The Muslim community may not have a spokesperson who can speak for it at a national level but they must be more vocal. Do its members fear attack from within their own community? When the decent fail to speak out then the voices and actions of radicals are allowed to color attitudes. This would be tragic and unfair to all.(See 2 below.)
Comments of a friend and fellow memo reader whose has served his country at a very high level. (See 2a below.)
How to slip off the hook. Do so from within. No one will ever know. Throwing Israel under the bus? (See 3 and 3a below.)
Single payer here we come. (See 4 and 4a below.)
Dick
1)Democratic consultant says he got a warning from White House after appearing on Fox News
'We better not see you on again,' the strategist says he was told by a White House official. Obama aides have taken an aggressive stance against the network and may be seeking to isolate it.
By Peter Nicholas
-At least one Democratic political strategist has gotten a blunt warning from the White House to never appear on Fox News Channel, an outlet that presidential aides have depicted as not so much a news-gathering operation as a political opponent bent on damaging the Obama administration.
Political consultants are a staple of cable television talk shows, analyzing current events based on their own experiences working on campaigns or in government.
One Democratic strategist said that shortly after an appearance on Fox, he got a phone call from a White House official telling him not to be a guest on the show again. The call had an intimidating tone, he said.
The message was, " 'We better not see you on again,' " said the strategist, who spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to run afoul of the White House. An implicit suggestion, he said, was that "clients might stop using you if you continue."
In urging Democratic consultants to spurn Fox, White House officials might be trying to isolate the network and make it appear more partisan.
A boycott by Democratic strategists could also help drive the White House narrative that Fox is a fundamentally different creature than the other TV news networks. For their part, White House officials appear on Fox News -- but sporadically and with "eyes wide open," as one aide put it.
David Plouffe, the president's campaign manager and author of a new campaign book, "The Audacity to Win," was scheduled to appear on Fox's "On the Record" with Greta Van Susteren Thursday night as he promotes his book. His appearance, preempted by the breaking news of the shootings at Ft. Hood, Texas, has been rescheduled for Monday.
White House Communications Director Anita Dunn said Thursday night that she had checked with colleagues who "deal with TV issues" and they had not told people to avoid Fox. On the contrary, they had urged people to appear on the network, Dunn wrote in an e-mail.
But Patrick Caddell, a Fox News contributor and a former pollster for President Carter, said he has spoken to Democratic consultants who have been told by the White House to avoid appearances on Fox. He declined to give their names.
Caddell said he had not gotten that message himself from the White House. "They know better than to tell me anything like that," he said.
Caddell added: "I have heard that they've done that to others in not-too-subtle ways. I find it appalling. When the White House gets in the business of suppressing dissent and comment, particularly from its own party, it hurts itself."
The White House has taken an aggressive stance toward Fox. When President Obama appeared on five separate talk shows one Sunday in September, he avoided Fox.
"It would be foolish for us to just treat it like it's CNN, ABC, NBC and CBS," said a White House aide. "That doesn't make any sense. That would be like saying we're going to do [interviews] with the newsmagazines and we're going to do Time, Newsweek and the [conservative] National Review."
The aide spoke on condition of anonymity in order to talk more openly about the White House's thinking.
Last month, Dunn told CNN that Fox was, in effect, an "arm" of the Republican Party. Dunn said in an appearance on the rival cable network: "Let's not pretend they're a news network the way CNN is."
As the dust-up played out, Fox's senior vice president of news, Michael Clemente, countered: "Surprisingly, the White House continues to declare war on a news organization instead of focusing on the critical issues that Americans are concerned about like jobs, healthcare and two wars."
Fox's commentators have been sharply critical of the Obama administration. After the president won the Nobel Peace Prize, Sean Hannity, who has a prime-time show on Fox, said he got the award for "trashing America."
The two sides seemed interested in easing tensions. On Oct. 28, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs met privately with Clemente.
But White House aides haven't changed their underlying view of Fox.
Fox's audience is by far the largest of the cable networks, with an average of more than 2.1 million viewers in prime-time this year. CNN is second with 932,000 prime-time viewers.
