How about a few civics questions? Name the three branches of government. If you answered the executive, legislative and judicial, you are more...

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Yesterday the nation’s largest health insurance trade group, the America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), unveiled its proposal for major reform of the U.S. health care sector. AHIP President Karen Ignagni told the [1] Los Angeles Times, “The nation is on the eve of a national discussion about healthcare. This comes around once every generation.”

Indeed, health care reform was a major theme in President-elect Barack Obama’s campaign. During the campaign, Obama pledged to build a health care system in which Americans can be assured of access to affordable health insurance; to use the health system that members of Congress have as a model for expanding coverage; and that Americans who already have insurance would be able to keep it and at a lower cost. These laudable themes struck a chord with Americans.

Achieving these goals at the same time will be difficult, and some truly bad public policy ideas will have to be opposed. For example, the AHIP plan insists on a mandate forcing all Americans to buy health insurance. During the campaign, Obama wisely fought against this proposal. Heritage’s new memo to Obama, “[2] Ensuring Access to Affordable Health Insurance,” identifies that issue, and other important elements, as part of successful health care reform:

• Use the consumer-choice system available to members of Congress as a true model. The system Obama and other federal employees have enjoyed, the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP), is not like Medicare or Medicaid. It is an employment-based system with important characteristics. Its “health insurance exchange” functions like a shopping mall for plans, making it easy for families to shop each year for plans and to have portable coverage.
• Create a level playing field of competing private plans and real choice, and do not allow a “public plan” to undermine other commitments to Americans.Lewin Group, a leading health econometrics firm, suggest that more than 22 million Americans would experience an unexpected change in coverage with a public plan in place. Obama has spoken of including a government-sponsored “public plan” as one of the competing plans in his proposed health exchange, but there is no public plan in the FEHBP — and for good reason. There can be little doubt that if the government sets the rules for competition in an exchange and also runs one of the plans, the rules will be rigged to favor the public plan. Moreover, employers who currently offer coverage could switch their workers to this plan, and millions of Americans would discover that their employers had ended their existing private coverage. That would be an unacceptable violation of Obama’s “no change” commitment. Recent estimates from the [3]
• Reform the tax treatment of health insurance to make it more equitable and efficient for taxpaying families. Today’s unlimited tax relief for employer-organized health insurance gives large breaks to executives and other highly paid employees but little or no relief for families without employment-based insurance or with only limited coverage at the place of work. The value of this “tax exclusion” is over $200 billion, or about 10% of all the nation’s spending on health care. The tax exclusion should be limited and the revenue used to provide tax relief for those without tax help to make coverage more affordable.
• Use incentives, not government mandates, to foster wider coverage. In his primary fight with Hillary Clinton, Obama laid out a strong case against government mandates. He showed that mandate advocates could not identify which powers they would use to enforce a mandate and he spoke eloquently of the unfairness of forcing families to purchase coverage they couldn’t afford. Any health care reform should explore the effectiveness of a combination of automatic enrollment and financial incentives to widen private coverage, and not draw up plans for more mandates or expansions of Medicaid or other public programs.
• Promote family control and choice through refocused employment-based coverage rather than mandating employers to offer government-defined coverage. There are large gaps in the system of employer-sponsored coverage. Many smaller firms do not offer coverage at all, and others offer coverage that many of their workers don’t want or can’t afford. The solution is not to mandate that firms offer an expensive, comprehensive plan determined by Congress or else pay a tax. That would mean one-size-fits-all coverage, while changing coverage that many workers are happy with — which Obama pledged not to do. Instead, families should be able to choose and retain their health coverage from job to job. This can be accomplished through such things as arranging payroll deductions, much like their role in arranging 401(k) retirement plans.
• Say “no” to the Daschle Federal Health Board. Even worse than congressionally mandated benefits would be mandatory coverage designed by a powerful Federal Health Board proposed by likely Health and Human Services nominee Tom Daschle. His Federal Health Board would have enormous power over medical decisions affecting every American. This is unacceptable, and would break Obama’s pledge to give Americans choice.

