“We are held hostage at any given moment by health insurance companies that deny coverage or drop coverage or charge fees that people can’t afford.” — Barack Obama, Aug. 14, 2009.

“We’re seeing this at the same time where not only is there an economic downturn around the country, but we know that insurance companies are not suffering that same kind of downturn. The five largest insurers in America have declared more than $12 billion worth of profits in 2009.” — Health & Human Services Sec. Kathleen Sebelius.

“At a time when everybody’s getting hammered, they’re making record profits, and premiums are going up. What’s the constraint on that? … Well, part of the way is to make sure that there’s some competition out there.” — Barack Obama, July 2009.

The Saint Petersburg Times’ Fact Check already debunked the last of the three hate-inciting whoppers by the Obama administration, and many others have as well, but that hasn’t changed much. It’s great to read that Mr. Obama is all for “some competition” but it comes off as an empty statement considering that Democrats have gone out of their way to exclude any Republican idea to increase the same, such as insurance pools for individuals, or allowing insurance companies to cross state lines. Democrats are only for “competition” when it means the government getting into the act — but it’s hard to compete with an entity that may borrow perpetually, has no budget, need not answer to its stockholders (i.e., the taxpayers), can print money, and spend any amount it desires. This is competition? If that’s so then the U.S.S.R. was the epitome of free enterprise!

But more to the point of this post: The Obama camp lies. Or at very least exaggerates for anger’s sake. It’s hard to believe they don’t have the data.

Insurance companies don’t make record profits. Indeed they make far less than most industries.

Jeff Anderson explains:

According to the most recent Fortune 500 rankings, health insurers are not even among the top-30 United States industries in profit-margin. Health insurers rank 35th, with a profit-margin of just 2.2 percent — less than one-fifth the profit-margin of railroads. None of the ten largest American health insurers made profits of more than 4.5 percent, and two of them lost money. Health insurers’ collective profit-margin is less than one-eighth that of drug companies and less than one-seventh that of companies that sell medical products or equipment. It’s also less than that of medical facilities. Yet when was the last time you heard President Obama rail against greedy hospitals?

The combined profits of America’s ten largest health insurers are $8.3 billion. That’s less than two-thirds of the profits of Wal-Mart alone, less than half of the profits of General Electric alone, and less than one-seventh of what Medicare loses each year to fraud. Health insurers collectively have one-eighth the profit-margin of McDonald’s or Coke, one-ninth that of eBay, and one-fifteenth that of Merck.

Why don’t these much more profitable companies or industries need to be taken over by the federal government? Why don’t they need to be subjected to something like President Obama’s proposed Health Insurance Rate Authority, which would be run by the same U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that already loses $60 billion of taxpayer money to Medicare fraud each year? (Not that I want to give the Obama administration any ideas.)

In all, the combined profits of the 14 largest American health insurers (the ones who crack the Fortune 1000) are $8.7 billion. That’s less than 0.4 percent, or 1/250th, of overall U.S. health-care costs, which are $2.5 trillion.

Anyone but an ideologue could plainly see that insurance profits aren’t the problem. The problem is having a health-care system with too many middlemen (government or otherwise); too little competition and choice; and too little opportunity for Americans to control their own health-care dollars, shop for value, or even see prices.

If you can’t identify the problem, you aren’t likely to stumble upon the solution. Maybe that’s why the Congressional Budget Office says that, under Obamacare, which would cost $2.5 trillion in its real first decade (2014 to 2023), the average family’s insurance premiums in the individual market would increase by $2,100 in relation to current law — while under the House Republican health bill, which would cost $61 billion (just 2 percent as much as Obamacare), the average premiums would be reduced by 5 to 8 percent.

President Obama likes to say that the Republicans don’t have any ideas, but the House GOP bill would clearly make the American health-care system better. The small bill would make it better still. Obamacare would raise nationwide health costs, siphon billions out of barely solvent Medicare and spend them elsewhere, cut Medicare Advantage benefits by an average of $21,000 per beneficiary in its real first decade, politicize medicine, reduce liberty, raise taxes, cost jobs, and inevitably lead to rationed care.