Fox's viewership is not what worries the White House, though. More troubling to White House aides is that other news organizations may uncritically follow stories that Fox has showcased.
The White House aide said: "Where some of the falsehoods become dangerous is when the rest of the media accepts them as fact and reports on them, either out of a desire to tap into Fox's news audience -- which you can understand, given where circulation and viewership rates are -- or as some sort of knee-jerk fear of being considered liberally biased, which is what conservatives have been saying of the mainstream media for years."
The White House's pugnacious approach to the network leaves some Democrats troubled.
Don Fowler, a former Democratic National Committee chairman, said in an interview: "This approach is out of sync with my conception of what the Obama administration stands for and what they're trying to do. I think they'll think better of it and this will be a passing phase."
1a)The Rose Garden Path: The White House has gotten bad at listening, and now it's paying the price.
By PEGGY NOONAN
First thought on Tuesday's elections: There's a lot of firing going on in America, and now that includes politicians. Seems only fair and will likely continue. I don't think voters in New Jersey and Virginia were saying, "Oh the Democrats are awful, and we hate them," nor were they saying, "Republicans are wonderful, and we love them." The voters were being practical, and thinking policy: "Will he raise my taxes?" In Jersey, they fired the incumbent governor because they couldn't imagine the state getting off its current trajectory (high unemployment, high taxes, high spending) with him there. And they're certain they have to get off their current trajectory or they're sunk.
Both states hired new governors. The good news for the GOP is that they hired Republicans. The bad news is that if the Republicans don't make progress, they'll fire them too.
Second, it's too simple to say this was a vote against Obama. Yes, he went to Jersey three times and draped himself like a shawl around the Democratic incumbent. But the crowds showed and nobody booed and everyone had a good time. What happened actually is more interesting. They just didn't listen to him. Mr. Obama told Jersey to vote for Jon Corzine, and they didn't. They don't hate him, they're just not hearing him. That's new. They're warning him: Hey you with the health-care obsession, shape up or you'll get shipped out!
There's a new detachment between the president and the electorate he won a year ago by 9.5 million votes. The reason: In 2009, the Democrats who run the White House and Congress chose to go down one path at the exact moment voters went down a different one. The voters, frustrated and then alarmed, waited to fire the first available Democrat, and this week they did. Mr. Obama carried Democratic Jersey by more than 15 points exactly one year ago. The Democratic governor lost by nearly five points this week. That is a 20-point swing. Mr. Obama won Virginia a year ago by six points. The Democratic candidate for governor lost by more than 18 points. That is a 24-point plummet. (The congressional race in upstate New York was too messy, too local, and too full of jumbly facts to yield a theme that coheres.)
The path the president and the Democrats of Congress chose has been called the big-bang strategy. In January 2009 they had the big mo and could claim a mandate. The strategy was to give their first year to 2008 domestic policy pledges: health-care reform, climate change, empowering unions, etc.
But reality came in and stole the mandate, stopped the mo. The reality is that over the past 10 months the great recession settled in, broadened its presence, and became part of the national landscape. It became the big bad thing for normal people. It became a literal daily threat ("Is Daddy going to lose his job?") that underscored a chronic anxiety. That anxiety is that spending at all levels of government, and the tax demands it will bring and has brought, will make the overall economy worse. If Daddy manages to keep his job in this round of cutbacks, he won't be safe in the next round.
A president has only so much time. Mr. Obama gives a lot of his to health care. But the majority of voters in New Jersey and Virginia told pollsters they were primarily worried about joblessness and the economy. They're on another path, and they don't like the path he's chosen. A majority in a Gallup poll out Wednesday said they now think the president governs from the left, not the middle. The majority did not expect that a year ago.
The president chose promises made before the recession fully took hold, rather than more pressing and pertinent public concerns. In the language of marketing that has become the language of politics he thereby, in his first year, damaged his brand.