While Americans express frustration with our current health system and want action to make coverage more dependable and affordable, they also want the nation’s health system to retain important principles and features. Americans demand choice, for instance, and if they are content with the coverage they have, they do not want it disrupted. Millions of Americans voted for Obama because they believed his words meant he shared these principles. Let’s hope he keeps his pledge.

Article printed from The Foundry: http://blog.heritage.org

URL to article: http://blog.heritage.org/2008/12/04/morning-bell-health-care-reform-we-beleive-in/

UAW offers concessions to help bailout bid

The sadly obligatory SCOTUS birth-certificate post

The Chicago Tribune briefly revives the Obama-birth-certificate kerfuffle in an update today, if only to throw more cold water on it.  Tomorrow, the Supreme Court confabs over whether to grant a review to Leo Donofrio’s lawsuit after having it rejected in district and appellate courts:

The U.S. Supreme Court will consider Friday whether to take up a lawsuit challenging President-elect Barack Obama’s U.S. citizenship, a continuation of a New Jersey case embraced by some opponents of Obama’s election.

The meeting of justices will coincide with a vigil by the filer’s supporters in Washington on the steps of the nation’s highest court.

The suit originally sought to stay the election, and was filed on behalf of Leo Donofrio against New Jersey Secretary of State Nina Mitchell Wells. …

The Obama campaign has maintained that he was born in Hawaii, has an authentic birth certificate, and is a “natural-born” U.S. citizen. Hawaiian officials agree.

The latest buzz surrounds the decision by Clarence Thomas to circulate the appeal petition to the entire court after David Souter rejected it immediately.  That really doesn’t mean much, as the Tribune explains.  Of the 842 petitions circulated in that manner, only 60 got a spot on the court calendar, and not all of those succeeded.  Thomas may have been interested in the technical aspects of the suit rather than the merits, or perhaps it was a slow week.

It does, however, make it news, no matter how much some of us wish it would go away.  The state of Hawaii has repeatedly insisted that their records show Obama was born in Hawaii, as the Certificate of Live Birth states.  The COLB would get any Hawaii native an American passport with no questions asked, even without the official endorsement of the Republican governor and her Department of Health.  There is even a contemporaneous birth announcement in a local paper confirming it.

I’m sure the comments section will fill with various conspiracy theories over Indonesian school records, Kenyan births, and so on.  None of it — absolutely none — has any real, solid evidence showing that Obama was born anywhere else than Hawaii apart from sheer speculation and hearsay, and even less evidence that Obama’s stepfather renounced Obama’s birthright citizenship, which he didn’t have the power to do anyway.  It’s a conspiracy theory spun by conspiracy theorists (Philip Berg is a 9/11 truther) who use their normal thresholds of evidence for this meme.

Unfortunately, the Supreme Court can’t kill the conspiracy theories.  It can only kill the lawsuits, which is what they will almost certainly do tomorrow when they meet.

Update: From October 31:

The director of Hawaii’s Department of Health confirmed on Friday what Barack Obama has been saying all along: the presidential candidate was born in Honolulu.

“There have been numerous requests for Sen. Barack Hussein Obama’s official birth certificate,” said Chiyome Fukino. “State law prohibits the release of a certified birth certificate to persons who do not have a tangible interest in the vital record.”

Citing her statutory authority to oversee and maintain Hawaii’s vital records, Fukino said she has “personally seen and verified that the Hawaii State Department of Health has Sen. Obama’s original birth certificate on record in accordance with state policies and procedures.

“No state official, including Gov. Linda Lingle, has ever instructed that this vital record be handled in a manner different from any other vital record in the possession of the State of Hawaii,” Fukino added.

