A Fanatical Devotion to a Cause: Why Do the Cons Keep Dishing Out the Same 'Voters Don't Want Obama to Change the Health Care System' in America Narrative When It Just Isn't True?

 

"Jacques-Louis David does Karl Rove: political murders or suicide?
Marat and Karl Rove are ideologies of some stuff. Engineering foment is a nasty job and requires single mindedness with an ideology that can inspire the less thoughtful, more ignorant to follow into the morass of zealotry." Scari.org

Increasingly, Cons, as a political movement that has for decades projected an image of promoting individualism and free markets, are adopting an increasingly repetitive undertaking that exposes their own shortcomings of being so bereft of substantive alternative ideas that they have taken to laboriously repeating each other as a way to substantiate their claims of representing the will of the people when all that Cons are engaging in is to "inspire the less thoughtful, more ignorant to follow into the morass of zealotry." Rove displays this very tiresome practice by repeating many of the ill-conceived claims made by his fellow ideologue, David Brooks; that I wrote about in a post that appeared a few days ago in a September 1st posting I made to this blog.

Karl Rove recently 'wrote' a commentary that appeared in the Wall Street Journal that serves as an example of the cookie cutter type of pro-corporate viewpoint that is portrayed as fact by the main stream media.

As the Wonk Room has recently conducted an exhaustive refutation of a recent typical Frank Lutz, created Karl Rove distributed, collection of lies about the public's rejection of the public health care option that is nothing but vintage Con-created propaganda designed to support the insurance industry's monopolistic suppression of free trade, open marketplace practices.

The following was provided by the Wonk Room and points out in very substantive terms the several ill-conceived notions that the Cons are attaching to their ideological attacks on health care reform:

"A public option is unnecessary: "It's unnecessary. Advocates say a government-run insurance program is needed to provide competition for private health insurance. But 1,300 companies sell health insurance plans. That's competition enough." [WSJ, 6/11/2009]

    "TRUTH: Insurer and hospital markets are dominated by large insurers and provider systems. Private insurers rarely negotiate with dominant hospital systems and typically pass on the higher costs to beneficiaries in the form of higher premiums. Already, "1 in 6 metropolitan areas in a 2008 study of more than 300 U.S. markets is dominated by a single health insurer that controls at least 70% of consumers enrolled in health maintenance organizations or preferred provider organizations." Such consolidation negates any real competition. Without it, insurers don't negotiate prices and boost their profits. In fact, "there have been over 400 health care mergers in the last 10 years," and premiums have risen "nearly eight times faster than average U.S. incomes." A public plan could, in an environment of head-to-head competition, push private insurance companies to negotiate more aggressively with providers and dramatically lower health care spending." [Urban Institute, 10/03/2008; LA Times, 4/09/2009]

"Private competition in Medicare Part D has reduced costs: “The results of robust private competition to provide the Medicare drug benefit underscore [the ability of private competition to lower prices]. When it was approved, the Congressional Budget Office estimated it would cost $74 billion a year by 2008. Nearly 100 providers deliver the drug benefit, competing on better benefits, more choices, and lower prices. So the actual cost was $44 billion in 2008 — nearly 41% less than predicted. No government plan was needed to guarantee competition’s benefits.” [WSJ, 6/11/2009]

    "TRUTH: Medicare Part D beneficiaries have experienced significant cost increases. According to a recent analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation shows “significant increases in premiums, costsharing amounts, use of specialty tiers, and utilization management restrictions since 2008 that could have important implications for beneficiaries’ access to needed medications and out-of-pocket expenses.” [KFF, 6/2009]

"A public plan would shift costs to Americans with private insurance: "Second, a public option will undercut private insurers and pass the tab to taxpayers and health providers just as it does in existing government-run programs. For example, Medicare pays hospitals 71% and doctors 81% of what private insurers pay." [WSJ, 6/11/2009]

    "TRUTH: Private insurer payments promote medical inefficiency. A new public option will change the way the health care reimbursement system so that we pay for value, not volume and reward efficient providers. According to MedPAC, Medicare rates are adequate and consistent with the efficient delivery of services. In fact, over-payments by private insurers to health-care providers drives up overall costs. "Hospitals which didn't rely on high payment rates from private insurers 'are able, in fact, to control their costs and reduce their costs when they need to' and 'combine low costs with quality.'" [WSJ, 3/17/2009]