***
Professional politicians say great things after an election this stark, great in the sense that they reveal whether they have a tropism toward truth or a tropism toward . . . let us call it other things, including mindless spin. "We won last night!" Nancy Pelosi crowed. "I think we had a major victory," said Rep. Elijah Cummings (D., Md.) on "Morning Joe." Mika Brzezinski was so delighted by his lurch from reality that she asked him to repeat it, and he did.
Interestingly, the president has said nothing.
Under the heading tropism toward truth we have what Sen. Mark Warner, himself a former Virginia governor, told Politico: "We got walloped."
That was admirably candid. Some party activists said the problem was with Democrats such as Virginia's gubernatorial nominee, Creigh Deeds, not more fully embracing Mr. Obama in their campaigns. White House adviser David Axelrod echoed this to Politico, saying that in previous elections, beleaguered candidates learned that "the history of running away from a president is not very good."
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My goodness, throw the drowning man an anvil. This goes beyond loyalty. All White House staffs tend to hypnotize themselves into thinking their greatest asset is the president. George W. Bush's people thought this way too—the guy is magic, associate yourself with him and you'll win big. That's what they told candidates in 2006, when Mr. Bush dragged them down. Most modern White House staffs, no matter who the president, wind up at a point where they're like the men around Stalin. Stalin would give a speech, and his commissars would all wildly applaud. The applause would go on a long time, but it had to end at some point, so Vladimir sitting up front would, in an attempt to be helpful, would stop applauding and sit down. Everyone else would follow. The next week Stalin would give a speech and everything would be the same except Vladimir was no longer in the front row. He was in the gulag. This is how White House staffs come to think: Never be the first one to stop applauding.
Democrats in the House, especially the moderates and so-called blue dogs, really should stop applauding at this point, and signal to the president that he's been handed a gift by the voters: a rough suggestion as to a midcourse correction.
Politico asked if the White House would learn anything through what happened Tuesday, and if a correction was possible. I doubt it. It is odd to see such hard-line tough-guy political players—and that's how they see themselves and in part are—governed, really, by abstractions, by things that look big-time but are actually small-time: our legacy, our greater historical meaning, the Aristotelian purity of getting at least a partial public option established so that it will grow and history will look back and say, "Ah, after 40 years of waiting they delivered what America never had and needed."
Mr. Obama and the House leadership may be too deep into health care to make a shift now and get in line with the American people's concerns. But they should start paying attention to what the people are saying. What happened Tuesday isn't a death knell, but it is a fire alarm: Something's wrong, fix it, change course. Show humility. Bow to the public. "Public opinion is everything," Lincoln is said to have said. It is. It can be changed and it can be shaped, but it always has to be listened to. This White House has gotten bad at listening. It paid the price for that on Tuesday.
2)Another attack leaves US Muslims fearing backlash
By ERIC GORSKI
As word spread that a gunman had opened fire at Fort Hood leaving a trail of carnage, a chilling realization swept across the U.S. Muslim community: He has an Islamic name.
From a professor who just testified in Congress, to a White House adviser appearing before a Jewish group and a former Marine driving home from work, Muslims across the country were shocked, angry and afraid that the attack would erode efforts to erase anti-Islamic stereotypes.
Many Islamic leaders said the Fort Hood tragedy that left 13 dead and 30 wounded including the alleged gunman, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, could likely post the sternest test for U.S. Muslims since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
"A lot of us work very hard for this country, to make America a better place," said Muqtedar Khan, a progressive Muslim scholar who has just given Congressional testimony on U.S. foreign policy in Afghanistan before Thursday's attack. "And this one nut like Maj. Hasan comes along and in one crazy episode of a few seconds he undermines these years and years of hard work we are doing to make American Muslims part of the mainstream in the community."
Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, is a Muslim who attended his former mosque daily and had an "Allah is Love" bumper sticker on his car. Soldiers reported Friday that the shooter shouted "Allahu Akbar!" — Arabic for "God is great!" — during the rampage.
Other troubling details also emerged, including reports that authorities suspect Hasan posted online messages about suicide bombers and violence, was struggling with a pending deployment to Afghanistan and was being harassed in the Army for being a Muslim.
