The funding families formed a new organization, Democracy Alliance, to channel cash to liberal organizations. Soros, Lewis, and the Sandlers alone provide about 40 percent of the alliance’s funding.
Democracy Alliance gives tens of millions of dollars in grants to far-left organizations. But it’s impossible to know exactly who has received how much, since the alliance prohibits grant recipients from revealing its funding. This makes the alliance a major source of undisclosed and unaccountable political influence.
Despite this veil of secrecy, we know some organizations that have received Democracy Alliance funds, though not the precise amounts of the grants. According to the Capital Research Center, these include the aforementioned ACORN, as well as Media Matters for America, the Center for American Progress, the Sierra Club, Air America, and People for the American Way.
All these organizations are active supporters of the Obama-Pelosi-Reid agenda. All are now part of the secular-socialist machine.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Secular- Socialist Machine’s Health Bill Disaster
With David Merritt, Vice President of National Policy for the Center for Health Transformation
Nothing captures the corruption of today’s secular-socialist machine better than the Democrats’ takeover of the healthcare system. It’s hard to imagine a more destructive course of action than the one they pursued: using fast-paced votes and procedural tricks to pass trillion-dollar bills no one had read; scheming to pass bills without actually voting on them; dismissing deep public opposition; relying on secret negotiations among a handful of staff and politicians; bullying opposition with bare-knuckled threats; and resorting to backroom deals to buy support.
This process was a tragedy, because improving healthcare for all Americans is one of our country’s most pressing priorities. The healthcare system has become an anchor on virtually every aspect of society, including personal health, the quality of care we receive, and the availability and cost of insurance.
• Health insurance premiums skyrocketed 87 percent between 2000 and 2007, while wages grew only 20 percent over that period.
• Weighted down by healthcare costs, employers are dropping employees’ coverage, with only 59 percent of individuals now receiving employer-based health benefits, down from 64 percent in 2000.
• More than 7,000 Americans are killed annually by preventable medication errors, and nearly 100,000 Americans are killed every year by preventable medical errors.
• Sixty-four percent of adults are either overweight or obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The number of obese children has tripled since 1980.
• Diabetes is a major factor in killing more than 220,000 Americans every year.
Democrats were right to try to fix the health system, whose deficiencies threaten America’s future. We need reform so that every American has more choices of greater quality healthcare at lower cost. Everyone—policymakers, doctors, hospitals, employers, individuals—must work together to accomplish this goal.
But Obama, Pelosi, and Reid didn’t choose this path of inclusion, cooperation, and expertise. They saw the large Democratic majorities in Congress and a Democratic White House as an opportunity to expand the power of the secular-socialist machine by growing government. This was their moment to build another Great Society—a permanent expansion of the welfare state that would reduce ever more Americans into government dependence and bind them to the Democratic political machine. That’s just what they tried to do when the president signed health reform into law on March 23, 2010.
SECULAR SOCIALISM IN THE HEALTH BILL
The destructive, corrupt, and thuggish path the Left followed on health reform perfectly captures the extremism of the secular-socialist machine.
The Left had to resort to this corrupt process because Americans won’t willingly approve a “reform” that massively increases government power, erodes individual freedom, and redefines citizens’ relationship to our government. Obama’s healthcare reform will do all those things: it is impossible to spend trillions of taxpayer dollars and reduce the role of government. Instead, you get new bureaucracies, more regulation, more complexity, and less control of your healthcare, just as the Left planned.
Just look at H.R. 3590. That’s the bill that Senate Democrats passed on Christmas Eve—and the one the president signed into law. In 2,409 pages, the word “shall” appears 4,231 times. That’s nearly two federal requirements, directives, or bureaucratic powers per page. The law has the word “tax” 208 times—and not once to cut taxes. The word “require” appears 198 times, usually referring to the people who are required to do something—not government. It adds 159 new federal agencies, offices, and programs to what is already the largest department in the federal government. Among the new offices is the Personal Care Attendants Workforce Advisory Panel and four duplicative offices on women’s health (see pages 1089-1109). Women’s health is obviously important, but is it necessary to have four new offices within the same federal department? Just to make things even more bureaucratic, there will be a new Coordinating Committee on Women’s Health to oversee the four offices. And that’s not all; here are some of the other “vital” new offices, councils, groups, and programs created by the healthcare bill:• Grant program to establish state Exchanges (Section 1311(a))
• State-based American Health Benefit Exchanges (Section 1311(b))
• Exchange grants to establish consumer navigator programs (Section 1311(i))
• Private Purchasing Council for state cooperatives (Section 1322(d))
• Program to determine eligibility for Exchange participation (Section 1411)
• Federal Coordinated Health Care Office for dual eligible beneficiaries (Section 2602)
• Interagency Working Group on Health Care Quality (Section 3012)
• Program for use of patient safety organizations to reduce hospital readmission rates (Section 3025)
• Consumer Advisory Council for Independent Payment Advisory Board (Section 3403(k))
• Grant program for technical assistance to providers implementing health quality practices (Section 3501)
• Program to develop independent standards for patient decision aids for preference sensitive care (Section 3506)
• National Prevention, Health Promotion, and Public Health Council (Section 4001)
• Demonstration grant program to promote research-based dental caries disease management (Section 4102)
• Interagency Pain Research Coordinating Committee (Section 4305)
• Planning grant program for state and local healthcare workforce development activities (Section 5102(c))
• Public Health Workforce Loan Repayment Program (Section 5204)
• Grant program to provide mid-career training for health professionals (Section 5206)
• Commission on Key National Indicators (Section 5605)
• Board of Governors for Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (Section 6301 (b))
• Standing methodology committee for Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (Section 6301(d))
• Elder Justice Coordinating Council (Section 6703)
• Multi-state health plans offered by Office of Personnel Management (Section 10104(p))
• Advisory board for multi-state health plans (Section 10104(p))
• Interagency Access to Health Care in Alaska Task Force (Section 10501)
And what will all these new federal agencies and programs do? They will regulate, they will issue rules, they will dictate. They will empower bureaucrats to decide what care you can receive, who can give it to you, and when you can get it.
