NRO: The Case For Hoffman: On the Right, an Upstate Upstart

The case for rallying around Dede Scozzafava, the liberal and nominal Republican seeking to represent New York’s conservative 23rd Congressional District, eludes us. Scozzafava was thrust imprudently into the nomination by upstate Republican grandees faced with a special election following Republican John McHugh’s leaving his seat to become secretary of the army. The Republicans once again have shot themselves in the right foot. more…..

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Politico: Obama strategy: Marginalize most powerful critics

President Obama is working systematically to marginalize the most powerful forces behind the Republican Party, setting loose top White House officials to undermine conservatives in the media, business and lobbying worlds.

With a series of private meetings and public taunts, the White House has targeted the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the biggest-spending pro-business lobbying group in the country; Rush Limbaugh, the country’s most-listened-to conservative commentator; and now, with a new volley of combative rhetoric in recent days, the insurance industry, Wall Street executives and Fox News. more…..

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Chicago Sun-Times: Excuses wearing thin for Obama, media pals

Have you heard the news? President Obama inherited an economic mess from the Bush administration.

You say that’s hardly news? But it’s been the message sounded over and over by the White House. Top Obama adviser David Axelrod said on one of the Sunday news shows, “He walked in the door, we had the worst economy since the Great Depression.” In San Francisco, Obama talked of being “busy with our mop.” White House heavy hitter Rahm Emanuel used the worst-economy-since-the-Depression line on a public TV news show. more…..

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Michelle Malkin: Obamacare doctor bribe fails in Senate, Reid whines

It looked like the fix was in. The “Doc Fix,” that is. As the Heritage Foundation has been reporting, the White House and Dem leaders scurried today to try and pass a $247 billion payoff to doctors groups as an enticement to support Obamacare.

Surprise: The fix failed. The cloture voted on S. 1776 failed by 47-53. more…..

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Galveston County Conservative Examiner: Acorn supported Republican — WHAT?

Glenn Beck vetted Doug Hoffman, the CONSERVATIVE Republican candidate who is running for a Congressional seat in New York State, on his radio talk show this morning. He stated that Newt Gingrich has teamed up with ACORN to support Dede Scozzafava, who is also supported by the Daily Koz and the Working Family Party. Her conservative voting record had a high score of 15 out of 100. Hoffman said that 46 Democrats had a more conservative score than she, who is pro union and pro card check, among other things. A New York State Assemblywoman for eleven years, she is a career politician. Hoffman said the Democratic Candidate, supported by SEIU, is no better. Bill Owens is heavily supported by the DNC and would most definitely be a Pelosi puppet. more…..

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American Thinker: DOJ forces town to put party labels on candidates for racial reasons

A small North Carolina city is getting a taste of what life is like now that the Justice Department is run by Attorney General Eric Holder. When the city voters decided to do away with the party affiliation of candidates in local elections, the Justice Department came down on them like the proverbial load of bricks.

The Department overruled the decisions of the voters and decided that equal rights for black voters cannot be achieved without candidates being clearly labeled as Democrats. Ben Conery of the Washington Times reports: more…..

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-Cnation

This is who the RNC, Newt Gingrich and John Boehner have lined up behind? Are they out of their minds?

Dede Scozzafava, NY-23 congressional candidate, had the brilliant idea of staging a press conference in front of Conservative party candidate Doug Hoffman’s campaign office in upstate New York.

In  a move that…I dunno, anyone with an IQ above ‘dipshit’ could have predicted, she was promptly surrounded by Hoffman supporters bearing “Hoffman For Congress” signs. Gee, what were the odds of that happening?

The point of the press conference seems to have been to call out Hoffman for not debating her in public. Well, to add insult to her already considerable injury, it turns out that back in August, Hoffman proposed a series of debates with Scozzafava, even offering to foot the bill for the venues.

Statement by Doug Hoffman’s campaign on Scozzafava’s call for more debates:

Senior Communications Advisor Rob Ryan said:

“Dede Scozzafava is either extremely cynical or has a very short memory. On August 19, 2009 the Hoffman campaign challenged Dede Scozzafava to a series of 3-5 debates across the district. We asked the Republican County Chairs to sponsor them. The Hoffman campaign even offered to pick-up the rental costs of the venues. Both Scozzafava and the GOP County Chairs refused.

“Dede Scozzafava is desperate; she flip-flops on issue after issue, she calls the police on reporters, and now she claims she hasn’t had an opportunity debate. It’s sad, Dede Scozzafava, staff needs to tell her that she’s the spoiler in this race and that for the good of the Republican Party and her own reputation she should drop out of the race now.”