While a motive remains unclear, the confirmation of Hasan's faith alone prompted major Muslim groups and mosques to issue statements condemning the killings as contrary to Islam and praising the service of the many Muslim Americans in the U.S. military.
Of immediate concern was security at mosques Friday, Islam's main day of communal prayer.
In Washington, Chicago and elsewhere, mosques asked police for extra patrols. In Garden Grove, Calif., officers stood watch outside a mosque as a precaution.
Muslim leaders warned people to be vigilant and avoid exposing themselves unnecessarily — including walking alone, said Hussam Ayloush, director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Southern California.
"This is one of those moments where we have to sit and pray that most Americans will come out stronger, more united, and more tolerant," said Ayloush, adding that Muslim organizations have received dozens of death threats and hate e-mail.
At the Muslim Community Center in Silver Spring, Md., which Hasan attended before moving to Fort Hood, Imam Mohamed Abdullahi urged worshippers Friday to tell their non-Muslim neighbors that Islam was not responsible for the deaths. He also advised them to keep their tempers in check.
"Whenever we hear the name turns out to be Arabic or Muslim we feel a double shock" about such incidents. "And then we worry about backlash," said Imam Mostafa Al-Qazwini of the Islamic Educational Center of Orange County in Costa Mesa, Calif.
U.S. Rep. Andre Carson, an Indiana Democrat who is one of two Muslims serving in Congress, cautioned against focusing on the alleged shooter's religion and instead said the discussion should be about mental health issues.
"This is no way a reflection of Islam any more than Timothy McVeigh's actions are a reflection of Christianity," said Carson, who supervised an anti-terrorism unit in Indiana's Department of Homeland Security and comes from a family of Marines.
Eboo Patel, the executive director of Chicago-based Interfaith Youth Core, had just spoken at a Union of Reform Judaism conference in Toronto on Thursday night when a rabbi told him: "The guy had a Muslim name."
"I had just spoken from the tradition of Islam ... on the importance of interfaith cooperation and building Muslim-Jewish bridges," said Patel, who sits on a White House faith-based advisory board. "I wish that was viewed as reflective of Islam instead of a deranged lunatic who was acting only in the tradition of deranged lunacy, not in the tradition of any faith."
But other Muslims were weary of what has become a routine: a Muslim does something unspeakable, and Islamic organizations issue statements condemning it.
"Truth be told, we're getting a little exhausted because we've done this to death," said Robert Salaam of Maryland, a former Marine who converted to Islam shortly after the 9-11 attacks and now blogs and hosts a radio show on Muslim affairs. "We're apologizing for people we don't know."
Still, driving home from work listening to the news Thursday, Salaam thought: "God, I hope it's not a Muslim."
2a)
PS to my last msg; the rejection by US Muslims of Hasan's acts must be viewed against the Muslim doctrines of taqiyya and kitman, which require Muslims to lie when their faith puts them in danger.
3)The New Iran Man at the State Department's Iran Desk
By Ed Lasky
John Limbert will be the senior Iran official at the State Department, replacing Dennis Ross, who has moved to the National Security Council (and who has not been heard from publicly since). Should America be concerned? Yes. Limbert is not a neutral arbiter; he serves on the advisory board of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC).
What is the National Iranian American Council?
The Council is widely considered the de facto lobby for the Iranian regime in America. It opposes sanctions on Iran, soft-pedals any controversial events in Iran, and counsels "patience" regarding Iran's stance towards its nuclear program. The NIAC has been at the forefront of lobbying against continued congressional funding of the Voice of America Persia service, Radio Farad, and grants for Iranian civil society. To top it off, the NIAC has reportedly received funding from anti-Israel advocate George Soros, who at the very least was an honored guest and speaker at one of its symposiums. (He called for a more equitable Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and advocated for America to renounce regime-change as a goal).
The NIAC staunchly opposes any military attacks on Iran. In other words, it all but serves as Iran's embassy in Washington -- though the NIAC vociferously disputes this characterization. However, there is very little sunlight between the views of the regime and the NIAC.