"A public plan will lead to a welfare state:"If Democrats enact a public-option health-insurance program, America is on the way to becoming a European-style welfare state." [WSJ, 6/11/2009]

    "TRUTH: Americans will choose a public health insurance plan from a menu of different options. The private insurance market isn't going anywhere. Private insurers will play an important role in providing more integrated coverage options than the public plan and would retain a "brand advantage" (in the same way that a lot of people rather have the branded drug than the generic) for consumers. Private insurers who "offer a superior product through high levels of efficiency, satisfaction in consumer preferences and ease of access to quality medical services" will thrive in a reformed market. [Urban Institute, 10/03/2008]

"The public option is too expensive: “Fourth, the public option is far too expensive. The cost of Medicare — the purest form of a government-run “public choice” for seniors — will start exceeding its payroll-tax “trust fund” in 2017. The Obama administration estimates its health reforms will cost as much as $1.5 trillion over the next 10 years. It is no coincidence the Obama budget nearly triples the national debt over that same period.” [WSJ, 6/11/2009]

    "TRUTH: A public option will lower family premiums. If a public plan is “far too expensive” and has higher premiums, then Americans will not enroll. But if a public plan offers lower premiums, it will motivate private insurers to lower their costs. As a result, health care costs would decrease across the board.

"Americans will be forced into a public option: "Government-run health insurance would crater the private insurance market, forcing most Americans onto the government plan." [WSJ, 6/11/2009]

    "TRUTH: The government would not force Americans to purchase coverage from the public plan, but Rove would force everyone under 65 to enroll with a private insurer. Rove is essentially arguing that the public plan would work too well. It would use its inherent efficiencies to lower family premiums and force private insurers to aggressively negotiate on behalf of their beneficiaries.

"The public option would put a bureaucrat between you and your doctor: “The public option puts government firmly in the middle of the relationship between patients and their doctors.” [WSJ, 6/11/2009]

    "TRUTH: A public option improves the doctor-patient relationship. Existing reform legislation explicitly preserves the doctor-patient relationship. As a draft of the HELP bill notes, “a strong doctor-patient relationship is essential to the practice of medicine, and patents have a right to an effective doctor patient relationships…Doctors, nurses, and other health professional have the right to judge what is best for their patients.” Moreover, the public plan’s payment innovations would reward doctors for providing quality care and spending more time listening to their patients. [HELP Legislation, 6/09/2009]"

In his Wall Street Journal commentary; Rove takes every opportunity to criticize Obama for his profligate spending habits: "He has already had the budget-busting $787 billion stimulus package, a budget that doubles the national debt in five years, an earmark-laden appropriations bill that boosted domestic spending nearly 8%,..."

Rove's commentary makes the additional complaint: "Mr. Obama's problems are legion. To start with, the president is focusing on health care when the economy and jobs are nearly everyone's top issue. Voters increasingly believe Mr. Obama took his eye off the ball."

Rove's commentary gleefully concludes by advancing that: "Presidents always encounter rough patches. What is unusual is how soon Mr. Obama has hit his. He has used up almost all his goodwill in less than nine months, with the hardest work still ahead. At the year's start, Democrats were cocky. At summer's end, concern is giving way to despair. A perfect political storm is amassing, and heading straight for Democrats."

Rove can only rely his hopes that his ideological fervor will work to negate any successes by President Obama and the Congressional Democrats in bringing about health care reform. Time will tell whether Rove's powers of prognostication drawn from his fanatical devotion to his single-minded job to cause foment among the masses will work.This writer sincerely hopes that Rove and his co-conspirators fail miserably in their attempts; and health care with a strong single-payer element included, becomes a reality for many suffering Americans and helps bring about fiscal sanity to the administration of health coverage in the United States.

Desperate Con Games and Team Obama Response

The cons like to set the agenda and they can do so because they have large portions of the corporate establishment and private wealthy interests behind them. So money and foot soldiers are never a problem for cons to push their views on the American people.

The narrative behind their 'American tale of rugged individualism' was established decades ago; back in the later stages of the 19th century in fact. The cons strategy is to tell simple stories that grab the attention of 'common people' by setting up a scenario of two easy, competing tales of good and bad; white and black, with no contrasting shades of gray allowed.

The cons have had difficulty getting two of their favorite narratives to stick in the public consciousness: their race-baiting jabs, and their socialistic big government laments have fallen on deaf ears because since his January inauguration Barack Obama has commanded the attention of the American people from a mountain top of respect and dignity reserved for a historic presidency who stands as a true statesman. Cons who attempted their petty attacks against Obama were justifiably vilified throughout the media and by the public at large for using blatantly obvious delaying tactics intended to make the president appear to be a failure.