The Hoffman people couldn’t have written a better ad if they tried.

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It may be too soon to bid Dede a “don’t let the door hit you on the way out”, but if her support doesn’t tank after this it’ll be  miracle.

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-Cnation

Heritage Foundation Morning Bell for October 21, 2009

Politico’s Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei report today: President Obama is working systematically to marginalize the most powerful forces behind the Republican Party, setting loose top White House officials to undermine conservatives in the media, business and lobbying worlds.

Recent Entries WaPo Poll: Americans Still Oppose Obamacare Adult Time for Adult Crime: Ralph David Cruz, Jr. In the Green Room: Bill Kristol On the Big Story of Obamacare Iran’s Nuclear Poker Today’s Calamity: A Call for Transparency

With a series of private meetings and public taunts, the White House has targeted the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the biggest-spending pro-business lobbying group in the country; Rush Limbaugh, the country’s most-listened-to conservative commentator; and now, with a new volley of combative rhetoric in recent days, the insurance industry, Wall Street executives and Fox News.
Obama aides are using their powerful White House platform, combined with techniques honed in the 2008 campaign, to cast some of the most powerful adversaries as out of the mainstream and their criticism as unworthy of serious discussion.

We are in no way the first to point this out, but this Obama administration strategy is taken directly from the pages of Chicago community organizer Saul Alinsky’s book Rules for Radicals. It identifies thirteen rules for progressive activists including, “The thirteenth rule: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Explaining just how far progressives must be willing to go to marginalize their “enemies” Alinsky explains a few pages later:

Many liberals during our attack on the then-school superintendent, were pointing out that after all he wasn’t a 100 percent devil, he was a regular churchgoer, he was a good family man, and he was generous in his contributions to charity. Can you imagine in the arena of conflict charging that so-and-so is a racist bastard but then diluting the impact of the attack with qualifying remarks such as, “He is a good churchgoing man, generous to charity and a good husband”? This becomes political idiocy.

And then in his final chapter, Alinsky reveals what progressives really think of the average American: “Our rebels have contemptuously rejected the values and way of life of the middle class. They have stigmatized it as materialistic, decadent, bourgeois, degenerate, imperialistic, war-mongering, brutalized, and corrupt. They are right.”
Contempt for average Americans, and the desire to marginalize their common sense questions is both at the core of the Progessive vision for governance and completely antithetical to the values of our Founding Fathers. Thomas G. West, author of The Progressive Revolution in Politics and Political Science, explains:

The Founders thought that laws should be made by a body of elected officials with roots in local communities. They should not be “experts,” but they should have “most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society” (Madison). The wisdom in question was the kind on display in The Federalist, which relentlessly dissected the political errors of the previous decade in terms accessible to any person of intelligence and common sense.

The Progressives wanted to sweep away what they regarded as this amateurism in politics. … Only those educated in the top universities, preferably in the social sciences, were thought to be capable of governing. Politics was regarded as too complex for common sense to cope with. … Only government agencies staffed by experts informed by the most advanced modern science could manage tasks previously handled within the private sphere.
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The Progressives did not intend to abolish democracy, to be sure. They wanted the people’s will to be more efficiently translated into government policy. But what democracy meant for the Progressives is that the people would take power out of the hands of locally elected officials and political parties and place it instead into the hands of the central government, which would in turn establish administrative agencies run by neutral experts, scientifically trained, to translate the people’s inchoate will into concrete policies.

This is why you have Obama’s Energy Secretary telling auto makers how they must build cars. This is why Obama’s health care plan empowers a panel of health care “experts” to reorganize one-sixth of our economy from the top down. Commonsense questions like, “Won’t our electricity bills go up if we mandate power companies use more expensive alternative energy sources?”, and “Won’t our health insurance premiums go up if everyone is charged the same price and nobody can be refused coverage?” can’t be tolerated. People voicing such criticisms must be isolated and silenced. That’s what the White House campaign the Politico identifies today is all about.

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Here is a roundup of todays developments in the NY-23 race, a special election to fill the congressional seat vacated by Republican John M. McHugh, who resigned from office to become United States Secretary of the Army on September 21, 2009

For Republicans, the real race is between liberal Republican GOP candidate Dede Scozzafava and Conservative candidate Doug Hoffman

Go here for background on this race

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Washington Times: EDITORIAL: Dede’s police state

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, House Minority Leader John Boehner and the National Republican Congressional Committee are now in the position of endorsing thugocracy. Unless they withdraw their endorsements and financial support for left-wing Republican Dede Scozzafava, they will effectively condone a blatant, unwarranted and somewhat frightening attack on a free press.