All one needs to know about President Obama’s “bipartisan” health care summit — and his intentions — is succinctly summarized on their own website (which they tried to scrub, but which thanks to Google caching was all for naught).

[Via Michelle Malkin] White House: Where’s the GOP health care plan? Where’s the GOP healthcare plan?
GOP: Um, it’s linked right on your White House website.
White House: D’oh.

Thanks to the Save Jersey blog for the graphic that says it all. Snicker:

Background here from Daniel Foster who notes: “Ironically, this is perhaps the most exposure the Republican plan has so far received, and all it took was the Democrats saying that it didn’t exist.”

Other ideas? Who needs them? Insurance across state lines? Tort reform? Ha. With just those compromises President Obama could have had his health care bill 12 months ago.

But this isn’t about cost savings, it’s about tipping the political scales to the Europeanization of America; about getting all of middle-class America sucking on the government teet; about reducing individuality and independence, and increasing 1920′s style Wilsonian-Marxist “progressivism,” and dependence. It’s about power, and keeping it by forcing Americans to “mother may I” one-seventh of the economy. Next up, energy consumption in the guise of “saving” the planet via carbon rationing. After that, the food police, and executive pay police, and 401k police, like that Audi commercial on steroids.

So just shut up already and eat what these politicos are forcing down your throat. These fields of bureaucrats and egg-head academic “experts” know what’s best for you, not you,  and certainly not the collective decisions of 300 million consumers via the free market.

And they dared call George W. Bush suffering from “imperial hubris”! Sheesh.

[ABC NEWS] ABC News Thomas Giusto and Lindsey Ellerson report:

Conservative author Jason Mattera launched a relentless revolt today against President Obama and the leftist agenda, mocking Obama loyalists during remarks made at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

… Not only did Mattera hit Obama for his acknowledged drug use as a youth, but he went on to ridicule feminism, diversity and homosexuals.

“The allegiance to political correctness on the college campus goes a long way toward explaining how young people in their heart of hearts actually believe that a scrawny street agitator turned presidential candidate could save mankind, renew our faith in American politics, stop glaciers from melting, curb racism, end all wars, tackle terrorism, provide us health care, pay for our college tuition, and oh while he’s at it, Barack promises to send a government unicorn down to the sky to fly us up to the left’s world where people dance across the streets of government owned gold, eating FDA approved candy canes, and where MSNBC is programmed on every channel,” chided Mattera.  “Buyers remorse is setting in, heck even the slutty Obama girl said her crush has faded.”

Read the entire article and you’ll have no doubt that Mattera’s shtick seems obnoxious (albeit no different than a conservative Keith Olbermann).

But more curious is that I’ve read this a couple times in a row and I’ve yet to find the part where Mattera allegedly “went on to ridicule feminism, diversity and homosexuals.” Huh?

All he’s doing is pointing out that Obama proclaimed himself as the chosen one — saying at his own nomination that we’d remember it as the moment “that the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal” — and now, just one year later, people are finding it’s just not so.

He’s not a messiah. He’s not even half as deft as he thinks he is. He’s just the latest reincarnation of disproven, ineffective, stale, Marxist-Wilsonian socialist ideas. For thee, not for me! ‘If ONLY evil corporations would stop pursuing profits,’ summarized Obama in his $7 million NYT’s best-selling book, et cetera, and so on. It is to laugh. Obama is everything the far left has stood for and failed at for decades, and makes Jimmy Carter look like Barry Goldwater.

But for pointing this out, albeit crudely, says ABC News, Mattera MUST BE a gay-hating, misogynist racist. Ah, yes, THAT media bias…

Paging Eric Alterman!

Here’s Michelle Malkin commenting on the other stupid things said by Deputy National Security Adviser John Brennan.

