On Thursday, April 11, Stuart Varney, the host of Fox’s Varney & Co, agreed with Brent Bozell, president of the Media Research Center, that the three major TV networks were withholding information from the American public that revealed the detrimental effects of ObamaCare. Bozell hurled the charge that the networks are “deliberately censoring news and information from the American people,” then backed it up with substantial evidence. The evidence include the following stories, none of which got even one mention on the networks:

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I have finally figured out how to apply the lessons of Obamacare to save my own sinking medical office from bankruptcy.

Under the president’s health-care law, the stated goal of which is to provide easy-to-use health insurance for everyone, you — the struggling-to-make-ends-meet patient — will see your skyrocketing mandated premiums used to pay not only for contraception, but also for the medical sequelae of a rude and obese McDonald’s customer who chooses to eat one bacon cheeseburger with fries after another. As your physician, I will be paid less and less for treating you even as insurance companies charge you more and more to cover the self-destructive among us. At the same time, Obamacare mandates will shrink your co-pays to the point where I will no longer be able to afford coffee for my nurses.

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This week marks two years since of the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and if the Obama administration has chosen to all but ignore the second anniversary of Obamacare, the rest of us should pause and reflect on just what a monumental failure of policy the health-care-reform law has been.

What’s more, it has been a failure on its own terms. After all, when health-care reform was passed, we were promised that it would do three things: 1) provide health-insurance coverage for all Americans; 2) reduce insurance costs for individuals, businesses, and government; and 3) increase the quality of health care and the value received for each dollar of health-care spending. At the same time, the president and the law’s supporters in Congress promised that the legislation would not increase the federal-budget deficit or unduly burden the economy. And it would do all these things while letting those of us who were happy with our current health insurance keep it unchanged. Two years in, we can see that none of these things is true.

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On the night of February 17, I took a phone call from a senior Catholic official who was concerned about the pro-gay-marriage votes in the Washington and Maryland legislatures and the possible spillover effect of those defeats on the unity the U.S. bishops had thus far displayed in resisting the Health and Human Services contraceptive mandate. I told him not to worry. “The bishops of the United States,” I said, “haven’t been so unified since John Carroll took a deep breath in 1791 and decided something.”

In 1791, of course, Bishop Carroll of Baltimore was the only Catholic bishop in the young Republic.

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President Obama’s health plan should be rechristened “The Unaffordable Care Act.” Precisely as Obamacare’s critics predicted, the officially titled Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is no bargain for taxpayers or patients.

Obama signed this measure on March 23, 2010. Less than two years later, its original $940 billion, ten-year price tag is in tatters. As the Congressional Budget Office re-forecast Tuesday, this program will cost $1.76 trillion through fiscal year 2022. The CBO foresees 87 percent overrun, not even 24 months into this boondoggle. At this rate, the Unaffordable Care Act may do for medicine what the Big Dig did for public works.

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By November, nobody is going to remember who Sandra Fluke is. That’s what Republicans need to keep in mind as they judge the political impact of opposing the Obama administration’s latest health-care mandate. The issue is likely to help Republicans in the fall, if they can keep their wits about them.

They’re not doing that right now. Instead, they’re overreacting to two mistakes that opponents of the mandate have made. Both involved Fluke. After the Obama administration announced that it would require almost all employers to offer insurance that covers contraception, abortion drugs, and sterilization, whether or not those employers have moral objections, Representative Darrell Issa (R., Calif.) held hearings before the government-oversight committee he chairs. The Democrats requested that Fluke, a Georgetown Law School student and liberal activist who favors the mandate, testify. But the request was denied as too late. Since one of Issa’s panels had no female witnesses, the Democrats then used the incident as an illustration for their story that Republicans are waging a “war on women” by resisting the mandate. Press coverage was brutal. Since then, Issa has been telling his House colleagues to avoid the issue, and many of them have done so.

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(Reuters) – To be or not to be a tax?

That is the question in this month’s U.S. Supreme Court case testing the validity of President Barack Obama’s controversial healthcare system overhaul.

At issue is the money that Americans will have to pay starting in 2014 to the Internal Revenue Service if they fail to obtain medical insurance.

During his 2008 presidential campaign, Obama promised not to raise taxes on families earning less than $250,000. That’s the same income bracket where a lot of people lack health insurance.

So, as president, Obama and his aides studiously avoided using the “t-word” as they worked to persuade Congress to pass the healthcare overhaul. Instead, they called it a “penalty.”

Now enacted, the law itself refers to a “penalty” that must be paid if a taxpayer fails to get medical coverage.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said at a recent congressional hearing that the payment “operates the same way a tax would operate, but it is not per se a tax.”