Ms. Scozzafava, a New York state assemblyman running as a nominal Republican in a three-way special election for Congress, is no favorite of conservatives. Her extreme support for legalized abortion, close ties with the disgraced leftist social group ACORN, and record of high taxing and spending put her in some ways to the left of Democratic candidate Bill Owens. more…..

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Human Events: Hoffman Bid in NY-23 Becomes National Conservative Crusade

With only two weeks to go, conservative businessman Doug Hoffman’s race in New York’s 23rd congressional district is becoming a top priority among conservatives nationwide.

The insurgent conservative’s gains may be due to Hoffman’s pro-life, anti-bailout, and anti-spending platform — or disgust with liberal GOP nominee Dede Scozzafava and the means in which she was given the nomination by ten Republican county chairmen – or both. more…..

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Washington Post: NY-23: Can Doug Hoffman Win?

President Barack Obama heads to New York City later today to raise campaign cash for businessman Bill Owens, the party’s nominee in the Nov. 3 special election in New York’s 23rd district, but the emerging storyline in the race is whether Conservative party candidate Doug Hoffman has a real chance at winning.

Hoffman, who began the race as an after-thought, has quickly risen into a national conservative cause celebre — securing considerable financial backing from the Club for Growth and winning endorsements from the likes of former Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.), former Rep. Dick Armey (R-Texas) and social conservative stalwart Gary Bauer.  more…..

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Weekly Standard: Scozzafava Calls Cops:

Tonight, Dede Scozzafava, the Republican candidate for the November 3 special election in the 23rd congressional district, spoke to about 100 Republicans at the Lewis County GOP dinner at the Elks Lodge 1605. After a dinner of turkey, mashed potatoes, and stuffing, Scozzafava fended off criticism that she wasn’t as conservative as third-party candidate Doug Hoffman and urged her supporters to vote for her in order to keep her Democratic opponent Bill Owens from serving as a rubber stamp for Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama’s agenda in Washington. It was a fairly typical evening–until the speech ended and someone with Scozzafava’s campaign called the police. On me. more…..

UPDATE: It was Scozzafava’s union boss husband who called the cops

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Washington Examiner: No wonder Scozzafava called the cops, Hoffman is gaining fast, Right rallies for upset UPDATED!

Politicians like far-left New York Assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava who have Republican congressional nominations handed to them by local GOP poobahs sometimes turn out to be lousy candidates. Evidence is accumulating fast that such is the case in the rapidly heating-up special election campaign to fill the seat vacated by Rep. John McHugh, R-NY.

New York GOP leaders could have gone with Doug Hoffman, a well-known and successful entrepreneur of clear and unquestioned conservative principles. Instead, they chose Scozzafava, who has been endorsed in years past by ACORN’s Working Families Party, and who supports the Obama-Reid-Pelosi agenda across the board, including Big Labor’s Card Check proposal to abolish the secret ballot in workplace representation elections. more…..

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Washington Independent: NY-23: Hoffman Calls on Scozzafava to Leave the Race

The campaign of Doug Hoffman, the Conservative Party’s candidate in New York’s 23rd Congressional District, is clearly enjoying the bar fight between The Weekly Standard and GOP candidate Dede Scozzafava. After seeing that Scozzafava’s campaign released private emails between a spokesman and the Standard’s reporter John McCormick, a Hoffman spokesman called on the troubled Republican candidate to hang it up. more…..

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Donate to Doug Hoffman’s campaign

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-Cnation

We all know about the well-documented cases of voter registration fraud involving ACORN and its employees over the past couple of years. The argument from ACORN’s supporters has always been that the forgeries have been so obvious that they never turned into actual votes or counted ballots.

It seems to me that in terms of scanning for voter fraud, if you’re looking for names like Tony Romo and Mickey Mouse, you’re not looking for the innocuous names like Kimberlee Truell or Michael Ward.

It’s long been my contention (I don’t believe I’ve ever blogged about it though so you’re just gonna have to take my word) that the Mickey Mouse-type registrations were a smokescreen, nothing more; that for every bogus, highly visible ‘Mickey Mouse” registration or ballot that was being discovered, there was a below-the-radar, extremely legitimate looking registration or ballot slipping through unnoticed.

If I were a fraudster, that’s how I’d do it.

