President Obama and his friends in Congress are running multiple con jobs in the nation’s capital, but don’t expect to hear about it from most of the Homers for big government in the liberal media.
Just as some sports reporters never say anything bad about the home team, too many journalists see no evil at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue these days. Take the health care debate. Obama has made all sorts of ridiculous claims about his health care reform proposal, most prominently that, unless you’re rich, your health insurance costs won’t go up.
At the center of this particular con is the public option issue. Will there be a government health insurance option to compete with those offered by private companies, as favored by Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-NV, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-CA?
Growing public opposition means there probably won’t be such an option, but here’s the con: Even without it, Obamacare will include an individual mandate, a government requirement that everybody buys health insurance. As the Heritage Foundation’s Morning Bell noted earlier this week, under the compromise proposal pushed by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-MT, which seems mostly likely to pass the Senate, failure to do so will have expensive consequences.
People with annual incomes as low as $10,831 would face penalties of $750 per person, up to $1,500 per family under the Baucus measure. Those with higher incomes would be hit with fines of $950 per person, up to $3,800 per family, per year. You can count on some variation of this penalty being in whatever healthcare reform finally makes it to Obama’s desk.
You don’t hear or read much about these penalties on the evening network news or in the news pages of publications like The New York Times. About the only liberal media figure to challenge Obama on this issue was ABC’s George Stepanopoulos, who did so during the most recent White House weekend media blitz. Here’s the exchange:
“STEPHANOPOULOS: … Under this mandate, the government is forcing people to spend money, fining you if you don’t. How is that not a tax?
“OBAMA: Well, hold on a second, George. Here — here’s what’s happening. You and I are both paying $900, on average — our families — in higher premiums because of uncompensated care. Now what I’ve said is that if you can’t afford health insurance, you certainly shouldn’t be punished for that. That’s just piling on.
“If, on the other hand, we’re giving tax credits, we’ve set up an exchange, you are now part of a big pool, we’ve driven down the costs, we’ve done everything we can and you actually can afford health insurance, but you’ve just decided, you know what, I want to take my chances. And then you get hit by a bus and you and I have to pay for the emergency room care, that’s…
“STEPHANOPOULOS: That may be, but it’s still a tax increase.”
Kudos to Stephanopoulos – who, incidentally, was a career Democratic staffer, not a professional journalist, before joining ABC News in 1997 – for having the cojones to challenge Obama.
Then there is the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade energy bill steadily advancing in Congress with Obama’s enthusiastic endorsement. For months, Obama and his congressional allies claimed Waxman-Markey wouldn’t require tax hikes. But always remember this about Washington politicians: What one calls a “tax hike” is another’s “revenue enhancement.”
Here’s what we learned this week about revenue enhancement under Waxman-Markey: For months Obama’s Treasury Department has been hiding its own analyses predicting Waxman-Market would generate up to $300 billion annually in new government revenue, all of it paid ultimately by energy consumers. The overall cost of implementing Waxman-Markey, according to the Treasury analyses, will be “equal in scale to all existing environmental regulation.”
We know about these Treasury documents, thanks to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), which required weeks of wrangling. Even now, CEI has announced plans to sue Treasury for withholding additional documents requested in the FOIA.
This is why Obama could fire White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs and not worry; the Homers are always looking the other way.
Mark Tapscott is editorial page editor of The Washington Examiner and proprietor of Tapscott’s Copy Desk blog on Mark Tapscott is editorial page editor of The Washington Examiner and proprietor of Tapscott’s Copy Desk blog on washingtonexaminer.com.