Just last month, acting White House budget director Jeffrey Zients said in a hearing that it was not a tax.

Now, however, the White House needs to defend the healthcare law in court and things are different.

The Supreme Court starting on March 26 will begin hearing a case on whether Obama’s healthcare overhaul is constitutional.

The administration is arguing the government can make people buy health insurance and charge them if they don’t through its powers to regulate interstate commerce and to tax.

That argument raised some eyebrows and provided a “gotcha” moment for Republican lawmakers when administration lawyers argued in briefs filed before the Supreme Court that the minimum coverage requirement provision operated like a tax.

“The only consequences of failure to maintain minimum coverage are tax consequences,” the administration lawyers argued in the briefs.

In May 1953, the Polish government ordered the implementation of a decree giving the state the authority to appoint and remove Catholic priests and bishops throughout the country: The Catholic Church was to become a subsidiary of the Polish state; its clergy would act as agents of state power; and its educational and charitable activities would be approved (or rejected) by a state intent on bringing the most important institution in Polish civil society to heel. The bishops of Poland, who had tried for years to find a modus vivendi with the Communist regime, now drew the line. Meeting in Kraków under the leadership of the country’s primate, Stefan Cardinal Wyszyński, the Polish episcopate issued a memorandum deploring the government’s attempt to turn the Church “into an instrument of the state” as a violation of the natures of both church and state. The memorandum concluded memorably: “We are not allowed to place the things of God on the altar of Caesar, Non possumus! [We cannot!].”

Americans accustomed to religious freedom may, at first blush, find it hard to imagine any possible analogy between our situation today, in the midst of the debate over the HHS “contraceptive mandate,” and that of Poland’s Christians in 1953; of course those brave men and women faced challenges far beyond those facing American believers today. Yet the structure of the moral and political argument, then and now, is eerily similar. In both cases, an overweening and arrogant government tries, through the use of coercive power, to make the Church a subsidiary of the state. In both cases, the state claims the authority to define religious ministries and services on its own narrow and secularist terms. In both cases, the state is attempting to co-opt as much of society as it can, while the Church is defending the prerogatives of civil society.

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Dear President Obama,

As a certifiable member of the female sex, I want to thank you for preventing the Republican party from conducting a “war on women.”

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It ought by now to have become rather obvious that there is no more a crisis in “access” to contraception in America than there is in access to Tylenol. But, for the sake of argument, let’s step outside of reality’s bounds for a moment and imagine that there were. In such circumstances, we might presume that it would not be of pressing concern to design an entitlement for the nation’s working and insured people while entirely ignoring the poor, the unemployed, and the uninsured. And yet those entertaining the “access” fantasy have done precisely that with their HHS mandate. In short, they have contrived the wrong answer to a problem that does not exist. That is some feat.

Let’s recap: The mandate forces employers to cover their employees’ contraception within their insurance plans, and it does this without allowing the employer to take higher premiums from their employees’ paychecks. Notice a trend? In other words, it addresses those who do not need addressing while cloaking its moral imperatives in the language of the needy. Whatever one’s view of the obligations of society and the state toward the genuinely poor — and, equally, of the wisdom and efficacy of government intervention — the debate that we have been having over the past month is actually about those in society well placed to look after themselves.

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In his March 12 column, Washington Post writer E. J. Dionne Jr. attempts some fraternal intimidation of the Catholic bishops of the United States prior to the meeting of the bishops’ conference administrative committee on Tuesday and Wednesday. The argument, such as it is, doubtless reflects certain currents of thought within the Church in the United States — those currents that are deeply uncomfortable with the bishops’ emphasis in recent years on a robust assertion of Catholic identity. But that is about as much as can be said for it; as a matter of theological or political reasoning, it’s pluperfect nonsense.

Dionne warns the bishops that, if they do not back off from their strong defense of religious freedom and find some way to reach agreement with an administration he insists is trying to accommodate their concerns, they risk becoming a church that no longer stands for both life and social justice. Worse, they risk becoming “the Tea Party at prayer.”

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I’m writing this from Australia, so, if I’m not quite up to speed on recent events in the United States, bear with me — the telegraph updates are a bit slow here in the bush. As I understand it, Sandra Fluke is a young coed who attends Georgetown Law, and recently testified before Congress.

Oh, wait, no. Update: It wasn’t a congressional hearing; the Democrats just got it up to look like one, like summer stock, with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid doing the show right here in the barn, and providing a cardboard set for the world premiere of Miss Fluke Goes to Washington, with full supporting cast led by Chuck Schumer strolling in through the French windows in tennis whites and drawling, “Anyone for bull****?”

