I HOPE POLITICO GOT IT WRONG!  I DO NOT TRUST POLITICO; IT IS TOO FAR LEFT IN POLITICS FOR ME TO TRUST IT.  SO, WHEN POLITICO REPORTS THAT THE USCCB IS READY TO HELP PASS OBAMACARE IF ONLY AN ANTI-ABORTION AMENDMENT IS ADDED TO THE SENATE BILL, MY HEART SINKS.

The POLITICO article (which I reproduce below) quotes Richard Doerflinger, staff member of the USCCB Committee Pro-Life Activities as saying in effect that if the Senate will only add someting like the Stupak Amendment of the House Bill to the Senate Bill “the bishops will work to achieve the passage of the health care legislation.”  I have great respect for Richard Doerflinger.  I worked with him during the years I served on the Committee.  He is a good man.  He knows medical/moral issues.  But I do not believe that he is an expert in the field of government.  If what POLITICO says that Doerflinger said is true, all I can say is that the Church will bear much of the blame for the transformation of America into something resembling Canada and Europe.  Concern for the poor can cause one to be shortsighted and fail to see that in the long run what is being proposed in Obamacare is another entitlement form of slavery for the poor.

I will yield to no one in my opposition to abortion on demand.  However, I believe that it would be a tragic mistake for the USCCB to support Obamacare just because something like the Stupak Amendment has been added to the Senate Bill.  My reason is because after Obamacare becomes law governmental beaurocracies would enact all kinds of regulations which would vitiate the force of a Stupak Amendment and abortions would be allowed with indirect taxpayer support.

Then, the abortion scene in the United States would be infinitely worse than it is today.  Read Mark Steyn’s article and Charles Krauthammer’s article which immediately follow the POLITICO article and you will begin to understand why I object to the USCCB lending any support to the passage of Obamacare.

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Bishops offer help with Senate

By DAVID ROGERS | 3/5/10 4:56 AM EST  POLITICO

If the House agrees to abortion terms, Richard Doerflinger, an associate director of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, says clerics will work to move the upper chamber.

The Roman Catholic bishops signaled Thursday that if agreement is reached with House leaders on anti-abortion language, the church would work to get the votes needed to protect the provisions in the Senate — and thereby advance the shared goal with Democrats of health care reform.

“We would strongly urge everyone, Democratic and Republican, to vote to waive the point of order,” Richard Doerflinger, an associate director of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, told POLITICO. “Whether it would be enough to get to 60 votes, I can’t predict. We would certainly try.”

“I think it’s something we should explore,” said Rep. Dale Kildee (D-Mich.), a longtime opponent of abortion. “It could be something that could carry out the bishops’ objective.”

Absent some agreement, there is the real threat that anti-abortion Democrats will withhold their votes, making it harder, if not impossible, to save health care in the House. The alternate route is a gamble but one that opens the door to what could be a powerful alliance benefiting Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and President Barack Obama as they try to jump-start the reform effort in the coming weeks.

With a large network of Catholic hospitals and the church’s gospel of social justice, the bishops have long called for expanded health coverage. As Kathy Saile, director of domestic policy for the conference, said last fall, “The bishops see it as a moral imperative and national priority.”

But abortion has been a stubborn dividing point with the two sides fighting over how tight to make the ban on federal funding.

In November, the bishops drove a tough bargain, winning an amendment by Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) that would severely restrict the ability of even private companies to provide abortion coverage under new state insurance exchanges. That House deal — since weakened by the Senate — is what the bishops want to revive now as part of Obama’s final push on health care. But to survive the Senate, any revisions would need 60 votes to overcome points of order under the expedited reconciliation procedures being contemplated.

Conventional wisdom has held that it will be next to impossible to cut this Gordian knot, since Republicans — with 41 votes — will be determined to disrupt health care reform. But in the November House debate, the bishops moved forcefully to squelch Republican efforts to derail the Stupak amendment; Doerflinger indicated the conference would take the same posture — that this is a vote of conscience.

“If the Stupak amendment or something equivalent to it were in the reconciliation package on the Senate floor and it was necessary to get 60 votes to waive the point of order,” he said, “we would strongly urge everyone, Democratic and Republican, to vote to waive the point of order.”

“That could be the key vote,” Kildee told POLITICO. “The bishops could say, ‘Are you really with us?’ That’s the key vote.”

Stupak has been warning that he will withhold his vote for health care reform absent some agreement, but in her weekly news conference, Pelosi insisted that there have been no ironclad threats and that she is open to talks.

“When people think there isn’t going to be a bill, they can take whatever position they want,” Pelosi said. “But now they know there is going to be a bill, and these members are saying, let’s talk.”

Kildee agreed, saying he continues to have discussions with Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), Pelosi’s close ally. “It doesn’t have to be Stupak. … I would look more at the objective than the language,” he said. “The speaker’s good at counting. Her count will determine how far she may go.”

