Can you imagine the sheer audacity of outgoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sermonizing that repealing Obamacare would do "very serious violence to the national debt and deficit"? This is the woman whose four-year tenure as speaker saw the national debt explode from $8.67 trillion to $14.01 trillion.
She's the lady who boasted, "Deficit reduction has been a high priority for us. It is our mantra, pay-as-you-go." Such is the state of Pelosi's credibility that even 19 of her Democratic colleagues voted against her for speaker.
When it comes to a wide spectrum of issues, I'm not sure which planet Pelosi and her ilk of liberals inhabit, but the Obamacare fiasco takes their otherworldliness to another level altogether — and that's being charitable because it assumes they're innocently unaware of how wrong they are.
Everyone knows that with Obamacare's government-mandated increases in demand and in government control over prices, shortages and rationing are inevitable. (That's either why they've established their little bureaucratic boards or their excuse for establishing them; the boards will ultimately dictate decisions concerning choice of care — including, dare I say it, end-of-life care.) Obama promised universal coverage, which won't happen, but what he didn't tell us is that his socialized plan could only increase coverage, if at all, by reducing access to, choice of and quality of care.
Obama also forgot to tell us when stumping for the bill that he would appoint Donald Berwick to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, whose role will be greatly expanded under Obamacare to define the quality of care for every insurance plan and set Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement rates based on the CMS' assessment about the value in various medical treatments. If you doubted before that Obama's motive in socializing medicine was, well, socialistic, then that doubt should have been removed with the Berwick appointment. For Berwick is the man who loves Britain's socialized medicine and who said proudly, "Excellent health care is by definition redistributional." Just more evidence Obamacare was never about reducing budgetary pressures.
Moreover, everyone who reads and watches TV knows that Obama and his Democratic congressional conspirators funnied up the numbers to obtain a neutral Congressional Budget Office scoring so Obamacare could pass in the first place, for example, temporarily (and dishonestly) removing the "doc fix" from the bill, counting mythical Medicare funds in the calculations, and front-loading tax increases while deferring expenses, all of which grossly distorted the projected budgetary impact of the unpopular bill.
But the ink wasn't even dry on Obama's signature before abundant instances of other flagrant misrepresentations came to light, and since then, we've seen other evidence of just how cynical this entire operation has been from the beginning.
We soon learned that Obamacare doesn't allocate nearly enough money to cover the estimated 5.6 million to 7 million Americans with pre-existing medical conditions who will qualify for high-risk insurance pools. We discovered that the CBO estimate didn't factor in $115 billion worth of "discretionary" expenditures even though there's no question those expenditures will be made.
That was just the start. Since then, we've witnessed the numerous scandalous waivers the administration has granted to prevent a major exodus from this monstrosity, along with reports of untold numbers of health care providers threatening to leave the profession, which would generate even greater pressure on health care prices.
We've also watched Blue Shield of California seek rate hikes of as much as 59 percent for individuals because of rapidly increasing health care costs and expenses generated by Obamacare and its implementing regulations. Then there's the matter of Obamacare costs being further understated by unrealistic projections about the bill's new subsidy for low- and middle-income earners to buy coverage.
Based on the bogus information and assumptions the administration and Congress fed the CBO in order to make Obamacare appear budget-neutral at the outset, the anomalies that have been brought to light since, and the negative consequences the law is already producing, Nancy Pelosi's statement that repealing Obamacare would do violence to the debt and deficit is delusional at best and an outright lie at worst.
The mainstream media will continue to carry the administration's water on this monumental ruse, as ABC's George Stephanopoulos seemed to do in questioning House Majority Leader Eric Cantor recently, but their version must not be allowed to stand. Republicans must be aggressive in countering these lies and hammering home the truth that repealing Obamacare, in addition to striking a blow on behalf of liberty, would reverse, not increase, the government's budgetary imbalances.
David Limbaugh is a writer, author and attorney. His new book, "Crimes Against Liberty," was No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list for nonfiction for its first two weeks. To find out more about David Limbaugh, please visit his website at www.DavidLimbaugh.com. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
