What Has the President Really Given Up on Health Care? Not Much At All.

You know, it may well be that Sarah Palin controls the world from her Facebook page. As Sissy Wills notes, Palin engaged Obamacare in two places — “death panels” and the public option — and on both of them, the Obama administration has folded.

Or have they?

From what I’ve seen, the administration has fairly deftly sidestepped the two most damaging criticisms of the Obamacare scheme without making any real changes at all.

Last week, thanks largely to Sarah Palin’s Facebook broadside, Democrats removed the “end of life” provisions in the Senate version of the bill, but that doesn’t mean the “death panels” are no more. To see the chicanery involved (chicanery which, by the way, Palin unwittingly assisted), let’s go back to the Facebook post that got the whole thing started. Here’s what she said:

The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care.

The provisions dropped from the Senate bill bear no resemblance at all to what she was talking about. Those provisions gave incentives to doctors to talk to elderly patients about such things as hospice care, living wills, “Do Not Resuscitate” orders, and other things a person might want to consider as they near the end of their life. To be sure, those things are well beyond the proper authority of any government or any physician. They should remain between an individual and their family and/or trusted clergy.

But there’s a difference between a doctor and “bureaucrats” and those provisions don’t involve sick people, the disabled, or babies with Down Syndrome. What Sarah Palin was talking about and what everyone said she was talking about are two different things.

Both Palin and the MSM share the blame here. Palin’s spokesperson told ABC News that the post referred to a part of the House bill called “Advance Care Planning Consultation”. ABC News accepted that at face value and didn’t wonder how a conversation between a doctor and a patient could ever be described as a “panel” and what “advanced care” for the elderly would have to do with babies and sick people. It was a stunning bit of sloppy journalism from ABC to not go back to Palin and ask her to square the Facebook post with Stapleton’s statement. It did, however, let the network blow off Palin’s very clearly-written post as just another bit of wingnuttery.

That’s pretty much what has happened. The MSM and the Democrats have laughed off the entire notion of “death panels” based on ABC’s initial report.

That doesn’t mean we have to follow suit, though. There is a rationing scheme in Obamacare and you certainly could call it a “death panel” if you want without being the least bit inaccurate. The President himself has referred to it, although he hid the rationing behind a more innocuous phrase. Keith Hennessey found that quote from the New Hampshire Town Hall Meeting.

Another way of putting this is right now insurance companies are rationing care. They are basically telling you what’s covered and what’s not. They’re telling you: We’ll cover this drug, but we won’t cover that drug; you can have this procedure, or, you can’t have that procedure. So why is it that people would prefer having insurance companies make those decisions, rather than medical experts and doctors figuring out what are good deals for care and providing that information to you as a consumer and your doctor so you can make the decisions?

He has to be saying here that “medical experts and doctors” which, by the way, will be employed by the government, will ration care instead of the insurance companies. He says that those experts will be “providing information’ but they must do more than that because if they don’t, the insurance companies will still make the ultimate decision about paying for your care, just like they do now. In either case, the people who make the payment decisions do consign people to death if they refuse to pay for a procedure that could save someone’s life based on cost. When those people are government employees,

The truth of the matter is people don’t want insurance companies making those decisions. They want to make those decisions themselves but they can’t because, thanks to government meddling, individuals are not the ultimate consumers of their own health care. You don’t buy your health insurance and you don’t pay the doctor for most of the cost of your care so you’re not the important part of the transaction. You won’t be a true consumer, with the power of the market behind you, if the President simply swaps out your insurance company for a government board of “experts”.

But that’s exactly what he intends to do so the “death panels” are still in place.

Now, what about this “public option” thing? The administration is saying today that it’s not all that important, really. Here’s how Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius put it:

“I think there will be a competitor to private insurers,” Sebelius said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “That’s really the essential part, is you don’t turn over the whole new marketplace to private insurance companies and trust them to do the right thing. We need some choices, we need some competition.”

And this is what White House Spokesweasel Robert Gibbs said:

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs made clear Sunday that Obama would still prefer a public option, but said the “bottom line” for the president is “choice and competition in the insurance market.”

See that word “competition”? The Democrats have an entirely different definition for that word than you, I, and the rest of the English-speaking world. In Dem-speak, “competition” means “the government gaming the system”. Here’s how their “competition” works. The government would form something called a co-op and every private insurer would be required, by law, to join or they couldn’t sign up new policyholders. The government would also have a plan of its own in the co-op to make the game seem nice and legal. Then, the government would set rules on the plans the co-op members could offer — how much they would have to cover, who they would have to cover, and how much the coverage would cost. Then, the competition would begin!

In other words, government “competition” is about as competitive as making Usain Bolt and Tyson Gay put on backpacks with two hundred pounds of rocks in them before racing Robert Gibbs in a 50-yard dash.

Basically, what the White House is doing is giving up the name “public option” and replacing it with the Orwellian “competition”. My guess is that the ruse will work for a little while, especially because few if any members of the MSM will call them on their ploy.

Secretary Sibelius is, as usual, wrong. You can turn things over to the private sector and get lower cost, better service, and more efficiency. The President already admitted that last week when he reminded us what a horrible operation the Post Office runs compared to FedEx and UPS. Perhaps the Secretary needs to pay more attention to what her boss is saying on the campaign trail.

Meanwhile, the President’s “competition” will drive people out of plans they like into a government “death panel” plan they don’t want, which will end up costing them far more than they ever thought.

No, the Democrats haven’t given up yet. They’re watching the polls tilt against them, so they’ve given up one meaningless set of provisions and stopped using the phrase “public option”. They haven’t given up their quest for government-run health care complete with rationing boards. They won’t give that dream up easily. It is, after all, the progressive Holy Grail.

UPDATE: Linked by Nice Deb, who notes that Robert Gibbs has already obfuscated his way through a question about health care co-ops. A Gibbs mumblefest is never a sign that the White House is dealing honestly.

STACLU has a great roundup post, with some video that’ll get you up to date on the public option.

UPDATE 2: Melissa Clouthier has also noticed the Democratic word games and isn’t buying their act either.

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Category: Health Care Craziness, The Rise of the Nanny State