So after months of disarray and missteps by the Cons; they believe they have finally gained the upper hand on Obama by arguing that the combination of the August recess and his failure to pass a health-care plan portends of a massive loss by Obama and his fellow Democrats.

The cons can hardly contain their glee! They believe that all that Obama can now achieve is a watered down version of his original proposal. And to make things worse for Obama, the cons believe is that the impending failure is splitting the Democrats into two competing camps.

The progressive left, and the unions stand on one side of the divide while the Blue Dog Democrats, consisting of centrists and independents stand to the other side of what the cons hope is an insurmountable chasm.

So the cons are trying to extend their hand and add to the Democrats moment of seemingly disunity by resorting to their scare tactic approach based on the 'fact' that a new health-care system will shock taxpayers back into the GOP camp once they realize that not only Obama supporters in the upper tax brackets will suffer but that those in the middle class will be overwhelmed with revulsion once they realize at how high their top marginal rates could go.

The cons are furiously playing up their gloom and doom scenarios to taxpayers in states on the fiscal brink and are asking these people whether they can afford to pay higher marginal rates for people who are obviously too inept to secure their own private medical insurance coverage and instead are clamoring for a boondoggle federal health-care program that will force higher taxes on hard working, responsible Americans.

The cons are taking credit for insuring that President Obama's health-care bill has hit the wall and will never recover.

The cons are taking every opportunity to feed into the myth that Americans are thoroughly confused over the need for publicly funded healthcare even though the Democrats have well established facts on their side when they explain that the the lack of health insurance effects about “47 million uninsured Americans.” The cons are pushing their weak narrative that relies on disinformation and scare tactics that once tax payers realize that their taxes would increase under government health care they will revolt against government run health care.

White House adviser David Axelrod pushed back against the con verbiage when he said, “Our job is to help folks understand how this will help them.”

The cons hope that the harder the White House and Democrats push public health care, the worse it could get for them. The cons are betting their house stakes on their hope that Americans may have arrived at the limit of how much government they want or will pay for. If Barack Obama can’t sell more of it, no one can.

Meanwhile, President Obama is adapting his message on national health care to speak directly to those who already have health insurance.

On the president's agenda for the upcoming week; he will highlight his proposal to ban insurance companies from denying individuals coverage because of pre-existing conditions. During a Friday trip to Bozeman, Mont., Obama will stress how his plan would block companies from dropping an individual's coverage if he or she becomes ill. And at weeks end, in Grand Junction, Colo., Obama will emphasize that the Democrats' plan would end high out-of-pocket costs in some policies. All of these topics bypass Con rhetoric and concentrate on real, everyday issues faced by millions of Americans.

In another example of a shifting in Obama's strategy the White House has pivoted to campaign mode, making two significant modifications in their approach; they have dispersed select members of the Cabinet to key states to make the administrations case, and; a tech-savvy response to con misinformation has been launched through the White House Twitter and Facebook accounts, and has launched a new page on the White House's Web site entitled Health Insurance Reform Reality Check in which the administration enumerates examples of "the facts about the stability and security," Americans will "get from health insurance reform."

The British Conservative Legacy and the Current American Con Job

The Cons of the present day offer a far different version of conservatism than the English progenitor of conservatism, Edmund Burke. Conservatism today is all about ideology; in fact observers of the American political scene often hear arguments among conservatives about which one or ones are the most ideologically "pure." Burke based his belief in the superiority of conservatism on his conviction that it rejected ideology, thus making Burke the originator of the first modern "conservative" argument which appeared during his tenure in British politics from the 1760s to the 1790s. Burke's topic of focus was the French Revolution which spawned the first political movements of the left; liberalism, socialism, and communism. Burke's response to the political developments on the left was to propose conservatism as a counterweight to theories that he and his fellow countrymen saw as dangerous developments in the course of political thought and practice. In his book Reflections on the Revolution in France Burke based conservatism on tradition and actual experience which he proposed provided the only legitimate means to produce practical political systems of governance. Since the French proposed to base their politics on abstract ideas such as liberty, equality, fraternity the result for the French could only lead to chaos and disaster. Burke's theory demonstrated a long period of historical development that gave rise to institutions that bore centuries worth of experience. For Burke, this orderly process gave the British people a constitutional system ruled by an elected Parliament and divinely established monarchy that harmoniously ruled together. Burke, distrusted the the French Revolution's chaotic "innovation" of governance and his jeremiad was to convince his fellow countrymen and French sympathizers that they could not trust such an unnatural system of government as proposed by the French.

