Ann Coulter demolishes Democratic myths about ObamaCare/KennedyCare
Bookworm on Aug 27 2009 at 9:43 am | Filed under: Health
I had originally missed the first article in Ann Coulter’s series, but I went back and read it after reading her brilliant second article in the same series. Coulter brilliantly makes the case for the efficiencies of the marketplace versus the inefficiencies of government control. The bottom line is that our health care is in the mess it’s in now because we already have too much government control, not too little.
Related posts:
- Must read about health care myths
- ObamaCare is not about Health Care — by guest blogger Danny Lemieux
- A conversation with an ObamaCare supporter — by guestblogger Deanna
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chappaquiddick_incident
The important part is the first. Read what the two friends Kennedy called over said and did.
You’d think that the Left would be scared of Sarah Palin because they thought she was a loose cannon and someone incapable of making the right decisions.
Then you see the Mass. ‘people’ re-electing Kennedy and the Democrat party giving him support (not purging him like they did Zell and Lieberman), and you think…
I think Ann Coulter missed a reason for the behavior of insurance companies. Go here and watch and listen to Representative Shadegg:
http://problemiserisa.blogspot.com/2009/08/timothy-p-carney-in-washington-dc.html
Go here and watch and listen to Representative Shadegg:
And so?
ERISA is a law, perhaps the law, and a law that is seemingly designed to benefit certain insurance companies and their monopolies.
I already told you about the effects of monopolies and semi-monopolies. Coulter raised the same subject.
The problem is not ERISA, contrary to your basic statement of purposes for your blog. If you remove it, another law will replace it, because you have not removed the monopoly and semi-monopoly creating the fusion between government, mostly Democrats, and Big Businesses.
The insurance companies are going by law. In this case, people voted for representatives that made it legal, and thus the insurance company’s contracts are also legal. If it wasn’t, you could file for damages or breach of contract.
I have clients cheated by their insurers
As your video attests to, they got cheated by the people with D after their names. If they could choose another insurer, they would, but they can’t.They can’t because your video showed what happens when people try to dry up the insurance political payments well.
Lawyers give money so that tort reform won’t be done. Insurance companies give money to ensure their monopoly is both lucrative and sustained.
You just saw in the video that this amendment was knocked out of committee by the corrupt Dems in order to protect insurance from paying out x amount of benefits. Based upon what? That healthcare has nothing to do with ‘commerce’.
There’s your problem, if you can recognize it. Your view is a bit narrow at this moment.
Ymarsakar–
I did enjoy our previous discussion and it probably doesn’t do too much good to repeat it here. I will say that I am quite upset with the Democrats right now for letting this thing go without a fight, and I completely support Representative Shadegg’s efforts, party affiliation notwithstanding, to do something about it. I certainly have no illusions about the fact that Dems as well as ‘Pubs have been in the bag for the insurers on this for decades. The underlying problems you mention may certainly be there, but whatever the root causes this law needs to be changed.
If you have the time (perhaps 35 minutes) and inclination you might want to listen to a radio talk show I was on last night — yes, Air America, and yes, a host who was on my side of the issue from the get-go — as I debated a defense attorney about this. There’s a link to the audio at:
http://problemiserisa.blogspot.com/2009/08/thanks-to-nicole-sandler-and-air.html
I did enjoy our previous discussion and it probably doesn’t do too much good to repeat it here.
At the time, the issue was only the law, rather than any external impact that created that law. But I agree, the impacts of healthcare on law or vice a versa are the proper subject matter here.
The underlying problems you mention may certainly be there, but whatever the root causes this law needs to be changed.
There’s the thing, change. It’s not so easily done. You need power, or at least access to power. I’ve discussed this issue with changing the system before here. The difficulties are apparent. Ted Kennedy was one of them, but no longer, but it doesn’t mean the way is clear. A bill, by intent and nature, is a long drawn out process subject to flukes and Presidential vetos.
