount of pay possible. This is because government isn’t a for-profit enterprise…a bureaucrat doesn’t get a bonus for making a citizen happy. In fact, citizens are the bureaucrats’ natural enemy…we take up their time and cause nothing but trouble. Try and help a citizen out and you might make a mistake and then you’re in trouble, so what good did that do? The fewer citizens a bureaucrat has to deal with, the better (for those of you who don’t believe this, I present you as evidence your local DMV).

The problem is that we are stuck with insurance. Liberals created Medicare in the 1960’s to just take care of Granny so that no one had to bother their little heads about her. Trouble is, by providing coverage for every little thing, Granny started to exhaustively use the system, pushing up prices which impelled the rapid spread of private insurance, which drove up costs even further, which priced un-insured people out of the market…etc, etc, etc. But probably 99% of Americans (or, heck, I might actually be the only person who has figured this out, as no one I’ve ever talked to has noted this before I did) don’t understand that the problem with health insurance is the fact that it exists. If we had catastrophic and chronic medical insurance, that would be another story – like having car insurance to fix the $5,000.00 while everyone ponies up for their own oil changes, etc. But to tinker with the concept of insurance is a losing proposition right now – people are so used to insurance that there isn’t the ability to break in and offer the alternative. We have to some how or another fix what we’ve got in a manner which doesn’t bankrupt the country.

I’m working on such a plan, but I haven’t got it ready, yet; and I don’t want to present the half-formed to criticism. But one thing I know for certain, asking lobbyists for health care (of whatever stripe) is not the thing to do. We’re on the verge of disaster if we go the route we’re going – double disaster if the lobbyists are as involved as this linked article indicates. And as for you liberals – weren’t you once upon a time horrified at the very concept of lobbyists? Where is your outrage, now?

Weekly Recap (2009-07-25)

Matt Margolis

Pro-Life Amendment Passes House Committee

Mark Noonan

This is both stunning and quite wonderful:

An amendment introduced to strip Planned Parenthood of its taxpayer funding has passed the Rules Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, and is up for a vote on the House floor Friday, reports Jim Sedlak of the American Life League.

U.S. House Representative Mike Pence (R-Ind.) submitted, as part of the Health and Human Services appropriations bill, an amendment to render Planned Parenthood ineligible to receive Title X funds for “family planning” services.

The Pence Amendment states: “None of the funds made available under this Act shall be available to Planned Parenthood for any purpose under Title X of the Public Health Services Act.”

The backers of the amendment are counting on the people to carry it through – so:

Contact your House member and

your Senators.

My bet is that Pelosi will try to spike this on the floor – she doesn’t want to have common-sense issues like this coming to a vote because it would force moderate Democrats to vote rationally, thus exposing the weakness of the liberal’s House position…that it is dependent upon the votes of people who are in fundamental disagreement with the Democrat leadership. We’d be back to the early 80’s situation where the Democrats’ House majority was nominal while a coalition of GOPers and conservative/moderate Democrats really ran the show.

That aside – and I do urge everyone to make their voice heard – the mere fact that we can get such an amendment out of committee shows how badly weakened the liberal House leadership is. We can stop Obamunism – we can stop Pelosi and Reid from running rough shod over our nation. All we need do is fight and fight and then fight some more.

Phrase of the Day

Mark Noonan

The beginning of wisdom:

If through the machinations of Beelzebub or his fellow-devil Mammon, your house is in suburbia, plant your garden not with things lovely to see like roses, or sweet to smell like lavender; but good to eat like potatoes or French beans. At the end of two years you will have done three things: (1) You will have a higher appreciation of yokel-intelligence; (2), you will have a wider knowledge of Natural History (especially of slugs and the like); and (3), You will have a sardonic scorn for the economics of our present Sewage System. In other words you will have had the beginnings of a liberal education. – Fr.Vincent McNabb

Disturbing Trend in Foreclosures

Mark Noonan

Banks are not actually taking possession of the property:

City officials and housing advocates here and in cities as varied as Buffalo, Kansas City, Mo., and Jacksonville, Fla., say they are seeing an unsettling development: Banks are quietly declining to take possession of properties at the end of the foreclosure process, most often because the cost of the ordeal — from legal fees to maintenance — exceeds the diminishing value of the real estate.