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Over the past several days, it’s become clear that the White House’s talks with religious leaders — over the “accommodation” to HHS’s recent regulations on mandatory contraceptive benefits in insurance plans — are not going terribly well.

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The Obama White House just doesn’t get the Catholic Church in the United States these days. That blunt fact of public life was demonstrated once again by an anonymous “administration official close to the negotiations” over the Health and Human Services “contraceptive mandate.” The official was speaking off the record to the pliant David Gibson of Religion News Service, whose March 6 story took the administration’s latest prevarications at face value.

“The White House has put nearly every issue requested by the bishops on the table for discussion and has sought the views of the bishops on resolving difficult policy questions, only to be rebuffed,” said the official. “Unfortunately, it appears that some bishops and staff are more interested in the politics of this issue than resolving any underlying challenges faced by Catholic social service providers.” The official, Gibson wrote, was “responding” to the March 2 letter to his brother bishops by Timothy Cardinal Dolan, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

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As a practicing internist who prescribes contraception for women on a regular basis, I don’t see the current flame-throwing debate as being about religious principles or promiscuity, and certainly it isn’t about the need to save health-care dollars, as HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has so disingenuously asserted.

Instead, in the age of Obamacare, the new insurance mandate is simply about increasing government regulation. But if you regulate insurers, they will fight back. If something is mandated, something else will be cut. Premiums will rise, not fall. Health-care costs will rise, not fall. While I think it is absurd and inflammatory to suggest that a law student like Sandra Fluke who wants her contraception paid for is necessarily promiscuous, at the same time it is equally absurd to suggest that mandating this kind of coverage will somehow save money while supposedly not implying a moral choice of one health-care service over another.

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Over at the Huffington Post, Rabbi Daniel Brenner recently published an interesting piece about contraception and the Jewish tradition. Daniel wonders why Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, who had testified against the contraception mandate before Congress, and had written two columns on the subject, “never once mentioned the Jewish position on contraception.” 

The reason he didn’t is that the Jewish position on contraception, like the Catholic one, is immaterial to the mandate controversy. The real issue here implicates the very basis of our social contract.      

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The question of who controls health-care costs has been endlessly discussed, but it seems that we’ve all missed the answer: the media. In recent weeks, we have watched the cost of birth-control pills rise dramatically: Three weeks ago, in the infancy of the Sandra Fluke fracas, we were told that the annual cost was, at most, $600; then Fluke upped the ante, reporting $1,000 per year in her congressional testimony; and finally, her figure was widely misreported as being $3,000 per annum. This last spike seems to have been the messy byproduct of Fluke’s claim that $3,000 would be the cost over her three-year stay at Georgetown Law.

Fluke’s figure seems to have been plucked from thin air. Planned Parenthood estimates the monthly cost at between $15 and $50, which translates to $160 to $600 per year. If we were to take their maximum figure and run with it, we’d still be well below Fluke’s oft-repeated claim. But even Planned Parenthood’s price is on the high end. As has been widely reported, both Target and Walmart (and their online iterations) have been selling generic birth-control pills for $9 per month in 41 states since 2007 — equivalent to the cost of three cheap coffees at Starbucks. (The cost in the nine remaining states is around $27, or $324 per year. For the difference, we can thank those states’ regulations making it illegal to sell prescription drugs as loss leaders.)

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In 1984, Mario Cuomo pioneered the argument that one may be “personally opposed” to abortion while supporting abortion rights.

Ever since, this convenient locution has become a staple for countless Democratic politicians, particularly Catholic ones. It is Vice President Joe Biden’s view and was Senator John Kerry’s stance when he ran for president in 2004.

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The Obama administration issues an edict regarding birth control that is a) blatantly unconstitutional, b) economically absurd, and c) completely unmatched to any national need, and what are we talking about? The “Republican war on women.” 

Democrats are geniuses at muddying the waters and twisting the debate in a direction they find congenial. They’ve been at this a very long time. Recall that in the late 1980s and early 1990s, we found ourselves ensnared in a discussion of so-called “censorship.” The National Endowment for the Arts, (a luxury no deeply indebted nation should indulge), had provided grants to two particularly obnoxious exhibits. One was a photograph by Andres Serrano called “Piss Christ” that depicted a crucifix submerged in a jar of the artist’s urine. The other was a series of homoerotic photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, featuring, to cite just one example, a man’s anus being penetrated by a bullwhip.

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Despite the White House’s rather successful efforts to reframe the media and congressional debate over the HHS “contraceptive mandate” as a right-wing jihad against “women’s health” — a cynical ploy aided and abetted by Rush Limbaugh’s one-man circular firing squad — the real battle against the mandate and in defense of religious freedom has continued. A March 2 letter from Cardinal Timothy Dolan, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, to his brother bishops usefully and succinctly outlined the current state of affairs, which amounts to unremitting stonewalling from the Obama administration.