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Mark Steyn: Obamacare worth the price to Democrats

So there was President Obama, giving his bazillionth speech on health care, droning yet again that

“now is the hour when we must seize the moment,” the same moment he’s been seizing every day of the week for the past year, only this time his genius photo-op guys thought it would look good to have him surrounded by men in white coats.
Why is he doing this? Why let “health” “care” “reform” stagger on like the rotting husk in a low-grade creature feature who refuses to stay dead no matter how many stakes you pound through his chest?
Because it’s worth it. Big time. I’ve been saying in this space for two years that the governmentalization of health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture. It redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state in fundamental ways that make limited government all but impossible. In most of the rest of the Western world, there are still nominally “conservative” parties, and they even win elections occasionally, but not to any great effect (Let’s not forget that Jacques Chirac was, in French terms, a “conservative”).
The result is a kind of two-party one-party state: Right-of-center parties will once in a while be in office, but never in power, merely presiding over vast left-wing bureaucracies that cruise on regardless.
Republicans seem to have difficulty grasping this basic dynamic. Less than three months ago, they were stunned at the way the Democrats managed to get 60 senators to vote for the health bill. Then Scott Brown took them back down to 59, and Republicans were again stunned to find the Dems talking about ramming this thing into law through the parliamentary device of “reconciliation.” And, when polls showed an ever larger number of Americans ever more opposed to Obamacare (by margins approaching three-to-one), Republicans were further stunned to discover that, in order to advance “reconciliation,” Democrat reconsiglieres had apparently been offering (illegally) various cosy Big Government sinecures to swing-state congressmen in order to induce them to climb into the cockpit for the kamikaze raid to push the bill through. The Democrats understand that politics is not just about Tuesday evenings every other November, but about everything else, too.
A year or two back, when the Canadian Islamic Congress attempted to criminalize my writing north of the border by taking me to the Canadian “Human Rights” Commission, a number of outraged American readers wrote to me, saying, “You need to start kicking up a fuss about this, Steyn, and then maybe Canadians will get mad and elect a conservative government that will end this nonsense.”
Makes perfect sense. Except that Canada already has a Conservative government under a Conservative prime minister, and the very head of the “human rights” commission investigating me was herself the Conservative appointee of a Conservative minister of justice. Makes no difference.
Once the state swells to a certain size, the people available to fill the ever-expanding number of government jobs will be statists – sometimes hard-core Marxist statists, sometimes social-engineering multiculti statists, sometimes fluffily “compassionate” statists, but always statists. The short history of the post-war welfare state is that you don’t need a president-for-life if you’ve got a bureaucracy-for-life: The people can elect “conservatives,” as the Germans have done and the British are about to do, and the Left is mostly relaxed about it because, in all but exceptional cases (Thatcher), they fulfill the same function in the system as the first-year boys at wintry English boarding schools who, for tuppence-ha’penny or some such, would agree to go and warm the seat in the unheated lavatories until the prefects strolled in and took their rightful place.
Republicans are good at keeping the seat warm. A bigtime GOP consultant was on TV, crowing that Republicans wanted the Dems to pass Obamacare because it’s so unpopular it will guarantee a GOP sweep in November.
OK, then what? You’ll roll it back – like you’ve rolled back all those other unsustainable entitlements premised on cobwebbed actuarial tables from 80 years ago? Like you’ve undone the federal Department of Education and of Energy and all the other nickel’n’dime novelties of even a universally reviled one-term loser like Jimmy Carter? Andrew McCarthy concluded a shrewd analysis of the political realities thus:
“Health care is a loser for the Left only if the Right has the steel to undo it. The Left is banking on an absence of steel. Why is that a bad bet?”
Indeed. Look at it from the Dems’ point of view. You pass Obamacare. You lose the 2010 election, which gives the GOP co-ownership of an awkward couple of years. And you come back in 2012 to find your health care apparatus is still in place, a fetid behemoth of toxic pustules oozing all over the basement, and, simply through the natural processes of government, already bigger and more expensive and more bureaucratic than it was when you passed it two years earlier. That’s a huge prize, and well worth a midterm timeout.
I’ve been bandying comparisons with Britain and France, but that hardly begins to convey the scale of it. Obamacare represents the government annexation of “one-sixth of the U.S. economy” – i.e., the equivalent of the entire British or French economy, or the entire Indian economy twice over. Nobody has ever attempted this level of centralized planning for an advanced society of 300 million people. Even the control-freaks of the European Union have never tried to impose a unitary “comprehensive” health care system from Galway to Greece. The Soviet Union did, of course, and we know how that worked out.
This “reform” is not about health care, and certainly not about “controlling costs.” As with Medicare, it “controls” costs by declining to acknowledge them, or pay them. Dr. William Schreiber of North Syracuse, N.Y., told CNN that he sees 120 patients per week – about 30 percent on Medicare, 65 private on private insurance plans whose payments take into account the Medicare reimbursement rates, and about 5 percent who do it the old-fashioned way and write a check. He calculates that, under Obamacare, for every $5 he now makes, he’ll get $2 in the future. Which suggests now would be a good time to retrain as a realtor or accountant, or the night clerk at the convenience store. Yet Congresswoman Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., justifies her support for Obamacare this way:
“I even had one constituent – you will not believe this, and I know you won’t, but it’s true – her sister died. This poor woman had no dentures. She wore her dead sister’s teeth.”
Is the problem of second-hand teeth a particular problem in this corner of New York? I haven’t noticed an epidemic of ill-fitting dentures on recent visits to the Empire State. George Washington had wooden teeth, but, presumably, these days the Sierra Club would object to the clear-cutting. Yet, even granting Congresswoman Slaughter the benefit of the doubt, is annexing the equivalent of a G7 economy the solution to what would seem to be the statistically unrepresentative problem of her constituent’s ill-fitting choppers? Is it worth reducing the next generation of Americans to indentured servitude to pay for this poor New Yorker’s dentured servitude?
Yes. Because government health care is not about health care, it’s about government. Once you look at it that way, what the Dems are doing makes perfect sense. For them.
©MARK STEYN

