Health Care Problem? The Message Got Out
Thanks to Howard Kurtz’s article, we now know that the Obama administration thinks that its message isn’t getting out:
“It’s simple,” explains White House communications director Anita Dunn. “In an increasingly fragmented audience that gets information from a number of different sources, putting a huge amount of his time behind one medium increases our ability to really break through and get a message out. The effect of one interview, given how rapidly the news environment moves, doesn’t last as long as it used to.”
The problem isn’t that President Obama’s message hasn’t gotten out. President Obama’s problem is twofold: his message has gotten out and people think that the product he’s selling sucks. The only people who seem to like what President Obama is selling is the House Progressive Caucus and Barbara Boxer, Bob Casey and Jay Rockefeller in the Senate.
I suspect that the reason why the White House believes its message isn’t getting out is because it hasn’t closed the deal. I’m betting that it’s inconceivable to them to think that their messiah can’t sell anything to anyone. They haven’t figured out that President Obama’s Midas Touch disappeared in early February.
When President Obama sold the stimulus on the basis that not passing it would lead to an economic catastrophe and that passing it would keep unemployment under 8 percent and that it had to be passed before people read the bill, people started thinking that President Obama was just forcing something down their throats. That’s when people started realizing that President Obama wasn’t committed to transparency and bipartisanship.
Dick Morris has a great explanation for why health care is failing. It isn’t that the message isn’t getting out either:
Requiring everyone to buy insurance will impose a massive tax on all who now are uninsured. The Congressional Budget Office projects that it would force the middle-income uninsured to pay on average more than 15 percent of their income.
The poor will still have Medicaid. But for those earning more, the required premiums will be worse than any tax increase. For example, CBO estimates that when the program is fully implemented, by 2016, an individual earning $32,400 a year would have to pay $4,100 in premiums before getting any subsidy. With deductibles and co-payments, he’d have to shell out $5,600 a year, or 17.3 percent of his income. A family of four, making $80,000 a year, would have to pay about $10,500 in premiums alone, with deductibles and co-payments, up to $15,000 or just under 20 percent of income.
And if they don’t buy insurance, they’ll face federal fines that begin to approach these same premium levels. They won’t be able to buy what they truly need, catastrophic-only coverage at a lower premium, that won’t satisfy ObamaCare’s “minimum insurance” mandate.
The young and uninsured will catch on: This bill is designed to force healthy people who don’t have health insurance, and may neither need nor want it, to buy it anyway, in order to raise the money to subsidize those who do need it.
Obamacare is failing because it’s perceived to cost government too much (in terms of deficits), people too much (in terms of tax increases and other expense increases) and because it’d cost seniors too much in terms of rationed care. (You can’t cut $500,000,000,000 from the Medicare budget and not cut services. It simply isn’t possible.)
After you strip away the Obama administration’s campaign for comprehensive health care reform, what you’re left with is a slew of additional mandates, fees, taxes and various other expenses. What you aren’t left with is an appealing alternative to the current health care system.
That’s why this plan will fail. It won’t be because the Obama administration didn’t get their message out.
Technorati Tags: Message, President Obama, Mandates, Tax Increases, Fees, Medicare, Medicaid, Middle Class, Deficits, CBO, Bob Casey, Barbara Boxer, Democrats
Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog
September 21st, 2009 at 2:32 pm
Ya know, if “health care” is a RIGHT, what is the guvmint doing saying they’re going to be taxing “cadillac” insurance? If it is a RIGHT, why do we need insurance at all? Shouldn’t all our health care needs be automatically endowed upon us without cost, oversight, or any other guvmint interference? Shouldn’t that Right be bestowed upon us as is any other Right?
When are we going to start talking about what is, and isn’t, really a RIGHT under our Constitution?
September 21st, 2009 at 6:57 pm
Oh its getting out all right. Its getting out too damned much. Give us a break already! We are sick and tired of seeing his face day after day, after day, after day, after day, after day, after day!!!
Carlos I dont know, but I suspect we are about the same age, grew up in the late 40’s and 50’s, thought JFK, gthe last real Democrat, was swell etc. WE, our generation, are the ones putting the breaks on this, because we are old enough to know a snow job and shmooze when we hear it.
The country has been taken over by nincompoops!
Look it up youngsters.
September 21st, 2009 at 11:37 pm
USN, I’m probably a couple of years behind you, but still old enough to remember tough school rules and grading. I was a senior in chemistry class when the announcement of JFK’s death came over the intercom. I was sorry, because no president deserves that, but even then had major philosophical differences with the donks.
And what JFK was then, if he didn’t change his ideology, would probably be just a little right of center in the Republican Party now.
My, how times change.
September 22nd, 2009 at 1:11 pm
“I suspect that the reason why the White House believes its message isn’t getting out is because it hasn’t closed the deal.”
By “closed the deal” I assume you’re saying he can’t understand why people don’t like what he’s doing when he as much as has said (in typical Godfather tones) “I’m making you an offer you can’t refuse”.
One of the problems with having a Chicago thug for president is that he doesn’t understand the art of give-and-take. He only understands “take”.
And again I ask, if health care is a right (in the sense other rights are granted us through the Constitution), how can the guvmint define or modify or bestow that right upon us? If it is our right, it is not the guvmint’s to do anything with it except to protect our right to it. As soon as they supply it, they control it and it is no longer a right but a benefit, a perk, or a hammer with which to threaten the people with.