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Videos

Videos of health care summit speeches by Ryan, Blackburn, Coburn and Alexander

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Obama met with Republicans to discuss his health care plans. The Republicans selected a team of experts including three of my favorite conservatives, Marsha Blackburn, Tom Coburn and Paul Ryan. How did they do against Obama? Did we win?

Marathon Pundit has the scoop.

Selected quotes from leftists CNN:

  • CNN’S DAVID GERGEN: “Intellectually, the Republicans had the best day they’ve had in years. The best day they have had in years.” (CNN’s “The Situation Room,” 2/25/10)
  • CNN’s DAVID GERGEN: “The folks in the White House just must be kicking themselves right now. They thought that coming out of Baltimore when the President went in and was mesmerizing and commanding in front of the House Republicans that he could do that again here today. That would revive health care and would change the public opinion about their health care bill and they can go on to victory. Just the opposite has happened.: (CNN’s “Live,” 2/25/10)
  • CNN’s GLORIA BORGER: “The Republicans have been very effective today. They really did come to play. They were very smart.” (CNN’s “Live,” 2/25/10)
  • CNN’s GLORIA BORGER: “They took on the substance of a very complex issue. … But they really stuck to the substance of this issue and tried to get to the heart of it and I think did a very good job.” (CNN’s “Live,” 2/25/10)
  • CNN’s GLORIA BORGER: “They came in with a plan. They mapped it out.” (CNN’s “Live,” 2/25/10)

Video from CNN: (H/T Hot Air)

We won. By a landslide. And even the left-wing media admits it.

Now how did we win?

Lamar Alexander

Lamar Alexander makes the opening statement. He is fairly moderate, and has a history of stepping across the aisle to work with Democrats.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Marsha Blackburn

Marsha Blackburn makes Barack Obama admit that his refusal to allow people to buy plans out of state with no mandated coverages means that they will be paying too much for health care. Obama replies that he is happy with redistributing wealth from healthy young people to older people who ought to have saved their own money for their own health care expenses.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Paul Ryan (H/T Gateway Pundit)

Paul Ryan asks Obama how the implications of Obamacare on the federal budget. Why is Obama ignoring the analysis done by his own Congressional Budget office? Why does the government have to control health care? Why can’t people buy the health care that they choose with their own money?

Tom Coburn

Coburn talked about ways to reduce the cost of health care without having the government take it all over. I’ll post Tom Coburn’s full video when I find it.

Here’s the last 95% of the speech, just missing the first paragraph, really.

The full transcript is here.

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin’s latest column evaluates the health care summit.

Excerpt:

When he wasn’t cutting off Republicans who stuck to budget specifics and cited legislative page numbers and language instead of treacly, sob-story anecdotes involving dentures and gall stones, President Obama was filibustering the talk-a-thon away by invoking his daughters, rambling on about auto insurance, and sniping at former GOP presidential rival John McCain. “We’re not campaigning anymore,” lectured the perpetual campaigner-in-chief.

After ostentatiously disputing the GOP’s claims that health care premiums would rise under his plan, Obama walked it back. Confronted with more GOP pushback on the failure of Demcare to control costs, Obama told GOP Rep. Paul Ryan that he’d rather not “get bogged down in numbers.” Not numbers that he couldn’t cook on the spot without staff consultation, anyway.

Obama and the Democrats labored mightily to create the illusion of almost-there bipartisanship by repeatedly telling disagreeing Republicans that “we don’t disagree” and “there’s not a lot of difference” between us. But the dogs weren’t riding the ponies in this show.

Obama must be so shocked to find that not everyone in the world is a racist/communist/terrorist/tax cheat. This is his first exposure to a different point of view. He’s in shock.

News

Round-up of recent Republican legislative initiatives

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Tom Coburn

The Maritime Sentry had this post about Senator Tom Coburn’s Patient’s Choice Act.

“The Patients’ Choice Act of 2009,” transforms health care in America by strengthening the relationship between the patient and the doctor; using choice and competition rather than rationing and restrictions to contain costs; and ensuring universal, affordable health care for all Americans.

Tom Coburn is a medical doctor, not an ACORN lawyer who sues banks to force them to make risky loans. Commenter ECM sent me this article he wrote for the left-wing Huffington Post, in which he explains his new bill.

Marsha Blackburn

Congresswoman Blackburn urged the Senate not to pass the Democrat health care bill, citing the experience gleaned from Tennessee’s own bankrupt single-payer system.

In 1995, the state implemented TennCare, a health program modeled after Medicaid. While it covered more uninsured adults, the budget-busting program grew at a 1.5-percent annual rate, with costs skyrocketing from $2.5 billion in 1995 to $8 billion by 2004, Blackburn said.

“This program started to consume every new dollar that was generated in the state,” Blackburn said. Additionally, Tennessee residents who already had private health insurance were dropping their plans to get on the free health program, she said. “We started hearing stories of individuals trying to buy ‘uninsurable’ letters so they could get on TennCare.”

By 2005, Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen cut 170,000 adults from the program and reduced benefits for thousands more to get a handle on the soaring costs. “Our experience with trying to do universal coverage ended up being a disaster,” he recently told the AP.

Don’t forget about Mitt Romney’s socialized health care plan in Massachusetts, which is also bankrupt. When you make something “free” demand skyrockets, and the people who are being taxed to pay for it stop working or leave. That’s reality.

Lamar Alexander

Senator Lamar Alexander introduced a bill last week to distribute the government’s newly acquired stock in GM and Chrysler to taxpaying Americans.

“Instead of the Treasury owning 60 percent of shares in the new GM and 8 percent of Chrysler, you would own them, if you were one of about 120 million individuals who paid taxes on April 15,” Alexander explained. “This is the fastest way to get the stock out of the hands of Washington and back into the hands of the American people in the marketplace where it belongs. The stock certificates would be in your name, not that of your government.”

…“It would be helpful to GM and Chrysler if they had 120 million Americans interested in their success.”

And Senator Mike Johanns urges oversight on the TARP money already redistributed to the Obama’s union special interests, who desperately need it to pay for their underfunded pensions. In contrast, Democrat Barney Frank called GM’s CEO to complain about a GM warehouse closing in his home state. (Recall that Obama called the mayor of Detorit to assure him that GM would not be moving their headquarters out of Detroit). The Road to Serfdom.

Mike Pence

Congressman Mike Pence introduces the American Energy Act, a bill to increase clean domestic energy production.

The bill has 4 main objectives:

  • Increase production of American-made energy in an environmentally-sound manner.
  • Promote new, clean and renewable sources of energy such as nuclear, clean-coal-technology, wind and solar energy.
  • Encourage greater efficiency and conservation by extending tax incentives for energy efficiency and rewarding development of greater conservation techniques and new energy sources.
  • Cut red-tape and reduce frivolous litigation.

Good idea since gas prices are up $1.00 per gallon from the beginning of the year.

Bobby Jindal

Bobby Jindal, my pick in 2012 for President, is championing EIGHT bills to get tough on criminals.

Here are two of them:

  • House Bill 445 will, as reported by the Baton Rouge Advocate, “suspend a license for two years the first time a driver refuses to take a Breathalyzer test [and] a subsequent refusal would strip a driver’s license for four years.”
  • Senate Bill 166 would, as stated in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, “change the offense of driving with a suspended license for a previous DWI-related conviction from a traffic law violation to a violation of the criminal code.”

The rest are here, addressing child abuse, child welfare, sexual misconduct by teachers, monitoring of sex offenders, and more!