Brennan then went on to decry the “ignorant feelings” of Americans outraged at the jihadi attacks on American soil. And then he told [Omar] Shahin [of the infamous "flying Imams"] and the audience of Muslim students that he “was very concerned after the attack in Fort Hood as well as the December 25 attack that all of sudden there were people who went back into this fearful position that lashed out not thinking through what was reasonable and appropriate.”

The Fort Hood jihadist slaughtered 14 innocent soldiers and an unborn baby after an Army career of openly threatening the lives of our soldiers, and Brennan is wringing his hands about the rest of us “lashing out” over government incompetence. He believes our true sin is not in the systemic underreacting by the military, homeland security, intel and White House officials in charge, but in the “overreacting” of the American public.

With clueless capitulationists like Brennan in charge of our safety, who needs enemies?

I had a laugh out loud moment this Sunday night, flipping channels and stopping on the FX network showing (yet again) of The Day After Tomorrow, an apocalyptic global warming movie filled with gratuitous scenes of our destruction.

I imagine the folks at FX programming probably would never have guessed that this weekend one of the chief global warming proponents and researchers would be forced to admit that he “lost” all of the data he used to produce the infamous “hockey stick” computer model predicting global temperature increases due to carbon output. This comes after the professor, Phil Jones, stepped down as director of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit in the wake of scandal over e-mails showing that researchers were manipulating climate change data (i.e., Climategate).

Whoopsie! I lost my data. Of course, a more skeptical person might say Jones “destroyed the data.” And an even more cynical person might say the good professor “made up” or “fabricated” the data.

Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.

And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.

The admissions will be seized on by sceptics as fresh evidence that there are serious flaws at the heart of the science of climate change and the orthodoxy that recent rises in temperature are largely man-made.

Gosh… one would think that all scientists and policy makers, skeptics or not, would want to ensure that the facts and data were sound. One would think, that is, if this were really about science. But it’s really about control and social engineering by taxing and regulating the one thing that ensures a healthy and productive society: energy consumption.

Nonetheless, Professor Jones’ admissions are just more bad press for the global warming folks. What’s a social engineer who sucks on the government grant money tit to do? How will the likes of Duke Energy ever make billions off carbon trading now? How will the Congress ever institute a fraudulent VAT tax if there is no warming?

In just the last few weeks we’ve had: Climategate e-mails followed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was forced to admit that it relied on faulty science in a claim that Indian glaciers would disappear by 2035, that it was wrong about 1998 being the warmest year on record (1934); that it accidentally confused feet and inches in a report regarding sea level rise in Fl0rida (18 inches not feet).

Fear not, though, warming freaks!

The Obama administration isn’t going to let something as simple as the truth or facts get in the way of regulating the number of farts you make and miles you drive — they’re promising that the EPA, a gang of unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats, will by totalitarian fiat force we American consumers to, well, consume less.

Here’s Bill Kristol on Joe Biden’s queer historical revisionism:

Vice President Biden — who was for the Iraq war before he was against it, and who then argued that the surge could never work before he decided (in retrospect) that it did — said this to Larry King on Wednesday night:

“I am very optimistic about — about Iraq. I mean, this could be one of the great achievements of this administration. You’re going to see 90,000 American troops come marching home by the end of the summer. You’re going to see a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government. . . . I’ve been impressed how they have been deciding to use the political process rather than guns to settle their differences.”

Iraq is “one of the great achievements of this administration”? Well, any port in a political storm — even if it means taking credit for the success of policies of the previous administration, policies you opposed. In politics, after all, success acquires many fathers. And that’s fine, if it means the Obama administration is careful over the next couple of years not to toss away American troops’ achievements in Iraq.

Pretty funny, Crowder, as these things go.

I promise to be more hopey, changey, and such this year… that’s a peace prize!

Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security John Brennan blasts critics of the Obama administration for their handling of Christmas Day bomb plotter Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, saying among other things, doing so, “only serve the goals of al-Qaeda.” So much for dissension being “the highest form of patriotism.” These same hypocrites cried foul after any subtle insinuation of the same by the Bush administration, but now the shoebomb is on the other foot, I suppose.