Just look at the “essential health benefits” mandated by the law (Section 1302), which contains federal requirements for every private insurance policy sold in the United States to meet a certain minimum set of benefits or coverage. Individuals and businesses usually make these decisions, but under this bill, the federal government will decid
e. For example, if you are a single male with no children, the legislation still requires you to have maternity benefits and well-baby and well-child care coverage. You don’t want or don’t need that coverage? Sorry, you have to pay for it anyway.
The legislation signed by the president contains this and countless other expansions of government control. For example, the president pushed for, and Harry Reid included, the Independent Payment Advisory Board, a new bureaucratic body of government appointees explicitly charged with reducing healthcare spending not just in Medicare, but in the private market as well.
The larger question is this: does anyone believe federal bureaucrats can effectively manage the largest, most complex sector of our economy? Let’s face it, the federal government could not get “Cash for Clunkers” right, and that formula was simple: 1) buy a car, 2) file paperwork, 3) dealer gets paid.
Despite limitless examples of government failure, the Left expect tens of thousands of new bureaucrats to run healthcare efficiently. And the argument that this bureaucratic system won’t reduce the range of your private healthcare choices is so preposterous that it’s hard to believe many Democrats actually believe it.
RATIONING CARE
Instead of the miraculous cost savings the president claimed for his reform plan, healthcare rationing will be a much more likely outcome. Take comparative effectiveness research as an example. The new health reform law creates a new office of comparative effectiveness research that will study the value of one treatment or therapy to another to determine which is more effective. To be sure, this process can generate important knowledge that saves lives—we want to know which treatments are most effective, which medicines are more efficacious, and which approaches are best practices.
Secular socialism, however, has put comparative effectiveness research in the United States on the same path as in Britain: toward becoming a bureaucratic cost-control measure. The United Kingdom, which has a nationalized, single-payer health system, explicitly uses comparative effectiveness to ration medical care. Government uses this research to decide, sometimes with devastating consequences, which treatments its citizens can get.
Let’s say a government uses comparative effectiveness to determine the efficacy of new drug treatments. The research reveals drug A works 70 percent of the time and drug B works 50 percent of the time. The government would then decide to cover drug A. But what if, as often happens in medicine, 30 percent of the people who did not respond to drug A did respond to drug B? Or what about the even smaller groups that may have responded best to drug X, Y, or Z? Not wanting to cover less effective drugs, the government may simply decree those people are out of luck. These are the problems patients face when the government is empowered to decide what medicine they can have.
Consider this: what happens when one drug is more effective than another but costs three times as much? Do you want government to decide that relieving your pain and suffering isn’t worth the cost? That’s what happens in Britain. Government approves and government decides—not patients and doctors. Here is what Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) tells its citizens:You have the right to drugs and treatments that have been recommended by NICE [National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence] for use in the NHS, if your doctor says they are clinically appropriate for you. You have the right to expect local decisions on funding of other drugs and treatments to be made rationally following a proper consideration of the evidence. If the local NHS decides not to fund a drug or treatment you and your doctor feel would be right for you, they will explain that decision to you. [emphasis added]
During the healthcare debate, House and Senate Republicans offered amendments to prohibit the federal government from using comparative effectiveness research to deny or ration care. Democrats rejected them all and moved full steam ahead. But because of the citizen backlash against the federal government using comparative effectiveness research to ration care, the bill that the president signed deceptively renames the new federal body the “Patient Centered Outcomes Research Initiative.”
