Tag Archives: Obamacare

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

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.

Paul Ryan discusses Obamacare and the federal budget

Paul Ryan is the Republican expert on the budget and federal spending.

Ryan/Bachmann in 2012 for the win!

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Government-run health care is really about redistributing wealth

Article from radical leftist Jonathan Chait of the extremely biased New Republic. (H/T Just One Minute via ECM)

Excerpt:

The single most popular health care idea emanating from the right is to allow Americans to purchase health insurance across state lines. What a stupid idea, making people buy insurance only within their own state!

[…]Now, think about this for a minute. I doubt her precise figure, but let’s grant the premise that young healthy people could save a lot of money from such an arrangement. Why is that? Is it that out-of-state insurance companies are that much more efficient? No, of course not — profit and overhead don’t account for anywhere close to two-thirds of insurance premiums.

The young and healthy would save money because they’d find an insurance plan from a state with very limited regulation. Say, those plans would operate in a state that doesn’t require insurance to cover any medical conditions that are unlikely to afflict a young, healthy 25-year-old. What happens is that the health care industry becomes like the credit card industry. Some small state realizes it can attract a lot of business its way by winning the race to the regulatory bottom.

So then, effectively, we’ve almost completely eliminated all regulations on health insurance. Conservatives will say that’s great. And certainly the healthy 25-year-old would be better off. But, of course, the effect of those regulations was to force insurers to cover medical conditions that older or less healthy people have. As a result, all the young healthy people have split, and costs on everybody else go up. The young and healthy are paying higher rates because of these regulations. But the same regulations let the old and sick pay lower rates — and they’re the people who have the biggest trouble buying insurance as it is. Allowing interstate sale of insurance isn’t just a non-solution, it’s a massive anti-solution, worsening all the problems of the status quo.

Got that? The whole point of socialized medicine is to force people to limit their choice of coverage to only in-state plans so that young people just starting their careers have to pay more for coverages that they don’t need. And retired people who have had all their lives to make money and save for their own health care get health care for less. The health care of the elderly needs to be subsidized via government-controlled wealth redistribution. Isn’t it amazing that young people vote so overwhelmingly for Obama?