Update II: From the comments, a link to Donofrio’s explanation:

“Don’t be distracted by the birth certificate and Indonesia issues. They are irrelevant to Senator Obama’s ineligibility to be President. Since Barack Obama’s father was a Citizen of Kenya and therefore subject to the jurisdiction of the United Kingdom at the time of Senator Obama’s birth, then Senator Obama was a British Citizen “at birth”, just like the Framers of the Constitution, and therefore, even if he were to produce an original birth certificate proving he were born on US soil, he still wouldn’t be eligible to be President.

The Framers of the Constitution, at the time of their birth, were also British Citizens and that’s why the Framers declared that, while they were Citizens of the United States, they themselves were not “natural born Citizens”.

Hence their inclusion of the grandfather clause in Article 2, Section 1, Clause 5 of the Constitution: No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution shall be eligible to the Office of President; That’s it right there. (Emphasis added.)

If so, this is an even dumber argument than first thought.  The children of immigrants born in this country are ineligible to be President?  Since when does “natural born” refer to the parents of citizens?  Natural born means the person at question was born in US territory, and it always has.  Immigration-enforcement activists have been trying to change that definition to eliminate the “anchor babies” issue.

Also, adoption only changes the parentage on the birth certificate, not the place, date, or time of birth.  I’ve done an adoption myself and can personally attest to that fact.  If Obama had been adopted by Mr. Soetero, Hawaii would only have changed the father’s name on the record — and since Barack Obama Sr has been listed on the birth certificate, it appears that Mr. Soetero didn’t adopt Obama anyway.

Update III: As a rebuttal to Update 1, this from the comments:

The paper lied on purpose. The HI Dept of health went of its way to say everything but that. They do have his original birth certificate, but from where?

The State of Hawaii only keeps birth certificates from births in Hawaii.  The State of California only keeps birth certificates from births in California, Minnesota only keeps those from births in Minnesota, and so on. They don’t store information on births outside of their state.  Why would they bother to do that?  Use some common sense.

Update IV: The Honolulu Advertiser reported on the Dept. of Health statement on November 1 in a little more detail:

State Health Department employees continue to be barraged by requests from people demanding to see Barack Obama’s birth certificate, including some who have called the department’s registrar of vital statistics at home — in the middle of the night.

“This has gotten ridiculous,” state health director Dr. Chiyome Fukino said yesterday. “There are plenty of other, important things to focus on, like the economy, taxes, energy.”

So, in what likely will be a vain attempt to halt the inquiries, Fukino yesterday issued a statement saying that she and the registrar of vital statistics personally inspected Obama’s birth certificate and found it to be valid.

Will this be enough to quiet the doubters?

“I hope so,” Fukino said. “We need to get some work done.”

Fukino issued her statement to try to stomp out persistent rumors that Obama was not born in Honolulu — and is therefore not a U.S. citizen and thus ineligible to run for president.

Fukino, however, repeated the Health Department’s position that state law prohibits her or any other officials from actually releasing the birth certificate, which Obama’s campaign says shows he was born in Honolulu on Aug. 4, 1961.

“There have been numerous requests for Sen. Barack Hussein Obama’s official birth certificate,” Fukino said in the statement. “State law (Hawai’i Revised Statutes ¤338-18) prohibits the release of a certified birth certificate to persons who do not have a tangible interest in the vital record. … No state official, including Gov. Linda Lingle, has ever instructed that this vital record be handled in a manner different from any other vital record in the possession of the State of Hawai’i.”

I guess they’ll have to wait a little longer to get any work done.

Jack Nerad, Executive Editorial Director for Kelley Blue Book has a great oped here that’s worth a read. Here’s his conclusion:

So what are the implications of this history lesson? The first takeaway is that a portion of the woes the domestic Big Three are suffering today are the result of current and past federal government policies, so it seems fair that they be accorded government assistance now in time of dire need.