That’s the perfect way to describe our for-profit system of health insurance and health care in this country.
What’s obscene is that the Left’s desire for government regulation (aka looting the private sector to give to crooks, big corporations, and big government thugs) causes a million more incidents like this.
What’s obscene is those people turning around and then telling people like me that we need to trust them to write more regulations concerning people, regardless of the unintended consequences (such as unlimited tort damages).
If I want to fix the problem, I’d fix their ideology, not ERISA, first.
Btw, it also doesn’t matter what Republicans do here. Nothing they do, no law they put into effect, no bipartisan effort, will change the corruption of the system.
It doesn’t change the balance of powers, something the US Constitution was specifically written to describe and maintain.
Every issue of ERISA will be used, can be used, to create either ObamaCare, public option, or anything else. Emotion kills, and this is specifically important with propaganda designed to create laws.
You can say you won’t do so, that your focus is narrowed on one thing, ERISA, but you can’t make that same guarantee for the rest. For Ted Kennedy’s ideological supporters, even.
This is about power, and thus it is about politics, which also means it is about life and death.
Healthcare reform? They call it that like it is a good thing.
The Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA) (Pub.L. 93-406, 88 Stat. 829, enacted September 2, 1974) is an American federal statute that establishes minimum standards for pension plans in private industry and provides for extensive rules on the federal income tax effects of transactions associated with employee benefit plans. ERISA was enacted to protect the interests of employee benefit plan participants and their beneficiaries by requiring the disclosure to them of financial and other information concerning the plan; by establishing standards of conduct for plan fiduciaries; and by providing for appropriate remedies and access to the federal courts.
The Unions helped push this through. How many unions give 99% to Dems?
So this law will be changed or replaced by the Dems, and then for another 30 odd years some new hammer will be brought down on other people’s lives in another area.
That’s some way to change things, to fix them.
Point taken. In fact, and I acknowledge this in that radio talk show thing I linked earlier, ERISA was not a bad law at all in its inception, and it continues to be a pretty good law insofar as protecting pension rights is concerned.
But when it comes to employment-based health, life or disability insurance, I believe what happened is that over the years the insurance industry out-lawyered claimants’ lawyers, and got the courts to interpret ERISA in a way which, IMO, unduly squelches the ability to enforce one’s legitimate rights under an insurance policy. It really isn’t what ERISA says but the judicial interpretations over the years which hurts. And, any attempt to address the bad judicial interpretations legislatively have failed due to a combination of insurance industry lobbying clout and politician corruption.
Of course it pre-empts state law. It’s a federal law. That’s what it is supposed to do. Remember government regulation? It’s a good thing. Until somebody dies that you care about due to it, that is.
It’s very simple. Bypass ERISA or create health insurance independent of government regulations or employers.
Don’t create the problem in the first place, and you won’t have to deal with ‘unintended consequences’.
This is a good thing that has been brought up.
The whole problem with this robbing one person to pay another is somebody is going to not have money, their money, to pay for what they need. Social security taxes, other taxes, means people need insurance. They don’t have any private funds or capital they could use the interest off of.
They can’t all be Kennedies.
What this means is that when this insurance is monopolized people, absent funds, need a ‘public option’ because they got problems. So it escalates and the system goes bankrupt. So nobody is going to get any coverage of a good quality.
People have got to be stupid to pay premiums to insurers that don’t pay out due to ‘quibbling’ and ‘lawyering’.
That’s where the monopoly practice comes in. They don’t get a choice. They aren’t the ones paying.
What grocery store would be making a profit and having customers when those customers are dropping dead every few weeks or even years?
It really isn’t what ERISA says but the judicial interpretations over the years which hurts.
Again, don’t create a problem in the first place with regulation and then try to create another problem by ‘fixing the old problem’.
I know you’re just representing your clients, as you should, but there is a larger issue at stake here.