All this was unsurprising: in healthcare, the goal of the secular-socialist machine is to use the power of government to control Americans’ health decisions. This goal is both an ideological imperative that places the power of government over the rights of citizens and a raw power grab. It is a symptom of secular socialism’s creeping totalitarianism—a mindset completely opposed to historic American values.
TAXES
Economics 101 states that when government levies a tax on business, it is not the business that will ultimately pay it—consumers will. And the Left’s health reform has plenty of new taxes. The $28 billion tax on drug makers won’t dent the companies’ revenue; the firms will just raise the price of your medications. And health insurers will recoup the new $70 billion tax on them by raising your premiums—so said Congressional Budget Office (CBO) director Douglas Elmendorf when discussing the original proposed fee on insurers: “Our judgment is that that piece of the legislation would raise insurance premiums by roughly the amount of the money collected.”
Look at what the Left will do to medical technology companies. There are more than 80,000 medical devices in the United States, everything from artificial heart valves, pacemakers, and NICU incubators to thermometers and toothbrushes. The new law will impose a 2.9 percent tax on the sale of medical devices. That will raise prices for thousands of medical products because these costs will be passed on to consumers through higher prices, higher insurance premiums, or through lost wages when an employer has to pay. Thomas Barthold, chief of staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation, commented, “We have analyzed this as largely falling on the consumer.”
And the law has even more tax increases, over half a trillion dollars in higher Medicare payroll taxes; new taxes on investment income; taxes on random services like indoor tanning facilities; and fees on all insurance policies to fund federal comparative effectiveness research.
All these taxes will drive up costs. Yet, while campaigning for president, Barack Obama promised that his plan “will save a typical American family up to $2,500 every year on medical expenditures.”
With all the new taxes passed on to consumers, and with all the new federal programs, departments, offices, and subsidies, could he truly believe that costs will go down? Why should the American people believe that spending trillions of tax dollars will somehow reduce healthcare costs? As CBO chief Elmendorf noted in summer 2009, “In the legislation that has been reported we do not see the sort of fundamental changes that would be necessary to reduce the trajectory of federal health spending by a significant amount. And on the contrary, the legislation significantly expands the federal responsibility for healthcare costs.” Sadly, little changed in the final product that was signed into law.
Despite all this, the president boldly declared to Congress, “I will not sign [a healthcare reform bill] if it adds one dime to the deficit, now or in the future, period.” That promise was absurd, and the American people knew it. My friend, the pollster Frank Luntz, reported that by a 61 to 14 percent margin, more people believed scientists will discover life in outer space than believed the Democrats’ healthcare plan wouldn’t increase the deficit.
MEDICARE CUTS
Throughout the healthcare debate, most Americans asked a question to which they never got an honest answer: “How will reform impact me?” For seniors, it was easy to answer: you’re in trouble.
To put seniors and Medicare in context, remember that the nonpartisan Medicare Trustees projects Medicare will be broke in six years—two years earlier than previously estimated. That is just the beginning of the problems. Medicare is already burdened with an unfunded liability of up to $85 trillion in benefits that have been promised future generations with nothing saved to cover them.
Democrats did nothing to fix the structural problems behind this shortfall. Instead, the law simply guts the program for today’s seniors to create a new healthcare entitlement. The cuts to Medicare will pay
for the other aspects of the reform plan, like government subsidies and Medicaid expansion. They simply rob Peter to pay Paul while failing to fix Medicare’s fundamental problems.
The chief actuary at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which administers both programs, estimated that the law would cut Medicare by $494 billion. This breathtaking figure is the amount of money that would have gone to doctors, nurses, and other providers who deliver care and coverage to seniors. According to CMS, the new law cuts deep and wide, including home health ($39 billion); hospitals ($131 billion); skilled nursing facilities ($22 billion); and Medicare Advantage benefits ($101 billion).
Clearly, you cannot cut Medicare by more than a half a trillion dollars and not jeopardize seniors’ access to care. Medicare access is already declining. The Mayo Clinic announced that on January 1, 2010, its Arizona facilities would stop seeing Medicare beneficiaries because the federal government does not pay the clinic enough to even cover its costs. According to Lynn Closway, spokeswoman for Mayo, the clinic lost $840 million in 2008 treating Medicare patients. And that’s before the Democrats’ half a trillion in cuts.
Jeff Korsmo, executive director of the Mayo Clinic Health Policy Center, said with these kinds of cuts, “We will have to violate our values in order to stay in business and reduce our access to government patients.”
Just days before the president signed the legislation into law, Walgreens, the nation’s largest retail pharmacy chain, announced it would no longer accept the new Medicaid patients in Washington state. Why? Because the government pays the store so little to fill prescriptions for Medicaid beneficiaries that it loses money. Government often tries to control costs by cutting Medicaid reimbursements to providers, cuts which Walgreens described as “extreme.” With 20 million Americans being pushed into Medicaid by the new law, this is an ominous sign of things to come.
To Save America Page 9
