Factual Response to Democrat National Committee's Attack on Sarah Palin re: Health Care

Hi all:

Check out this quick video fact check of the Democrat National Committee's (DNC) attack ad trying to debunk Sarah Palin's claims about the horrible health care plans currently being forced upon us Americans:




(BTW, I thought Palin was an irrelevant, light-weight quitter? Why is the official DNC attacking a private citizen? ...)

ACTION ITEM

Join Congresswoman Michele Bachmann and actor Jon Voight and a few thousand or so (more if you can go) this Thursday (November 5) at high noon on the West Steps of the Capitol in DC to walk the halls and let our congressman and women - you know, those people we sent to DC to represent our policy preferences - that we do not want these health care plans foisted upon us.

Click here for all the details.

Engage!

hrh

ATTENTION: Vital Health Care Alternatives from House Minority Leader John Boehner

Hi all:

Please listen to tomorrow's weekly GOP address. Why? Well, House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi just released another health care bill from the House. And guess what?

1. Abortion coverage is back in.
2. Coverage for illegal immigrants is back in.
3. Mandatory end of life counseling alongside mandates for doctors to cut spending - which means they are incentivized to counsel seniors to not get the best care because it's too expensive - is back in.
4. Penalties for not having health insurance are back in.
5. The government "public" option is back in.

Talk about a scary Halloween nightmare!!!

So in tomorrow's weekly GOP address, House Minority Leader John Boehner will outline the right way to fix the parts of health care that are broken.

Here are my comments on the subject:

Because, really if you think of health care as a house, the house of U.S. health care is a mansion, the best in the world. 85% of American citizens are covered, and of those people, 75% or so are happy with their care. That's pretty darn good!

So to cover the 15% or so who want to be covered, all we need to do is finish off the basement, renovate the attic, or put in a room over the garage. We do NOT need to come in with a wrecking ball and knock the whole house down!!! Which is exactly what the Dem plan does!

Let's see:

• Finish off the basement with medical malpractice lawsuit reform.
• Renovate the attic by lifting the government restrictions on buying healthcare nationally across state lines. That's how we buy automobile, life, and home insurance. The Dems say the government option is necessary for choice and competition, but it will give us only one more choice. If they would lift the barrier to buy across state lines, that would give us around 1,500 choices, which is the number of health insurance companies in America!!
• Put in a room over the garage by incentivizing Health Savings Accounts with high deductible, low cost catastrophic health insurance policies! (That's what I have and more than 13 million others across American and it's great! It's my bank account that goes with me if I leave this job. Pretax deposits, interest bearing, used for healthcare expenses.)

Here's what Sarah Palin just wrote in her Facebook note:

TUNE IN TOMORROW TO HEAR A HEALTH CARE REFORM PLAN THAT WILL PROVE TO BE THE GAME CHANGER

Today at 6:28pm

Mark my words - tomorrow is the game changer! Tune in to hear common sense solutions that bury the false accusations that conscientious members of Congress have no solutions to meet America's health care challenges.

If you're like me, shaking your head wondering why all the miscommunication between Washington and the American people who have been saying, "Please hear what we're saying about our desire for health care reform," then tomorrow will be a refreshing time of clarity for all.

All Americans, and especially colleagues of House Republican Leader John Boehner: please listen to tomorrow's weekly GOP national address. Rep. Boehner will highlight a common sense alternative to Speaker Pelosi's 1,990-page government takeover of health care. I urge you to watch for it. For a preview, go to: http://HealthCare.GOP.gov

You'll hear solutions. You'll hear of real choices based on America's proven free-market principles. You'll know once and for all what the GOP and Independents have been saying all along about alternatives to another big government take over. After tomorrow, you'll know that accusations against the GOP and Independents for not providing solutions are false. Those claims are bogus. There are alternatives. Tune in to Rep. Boehner's address tomorrow to hear them.

I look forward to the game changer!

- Sarah Palin


BTW, good news from at least one of Connecticut's senators: Joe Lieberman will vote with the GOP bills with public options! Thanks, Joe!

Engage!

hrh

Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin agree: "Good Intentions Aren't Enough with Health Care Reform"

Hi all:

Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann came to Connecticut yesterday to speak to the CT Liberty Forum. I had the privilege to both hear her speak and meet her, because she came and spent 20 minutes or so with Connecticut for Sarah, of which I'm one of the state organizers. We were glad to make her an honorary member of our group:

Photo courtesy Wayne Kilburn copyright 2009

(The woman to Bachmann's right is Daria Novak, who will defeat Congressman Joe Courtney in 2010. Yes, she will! But I digress ...)