The so-called bank walkaways rarely mean relief for the property owners, caught unaware months after the fact, and often mean additional financial burdens and bureaucratic headaches. Technically, they still owe on the mortgage, but as a practicality, rarely would a mortgage holder receive any more payments on the loan. The way mortgages are bundled and resold, it can be enormously time-consuming just trying to determine what company holds the loan on a property thought to be in foreclosure.

In Ms. James’s case, the company that was most recently servicing her loan is now defunct. Its parent company filed for bankruptcy and dissolved. And the original bank that sold her the loan said it could not find a record of it.

“It is what some of us think is the next wave of the crisis,” said Kermit Lind, a clinical professor at the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law and an expert on foreclosure law.

First reaction: pass laws which state that if a financial institution refuses to take possession of a foreclosed property, it immediately becomes the free and clear property of the foreclosed debtor. And I mean, make it mere hours before such a forfeiture occurs. We can’t play these games – I, for one, note about 8 properties in my neighborhood which appear foreclosed (run down, over grown yards, and the like) but no attempt being made to sell…now I wonder if we’ve got abandoned properties? I found it odd that in May a realtor advised 34,000 homes on the Vegas market, and then a different realtor say 17,000 homes on the market in June…we didn’t sell 17,000 houses in June in Las Vegas. Are the banks just bagging it? This article makes me think they might.

Longer reaction: As I’ve said for some time now, we need what amounts to a bankruptcy reorganization of our national housing market. It will take some primo number crunchers to work it out, but mortgage amounts – by zip code – will have to be reduced to match current market values, and then the loans re-worked based upon the current value of the house. Its a lose/lose situation for everyone (for instance, I’d lose the approximately $130,000 I’ve paid for this house to date, the bank would lose a great deal of future interest as my mortgage amount would have to drop by 50% or so to bring it in line with current market values). Its lousy, but I can’t think of any way to really get us out of this mess – we have so many millions of houses “upside down” in relation of loan balance to house value that the temptation will become massive for people in that situation to just walk away…in which case, the banks would get even less than they’d get with a “cram down” on existing loans.

Inescapable truth: any effort to prop up this situation in the hopes that housing values will recover is the most asinine of wishful thinking. It is not foreseeable that housing prices will reach back to their 2005 level over the next ten years, and may be 20. We have to think anew and act anew.

64, 25, 3

Mark Noonan

The number of bank failures, respectively, in 2009, 2008 and 2007:

Regulators on Friday shut six banks in Georgia and a small bank in New York state, raising to 64 the number of federally insured banks to fail this year…

…With the latest closings, 16 Georgia banks have failed this year, more than in any other state. Most of the failures have involved banks in the Atlanta area, where the collapse of the real estate market brought economic dislocation.

The 64 bank failures nationwide this year compare with 25 last year and three in 2007.

For those keeping score at home, 2009 still has more than 5 months left to run. For most of the last 20 years, bank failures have been in trivial numbers. The record is more than 500, but that was when we essentially shut down the S&L system in 1988 and 1989. We are, on the other hand, rapidly approaching 1932 levels of bank failures.

Obama Goes in to Full Fledged Damage Control

Mark Noonan

Not too often that a President has to make this sort of effort:

Trying to tamp down an uproar over race, President Barack Obama said Friday he used an unfortunate choice of words in commenting on the arrest of black scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. and could have “calibrated those words differently.”

The president said he had telephoned the white policeman who arrested Gates, and he said the conversation confirmed his belief that the officer was a good man and an outstanding officer.

Then again, its not too often that a President makes such a bone-headed remark. The answer to the question, Mr. President, was “while I’m concerned about any incident which may be the result of racial profiling, I believe we should all suspend judgment on the Gates case until all the facts are known”. If your cracker-jack White House staff finds itself incapable of providing you with such answers, I suggest firing them all. In the interests of patriotism, I will volunteer, as need arises, to help you figure out answers to the really, really simple questions.

