PRESS RELEASE
Nero Obama to GOP:
Capitulate to My Nazi Health Bill,
Or I'll Ram It Through Without You
Feb. 25, 2010 (EIRNS)—Although President Obama ducked the issue of his Nazi "T-4" death panel in the first part of today's healthcare "summit," it did come up a number of times, and Obama went all out for it, in his closing statement.
This was first raised by Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.) who alluded to IMAC by saying that the Senate bill, on page 982, "creates an unelected board charged with recommending even more Medicare reductions.... if Congress doesn't accept these recommendations, they have to find other Medicare spending to cut instead." At this point, a rattled Obama interrupted Camp, saying this would be taken up in the session on deficits.
A few minutes later, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said that the Democrats agree with most of what Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) had said, when Coburn had given a whole speech (without explicitly mentioning the discredited Dartmouth studies), claiming that one-third of all medical expenditures are unnecessary and wasteful. Schumer himself cited the fraudulent Gawande study in the New Yorker, on the differing medical costs in McAllen and El Paso, Texas, and Schumer complained that Dave Camp is saying that you can't cut any costs out of Medicare. Schumer said that if you listen to "what Senator Coburn says, that one-third of Medicare doesn't go to patient care, you can't just get up there and say we don't want to cut anything out of Medicare."
The next to bring it up was Sen. Jay Rockefeller, who, at the end of his speech in which he had delivered a strong denunciation of the insurance companies, said that "I wish we could talk about the Medicare board, the advisory Medicare board, which is controversial," and then Obama cut him off, too, saying it would be discussed in the next session. But in that session, which was led off by Vice President Biden, it never came up. Obama himself didn't bring it up until the very end, when nobody would have a chance to respond.
This was in his closing statement, in which Obama outlined areas of possible agreement with Republicans. Obama said that with regard to "bending the cost curve," there is a lot of agreement, and he added that he would probably agree with 95% of what Tom Coburn said (about 1/3 of healthcare costs being wasted). Obama boasted that "we set up the idea of a MedPAC, which is basically a panel of doctors and health care experts who would recommend ways to make the delivery system so that we can squeeze out that one-third in Medicare and Medicaid that's wasted," but he complained that Republicans had then used this to say that "the government's going to take away your health care."
Obama told the Republicans that "if we're serious about delivery system reform, if we're serious about squeezing out the waste that Tom Coburn referred to, you should embrace those mechanisms," i.e., the T-4 death panel, "that are in this bill."
It was after this, that Obama concluded by threatening (or blustering) to the Republicans that if they would not come to an agreement with him on his Nazi bill, that he would simply ram it through the Congress without them. As Obama put it:
We cannot have another year-long debate about this. So the question that I'm going to ask myself and I ask of all of you is, is there enough serious effort that in a months' time or a few weeks' time or six weeks' time we could actually resolve something? And if we can't, then I think we've got to go ahead and make some decisions, and then that's what elections are for.
