President Barack Obama will host the first of three health care townhalls at 1 PM in Portsmouth, N.H. today, with follow up sessions in Bozeman, Montana on Friday and Grand Junction, Colorado on Saturday. Close followers of the health care debate might not recognize the pitch President Obama will make this afternoon. Gone are any promises that Obamacare will be “deficit neutral”, or reduce medical costs by cutting waste, or of “bending the cost curve” through a Trojan Horse public option. Instead, Obama has shrunk his sales pitch to three …
Despite President Barack Obama’s deadline, both the House and Senate failed to pass Obama’s health care plan before they adjourned for the month of August. Now Senators and Representatives are returning home to participate in one of America’s greatest democratic traditions: the townhall. The events afford citizens the rare opportunity to share their opinions directly with their elected officials….that is, when their elected officials aren’t berating them for asking health care questions during the question and answer period of the townhall. Watch Rep. Scott attack his constituent, Dr. Brian Hill:
For some, the ongoing recession means tightening the belt on gratuitous spending. Congress clearly doesn’t share this sentiment. Curiously, they seem to believe now is the perfect time to upgrade their private jet fleet. At a measly $550 million taxpayer dollars, why not? After scolding “The Big Three” auto executives for flying private jets on their way to beg Washington for $25 billion in taxpayer bailouts last November, Congress is now requesting funds for eight new Boeing 737’s and Gulfsteam V planes of their own. The Pentagon, which handles Congressional …
The Heritage Foundation recently released its economic analysis of the Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill, and unsurprisingly, found devastating results. The goal of cap and trade is to force energy prices to rise so high that people use less of it. And boy do they. Even under the most generous assumptions the Heritage analysis found: Gas prices will rise 58 percent. Gas prices are expected to increase in the future even without cap and trade. Waxman-Markey would add an additional $1.38 to that increase. Electricity prices will rise 90 percent. …
The Tax Foundation reported last week: “Canada, the Czech Republic, Korea, and Sweden all cut their corporate tax rates in 2009, distancing the United States even further from the pack with its combined federal and state rate of 39.1 percent—second only to Japan for the highest corporate tax rate among nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). A Tax Foundation analysis of new OECD data finds that 2009 marks the 12th consecutive year in which the U.S. corporate tax rate is higher than the average rate among …
In their USA Today op-ed attacking all criticism of Obamacare as “Un-American” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Majority Leader (D-MD) write: People must be allowed to learn the facts. … Reform will also mean higher-quality care by promoting preventive care so health problems can be addressed before they become crises. This, too, will save money. So is Pelosi’s and Hoyer’s claim that preventative medicine will save money a fact? The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) doesn’t think so. CBO director Doug Elmendorf told Congress Friday: Although different types of preventive …
According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the federal deficit grew by another $181 billion in July, bringing the tab to a record $1.3 trillion total. One might think that for all of its other evils, the Waxman-Markey energy tax legislation would at least manage to help cut the deficit. Not so according to the latest Center for Data Analysis study of Waxman-Markey’s impacts: Because the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade tax reduces income, it reduces the revenues collected from other taxes, such as personal and corporate income taxes. And because the revenue …
The House Energy and Commerce Committee was the last to mark up their health care bill, but the decisions in Energy and Commerce mirrored those of the Education and Labor and Ways and Means sessions. In every case,members of Congress have already gone on record in deciding the most contentious issues in the debate.Taxpayers should take note of several key decisions that the Energy and Commerce Committee members made: Gutting Consumer Choice: (Stearns #9, Rogers and Gingrey #10) The President and his congressional allies routinely insist that if Americans like …
After pushing Americans to turn in any “fishy” information, ABC-reporter-turned-White-House-communications-director Linda Douglass recently led an hour-long, government-sponsored Webcast on health care reform, “to take on some of the myths you’ve heard.” Douglass along with Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and other health administration officials spent most of the state-run Webcast touting the health care savings of health information technologies as well as prevention and wellness services — savings the Congressional Budget Office has refused to take into account in its scoring of current health care legislation. “These can …
In last month’s Washington Post, Common Good chairman Philip Howard wrote: Health-care reform is bogged down because none of the bills before Congress deals with the staggering waste of the current system, estimated to be $700 billion to $1 trillion annually. The waste flows from a culture of health care in which every incentive is to do more — that’s how doctors make money and that’s how they protect themselves from lawsuits. Yet the congressional leadership has slammed the door on solutions to the one driver of waste that is …