In Troy, New York, that may be exactly how they did it.

From FOX:

‘They Tried to Steal an Election,’ N.Y. Voter Fraud Case Heats Up

Thirty-eight forged or fraudulent ballots have been thrown out, according to records at the Rensselaer County Board of Elections in Troy, N.Y. Enough votes, an election official admits, to likely have tipped the November election to the Democrats.

Brian Suozzo voted with an absentee ballot in the Working Families Party primary on Sept. 15 because, as his application stated, he was “at home recovering from medical procedure.”

Jessica Boomhower’s application said she would be attending a “work conference in Boston.”

Michael Ward couldn’t vote in person because he was “taking care of elderly parent.”

Kimberlee Truell was on a “Bus trip to casino,” as was Miguel Vazques.

The only problem with these absentee ballot records at the Rensselaer County Board of Elections in Troy, N.Y., is that they’re phony, voters and investigators say — and they’ve prompted what’s being called an unprecedented investigation of suspected voter fraud.

Thirty-eight forged or fraudulent ballots have been thrown out — enough votes, an election official admits, to likely have tipped the city council and county elections in November to the Democrats. Candidates would have been able to run both on the Democratic and Working Families Party lines in two weeks, and that could have given the Democrats the general election.

According to the FOX News article, the absentee ballots were the work of the Working Families Party, an ACORN front group that has been gaining strength in New York.

Hillary Clinton garnered 2.7 percent of her total votes from the WFP line when she first ran for Senate in 2000, which increased to 5 percent of her total vote in 2006. In September, Clinton’s former campaign manager for her 2000 Senate run, New York City Councilman Bill DeBlasio, who has been endorsed by the WFP, beat two long-established politicians in the Democratic primary. Critics also accuse the Working Families Party of having a long association with the troubled activist group, ACORN. Bertha Lewis, ACORN’s CEO, is one of the party’s co-founders. The New York Times reported this month that “Patrick Gaspard, the White House political director, worked with ACORN in New York to set up the Working Families political party and sat on the party’s board with Ms. Lewis.”

So basically what we have here is yet another ACORN voter fraud scandal. One that will, undoubtedly, go uninvestigated by Congress (John Conyers already backed away fron an ACORN investigation once before) or Eric Holder’s Justice Department (you know, the same Justice Department that let the New Black Panthers walk away from a clear cut case of voter intimidation in Pennsylvania, and who just forced a small North Carolina town to hold partisan electons so black voters would know who to vote for. Interestingly enough the DOJ  official responsible for both of these cases that seem to have been decided primarily on race, is Assistant Attorney General Loretta King, a woman who is rapidly acquiring a well-earned reputation for placing blind justice second to a racial agenda, and who, in my opinion, is nothing more than a dolled-up racist in a position of authority..

Above all though, these are Barack Obama’s people; he’s one of them, he owes them, and he will continue to protect them.

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-Cnation

Sez the sender, ‘What a load of fuckwits:’

I couldn’t agree more. It’s almost inconceivable to me that this is the legislative body of the greatest nation in the world.

Absolutely disgraceful.

Democrats lock Republicans out of committee room

By Susan Crabtree – 10/20/09 05:47 PM ET

Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.) locked Republicans out of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee room to keep them from meeting when Democrats aren’t present.

Towns’ action came after repeated public ridicule from the leading Republican on the committee, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), over Towns’s failure to launch an investigation into Countrywide Mortgage’s reported sweetheart deals to VIPs.

For months Towns has refused Republican requests to subpoena records in the case. Last Thursday Committee Republicans, led by Issa, were poised to force an open vote on the subpoenas at a Committee mark-up meeting. The mark-up was abruptly canceled. Only Republicans showed up while Democrats chairs remained empty.

Republicans charged that Towns cancelled the meeting to avoid the subpoena vote. Democrats first claimed the mark-up was canceled due to a conflict with the Financial Services Committee. Later they said it was abandoned after a disagreement among Democratic members on whether to subpoena records on the mortgage industry’s political contributions to Republicans.

A GOP committee staffer captured video of Democrats leaving their separate meeting in private chambers after the mark-up was supposed to have begun. He spliced the video to other footage of the Democrats’ empty chairs at the hearing room, set it to the tune of “Hit the Road, Jack” and posted it on the Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s minority webpage, where it remained as of press time.

The Hill has the full story.