Unfortunately for Obama, the critics are far more swift than Mr. Brennan.

Take, for example, the retort below by former Bush official, Mark Thiessen. (Thiessen recently authored an excellent summation of waterboarding, intelligence gathering, etc., and the myriad of plot we’ve prevented since 9-11, titled “Courting Disaster,” and I highly recommend it).

The fact is the Obama administration — and Brennan in particular — are on the defensive over the mishandling of Abdulmutallab, and with good reason. So they are flailing about, lashing out at their detractors and coming up with a series of confused, contradictory, and demonstrably false excuses for their egregious string of errors.

This weekend, for example, Brennan claimed on Meet the Press that he informed key Republican members of Congress that the Christmas bomber was in FBI custody, and said “They knew that ‘in FBI custody’ means that there’s a process then you follow as far as Mirandizing and presenting him in front of a magistrate. None of those individuals raised any concerns with me at that point.”

He forgot to mention that in August 2009 the Obama administration had informed Congress and the press that terrorists questioned by the FBI, as part of its High-Value Interrogation Group, would not automatically be Mirandized. According to the Washington Post, “Interrogators will not necessarily read detainees their rights before questioning, instead making that decision on a case-by-case basis, officials said. … ‘It’s not going to, certainly, be automatic in any regard that they are going to be Mirandized,’ one official said, referring to the practice of reading defendants their rights. ‘Nor will it be automatic that they are not Mirandized.’” Whoops.

This is only the first of many whoppers Brennan has told since the scandal broke. In his USA Today op-ed, writes: “Would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid was read his Miranda rights five minutes after being taken off a plane he tried to blow up. The same people who criticize the president today were silent back then.” He fails to mention that Reid was captured just a few weeks after the 9/11 attacks, when they system of military commissions was not yet up and running, and the authority to hold terrorists captured inside the U.S. as enemy combatants had not yet been affirmed. (And, by the way, since when is “we’re doing the same thing as Bush” the mantra of the Obama administration anyway? Didn’t Bush leave them a big “mess” on detainees that Obama had to clean up? Forgive us for being confused)

Then Brennan writes: “There have been three convictions of terrorists in the military tribunal system since 9/11, and hundreds in the criminal justice system — including high-profile terrorists such as Reid and 9/11 plotter Zacarias Moussaoui.” He fails explain why there have been only three convictions in the military tribunal system. The military commissions did not begin functioning until 2008 because of all the legal challenges from left-wing lawyers, including Eric Holder’s law firm, Covington & Burling (which, as I point out in Courting Disaster, donated about $1.2 million in free legal services to terrorist at Guantanamo Bay in 2007 alone). As for the argument that hundreds were convicted in the criminal justice system, it has been decimated by Andy McCarthy over at National Review Online. Apparently that number includes every junior extremist who got a parking ticket outside a radical mosque.

Brennan claims that reading terrorists Miranda rights was standard FBI policy under Michael Mukasey. But he neglects to mention that Mukasey forcefully affirmed the President’s wartime authority to detain terrorists captured in the United States — including U.S. citizens — as enemy combatants, both as Attorney General and as a federal judge.

Brennan claims that terrorists like Padilla and al-Marri “did not cooperate when transferred to military custody.” Release the interrogation reports and prove it. These are the same people who told us the CIA interrogation program did not work, until the declassified intelligence proved those claims to be completely wrong.

Brennan claims that “Immediately after the failed Christmas Day attack, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was thoroughly interrogated and provided important information.” If he was so “thoroughly” interrogated during that 50 minutes of questioning, why are we questioning him again today after he broke his five weeks of silence? Either we got everything we needed (as the Administration conveniently argued when Abdulmutallab was not speaking), or he has more information (as the administration claims now that he is speaking). Seems that initial interrogation was not so “thorough” after all.