It was Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France who said: "A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation." The duty of the politician was to ensure equilibrium between "[t]he two principles of conservation and correction." It was the duty of government, in Burke's view, to oversee a continual process of compromise; "sometimes between good and evil, and sometimes between evil and evil."

Our current discussion of conservatism in America begins at the conclusion of the Second World War. It was during that period that a significant bifurcation occurred in American conservative thought. There were those American conservatives who adhered to Burke's ideal ( for identification purposes this group will be referred to as the Burkeans) that civil society must be replenished by its reactions to changing conditions in society. The opposite view held (by a group that shall be herein referred to as the traditionalists) that America's only hope for survival was in its ability to eradicate all vestiges of the welfare state from the operations of American government. It is obvious that it has been the cons who have pledged to turn back the hands of time to return to an idyllic paradise where state welfare did not exist. They wanted to overturn New Deal and reinstate the laissez-faire Republicanism of the 1920s. And the means that the traditionalists chose to undertake their cleansing of welfare from the practices of American government was through the use of the politicization of civil warfare.

The traditionalists were populated by a large group of former Marxists who bypassed the Marxist dialectic and replaced it with the idea that politics consisted of no more than an absolutist struggle between good and evil. The traditionalists represented all that was good while evil was represented by social programs; socialized medicine; big labor; activist Supreme Court justices, the media elite; tenured college and university radicals; experts in and out of government who held contrarian views to traditionalist dogma.

As a nation, America has just emerged from a period of political history that lasted for more than a quarter of a century that began with the Reagan presidency continued with the Republican Revolution that was lead by Newt Gingrich and secured the House for a Republican majority. It was the heyday of the cons attempts to kill the New Deal and replace it with free market capitalism. Their attempts for the most part ended in miserable failures but they were able to inflict considerable damage on the structure and legal foundations of the American system of government. A monumental task stands before us as Obama and the Democrats attempt to undo the rot that the Republicans have allowed to enter into America. It's a task that will take a considerable amount of effort and time to rectify.

Republican National Committee Ready Opposition to Bailout Legislation

Susan Davis reports in the Wall Street Journal: Conservatives demonstrate their ability to promote forward thinking ideas and encourage an "anti-bailout resolution at (the) RNC. "“I think the bailouts are just wrong and take us in a profoundly radical, left wing direction,” said prominent Republican attorney James Bopp Jr., a vice chairman of the RNC and author of the resolution,.." The resolution, "(if) approved, it would also put the party committee at odds with the White House and many Republican leaders on Capitol Hill who supported bailouts for the financial industry and the Big Three auto-makers. But it also captures the anger many conservatives feel towards bailout legislation. In the latest WSJ/NBC News poll conducted in mid-December, 73% of self-identified conservatives disapproved of the federal government’s handling of the financial crisis."

Viguerie's Idealism for Small Government Defies History

Richard A. Viguerie makes the worn out conservative call to arms: "Republicans are making a huge mistake by turning away from the principle of small government." The face is Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush 41 and Bush 43 all made government bigger, not smaller, and you can't blame the GOP's love affair with big government on the Democrats.Viguerie's rants are nothing more than an appeal to old fairy tales -- it's time we put outworn rhetoric to bed and get on with the business of government -- working to better the lives of ALL Americans and move the nation forward.

William Kristol continues his obnoxious streak

As the saying goes: Once a neoconservative, always a buffoon! In Kristol's case an unpatriotic buffoon who is "leaving the country the day of Barack Obama’s inauguration. It’s nothing personal...It’s just that I happen to have a speech to give in Canada." So Kristol puts money ahead of witnessing one of the most historic events in American history! Kristol is not just a buffoon; he's an unpatriotic buffoon who places profit above country. Kristol, you are nothing but a self-serving scoundrel.You are a crass opportunist and an un-American ideologue. As for the blather that fills your column; it comprise nothing more than cheap insults that fail to veil your fervent hope that this country and it's new government will fail. Your final sarcasm: "Now that’s a presidency I can believe in." Does nothing but highlight the last eight years of criminal contempt and felonious failure against the American people that you supported with every fiber of your un-patriotic, un-American buffoonery.