In the mean time, here’s that video:

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-Cnation

Heritage Foundation Morning Bell for October 20, 2009

After thousands of Americans attended hundreds of townhalls this summer, after the President of the United States delivered a rare speech to a Joint Session of Congress, after endless coverage of legislative markups in the relevant congressional committees, what if the Senate began actual floor votes on the health care overhaul and the drive-by media refused to cover it? Couldn’t happen? It already is.

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This week the Senate is set to vote on a measure that would approve spending for almost one quarter of Obamacare’s $1 trillion price tag. Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) has introduced, and Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) is moving to the floor, S. 1776 which, as we explained yesterday, raises Medicare provider reimbursement rates by $247 billion over the next ten years and $3 trillion over the next 75. Under current law, doctors nationwide are set to take a 21.5% pay cut for every Medicare patient they see starting in January 2010. Such a cut would lead many doctors to abandon Medicare patients, thus significantly undermining our entire health care system.

Doctor’s reimbursement rates do need to be fixed. But such a fix must be part of comprehensive reform of our health care system. Instead, Reid and the White House are trying to pull a fast one on the American people, claiming “the Medicare doctors’ payment discrepancy is a budgetary problem” while “health insurance reform tackles a serious regulatory problem.” The Obama administration is trying to add $247 billion in deficit health care spending one week, and then turn around and claim their health care plan is deficit neutral the next. The trickery has come in for some heavy bi-partisan criticism. Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) said he thought the tactic is a “mistake”, and Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN) told Politico: “I am for the fix, but I don’t think we should blow the roof off the deficit — not at a time when we are already running record deficits.”

Robert Bixby, Director of the nonpartisan, grassroots Concord Coalition clearly articulates why the Medicare reimbursement fix must be considered part of health care reform:

Dealing with the ‘doc fix’ in a separate bill, outside of health care reform, would change the scoring of the bills but not the effect on the deficit. If policymakers believe that the current SGR [Sustainable Growth Rate] formula is unrealistic, they should replace it with a more appropriate policy and pay for the change in keeping with their pledge to reform health care in a deficit-neutral way. If paying for this SGR change means there would be fewer offsets on the table to pay for expanded coverage, then policymakers would be forced to appropriately weigh their priorities and make the necessary tough choices — either scale back other costs in the health reform package or find more ways to pay for the larger bill.

The Tea Party movement that swept the nation this summer is already making life difficult for politicians that say they care about deficit spending but then support policies that undermine that goal. The Boston Tea Party of 1773 set the stage for the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Will the debate over S.1776 set the stage for something much larger and important?

QUICK HITS

Gee, another communist in the Obama White House? Who would have guessed?

First Van Jones, then Anita Dunn, and now Ron Bloom.

A video has just surfaced showing manufacturing czar Ron Bloom addressing an audience on February 27-28 2008, in which he says:

“we know that the free market is nonsense”

and

“We kind of agree with Mao that political power comes largely from the barrel of a gun”

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Gateway Pundit has more

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-Cnation

The race for the NY-23 Congressional seat is heating up, with GOP-supported RINO Dede Scozzafava and Conservative Doug Hoffman both vying for the Republican vote.

Michelle Malkin has been all over this, so I’ll defer to her for the background:

Michelle Malkin:

A message from NY-23 conservative candidate Doug Hoffman

Dede Scozzafava An ACORN-Friendly, Big Labor-Backing, Tax-and-Spend Radical in GOP Clothing

Radical leftist Dede Scozzafava can’t stand the heat

From Dana Loesch and the movement to stop Scozzafava: DumpDede.com:

Republicans in New York’s 23rd District have chosen to nominate and support an ACORN-backed, Working Families Party-endorsed liberal over conservative candidate Doug Hoffman. Newt Gingrich called this shift to the left the “new revolution.” It’s not the new revolution: it’s political death. It’s indicative of a festering problem with many of the GOP all across the country. It’s an allegiance to party over America, party over conservatism. Millions have not taken to the streets since February of 2009 for nothing. The Republican party has this week to Dump Dede Scozzafava or the tea party will take over for them. Issue your statements and throw your support behind conservatism, ladies and gents; the clock starts now.

If we want to bring conservative values back to congress, we need to think and act beyond our own districts and support conservative candidates wherever they’re found, particularly in districts where the GOP puts up an actual liberal nominee such as Dede Scozzafava.

Earlier this year, Scozzafava actually considered running as a Democrat for this same seat, and for a State Senate seat back in 2008.

This is not a principaled woman.

And yet, these self-destructive idiots in the GOP….it’s like the summer of ’09 never happened.

