“Competition is as American as apple pie.”

That’s the premise behind a new ad from MoveOn.org, the left-leaning grassroots group that’s pushing President Barack Obama’s socialized medicine plan. If it sounds familiar to supporters of free market reform, it should.

Competition is as American as apple pie, but there’s just one small problem with this group’s definition of the term.

By adding (or rather re-adding) a so-called “public option” to the latest trillion-dollar health care plan, Obama and his allies in Congress are not promoting competition – they’re squashing it. Simply put, by injecting the government directly into a market that it has the power to regulate, “Obamacare” would place the health care industry in America on an irreversible path toward nationalization – not to mention raise health care costs on the typical American family by as much as $4,000 per year.

Government doesn’t want to “compete” in the marketplace – it wants to artificially manipulate the marketplace to force millions of Americans out of private plans and into government-run plans, which they ludicrously claim will save taxpayers money.

At the heart of this bastardized notion of “competition” is the demonstrably false belief that government-run programs have lower administrative costs than private plans.

“Medicare has lower administrative costs than any private plan on the market,” U.S. Rep. Pete Stark wrote years ago as the government-run health care movement started picking up steam.

This is simply not true. Medicaid plans have significantly high per person costs than private plans, even though Medicaid is exempt from state health insurance premium taxes that private providers must pay.

“In recent years, Medicare administrative costs per beneficiary have substantially exceeded those costs for the private sector,” writes Dr. Robert A. Book for the Heritage Foundation. “This (is) despite the fact that, as critics note, private insurance is subject to many expenses not incurred by Medicare. Contrary to the claims of public plan advocates, moving millions of Americans from private insurance to a Medicare-like program will result in program administrative costs that are higher per person and higher, not lower, for the nation as a whole.”

Additionally, Medicaid is riddled with fraud and abuse – an epidemic problem that the U.S. government has shown little interest in “reforming.”

In fact, according to a CBS 60 Minutes report that aired last weekend, an estimated $60 billion out of $430 billion in annual Medicaid disbursements goes to fund fraudulent Medicaid claims.

That means one out of every seven dollars spent on Medicaid goes toward fraud – one reason why the program has seen skyrocketing annual premium increases in recent years, and one reason why its hospital trust fund is forecast to run out of money within the coming decade.

In South Florida, CBS found that Medicaid fraud had replaced cocaine traffic as the most lucrative criminal enterprise.

Why would a program that’s ostensibly so vital to the health of the nation be allowed to pour so much money down the drain?

“Our oversight budget has been extremely limited,” the government’s top anti-fraud bureaucrat complained to CBS, revealing another flaw of the “public option.”

Whenever these government-run monstrosities break down – and they always break down – every American taxpayer is suddenly on the hook for the “bailout.”

Is this really the sort of system we want to expand – perhaps to include as many as 100 million new Americans? Of course not. But that’s exactly what would happen under the plan currently being debated in Washington.

Obviously, proponents of Obama’s socialized medicine proposal are very well aware of the public’s skepticism when it comes to supporting unsustainable entitlement programs – which is why they are hiding the greatest government power grab since the “Great Society” beneath a cloak of capitalist-sounding terms like “market principles,” “choice” and “competition.”

Don’t be fooled. The only “choice” Americans will receive in this “market” will be left exclusively to government bureaucrats, whose definition of “competition” is racking up exorbitant costs to provide substandard service – and then sticking you with an ever-expanding bill.

Over the last three decades, American consumers have demonstrated precious little in the way of fiscal responsibility. Rather than adopting a motto of “spend only what you earn” and carrying on the frugality of previous generations, we’ve witnessed the dawning of an “age of credit.” Little plastic cards have promised (and delivered) instant gratification to tens of millions of consumers – only to hit them later with double-digit interest rates, “fine print” which ruins their legitimate borrowing potential and condemns many to a downward cycle of debt and despair.

How bad have things gotten?

In 1980, total consumer credit outstanding stood at less than $400 billion. By 1990, that number had more than doubled to $800 billion. Of course, this increase was nothing compared to the explosion that was to come.