Congresswoman Bachmann was informed and inspiring about the need for us to CALL OUR CONGRESSIONAL DELEGATIONS to stop this health care takeover. She compared it to the federal government's getting a federal "public option" for student loans 20 years ago.

It may have taken two decades, but last week President Obama nationalized all student loans - there are now no private student loans.

THAT IS WHAT WILL HAPPEN WITH OUR HEALTH CARE.

President Obama is on record saying that "it may take 10, 15, or 20 years but we will get a single payer option."

The Democrats are patient; they took 20 years to nationalize student financial aid.

They CANNOT BE ALLOWED TO GET THIS TROJAN HORSE OF A BILL PASSED, which allows anything close to a public option in health care.

If it passes, in 20 years or fewer, we will have completely NATIONALIZED HEALTH CARE, with no private options allowed.

On the same day that I was privileged to meet and be inspired by Congresswoman Bachmann to continue the fight, I got home and found that Sarah Palin had also written another call to action on health care:

GOOD INTENTIONS AREN'T ENOUGH WITH HEALTH CARE REFORM

Yesterday at 11:57pm

Now that the Senate Finance Committee has approved its health care bill, it’s a good time to step back and take a look at the long term consequences should its provisions be enacted into law.

The bill prohibits insurance companies from refusing coverage to people with pre-existing conditions and from charging sick people higher premiums. [1] It attempts to offset the costs this will impose on insurance companies by requiring everyone to purchase coverage, which in theory would expand the pool of paying policy holders.

However, the maximum fine for those who refuse to purchase health insurance is $750. [2] Even factoring in government subsidies, the cost of purchasing a plan is much more than $750. The result: many people, especially the young and healthy, will simply not buy coverage, choosing to pay the fine instead. They’ll wait until they’re sick to buy health insurance, confident in the knowledge that insurance companies can’t deny them coverage. Such a scenario is a perfect storm for increasing the cost of health care and creating an unsustainable mandate program.

Those driving this plan no doubt have good intentions, but good intentions aren’t enough. There were good intentions behind the drive to increase home ownership for lower-income Americans, but forcing financial institutions to give loans to people who couldn’t afford them had terrible unintended consequences. We all felt those consequences during the financial collapse last year. Unintended consequences always result from top-down big government plans like the current health care proposals, and we can’t afford to ignore that fact again.

Supposedly the Senate Finance bill will be paid for by cutting Medicare by nearly half a trillion dollars and by taxing the so-called “Cadillac” health care plans enjoyed by many union members. The plan will also impose heavy taxes on insurers, pharmaceutical companies, medical device companies, and clinical labs. [3] The result of all of these taxes is clear. As Douglas Holtz-Eakin noted in the Wall Street Journal, these new taxes “will be passed on to consumers by either directly raising insurance premiums, or by fueling higher health-care costs that inevitably lead to higher premiums.” [4] Unfortunately, it will lead to lower wages too, as employees will have to sacrifice a greater percentage of their paychecks to cover these higher premiums. [5] In other words, if the Democrats succeed in overhauling health care, we’ll all bear the costs. The Senate Finance bill is effectively a middle class tax increase, and as Holtz-Eakin points out, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation those making less than $200,000 will be hit hardest. [6]

With our country’s debt and deficits growing at an alarming rate, many of us can’t help but wonder how we can afford a new trillion dollar entitlement program. The president has promised that he won’t sign a health care bill if it “adds even one dime to our deficit over the next decade.” [7] But his administration also promised that his nearly trillion dollar stimulus plan would keep the unemployment rate below 8%. [8] Last month, our unemployment rate was 9.8%, the highest it’s been in 26 years. [9] At first the current administration promised that the stimulus would save or create 3 to 4 million jobs. [10] Then they declared that it created 1 million jobs, but the stimulus reports released this week showed that a mere 30,083 jobs have been created, while nearly 3.4 million jobs have been lost since the stimulus was passed. [11] Should we believe the administration’s claims about health care when their promises have proven so unreliable about the stimulus?

In January 2008, presidential candidate Obama promised not to negotiate behind closed doors with health care lobbyists. In fact, he committed to “broadcasting those negotiations on C-SPAN so that the American people can see what the choices are. Because part of what we have to do is enlist the American people in this process. And overcoming the special interests and the lobbyists...” [12] However, last February, after serving only a few weeks in office, President Obama met privately at the White House with health care industry executives and lobbyists. [13] Yesterday, POLITICO reported that aides to President Obama and Democrat Senator Max Baucus met with corporate lobbyists in April to help “set in motion a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign, primarily financed by industry groups, that has played a key role in bolstering public support for health care reform.” [14] Needless to say, their negotiations were not broadcast on C-SPAN for the American people to see.