Conservative candidate Doug Hoffmnan has a legitimate shot at this seat. According to a 10/15 poll of 617 likely voters by Siena College, Democratic candidate Bill Owens was pulling 33 percent, Scozzafava 29 percent and Hoffman 23 percent. While it seems clear at this point that Hoffman and Scozzafava are splitting the Republican vote in this normally solid-Republican district, the mounting national media attention – especially conservative media – to this race and to Scozzafava’s significant shortcomings compared to Hoffmans strong conservative values, as well as the pressure being put on the GOP for supporting a liberal like Scozzafava in the first place,  could and should give Hoffman the momentum he needs to overtake Scozzafava.

We may still end up with a split vote though, but in my opinion, I’d rather see a Democrat win than another liberal masquerading as a Republican. If we don’t get the seat, we will still have achieved a very important goal, which is to let the GOP know in no uncertain terms that we can and will keep them from power if they don’t return to the core principals of conservatism.

We stand on principal or we stand for nothing.

-Cnation

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Donate to Doug Hoffman’s campaign

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Related:

tcotreport.com: Nomination of Liberal Republican in New York 23rd Tainted by Breach of Trust

RCP: NY-23: Club for Growth Launches TV Ad

AP: NY House race seen as test for GOP, Obama

Heritage Foundation Morning Bell for October 19, 2009

In his primetime health care address before a Joint Session of Congress, President Barack Obama promised the American people: “I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits – either now or in the future. Period.” But it is hard work adding $1 trillion in government spending while claiming with a straight face that you are not adding to the deficit. Enter White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel who has just the solution: just strip out $247 billion of the spending in the bill, pass it separately, and voila … your job just got one-fourth easier.

Recent Entries Guest Blogger: Michele Bachmann (R-MN) on Free Trade Agreements The Administration Gets It Wrong on Arms Control, Again Obamacare Is Not Reform. It’s Just Medicaid on Steroids. New Fall Foundry Series: Adult Time for Adult Crimes Cash for Clunkers: The Bus Version

The specific issue at hand is the centrally planned price control regime the federal government uses to reimburse doctor’s who participate in Medicare. Medicare reimburses doctors and other medical professionals for their services according to a congressionally created fee schedule that is annually adjusted by the Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) formula. The idea is relatively simple: If Medicare spending grows faster than our overall economy (which is almost always the case), then payments to Medicare providers are supposed to be reduced proportionately to keep expenditures in line over a period of time.

Problem is every year Congress–under both Democratic and Republican leadership–routinely blocks the cuts from going into effect. Subsequently, the necessary cumulative cut in Medicare payments grows bigger. Without a change to current law, payments to physicians would be reduced by 21.5% as of January 1, 2010. The Senate Finance Committee bill addresses this problem by raising the reimbursement rate for one year and then pretending that Congress will allow massive cuts for the next 9 years. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) rightfully called the Senate Finance Committee proposal a façade.

The Obama administration’s proposed solution, however, is no more honest. Instead of pretending Congress will cut doctor’s Medicare reimbursement rates, the Senate wants to pretend the doc fix isn’t part of health care reform. So Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-NV) dissembled Friday: “Correcting the Medicare doctors’ payment discrepancy is a budgetary problem — health insurance reform tackles a serious regulatory problem. That’s why we need to fix the Medicare doctors’ payments first, outside of health reform.” The Washington Post editorial board responded this morning:

Mr. Reid’s attempt to distinguish the budgetary and regulatory issues is nonsensical. The health reform measure includes all sorts of changes in the ways that various providers are compensated. True, the problem with inadequate Medicare payments is something of a preexisting condition to health reform, but that does not make it unrelated. The so-called doc fix is being rushed to the Senate floor this week in advance of health reform not because it has nothing to do with health reform but because it has everything to do with it.
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A president who says that he is serious about dealing with the dire fiscal picture cannot credibly begin by charging this one to the national credit card, with no concern for the later generations who will have to pay the bill.

And it is the later generations that should be particularly concerned with this shell game. That $247 billion price tag is just the ten year cost of the doc fix. Looking over the long-term, the 75-year cost to our national debt is another $3 trillion. This past Friday the Obama administration admitted that the federal budget deficit for the fiscal year that just ended was $1.4 trillion, nearly a trillion dollars greater than the year before and the largest shortfall relative to the size of the economy since 1945. Just like Obamacare’s massive expansion of the Medicaid rolls, the doc fix shell game exposes the fact that Obamacare is just a continuation of the current budget busting health care system, not real reform.

QUICK HITS