After flat-lining for a few years during the recession of the early 1990’s, total consumer credit soared to unprecedented heights over the next fifteen years, more than tripling to a whopping $2.6 trillion in 2008.

As big as this number may sound, the dramatic increase in consumer debt actually pales in comparison to the unsustainable ramp-up in government debt.

In 1980, the U.S. public debt was “only” $909 billion – or an amount equal to 33.3% of America’s gross domestic product (GDP). By 1990, that number had more than tripled to $3.2 trillion – or 55.9% of GDP. Today America finds itself staring down a scarcely-fathomable $14.4 trillion debt that will represent 98.1% of the coming year’s projected GDP.

In other words, while consumer debt roughly tripled over the past two decades – government debt has more than quadrupled over that same time period.

What’s even more revealing than the irresponsible spending binges that took place during good economic times? How differently consumers and politicians are handling the current recession – which is now entering its twenty-second month. While government continues to spend more money faster than at any time in its history, consumers – for the first time ever – are steadily decreasing their debt.

After experiencing a slight uptick in January, total consumer debt has been dropping like a rock ever since, including a record $21.6 billion decline in July. This drop was five times larger than what economists had predicted, and came on the heels of a $10 billion decline the previous month. In fact, 2009 has seen the first sustained declines in consumer credit since the government started tracking monthly measurements in 1943.

The bottom line is simple: Faced with difficult economic times, consumers are doing what they have to do – spending less and paying down debt at record levels. Government on the other hand has decided to go in precisely the opposite direction – escalating its spending addiction to a level that defies not only common sense, but comprehension.

Quite frankly, it’s the sort of behavior that would land an individual in rehab, not a position of public trust.

Thanks to trillions of dollars in bailouts and unchecked entitlement growth, America is staring down a fiscal rabbit hole unlike any other in its history. According to the latest numbers from the Office of Budget Management, the national debt is projected to reach an astounding $18.3 trillion within five years, a tab that will only get worse if President Barack Obama succeeds in pushing through his latest socialized medicine proposal, or if he succeeds in enacting the massive new energy tax he has so cleverly disguised as an “emissions market.”

Clearly, the American public has read the handwriting on the wall and is working to limit its liability in the face of dire economic circumstances. Why is government not doing the same thing?

After all, the contraction of consumer credit is yet another sign that recovery is not as imminent as some Washington politicians would have us believe.

By Howard Rich

In an era of debt-exploding bailouts and deficit-busting expansions of government, it goes without saying that America cannot afford a $1.5 trillion government-run health care plan. Of course, the massive socialized medicine boondoggle proposed by President Barack Obama is much more than just another example of government pouring billions – now trillions – of taxpayer dollars down the drain.

If that were all “Obamacare” were, it would be bad enough.

But this program is much worse because it constitutes government not only wasting vast sums of taxpayer money, but imposing artificial conditions on the free market in a deliberate effort to nationalize the health care industry. In addition to costing millions of American jobs, the creation of a government-run health care monopoly will result in higher premiums, limited options, lower quality care and a lack of innovation in the one field of human endeavor where we should strive to be as innovative as possible – namely, saving lives and improving quality of life.

While Obama continues to mislead an increasingly skeptical public on this front, U.S. Rep. Barney Frank recently admitted that the real intention of the so-called “America’s Affordable Health Choices Act” was nationalization, saying that the new government-driven “public option” plan was the “best way … the only way” to achieve an eventual single payer monopoly.

The long-term costs of the plan are also much larger than anyone is willing to admit – particularly seeing as Obamacare (like nearly everything in Washington these days) is being “paid for” almost exclusively with money that doesn’t exist.

How much larger are these long-term costs?

Well, according to a recent report by the Congressional Joint Economic Committee, along with its imposing debt- and deficit-busting dimensions, Obamacare would add another $9.2 trillion to the massive pile of unfunded liabilities that politicians in Washington have forced upon the American taxpayers.

In other words, it’s yet another example of government writing a check that it can’t possible hope to cash – one which forces additional strain on the taxpayers and sucks more life out of our economy.