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The President Says Onward — Regardless

By CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER

So the yearlong production, set to close after Massachusetts’ devastatingly negative Jan. 19 review, saw the curtain raised one last time. ObamaCare lives.

After 34 speeches, three sharp electoral rebukes (Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts) and a seven-hour seminar, the president announced Wednesday his determination to make one last push to pass his health care reform.

The final act was carefully choreographed. The rollout began a week earlier with a couple of shows of bipartisanship: a Feb. 25 Blair House “summit” with Republicans, followed five days later with a few concessions tossed the Republicans’ way.

Show is the operative noun. Among the few Republican suggestions President Obama pretended to incorporate was tort reform. What did he suggest to address the plague of defensive medicine that a Massachusetts Medical Society study showed leads to about 25% of doctor referrals, tests and procedures being done for no medical reason?

A few ridiculously insignificant demonstration projects amounting to one-half of one-hundredth of 1% of the cost of Obama’s health care bill.

As for the Blair House seminar, its theatrical quality was obvious even before it began. The Democrats had already decided to go for a purely partisan bill. Obama signaled precisely that intent at the end of the summit show — then dramatically spelled it out just six days later in his 35th health care speech:

He is going for the party-line vote.

Unfortunately for Democrats, that seven-hour televised exercise had the unintended consequence of showing the Republicans to be not only highly informed on the subject, but also, as even Obama was forced to admit, possessed of principled objections — contradicting the ubiquitous Democratic/media meme that Republican opposition was nothing but nihilistic partisanship.

Republicans did so well, in fact, that in his summation, Obama was reduced to suggesting that his health care reform was indeed popular because when you ask people about individual items (for example, eliminating exclusions for pre-existing conditions or capping individual out-of-pocket payments) they are in favor.

Yet mystifyingly they oppose the whole package. How can that be?

New Taxes

Allow me to demystify. Imagine a bill granting every American a free federally delivered ice cream every Sunday morning. Provision 2: steak on Monday, also home-delivered. Provision 3: a dozen red roses every Tuesday.

You get the idea. Would each individual provision be popular in the polls? Of course.

However (life is a vale of howevers) suppose these provisions were bundled into a bill that also spelled out how the goodies are to be paid for and managed — say, half a trillion dollars in new taxes, half a trillion in Medicare cuts (cuts not to keep Medicare solvent but to pay for the ice cream, steak and flowers), 118 new boards and commissions to administer the bounty-giving, and government regulation dictating, for example, how your steak was to be cooked. How do you think this would poll?

Perhaps something like 3-1 against, which is what the latest CNN poll shows is the citizenry’s feeling about the current Democratic health care bills.

Late last year, Democrats were marveling at how close they were to historic health care reform, noting how much agreement had been achieved among so many factions. The only remaining detail was how to pay for it.

No More Debate

Well, yes. That has generally been the problem with democratic governance: cost. The disagreeable absence of a free lunch.

Which is what drove even strong Obama supporter Warren Buffett to go public with his judgment that the current Senate bill, while better than nothing, is a failure because the country desperately needs to bend the cost curve down and the bill doesn’t do it. Buffett’s advice would be to start over and get it right.

Obama has chosen differently, however. The time for debate is over, declared the nation’s seminar leader in chief. The man who vowed to undo Washington’s wicked ways has directed the Congress to ram Obama-Care through, by one vote if necessary, under the parliamentary device of “budget reconciliation.”

The man who ran as a post-partisan is determined to remake a sixth of the U.S. economy despite the absence of support from a single Republican in either house, the first time anything of this size and scope has been enacted by pure party-line vote.

Surprised?

You can only be disillusioned if you were once illusioned.

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