Michele Bachman Is Exactly Right
Tuesday night, my representative Michele Bachmann appeared on Hannity to talk about health care reform and how the Democrats are alienating John Q. Public. Here’s a portion of the transcript from Tuesday night’s show:
HANNITY: What do you make of this internal battle within the Democratic Party? And we’ll get into this in some detail later, but you know, Congressman Anthony Weiner says, hey, you threw us under the bus, and that there’s going to be a hundred Democrats in the House that if you don’t have that government option, we’re bailing on this bill.
What do you make of the internal strife and the trial balloon that was floated this weekend?
BACHMANN: Well, I think you’re exactly right. I think that there is an effort made to call the public option a co-op or something other than public option in order to maybe fool the public and to buy support from both Blue Dogs and the liberals.
It’s not going to work. What we know now, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have both said, it does not matter what you call it, it’s a public option. The American people need to realize they’ve been extremely effective with Congress. Now is not the time to give up.
Now is not the time to take the pressure off because they will move forward with some level of a public option. It may not be the full option they wanted but it will be incrementally in that direction. And if they have to wait a couple of years to get the public option, they’ll do it. If they can lay the ground works. So the American people need to rise up with one voice and say no to going down that road.
There isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between the government option that the Progresive Caucus wants and the type of co-op that Henry Waxman would write. Setting the United States on the glidepath to a single-payer system isn’t just a priority with Democrats. It’s their Holy Grail. It’s what gets Speaker Pelosi and President Obama salivating. If I told President Obama that he could pick just one thing and his choices were either passing a single-payer system or his re-election, I’m certain that he’d pick passing single-payer.
Here’s another important exchange:
HANNITY: But if the government ultimately decides who’s covered, if the government decides, you know, what people can charge, if the government decides what care you ultimately get, it still destroys the public free market system, the private insurance system. Doesn’t it?
BACHMANN: Yes, because it’s government control and it’s government mandate. The government either will mandate that you do something, that’s the hidden tax. Or they’ll do it to themselves. Clearly they’re not going in the direction people want to go.
I hail from Minnesota, we are known for innovation in health care. We have great medical schools. We created the Mayo Clinic. We have a gentleman who in his garage invented the pacemaker and turned it into a world class company Medtronic. We are the leader of innovation. That’s what we won’t have under the government taking over health care. We will under free market.
It’s important to note that single-payer systems aren’t known for innovation or flexibility or service. In fact, Canada’s health care system is imploding. The incoming president of the Canadian Medical Association says that Canada’s system must become more patient-centered:
The incoming president of the Canadian Medical Association says this country’s health-care system is sick and doctors need to develop a plan to cure it.
Dr. Anne Doig says patients are getting less than optimal care and she adds that physicians from across the country, who will gather in Saskatoon on Sunday for their annual meeting, recognize that changes must be made.“We all agree that the system is imploding, we all agree that things are more precarious than perhaps Canadians realize,” Doig said in an interview with The Canadian Press. “We know that there must be change,” she said. “We’re all running flat out, we’re all just trying to stay ahead of the immediate day-to-day demands.”
The pitch for change at the conference is to start with a presentation from Dr. Robert Ouellet, the current president of the CMA, who has said there’s a critical need to make Canada’s health-care system patient-centred.
Because the Canadian doesn’t rely on co-pays for doctors, hospitals and clinics, there hasn’t been a need to ask whether the system has an incentive to innovate or improve service. In fact, all that matters to them is that the government check arrives on time.
Another facet of this debate that isn’t getting coverage is that Canadacare doesn’t cover perscription drugs, meaning that people have to buy a supplemental policy to pay for their medications, whether it’s for their blood pressure or if it’s for their Lipitor or their Dilantin.
The Canadian system utilizes a global budget for each province, which pays for medical schools, research grants, medical testing and payments to doctors and hospitals. From what I’ve seen, finding new cures for cancer, heart disease and other chronic illnesses isn’t a high priority. Canadians would be sunk if not for the innovations produced by our capitalist system.
HANNITY: One of the things the White House and the president, particularly the message he’s trying to send, is that these town halls aren’t real, this is manufactured and the only thing the American people don’t quite get it yet.