Once a federal law was put into place, you got your black robes in charge. And that is the fundamental problem behind ObamaCare and TeddyCare. It places power at the top, stripping it from the bottom, allowing the people at the bottom to be exploited and ripped off.
I would support the return of all money paid into the insurance system, if a death results. Double that for damages, and that would be sufficient.
These tort law ‘damages’ for millions are ridiculous. It will just create a different behavior amongst insurance providers.
Private insurances i hear mentioned. There are losses that can be recovered. So the semi-monopoly is when employers create that semi-monopoly, and it was created by aid of ERISA’s pension guarantees or transparency.
That’s pretty much clear here pertaining to my case. If it wasn’t for the Feds butting in, with aid of Dems like the radio host’s funds, support, activism, and political votes… well, it would follow logically.
Apart from the subject you brought up, Richard, the Dems, some issue you don’t perhaps want to take a side in and which I respect, are going to use some Dem special interest funded law, and perhaps Kennedy had something to do with it; god’s know he’s been in there long enough, and is going to use THAT crisis they themselves generated to bring forth something whole heck load worse, Health Care “Reform” (aka exploitation).
Perhaps that’s why they oppose getting it changed. So long as ERISA is not reformed, they can ‘reform’ healthcare. It may not even be that they are getting big bucks from the insurance companies, certainly many of them are private, not employer, based. Perhaps the big insurance companies aren’t shelling out cash like Bi g Pharma has been.
When government has the power, all the rich blokes and obscenely big corporations go there to shaft the rest of us. With the help of lawyers, even.
That system is unsustainable.
In fact, and I acknowledge this in that radio talk show thing I linked earlier, ERISA was not a bad law at all in its inception, and it continues to be a pretty good law insofar as protecting pension rights is concerned.
I move away from arguing the merits of the law and have argued Constitutional principle.
The government that governs best, governs least.
This is for clarification purposes in case you overlooked what I meant with those comments.
Hey if this ERISA thing highjacks the thread I apologize — I just think it needs to be on the table if “health reform” is being discussed. If our host would like this to cease and desist I will comply gladly.
Anyway, to respond to Ymarsakar on a few things.
Federal law is not “supposed to” preempt state law except under limited circumstances. In fact there is a working presumption against preemption when it comes to traditional state police powers, which include contract law,tort law, insurance company regulation, and such. In those areas federal law is supposed to preempt only if that is the clear and unmistakable intent of Congress, and that’s one of the major places the courts went wrong with ERISA, because any intent to preempt in the manner we have now is very difficult to ascertain, and it certainly isn’t unmistakable. But since I do not have the honorific “Justice” in front of my name my opinion about that means nothing.
Also, to be clear, while I am certainly an ERISA reform advocate I am by no means sold on what is currently proposed by way of health reform. I will cop to being of the “we have to do something” school of thought, but I am not at all sure that what that something is should be what is currently on the table. And I agree your concerns about overly vague legislation which leaves too much up to administrative agencies and/or courts is quite problematic.
Richard,
As long as the debate is civil and intelligent, I don’t get upset about highjacked threads. Some of the most interesting thoughts come out of this organic movement from one idea to the next.
The big insurers are involved in group and individual coverage — you see the same names in both realms. You know I found myself scratching my head when the insurers seemed so acquiescent about health reform early on. One concern I have had in trying to figure out why the Democrats are not invoking ERISA abuse as a club to keep the black hats on the insurers is that there may have been a back room deal to get the insurance industry on board in the first place. This, although not widely appreciated, is a very very big deal to the insurance industry, and it would not surprise me one bit if they said do whatever you want, just leave ERISA alone, and we’ll stay out of your way.
I think they are getting a better deal than that. They don’t spend millions upon millions to lobby Congress if the ‘status quo’ is all they want. It’s not in their interests, especially with ObamaCare going into law, sooner or later.
They’ll want some kind of guarantee or ‘fix’ or loophole in the law to guarantee their dominance. What form they dominance takes, however, is a bit more murky.