Presidential candidate Obama also promised that he would not “sign any nonemergency bill without giving the American public an opportunity to review and comment on the White House Web site for five days.” [15] PolitiFact reports that this promise has already been broken three times by the current administration. [16] We can only hope that it won’t be broken again with health care reform.

All of this certainly gives the appearance of politics-as-usual in Washington with no change in sight.

Americans want health care reform because we want affordable health care. We don’t need subsidies or a public option. We don’t need a nationalized health care industry. We need to reduce health care costs. But the Senate Finance plan will dramatically increase those costs, all the while ignoring common sense cost-saving measures like tort reform. Though a Congressional Budget Office report confirmed that reforming medical malpractice and liability laws could save as much as $54 billion over the next ten years, tort reform is nowhere to be found in the Senate Finance bill. [17]

Here’s a novel idea. Instead of working contrary to the free market, let’s embrace the free market. Instead of going to war with certain private sector companies, let’s embrace real private-sector competition and allow consumers to purchase plans across state lines. Instead of taxing the so-called “Cadillac” plans that people get through their employers, let’s give individuals who purchase their own health care the same tax benefits we currently give employer-provided health care recipients. Instead of crippling Medicare, let’s reform it by providing recipients with vouchers so that they can purchase their own coverage.

Now is the time to make your voices heard before it’s too late. If we don’t fight for the market-oriented, patient-centered, and result-driven reform plan that we deserve, we’ll be left with the disastrous unintended consequences of the plans currently being cooked up in Washington.

- Sarah Palin

[1] See http://tinyurl.com/yjs3mgf
[2] See http://tinyurl.com/yfuw3k3
[3] See http://tinyurl.com/yfxq8ca
[4] See http://tinyurl.com/ykefsk6
[5] See http://tinyurl.com/ygf42fj
[6] See http://tinyurl.com/ykefsk6
[7] See http://tinyurl.com/lkvgsp
[8] See http://tinyurl.com/nx4nh6
[9] See ibid.
[10] See http://tinyurl.com/yhhr56v
[11] See ibid.
[12] See http://tinyurl.com/yhzhkvg and http://tinyurl.com/lhyr9o
[13] See http://tinyurl.com/yksd6h3
[14] See http://tinyurl.com/yl9gg27
[15] See http://tinyurl.com/yknpxd6
[16] See http://tinyurl.com/d2k5hb
[17] See http://tinyurl.com/yf8qmfh

ACTION ITEMS

1. Click here or here to support Michele Bachmann as she fights to save our freedoms.
2. Click here or here to support Sarah Palin and like-minded patriots who are fighting to save our freedoms.
3. Click here to CONTACT YOUR CONGRESSIONAL DELEGATION. Congresswoman Bachmann says they do pay attention if they get thousands of calls a day.

Engage!

hrh

Sarah Palin says "Drill" in National Review article

Hi all:

In the interest of getting this well-reasoned and common sense article spread across every corner of the Internet, I'm doing my part by reposting it here. The original piece with all due credit was published by National Review Magazine, conservative extraordinaire, William F. Buckley's, legacy.

Drill

Petroleum is a major part of America’s energy picture. Shall we get it here or abroad?

By Sarah Palin

Given that we’re spending billions of stimulus dollars to rebuild our highways, it makes sense to think about what we’ll be driving on them. For years to come, most of what we drive will be powered, at least in part, by diesel fuel or gasoline. To fuel that driving, we need access to oil. The less use we make of our own reserves, the more we will have to import, which leads to a number of harmful consequences. That means we need to drill here and drill now.

We rely on petroleum for much more than just powering our vehicles: It is essential in everything from jet fuel to petrochemicals, plastics to fertilizers, pesticides to pharmaceuticals. Ac­cord­ing to the Energy Information Ad­min­is­tra­tion, our total domestic petroleum consumption last year was 19.5 million barrels per day (bpd). Motor gasoline and diesel fuel accounted for less than 13 million bpd of that. Meanwhile, we produced only 4.95 million bpd of domestic crude. In other words, even if we ran all our vehicles on something else (which won’t happen anytime soon), we would still have to depend on imported oil. And we’ll continue that dependence until we develop our own oil resources to their fullest extent.

