Ruminations, March 7, 2010

What’s behind the Democrats push on health care?

President Obama has stated, “The [health care] bottom line is, our proposal is paid for."  According to Senator Joe Lieberman (D, CT), “this legislation would reduce the federal deficit by $132 billion over the next ten years and will continue to reduce costs by billions more in the following decade. This bill will also extend the solvency of the Medicare Trust Fund for an additional nine years.”

That sounds great and, if you parse every word and its meaning, it’s not false. However, in order to say that the “proposal is paid for” or that it “reduce[s] the federal deficit,” the Democrats and the President have had to go to extraordinary lengths.

• The numbers show ten years of revenue and balance it against six years of expenses. According to Douglass Emmendorf, Director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the government plan would collect some $500 billion in revenue and $500 billion in Medicare cuts over 10 years. Costs, however, are projected over six years. So, comparing the last six years of revenues to the last six years of expenditures, the $132 billion in deficit reduction becomes a $268 billion deficit increase.
• The $500 billion in Medicare cuts will be something that Congress will not let stand. It will be added under another bill. But putting the $500 billion in another bill does not make it disappear. It will still be spent by the government. So now the $268 billion increase over the last six years becomes, proportionately, $568 billion.
• It also has some dubious revenue sources. For example it counts some $52 billion in Social Security revenue as an offset. Wait a minute. Social Security is an unfunded liability now and we are reducing Social Security revenues to pay for this health plan? And here’s an interesting footnote from Emmendorf’s memo to Senator Harry Reid (D, NV) on the effects of the health care plan on the budget: “Off-budget effects include changes in Social Security spending and revenues as well as spending by the U.S. Postal Service.” The U.S. Postal Service?
• According to Richard Foster, Chief Actuary for Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the net result (i.e., after additional revenue and taxes have been taken into account) will be an increase in costs of $222 billion over ten years, and since expenses are only taken into account for six years, the actual results may be much worse.

• The Medicare Trustees’ projection for long-term cost growth has been tinkered with by the Obama Administration to make the long-term health care costs without the proposed bill look worse and at the same time it reduced the number of aging people entering into the program to make the future demands of Medicare look better.
• Medicare reimbursements to doctors are scheduled to be cut by better than 20 percent. The effect of these cuts would be that doctors would treat fewer Medicare patients. To avoid this scenario, Congress will offset the cuts and provide the necessary funds, estimated by the Administration at $245 billion over 10 years. But the funds will be provided in a separate bill. While these funds are undoubtedly health care related costs, Democrats have excluded them from the health care estimates.
• Last Friday, the CBO, even with the restrictions of evaluating the limited set of data Congress gave it, projected the health care bill will “increase … the federal budget deficit by $239 billion over the 2010-2019 period."

It’s clear that we cannot afford the proposal in Congress. Why do the Democrats continue to push it? Why do they continue to jigger the numbers in an attempt to make them appear to be something that they are not?

Could it be that pro-Obama columnist David Ignatius of the Washington Post reflected the Democrat’s attitude when he encouraged them to forget about the numbers and make health care a moral crusade? Could it be that he wants to do what he thinks is right regardless of the implied consequences because, being America, he thinks that sooner or later we will figure out how to pay for it?

Or is there something more devious at work? In order to pay for the Obama health care program in the future, we will have to cut something. Could it be that Democrats accept the bogus health care numbers because they anticipate that (1) once enacted, people and the economy will become so dependent on it that it can never be rescinded, and (2) the money will be found elsewhere through drastic cuts (for example, – the Defense Department’s budget for 2010 is over $663 billion) or higher taxes?

The Democratic health care proposals are economically unsound. Are the Democrats oblivious to these numbers or are they just devious? Maybe they are just so focused on the political process that they are not paying attention.

“The bottom line is, our proposal is paid for."  By whom, Mr. President?

Armenia and Turkey – no biggie?

Representative Howard Berman (D, CA), the Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, wants it both ways: he wants Congress to make a profound statement and wants the rest of the world to ignore the profound statement.