Just as I was coming down on air here, I saw a headline, a preview on the Drudge Report that it’s going to be a New York Times article this morning that the Democrats are willing to go it alone. If they go it alone, what does that mean politically for them?
BACHMANN: Well, if they go it alone, I think they’ll really be alone in November, 2010, because the American people are very intelligent people. Members of Congress may not read these bills, the American people do read these bills and they won’t let their representatives in Congress alone come November of 2010.
The House Republicans have taken this very seriously. We are listening to our constituents, we’re holding town hall meetings. And we’re hearing exactly what the Democrats are hearing and it’s going to be a very tough time for them in November of 2010.
You can’t tell it by the transcript but Hannity was enjoying himself tweaking liberals with a tiny dose of sarcasm. Admittedly, there isn’t a death panel provision in H.R. 3200 but the rationing of care for seniors who’ve been diagnosed with cancer is essentially a silent death sentence. That’s why many of the faces from the townhall meetings are senior citizens who rely on Medicare.
Dick Morris said recently that there are six major special interest groups that Democrats rely on: Hispanics, African-Americans, unions, single moms, young people and senior citizens. What’s happened during this debate is that President Obama just neutralized the Democrats’ annual scare tactics about Republicans want to screw the elderly out of their social security and medicare benefits.
He gave that issue away when he announced that he was planning on paying for his health care plan by cutting the Medicare budget by $313,000,000,000 over the next decade. Seniors noticed. That’s why they’re showing up at these meetings and getting in their representatives’ faces.
What’s especially important about their anger and their fear is that, according to Morris, seniors comprise 14 percent of each election’s likely voters. When President Obama proposed his Medicare cuts, he alienated a large number of people who’ve been a reliable voting block for Democrats. Depending on how many seniors President Obama alienated with his comments, this could be a disastrous cycle for Democrats.
The other thing that’s hurting this administration is the fact that the talking points the Democratic leadership cranked out before Democrats left for recess were quickly refuted. That’s led to growing distrust of Democrats. It isn’t just that Democrats have tried selling voters a bill of goods with health care. It’s that it’s becoming a pattern.
People heard President Obama say that Congress had to pass the stimulus bill if they wanted to avoid an economic catastrophe. Congress rushed the vote, not letting the bill be read, only to have President Obama wait five days before signing the bill in a well-orchestrated photo-op in Denver. He said that they needed to pass that bill ASAP so that thousands of shovel-ready jobs could be funded ASAP.
People have heard President Obama say that he didn’t have any interest in running a car company, too. Shortly after they heard that, he engineered the firing of GM’s CEO, Rick Waggoner, then saw him bail GM out often enough to bail out the UAW.
Now President Obama and Pelosi’s Democrats are telling senior citizens that there won’t be rationing if the Democrats’ plan is enacted. People don’t believe that, either, as well they shouldn’t. Sen. Mike Enzi offered an amendment to the Finance Committee bill that would’ve prohibited the rationing of care. Sen. Enzi’s amendment was immediately defeated on a party line vote.
The Democrats’ deceptions are reaching critical mass. When that happens, the reaction is likely to be similar to 1992, when the House Banking Scandal and the House Post Office scandals broke. Two years later, Republicans won a majority in the House for the first time since 1952.
I’m not predicting a 1994-esque landslide victory in 2010 but I won’t rule it out because Democrats’ credibility, coupled with their unpopular policy initiatives, could create the perfect storm needed for the House to flip.
Technorati Tags: Hannity, Michele Bachmann, Health Care, Townhall Meetings, Republicans, President Obama, Rahm Emanuel, Speaker Pelosi, Senior Citizens, Medicare Cuts, Rationing, Bailouts, ARRA, Democrats, Election 2010
Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog
August 22nd, 2009 at 8:55 am
I was with her up until she said, “We created the Mayo Clinic.”
Forgive me, but I do believe the Mayo Clinic is a private institution, not a state-run enterprise. It may just be nitpicking, and I know what she thinks she said, but this is exactly the kind of thinking that allows liberals/statists to think that the state can come in and do better than private enterprise, in spite of the fact it never once in history has and, because of that record, can be assumed to never be able to in the future.
I’m sure Bachmann is a fine lady with a lot going for her, but she’d better get out of the statist way of thinking.