The Un-Exploded Economic Bomb

Mark Noonan

Municipal bankruptcy – via Mish’s Global:

Detroit’s financial picture is grim, but Mayor Dave Bing says a complete overhaul of city government by 2010 could help the city avoid the appointment of an emergency financial manager or the filing of municipal bankruptcy.

Bing said Thursday there are no more creative moves to make — those budgetary tricks were all tapped by previous administrations — and the city is up against a wall financially. The only answer, he said, is to change how the city functions.

The time frame is pressing — Bing said the city could run out of money by the start of the second quarter, Oct. 1 — if a $20-million to $25-million hole is not plugged.

“There’s a reality that we all have to live with, and the reality of the City of Detroit is that we are broke and we are in a financial crisis,” Bing told the Free Press on Thursday.

What is clear to Mayor Bing, among other things, is that the government workforce is going to have to shrink – either in numbers, pay or a combination of these two things. The unions, of course, are mindlessly opposed to this – I guess figuring that Obama will come to the rescue, when push comes to shove. This should not be counted on – a very large number of America’s municipalities are on the brink of financial disaster. Shrinking tax bases and rapidly rising costs of government employees (especially in the areas of health care and pensions) are putting cities, as Mayor Bing says, up against a wall. Obama will not be able to get a generalized State and local government bail out through Congress – there might be a one-time shot for some places, but most are going to have to sink or swim on their own…and a lot of them will sink.

The real problem here – for the economy and Obama – is that a very large proportion of the new jobs we have are in government or government-subsidized entities. Obama, naturally, will not cut off the spigot for federal jobs, but what the Obama gives with one hand, economic reality will take away with the other. Very rapidly now, government employees around the nation – high paid and living pretty good lives – are going to suffer pay cuts and/or job losses. With that will go the very last prop to home sales, car sales and investment. Expect another rise in foreclosures, another financial collapse as financial institutions have not put aside sufficient reserves for this sort of thing and, as it were, the “second dip” of our “double dip” recession (we’re still in the “first dip” – we might have allegedly positive growth in the fourth and first quarters which will officially end the recession; and just watch as the Obamaniacs proclaim their man a sheer genius over this…but such celebrations will be very short lived).

Our liberals will say that I’m just talking down the economy and hoping for disaster. I’ve reviewed this and come to the conclusion that I’d rather not have this happen – I work for a bank and am not prepared, at this moment, for a career shift. I’d like to keep this job at least in to 2010…but as time goes on, I think there might be a rather nasty lump of corporate coal in my stocking this upcoming holiday season. So, I’d rather we avoided this – but liberal polices up and down the line are tailor made for it. In fact, if you wanted to deliberately sabotage an economy, just following the Obama model would do the trick. Its going to happen, sure as night follows day.

Phrase of the Day

Mark Noonan

The answer to the “if you don’t want Obamacare, you want people to die” sort of liberal argument:

Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. – Frederic Bastiat

MoveOn Hijacked

Mark Noonan

Wonderful:

Local MoveOn.org members had penciled in on today’s schedule a protest in front of Senator John Cornyn’s Spring Valley Road office, during which they had hoped to pressure the senator to support President Barack Obama’s public health care legislation. But when Paula Anderson, a MoveOn.org member and spokeswoman, showed up at 11:30 a.m., she found another contingent had beat her to the proverbial punch: A large number of Dallas Tea Party members were already set up, voicing their opposition to the proposal.

Anderson was stunned: “We really did not expect them to show up.” She estimated the crowd at about 130. “From our perspective we took names of everyone there, and we had about 30 people,” she told Unfair Park. “And I would assume they maybe had 100.” As it turned out, according to Jessica Sandlin, Cornyn’s Texas press secretary, Tea Party-hearties also showed up to health-care legislation rallies in Austin and in San Antonio…

The TEA Party movement will be in the driver’s seat at least through 2010, and perhaps all the way in to 2012. Ignore it at your peril – and that goes for both left and right politicians who wish to ignore it.