That a boondoggle projected to cost $1,000,000,000,000 will be funded by cutting waste from a boondoggle is something you might hear from a con, and it goes without saying that naivete fills the air. There was once a time when America esteemed honesty, expecting, if not demanding, integrity in its leaders, but gone is the era, and with it common sense. The acceptance of lies, couched simply, is foolish. Why, an educated voter might ask, do we not PREVENT waste? The answer is that programs become wasteful as they increase in size and power. Fraud and waste are INEXTRICABLE, inherent to bureaucracies and the people who run them.
Indeed, they are prevalent—myriad entities bilk Medicare daily. In 2003, Abbot Labs
settled D.O.J. suits for $382 million. A division of the company offered kickbacks to federal agents to purchase Abbot products, then happily encouraged fraudulent bills. In 2006, Tenet Health Care
settled $900 million in D.O.J. suits after (allegedly) submitting fraudulent claims. The conduct included excess billing, inflation of charges, unnecessary treatment, and medical kickbacks. (“Tenet,” incidentally, means “a doctrine or principle held as being true.”) In March of this year, Miami physician,
Keith Russell, was sentenced to 90 months…. In September, Pfizer settled the largest
fraud case in history.
You get the point. According to Steve Malanga, of the Manhattan Institute, experts estimate that
abuses in Medicaid account for 10% of costs, amounting to over $30 billion annually. Medicare
DOUBLES that score. It would be easier—and more efficient—to de-vine the Amazon than de-fraud Medicare; yet the president refuses to add to the deficit?
Please. It’s enough that he insults our intelligence, must he also pick our purse? Pie-in-the-sky liberalism is synonymous with loose “facts,” but experience tells us that government is insatiable and largely aloof to the taxpaying citizen. Last week, the increasingly Clothes-less Emperor followed-up, saying that reform will
lower costs, raise quality, and hold insurers accountable. “Lack of reform,” he claimed, “is costing the nation jobs.... Reforming our health insurance system will be a critical step in resurrecting our economy so that entrepreneurs can pursue the American Dream and small businesses can grow and create new jobs. That is precisely what the reform legislation before Congress will do.”
I have to shake my head. For Obama to trot out the American Dream and attach it to an entitlement program is crazy. For him to invoke “entrepreneurs” and small business in a claim that each will thrive as taxes increase and government expands defies logic. Clearly, he believes in “charm before truth.” Notice he didn’t say that
under-reimbursement by the government inflates costs (doctors charge more privately) to insurers, making them less competitive. He didn’t say that private businesses will choose the
8% penalty, which is less than their current costs, and place employees in the government plan. He didn’t say there will be rationing and less innovation as the program bloats under federal mandates. He didn’t say that survivability will decrease and we’ll look back in shame and regret at what we did. Instead, he appeared on five Sunday talk-shows,
saying on one of them: “About two-thirds of what we’ve proposed would be from money that’s in the system but just being spent badly. This isn’t about me making wild assertions—you always hear about waste and abuse in Washington, and usually it doesn’t mean much because nobody ever finds where that waste and abuse is.”
Let that sink in.
If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it
It doesn’t mean much because NOBODY EVER FINDS IT? Who are nobody? People who game the system and promote waste and fraud? Pardon my disrespect, but if the president is going to act like a swindler, he is one. Claims that he’ll exhume what no one can find, make it mean something, and create “efficiency” are absurd. What next? A promise that 95% of Americans get a tax cut? A vow to cut spending? The elimination of pork?
The predictability is egregious. More disturbing is the rhetorical propaganda. A German named Goebbels once
said of lies:
If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic, and/or military consequence of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the greatest enemy of the State.
Goebbels, of course, was a book-burner sans restriction. That said, his words inform. This White House has a thing for “fishy e-mail,” right-wing pundits, and conservative bloggers who thwart leftist aims.
Cass Susstein, the “regulatory” czar, and
Mark Lloyd, the “diversity” czar, are puritanical muzzlers, while journalistic phantoms provide a nice shield. Between failed education, the war on Jesus, and the demise of
virtue, America is in decline—medical “reform” merely marks an inflection. Indeed, if you tell a lie big enough and repeat it, it will stick. Obama is a master. Goebbels would be proud.