And why on earth are they telling us that he is talking, much less what he is talking about? By sharing this information with the press, they are also sharing it with al Qaeda. The surprisingly candid explanation came from White House Deputy Press Secretary Bill Burton, who told reporters: “Ideally this information would not necessarily come out … but we made the determination that it was a good idea to make sure that people knew … that our methods here were working.” In other words, “ideally” we would not share with al Qaeda that Abdulmutallab was talking, but since we are under fire from critics for screwing this up we thought it was a “good idea” to share intelligence with the enemy.

And Brennan accuses his critics of being “politically motivated”?

Former WTC bombing prosecutor Andrew McCarthy discovers that the claim that the U.S. has Mirandized and prosecuted 300 terrorists is highly dubious.

It was just brought to my attention that, if you don’t read carefully, the phony figure of 195 convictions of “international terrorists” since 9/11 magically becomes 300 by the time the Justice Department is done with it. Last week, DOJ put out a “fact sheet” on “The Criminal Justice System as a Counterterrorism Tool.” Among other things, it claims (the italics are mine, for reasons that will become clear):

“Hundreds of terrorism suspects have been successfully prosecuted in federal court since 9/11. Today, there are more than 300 international or domestic terrorists incarcerated in U.S. federal prison facilities.”

Note first the slippery use of the word “suspect.” All this means is that a person was suspected of being a terrorist at some point in the course of an investigation. It does not mean he actually was one, that he was ever charged with an actual terrorism crime, or that he was ever convicted of such a crime.

Adds McCarthy, it matters much how many of these 300 were, say, members of an environmental or animal-rights group gone awry — after all, we’re in a war against Islamic fanatics, not PETA.

WaPost columnist George Will covers the highlights of former Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan’s road to economic recovery. This is exactly the kind of fiscal agenda that would have ensured a victory for John McCain — already popular with moderates, he just needed to energize the Republican base. Will the moderates ever learn?

Ryan would eliminate taxes on interest, capital gains, dividends and death. The corporate income tax, the world’s second-highest, would be replaced by an 8.5 percent business consumption tax. Because this would be about half the average tax burden that other nations place on corporations, U.S. companies would instantly become more competitive — and more able and eager to hire.

Medicare and Social Security would be preserved for those currently receiving benefits or becoming eligible in the next 10 years (those 55 and older today). Both programs would be made permanently solvent.

Universal access to affordable health care would be guaranteed by refundable tax credits ($2,300 for individuals, $5,700 for families) for purchasing portable coverage in any state. As persons younger than 55 became Medicare-eligible, they would receive payments averaging $11,000 a year, indexed to inflation and pegged to income, with low-income people receiving more support.

Ryan’s plan would fund medical savings accounts from which low-income people would pay minor out-of-pocket expenses. All Americans, regardless of income, would be allowed to establish MSAs — tax-preferred accounts for paying such expenses.

Ryan’s plan would allow workers younger than 55 the choice of investing more than one-third of their current Social Security taxes in personal retirement accounts similar to the Thrift Savings Plan long available to, and immensely popular with, federal employees. This investment would be inheritable property, guaranteeing that individuals will never lose the ability to dispose of every dollar they put into these accounts.

Ryan would raise the retirement age. If, when Congress created Social Security in 1935, it had indexed the retirement age (then 65) to life expectancy, today the age would be in the mid-70s. The system was never intended to do what it is doing — subsidizing retirements that extend from one-third to one-half of retirees’ adult lives.

Compare Ryan’s lucid map to the Democrats’ impenetrable labyrinth of health-care legislation. Republicans are frequently criticized as “the party of no.” But because most new ideas are injurious, rejection is an important function in politics. It is, however, insufficient. Fortunately, Ryan, assisted by Republican Reps. Devin Nunes of California and Jeb Hensarling of Texas, has become a think tank, refuting the idea that Republicans lack ideas.

The only unrealistic portion of this plan is the second to last paragraph — raising the retirement age. While one can fully support such common sense, there is no way a candidate could ever win in Florida or Arizona proposing that to the retirees.