The key section of Dolan’s letter read as follows:

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WASHINGTON – Cost estimates for a key part of President Obama’s health care overhaul law have ballooned by $111 billion from last year’s budget, and a senior Republican lawmaker on Friday demanded an explanation.

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp, R-Mich., wants to know by Monday why the estimated ten-year cost of helping millions of middle-class Americans buy health insurance has jumped by about 30 percent.

Administration officials say the explanation lies in budget technicalities and that there are no significant changes in the program.

The revised numbers, buried deep in the president’s budget, stumped lawmakers and some administration officials for most of the week. At a congressional hearing Tuesday, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who is in charge of carrying out the health care law, indicated she was unaware of the changes.

At issue are subsidies that will be provided under the health care law to help middle class people buy private coverage in new state insurance markets that will open for business in 2014.

Last year’s budget estimated the cost of the aid to be $367 billion from 2014-2011. This year’s budget puts it at $478 billion over the same time period.

“This staggering increase … cannot be explained by legislative changes or new economic assumptions, and therefore must reflect substantial changes in underlying assumptions regarding the program’s … costs,” Camp wrote Friday in a letter to Sebelius and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.

Republicans say they’re concerned that either the estimated cost of the insurance has gone up, or that the administration has determined many more people will be losing employer coverage and going into the new government-subsidized markets, which will be called exchanges.

Administration officials say the big increase from last year’s estimates is no cause for alarm and that the administration is not forecasting an erosion of employer coverage or higher insurance costs.

About two-thirds of the increase is due to effects of newly signed legislation that raises costs for one part of the health care law, but still saves the government money overall. The rest is due to technical changes in Treasury assumptions about such matters as the distribution of income in America.

“The estimates do not assume changes in what exchanges look like, the cost of insurance, or the number of Americans who will get their insurance in this new marketplace,” Treasury spokeswoman Sabrina Siddiqui said in a statement Friday.

That explanation has drawn skepticism from Ways and Means Committee Republican staff members

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/03/02/lawmaker-wants-answers-after-cost-estimate-for-health-insurance-aid-rises-by/#ixzz1nzBMarOE

After expressing serious reservations about the policy discussions of the current election campaign, it seems to me useful to remember that the country’s principal problems can be addressed fairly straightforwardly.

Tax policies are available that would stimulate rational economic growth while reducing the deficit. Income taxes should be lowered on all incomes below $250,000, and taxes should be raised on elective spending, such as gasoline not consumed to earn the taxpayer’s living, as with taxis or delivery vehicles. Restaurant meals, luxury goods, and financial transactions other than simple equity or bond-market buying and selling could be lightly taxed, but very profitably for the Treasury. Taxes on capital-gains and dividend and interest income should all be reduced, and former Senator Santorum’s proposal for an extended and increased family tax credit and a reduced tax rate for manufacturing should be enacted, if not exactly as he proposes.

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In last Wednesday’s debate, when the Republican candidates were asked about their positions on birth control, Newt Gingrich parried with one of his usual tactics, a fusillade against the mainstream media. He told CNN’s John King, “You did not once in the 2008 campaign, not once did anybody in the elite media ask why Barack Obama voted in favor of legalizing infanticide. If we’re going to have a debate about who is the extremist on these issues, it is President Obama, who, as a state senator, voted to protect doctors who killed babies who survived the abortion.”

Two points of Gingrich’s barrage warrant assessment. First, did Barack Obama, as a state senator, vote “in favor of legalizing infanticide,” by voting “to protect doctors who killed babies who survived the abortion”? And second, has no one in the elite media ever discussed his record on the issue? Yes; and no, but essentially yes.

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The Obama administration’s contraception mandate touched off a firestorm when it was announced on January 20. Lawsuits challenging the rule were soon filed. Republican presidential hopefuls vowed to reverse it. Bills to do just that were introduced in Congress. The nation’s Catholic bishops (whose institutions would be most dramatically affected by the mandate) said — emphatically — that they would not comply.

At this point, it still remains unclear how much calm the administration’s February 10 “compromise” on the mandate will restore. The “compromise” conceded nothing to religious liberty; it was not meant to. It was meant to stop the political bleeding. The New York Times headline said that it “aimed to please the Catholic left.” It did so by applying a verbal salve. On cue, Sister Carol Keehan, president of the Catholic Health Association, said that she was “very pleased.” Liberal Catholic journalists and politicians were happy too. The bishops’ initial response was conciliatory as well, but on a careful second look they saw through the charade.

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