But equally important, while the Big Three automakers might well be accused of not correctly gauging the needs and desires of the American buying public, one group that is demonstrably much worse in that endeavor is Congress. If the U.S. government were a car company, it would not only be deep in the red, but also have miserable customer satisfaction scores.

So a second takeaway is that doing the wrong thing — and by the wrong thing we mean attaching assistance to a web of politically motivated strings to federal loans — will only lead to a bigger catastrophe down the road.

If Congress acts to aid the ailing Big Three car manufacturers — and I strongly suggest it should — then it is equally important that the domestic carmakers be allowed the latitude to conduct their business based on the dictates of the American consumer, not the politicians.

Here’s what Congress doesn’t get. A base briced Toyota Camry ($19,000) costs $7000 less than the hybrid model ($26,000). The hybrid gets 33 m.p.g. in the city, 34 m.p.g. on the highway, the base model gets 21 and 31 respectiveley. You can do all the calculations you want to see how many years the payback period is, or you can do what most people in America actually did if they were worried about gas mileage: they bought the 26 m.p.g. city/35 m.p.g. highway Toyota Corolla for $15,000.

With the gas mileage of the Corolla nearly identical to that of the hybrid Camry, there’s really no reasonable way to make up the $11,000 difference. 

What’s becoming increasingly terrifying for the U.S. economy is to hear the Big Three CEO talk about how disastrous the failure of their three companies would be, and then hearing them talk about how the future of their companies rests on a) technologies that don’t exist and b) consumer demand that isn’t proven.

Three days after the president-elect announced in a radio address that he had directed his "economic team" to devise a plan "that...

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How will anyone calculate the number of jobs "saved"? In what sense saved? Saved from what? Saved by what? By government action, such as agriculture subsidies or other corporate welfare?

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Before this juggernaut imposes its will on the American people, there are some questions that need to be asked and honestly answered. Who are the uninsured? How many are there? How long have they been without coverage? And most importantly, why?

Washington should also show why it is morally acceptable to make a portion of the population pay for the medical treatment of others, and to point to exactly which provision in the Constitution allows the national government to establish a health care system.

Advocates for the uninsured say Americans without health care coverage total 44 million to 47 million — numbers they use as a blunt instrument during health care debates. It makes for a powerful talking point — until the full account is revealed.

Of the uninsured, nearly a fourth live in households that earn at least $50,000 a year, according to Census Bureau data. More than a quarter (27%) are not U.S. citizens. An Employee Benefits Research Institute study reported that 86% of the growth in the total number of uninsured between 1998 and 2003 was due to both legal and illegal immigration.

Despite the alarmist rhetoric, being uninsured is not a widespread chronic problem. Most of the uninsured go without coverage only for brief periods, such as when they are between jobs.

The National Center for Health Statistics, for instance, found that in 2005, only 29 million Americans were uninsured for more than a year. A Congressional Budget Office analysis has reported that almost 45% are uninsured four months or less.

Research done by Blue Cross Blue Shield indicates that of the uninsured households with incomes below $50,000 that didn't qualify for public coverage, almost half went without insurance six months or less.

Advocates also fail to mention that being uninsured is often a choice. One in five Americans who have access to job-provided or employee-subsidized insurance programs decline to participate.

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Nowhere is it mentioned that these "green-collar jobs" would be terribly costly, and that the planned "investments" are really just subsidies. And, as we know, things that require subsidies aren't competitive in the market, and thus aren't profitable.

Claims that such "investments" will create five million jobs are false. It's likely more jobs will be killed than created due to higher costs and increased inefficiency of the U.S. economy. A recent report from the Center for Data Analysis at the Heritage Foundation found that limiting CO2 emissions under recent proposed legislation would destroy 900,000 net jobs.

Spending money on projects where costs exceed benefits simply to "create jobs" is a bad idea. Taking capital from productive uses and redeploying it to politically popular but nonproductive uses lowers productivity by paying those with "green jobs" more than their output is worth. It's not welfare, it's "greenfare."