Last week, the House Foreign Affairs Committee approved by a vote 23-22 a resolution that stated the Ottoman Empire (the predecessor to modern day Turkey) had committed genocide on Armenians in 1915. While responding to his constituencies, Berman felt that the resolution was significant enough for the entire House of Representatives to declare before the world that the Ottomans are guilty of genocide. At the same time, he downplayed the impact that the declaration would have in the international relations, stating “"I believe the Turks, however deep their dismay today, fundamentally agree that the U.S.-Turkish alliance is simply too important to get sidetracked by a nonbinding resolution passed by the House of Representatives." In other words, no biggie.

The definition of genocide is the systematic destruction of a people. It was first used to describe the attempted destruction of Jewry by Nazis during World War II. Since that time, the term has been used by groups of people who seek, rightly or wrongly, to vilify another group.  Israelis have been accused of genocide by Palestinians; Anglo-Americans by Native Americans; and Turks by Armenians.

Congress, dealing with local constituencies – many of whom are of Armenian ancestry – decided to curry favor with them and leaving President Obama to pick up the pieces and try to maintain a relationship with Turkey. Actually, Obama bears some of the responsibility for this vote since, during his campaign in 2008, he stated that he would have the Ottomans/Turkey declared guilty of genocide and Congress took him at his word. However, between the campaign and today, Obama has had to face the realities of governing and foreign policy, and decided that the declaration wouldn’t be in the best interests of the United States — but it was too late.

What actually happened? There are disputations of some of the action but two things not in dispute: between 1915 and 1923 between 600,000 and 1.5 million Armenians died, and the Turks had a hand in it.

On the eve of World War I in 1914, Armenia was no longer independent and straddled a border: partly in Russia and partly in the Ottoman Empire. As a Christian people, Armenia’s relationship with the Muslim Ottoman Empire was at times precarious, to say the least. Twenty years earlier, when the Armenians had begun to demand more rights, the Sultan massacred between 80,000 and 300,000. When World War I broke out, the Ottomans cast their lot with Germany against Russia, leaving the Armenians right in the middle. Many Armenians saw a possible Russian victory as leading to an independent Armenia and began to work with Russia.

By 1915, the Russians had organized Armenian volunteers in its army and some Armenians worked against the Ottomans as Russian agents. The Ottomans, always suspicions of Armenians, undertook to remove them from the border regions. Although those charged with removing the Armenians were officially told to provide them with food and water, many historians consider their admonitions as cover (“Give them plenty of food and water, Kerem.” Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. “You know what I mean?”)

During the removal, between 600,000 and 1,500,000 Armenians died. What ever the precise cause of death (the Turkish civil war, disease, malnutrition), the proximate cause was the Turks’ actions. Turks, understandably sensitive to this issue, often point out that the few Armenian villages that were not in the region of conflict were left alone; hence, according to the Turks, it could not be described as genocide.

Representative Berman may not think the House’s declaration of genocide a biggie but, evidently, Turkey thinks it is. In response to last week’s House committee vote, Turkey has withdrawn its ambassador to the United States.

And the President and Secretary of State Clinton think it’s a biggie, too. They are tasked with maintaining amicable relations with Turkey and their reasons for maintaining this relationship are many. After all, Turkey is a member of NATO and has provided troops for many operations including Afghanistan. It is a gateway to northern Iraq for the United States and home to a U.S. air base. Add to that the fact that the ruling party in Turkey is moving from being a secular government in a Muslim country towards becoming a Muslim government in a Muslim country. And Turkey has increasingly cordial ties with Iran and Syria and increasing hostility toward Israel.

Describing the dilemma in which the United States now finds itself, Sedat Ergin last week wrote in the Turkish newspaper Hurriyet: “On one side of the scale, there is the Congress under the influence of ethnic lobby groups, and on the other, there are the greater United States’ interests in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and Caucasus. It is up to the American administration to come up with the best choice between the two.”

It sounds like it could be a biggie and Representative Berman has not done his president or country any favors.

Quote without comment

Will Rogers: “This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer.”