And for what result? A health plan that does more harm than good?

Federal unfunded liabilities currently total a whopping $58.8 trillion – or $191,000 for every man, woman and child in America. This total includes $39.6 trillion for Medicare and Medicaid, $10.6 trillion for Social Security and $8.5 trillion for Bush’s ill-conceived prescription drug benefit.

Add the unfunded liability of Obamacare to this pile and the total tab soars to a scarcely-comprehensible $68 trillion – or $226,000 for every man, woman and child in America.

Clearly, these are numbers that Obama and his allies don’t want to talk about. After all, they demonstrate conclusively the numerical impossibility of funding all of Obama’s new proposals simply by imposing new tax hikes on “the wealthy.”
“There is no way we can pay for health care and the rest of the Obama agenda, plus get our long-term deficits under control, simply by raising taxes on the wealthy,” former Clinton budget advisor Isabel V. Sawhill recently told The New York Times. “The middle class is going to have to contribute as well.”

Obama has promised that 95% of Americans won’t see their taxes increased “by one dime” during his administration. How, then, does he plan on bridging the short- and long-term gaps to pay for his health care plan?
Short answer? He doesn’t.

Obama isn’t planning on bridging these gaps, which is why you can add this to the stack of promises he probably never planned on keeping – right on top of the pledge that citizens would be able to keep their existing health care plans if that was their choice.

Whether in the immediate or distant future, America simply cannot afford Obamacare. And even if we could afford it, we should never put government in control of any industry – particularly one so vital to the pursuit of the first of our fundamental liberties, “life.”

President Barack Obama says that his health care program will cut costs and give Americans better coverage and more choices. Obviously, these are concepts which should sell extremely well in a country where we place a premium on savings and selection. Of course, the actual substance of Obama’s $1.5 trillion socialized medicine plan stands in stark contrast to the capitalist-sounding, fiscally-responsible rhetoric that’s being used to promote it – which is probably why Obama is encountering such serious resistance in selling even members of his own party on the plan.

Far from expanding individual choices, Obama’s proposal is designed specifically to eliminate competition and put one provider in charge of health care – the government. And instead of cutting costs, Obama’s plan would force millions of Americans to use the same low-quality government health care options that have spawned the unsustainable growth rates that we’re now supposed to be “reducing.”

In other words, if “Obamacare” passes, costs would go up, choice would be eliminated and coverage would diminish – which is ironically the opposite of everything Obama claims his plan would accomplish.
Sadly, Obama and his supporters are ignoring literally dozens of common sense reforms in their effort to impose government’s flawed, demonstrably ineffective philosophy on the rest of the health care industry.

Rather than pushing for private, portable health savings accounts (while simultaneously combating fraud, cutting administrative costs and reforming eligibility in Medicaid), Obama instead wants to put the failed government model of high costs, zero accountability and rampant administrative inefficiency in control of everything.

Of course, Obama is much too politically astute to simply hand over the nation’s health care system to government bureaucrats, which is why his plan creates an intermediate step – a so-called “exchange” system where consumers are driven to lower-quality government care by artificially-established premiums at both ends of the spectrum.

All this does, however, is delay the inevitable, as government simply manipulates the market to create artificially-high premiums for private plans and artificially-low premiums for its own offerings.
The end result of all this so-called “choice?” According to a recent study by the Cato Institute, Obama’s plan would “reduce competition by driving lower-cost private health plans out of business.”
“President Obama’s vision of a health insurance exchange is not a market, but a prelude to a government takeover of the health care sector,” the report continues. “In the process, millions of Americans would be ousted from their existing health plans.”

Additionally, the tax hike that is supposed to pay for $540 billion of Obama’s “cost-saving” plan will itself cost an estimated 4.7 million jobs, according to a recent report by the National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB). How, exactly, would these massive layoffs reduce the cost of coverage, to say nothing of assisting in our nation’s “economic recovery?”

Ask yourself honestly – when was the last time a monopoly wound up cutting costs? Or producing a better product or service? And when was the last time you can remember government running a business better or more efficiently than the private sector?

