Stop the Raid on Medicare before it begins

Stop the Raid on Medicare before it begins

by Dr. Larry Hunter

President Barack Obama failed in his brazen effort to have the government takeover healthcare. The American people rejected every variant of ObamaCare run up the flagpole. A man of integrity and common sense would have accepted the will of the people and moved on. A Congress worthy of the American people it represents would have recognized it lost the Mandate of Heaven when the people rejected every bill Congress concocted, and Members of Congress would have submitted the fate of healthcare reform to the will of the people in the upcoming November elections.

But Nooo. The President and his acolytes in the Congress are doubling down on a bad hand. They are redoubling their efforts to jam a government takeover of healthcare down the throats of the American people.

The president has come out with a retread health plan that is sloppily conceived—the Congressional Budget Office says the “plan” lacks so many details it can’t even estimate how much the thing will cost—and stealthily designed to pull the wool over the American people’s eyes.

The Congress is contemplating ways to sidestep and circumvent the regular legislative order to railroad Obama’s latest plan for a government takeover of healthcare through the Congress despite overwhelming opposition among the people—using a tricky legislative maneuver called reconciliation that restricts debate, limits amendments and runs roughshod over the rights of minorities.

This government is out of control, and rather than negotiationg with the president and congressional Democrats, as Republicans propose to do in Obama’s TV extravaganza Thursday, Republicans should be objecting, obstructing and delaying with every means at their disposal. Now is not the time for TV posturing and backroom negotiating; now is the time for the American people to vote on the fate of healthcare. It’s called an election.

President Obama is sticking his thumb in the eye of the American people—disrespecting them—by proposing a slipshod, ill-conceived heath proposal that takes the healthcare debate from the ludicrous to the preposterous. The president is acting out as a willful child who doesn’t know when to shut up, take his medicine and listen to his elders. Like delinquent children, the president and Democrats in the Congress recognize no higher authority than their own egos. We used to call that sinful; today it’s considered SOP—standard operating politics.

The American people have rejected every variant of a government takeover of healthcare the President and his fellow congressional liberals have come up with. But like a Night-of-the-Living-Dead zombie, ObamaCare just keeps on bearing down on Americans, especially senior citizens, intent on devouring them in the name of the greater good.

A recent Wall Street Journal analysis of the President’s warmed-over healthcare takeover proposal exposes the deceit and deception at its core:

“This new ObamaCare bargain would for the first time apply the 2.9% Medicare payroll tax to "interest, dividends, annuities, royalties and rents," so-called passive income that we are told includes capital gains, though the latter wasn't explicitly mentioned in the proposal.”

Obama's new taxes will destroy any semblance of an economic recovery, and the damage these new taxes will do to Medicare and the rationing his healthcare takeover they pay for will usher in will put old people out in the cold and into an early grave.

This year, Social Security begins to pay out more than it takes in; the Raid on Social Security is complete; Social Security is in deficit; Congress has drained it dry.

NOW, the president wants to start a Raid on Medicare.

Medicare already is insolvent. It has an $89 trillion (with a “t”) unfunded liability, which is five times bigger than Social Security’s unfunded liability ($17.5 trillion). Obama wants to run a version of the same scam on Medicare that Congress and past presidents ran on Social Security, namely jack up the earmarked taxes, raid the revenues, leave behind paper IOUs in the Trust Fund and use Bernie Madoff accounting to make it appear this round-trip embezzlement actually strengthened the program’s finances.

President Obama wants to levy a stealth tax on work, saving and investment under the guise of "strengthening" Medicare. All the new revenue from Obama’s new taxes will show up on the books as new Medicare revenue, which will immediately be "borrowed" by the Treasury to help pay for the new healthcare takeover. Then, just as it did for 25 years with Social Security, the federal Treasury will paper over this embezzlement—there is no other word for it—with IOUs it writes to itself; pretending those IOUs represent Medicare assets that strengthen the program’s bottom line.

If the American people swallow this Kool-Aid, it will prove Abraham Lincoln wrong once and for all: politicians really can fool all the people all the time—or at least enough of them enough of the time to work their dastardly deeds without fear of reprisal.

The latest Obama proposal to takeover healthcare is his version of the Raid on Social Security, and it must be stopped before it gets off the ground. The simple fact is, President Obama intends to raid Medicare, not fix it. He plans to use Medicare as a cash cow to fund his grandiose government takeover of healthcare at the expense of old people. This attack on Medicare and America’s senior citizens is outrageous; it borders on the criminal; it certainly is immoral.

Seniors of the nation, rise up; throw off Obama's chains—chains we can live without—you have nothing to lose but your chains.