Death Panels for Democrats … The DNC’s new tactic to hold the House

The story that has the political establishment all abuzz today is the plan for Democrats to concentrate party resources on those with the best chances of winning so Nancy Pelosi can still wield the gavel. The sacrificial lambs and potential survivors will be chosen by party leaders in the next week or so. Not a great consolation for those from highly contested districts who were told they were better off voting for Obamacare than not.

From today’s NY Times:

[Democratic] party leaders are preparing a brutal triage of their own members in hopes of saving enough seats to keep a slim grip on the majority. In the next two weeks, Democratic leaders will review new polls and other data that show whether vulnerable incumbents have a path to victory. If not, the party is poised to redirect money to concentrate on trying to protect up to two dozen lawmakers who appear to be in the strongest position to fend off their challengers.

This is a disaster of their own making. Instead of governing from the center and including Republicans in the writing of highly controversial legislation, they sought to use their supermajority in the Senate and 40 odd majority in the House to cram through bill after bill drafted in secret and not made known until the last moment. The tone deafness of Democrats reached a peak this summer when many refused to even appear at townhalls after experiencing voter outrage during earlier recesses. While many freshmen House Democrats expressed their uneasiness, they were reassured by Speaker Pelosi the mood of the country would change once voters knew the content of the bills. This despite polling data for Democrats in general and Obama in particular showed impending disaster.

Those who went along with Pelosi’s charade are now being given the ultimate insult. They are being rewarded with the proverbial pain killer, or more likely Kool-Aid for their loyalty, especially on Obamacare. It is fitting medicine for a bill that will do the same thing to patients who in the view of bureaucrats are not worth saving.

When the dust settles after the November elections, the finger pointing will begin. Ultimately the responsibility for the impending disaster must point to the White House, where a truly clueless President has risked the political health of his party for a highly unpopular medical bill. At least Bill Clinton knew the health of the party was important.

This President does not.

Fortune Magazine critiques Health Care Reform … and it is devastating.

The MSM has been totally in the tank for anything Obama. They have treated the health care debate as a giant scorecard about who is gaining and who is losing, and demonizing those who disagree with The One. Fortune Magazine breaks that mold. It carefully and thoroughly dissects the two bills being rushed through the House and Senate. It analyzes five critical freedoms Americans would lose under the current health bills. 1. Freedom to choose what's in your plan 2. Freedom to be rewarded for healthy living, or pay your real costs 3. Freedom to choose high-deductible coverage 4. Freedom to keep your existing plan 5. Freedom to choose your doctors The article concludes with this: The best solution is to move to a let-freedom-ring regime of high deductibles, no community rating, no standard benefits, and cross-state shopping for bargains (another market-based reform that's strictly taboo in the bills). I'll propose my own solution in another piece soon on Fortune.com. For now, we suffer with a flawed health-care system, but we still have our Five Freedoms. Call them the Five Endangered Freedoms Read it all here. It is a devastating article. Pass it on to your friends. Also, make sure to make your Congressional Representative and Senators aware of your feelings.

Coming, health rationing for seniors … alternatives can be found.

Rest assured heath care rationing for seniors is coming. It is happening in the UK and Canada where certain procedures are simply denied at a certain age or interminable waits face those who need care. Rationing to control costs is just the nature of government run health care. The poster child for excessive costs is hip replacements for the elderly. And they will be on the chopping block. Obama himself suggested pain pills might have been a better alternative for his grandmother than a hip replacement she had been considering. But for those who have suffered hip problems, it is a quality of life procedure no amount of pain killers can substitute for. So what are the alternatives? India now offers a hip replacement for under $5,000 (using an FDA approved prosthesis) compared to $25,000 to $30,000 in the US. That's not much different than out of pocket expenses now. In the global economy, procedures denied those in the US can and will eventually be available closer to our borders than India, perhaps in Mexico, Costa Rica and yes, even Canada. That would be ironic! It is comforting to know there are alternatives. It is discouraging that under the ideological premise, government knows better than its citizens, we end up driving medical jobs overseas. Government simply doesn’t feel the pain. We do.