Given these concerns, the “socialized medicine” stigma is one that Obamacare backers are desperately seeking to avoid. In fact, just last week a Texas Congressman was prohibited from using the term “government-run health care” as he attempted to advise his constituents of a telephone town hall meeting on the proposal.

Congressional leaders informed him that “public option health plan” was the term he must use.
Far from creating options, though, “Obamacare” is truly socialized medicine at its worst – a manipulative effort to get rid of choice in the marketplace and exert government control over yet another facet of our daily lives.

Passing it will only make our nation’s health care problems exponentially worse.
The author is chairman of Americans for Limited Government.

By Howard Rich

“Make the rich pay for it, they can afford it.”

For decades, this has been the /modus operandi/ of politicians and public officials who rely on unsustainable government growth and skyrocketing taxpayer debt to pad their patronage and expand their influence. It’s also the driving force behind House Ways & Means Chairman Charles Rangel’s new “health care surtax,” which the New York Democrat says will raise $540 billion over the next ten years to pay for part of “Obamacare.”

Who would end up paying Rangel’s surtax? All joint filers making over $350,000 – before deductions. Also, the surtax applies to all forms of income, including wages, dividends and capital gains.

This latest “bleed the (moderately) rich” scam comes from a tried-and-true big government playbook. In fact, it’s every bit as predictable as the blooming of the cherry blossoms, the naming of yet another government “czar,” or whichever Beltway sex scandal /du jour /is dominating the cocktail party chatter. And like countless other government schemes of its kind, it will no doubt be communicated to middle class mailboxes or televisions via slick advertisements that invoke how wealthy Americans are enjoying “faster jets or bigger swimming pools” while poor people lay “starving in the streets.”

Sounds familiar, right?

Unfortunately, many of the limited government advocates whose job it is to respond to this nonsense have fallen into a predictable rut of their own.

“Wealthy Americans create jobs,” they remind us – and they’re right.

“Wealthy Americans pay their fair share,” they say. Sometimes they even point out that wealthy Americans pay not only their fair share, but the “fair share” of dozens of others who can’t afford to pay anything.

But these critical points are rarely expounded upon and are almost always ignored by our intellectually incurious mainstream media. After all, it’s just too easy for them to say that “rich people will be paying for new services for poor people” – even though in reality almost all of the money ends up going to bureaucrats, not services, while the money taken from the rich invariably ends up costing far too many poor people their jobs.

This is precisely what would happen under Rangel’s proposal. According to a report issued by the Heritage Foundation, over sixty percent of the returns that would be impacted by the Rangel surtax include income from small businesses or partnerships. Twenty percent of the returns receive more than half of their income from small business or partnership income.

Translation? Jobs will be lost. Lots of them, too.

Contrary to the carefully-prepared talking points of the class warfare spin doctors, the people being asked to pick up this tab are not super-wealthy Americans.

These are not “too big to fail” financial institutions or union-driven (now government-driven) automakers, these are small businesspeople – supermarket owners, retailers and website developers -in other words, the people who create the vast majority of jobs in America.

Instead of coming to Washington D.C. with their hats in hand, these businessmen and women are doing precisely what we want them to do – innovating, turning a profit and providing a livelihood for their employees so that the taxpayers don’t have to.

Under Rangel’s surtax, however, many of these very business owners would be forced to pay over half of their income in taxes – 52%, to be precise – a ridiculously-high rate that exceeds the top marginal rate in all but three industrialized nations.

Even socialist countries aren’t taxing their citizens at such exorbitant levels.

The bottom line is this – if America wants to remain competitive with the rest of the world, its leaders must realize sooner rather than later that they cannot continue to spend us into fiscal oblivion while at the same time throwing a monkey wrench into our nation’s job creation engine.

Clearly, President Obama made no bones about his desire to “spread the wealth around,” but the problem with that approach is that you eventually run out of wealthy people – and the jobs they provide.

The Rangel surtax is nothing more than another predictable step in that direction.