Hey if this ERISA thing highjacks the thread I apologize
Book is like Neo. Very… liberal. And I don’t mean that as an insult ; ) Classical liberal, not fake liberal.
I will cop to being of the “we have to do something” school of thought, but I am not at all sure that what that something is should be what is currently on the table.
I believe I can convince most AMericans to do the same, including the Left. The former, not the latter.
But I hope you realize that most of the people in positions of power and those who vote in those pols, don’t know the background as you do. They don’t know how to navigate what politics in DC really is. So they can be convinced to support things that they haven’t been fully briefed on, while pols benefit from favors being traded.
It’s a sad but true state of affairs that in America, only lawyers or those with an extreme interest (or OCD) are interested in pursuing these issues at the detail level.
And that’s what the media tries to keep as a status quo. So that the American public cannot make informed choices. Not about insurance, not about their employers, and not about healthcare.
It’d be a good thing if people actually stupid. But they’re not, just ignorant and deceived and mislead. That makes it worse. Stupid people know they’re stupid and try their best to solve issues by putting in hours and hours of hard work. If they don’t get it, they’ll find help that will.
But smart people… even if I just take myself as an example as a person with slightly above average intelligence, don’t tend to take advice well given the preconceptions of smart people. And since those people are smart and can think lots, there’s a lot of prejudices, preconceptions, arrogance, Ivy League standards applied. They’re smart enough to deceive themselves, even. WHile stupid people are too dumb to waste brainpower deceiving themselves in a web of consistent lies.
Wisdom will hammer arrogance out. But, American culture doesn’t focus on cultivating wisdom. If it did, politicians would make better laws and justices wouldn’t have to decide to rule them unConstitutional. I believe I read an article about Sotomayor dealing with ERISA cases. They were almost always brain twisters. But unless the Justices are wiling to render ERISA unConstitutional… it’s in the ball of Congress to elucidate what they really meant.
That’s how the system is supposed to work. But doesn’t, because somebody stabbed a 9 foot steel blade in its back.
Okay, I am one of the “smart” people who never has enough information on what REALLY is going on because life is far more complicated than the news outlets like to report on. Maybe they can’t keep up either. But we must face it, too, that the general news media has reduced itself from watch dog to lap dog. They are neither independent nor dependable sources for information.
However, I rely on principle to guide me. The answer is always going to be “remove government obstacles put in place by well-meaning or well-paid-off politicians.” These politicians and their work cause far more problems than they ever fix and that would be because they never fix anything. The more money and power we hand over, or is forced from us, the more problems we face from our government and its ensuing corruption. What I don’t understand is how the general public does not see how money and power corrupt. I don’t understand how the general public so eagerly throws money at the government to “solve” problems that never get solved. Problems get worse, and then of course liberals demand more money.
No matter how complicated life gets from ERISA or any other legislation, the answer is always simple – SIMPLIFY the law. Fixing health care would be so easy and cost the federal government NOTHING. Remove government from it. Remove employers from it. Why don’t we have these problems with car insurance? Because our government and employers aren’t involved. The consumer of the insurance benefit is the person buying the insurance. Inject freedom into the system, and we will find better choices and people making more wise decisions. We also must find a way to make torte reform to reduce the burden of malpractice insurance costs. Mostly, however, we must let people make decisions for themselves, and then the market MUST respond.
What politicians and elites everywhere don’t like is how people make decisions. They don’t like freedom, they would rather people lived by their standards. They want people dependent on government so that they can control those people, how they live, the decisions they make. They think people can’t take care of themselves, and they certainly don’t want us taking care of each other. They want to decide who gets what and how, and they get this power by promising people an easier life. It is arrogant, corrupt, and down at the core just plain evil. Their ideologies are no different than Hugo Chavez’ or the Ayatollah’s, they simply want control. Thankfully, our idealogues are just not willing to kill or jail or torture people over ideology. Or maybe they just aren’t allowed to.