Those who oppose domestic drilling are motivated primarily by environmental considerations, but many of the countries we’re forced to import from have few if any environmental-protection laws, and those that do exist often go unenforced. In effect, American environmentalists are preventing responsible development here at home while supporting irresponsible development overseas.

My home state of Alaska shows how it’s possible to be both pro-environment and pro-resource-development. Alaskans would never support anything that endangered our pristine air, clean water, and abundant wildlife (which, among other things, provides many of us with our livelihood). The state’s government has made safeguarding resources a priority; when I was governor, for instance, we created a petroleum-systems-integrity office to monitor our oil and gas infrastructure for any potential environmental risks.

Alaska also shows how oil drilling is thoroughly compatible with energy conservation and renewable-energy development. Over 20 percent of Alas­ka’s electricity currently comes from renewable sources, and as governor I put forward a long-term plan to increase that figure to 50 percent by 2025. Alaska’s comprehensive plan identifies renewable options across the state that can help rural villages transition away from expensive diesel-generated electricity — allowing each community to choose the solution that best fits its needs. That’s important in any energy plan: Tempting as they may be to central planners, top-down, one-size-fits-all solutions are recipes for failure.

For the same reason, the federal government shouldn’t push a single, uni­versal approach to alternative-powered vehicles. Electric cars might work in Los Angeles, but they don’t work in Alaska, where you can drive hundreds of miles without seeing many people, let alone many electrical sockets. And while electric and hybrid cars have their advantages, producing the electricity to power them still requires an energy source. For the sake of the environment, that energy should be generated from the cleanest source available.

Natural gas is one promising clean alternative. It contains fewer pollutants than other fossil fuels, it’s easier to collect and process, and it is found throughout our country. In Alaska, we’re developing the largest private-sector energy project in history — a 3,000-mile, $40 billion pipeline to transport hundreds of trillions of cubic feet of natural gas to markets across the United States. Onshore and offshore na­tural gas from Alaska and the Lower 48 can satisfy a large part of our energy needs for decades, bringing us closer to energy independence. Whether we use it to power natural-gas cars or to run natural-gas power plants that charge electric cars — or ideally for both — natural gas can act as a clean “bridge fuel” to a future when more renewable sources are available.

In addition to drilling, we need to build new refineries. America currently has roughly 150 refineries, down from over 300 in the 1970s. Due mainly to environmental regulations, we haven’t built a major new refinery since 1976, though our oil consumption has increased significantly since then. That’s no way to secure our energy supply. The post-Katrina jump in gas prices proved that we can’t leave ourselves at the mercy of a hurricane that knocks a few refineries out of commission.

Building an energy-independent Amer­ica will mean a real economic stimulus. It will mean American jobs that can never be shipped overseas. Think about how much of our trade deficit is fueled by the oil we import — sometimes as much as half of the total. Through this massive transfer of wealth, we lose hundreds of billions of dollars a year that could be invested in our economy. Instead it goes to foreign countries, including some repressive regimes that use it to fund activities that threaten our security.

Reliance on foreign sources of energy weakens America. When a riot breaks out in an OPEC nation, or a developing country talks about nationalizing its oil industry, or a petro-dictator threatens to cut off exports, the probability is great that the price of oil will shoot up. Even in friendly nations, business and financial decisions made for local reasons can de­stabilize Amer­i­ca’s energy market, since the price we pay for foreign oil is subject to rising and falling exchange rates. Decreasing our dependence on foreign sources of energy will reduce the impact of world events on our economy.

In the end, energy independence is not just about the environment or the economy. It’s about freedom and confidence. It’s about building a more secure and peaceful America, an America in which our energy needs will not be subject to the whims of nature, currency speculators, or madmen in possession of vast oil reserves.

Alternative sources of energy are part of the answer, but only part. There’s no getting around the fact that we still need to “drill, baby, drill!” And if those in D.C. say otherwise, we need to tell them: “Yes, we can!”

— Sarah Palin was governor of Alaska from 2006 to 2009, and the Republican candidate for vice ­president in 2008. This article appears in the November 2, 2009, issue of National Review.

1. I'm getting ready to attend the Connecticut Liberty Forum event tomorrow to hear Minnesota Republican Congressman Michelle Bachmann.
2. I've emailed all 3 of my Congressional delegation regarding healthcare legislation.
3. I've written up an Information Sheet for Connecticut for Sarah, our conservative activitist group.

What are you doing?

Engage!

hrh