The NIAC is also headed by the controversial Trita Parsi. Who is Trita Parsi?
He was born in Iran, but moved to Sweden at the age of four. He pursued a career in international relations, eventually leading him to found the National Iranian American Council (more on that tie later).
Parsi serves as an adjunct scholar at the Middle East Institute, a "think-tank" that serves as one of the public-relations agencies for the Muslim world in Washington. The Middle East Institute is headed by Wyche Fowler, who has a string of what I called "Fowler Howlers" when I wrote about the Middle East Institute years ago. The Fowler Howlers were statements to the media that were so glowing regarding the Muslim world as to be synonymous with mirages.
Parsi also is the author of the book The Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and the United States, which was an expanded version of his dissertation thesis. The book was warmly endorsed and recommended by none other than John Mearsheimer, Zbigniew Brzezinski (who served as Parsi's dissertation adviser), and the former Foreign Minister for the State of Israel who has become an appeasement-focused dove, Shlomo Ben-Ami -- recently seen speaking at the J Street conference. Treacherous Alliance delves into anti-Semitic canards regarding Jewish control of policy in Washington.
The Treacherous Alliance also traffics in conspiracy-mongering, blaming neo-cons (you know who they are) for trying to push America into war with Iran. Parsi distorts history and willfully mistranslates the Iranian call for Israel to be "wiped off the map." He omits Iranian responsibility for the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia that killed so many Americans. He characterizes Iranian rhetoric against Israel as just words. He also blames the West for ignoring and dismissing numerous efforts by the Iranians to accommodate the West and blames the problems between America and Iran on Israeli machinations to turn nations, including our own, against Iran. The book is replete with errors and misinformation. Both Michael Goldfarb of the Weekly Standard and Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic take a skeptical view towards Parsi and the NIAC: Goldfarb calls him "the Iranian regime's man in Washington," while Goldberg accuses him of "doing a lot of leg-work for the Iranian regime."
The NIAC also has an ambitious plan that it unwittingly disclosed just a few years ago: enhance its power in Washington in order to help steer American foreign policy.
One curious fact is that board members of the NIAC contribute to J Street, the anti-Israel lobby that tries to pass itself off as "pro-peace" and supportive of Israel (just as the NIAC tries to palm itself off as being pro-American and pro-peace). Not so coincidentally, Trita Parsi himself was on a panel at the recent J Street conference.
There are a range of efforts that the NIAC has undertaken to enhance its power in Washington: it has placed interns in the offices of Congressmen; persuaded House members to sign a letter to President Bush in 2006 calling for unconditional negotiations with Iran's regime; and has, among other steps, hired the Iranian-American Press Secretary for Representative Marcy Kaptur (not known to be a stalwart supporter of the America-Israel relationship) to help improve their lobbying in Congress. The key goal of the NIAC, as made clear in their master plan, is to place its supporters into key positions of power in Washington.
Their efforts have reached fruition: the National Iranian American Council now has one of their own as the Iran man (literally and metaphorically) at the State Department. The caviar is flowing in Tehran.
3a)PM heads to U.S., under threat of Palestinian statehood declaration
By Barak Ravid and Natasha Mozgovaya
Concerns are growing in Israel's government over the possibility of a unilateral Palestinian declaration of independence within the 1967 borders, a move which could potentially be recognized by the United Nations Security Council.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently asked the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama to veto any such proposal, after reports reached Jerusalem of support for such a declaration from major European Union countries, and apparently also certain U.S. officials.
The reports indicated that Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has reached a secret understanding with the Obama administration over U.S. recognition of an independent Palestinian state. Such recognition would likely transform any Israeli presence across the Green Line, even in Jerusalem, into an illegal incursion to which the Palestinians would be entitled to engage in measures of self-defense.
In late August Fayyad presented the international community with a detailed plan for building up Palestinian Authority institutions and set a timetable of up to two years for its implementation. Senior Israeli officials said Fayyad's plan initially met with positive reaction in Jerusalem for its emphasis on institution-building and making security services more efficient.
But some Israeli officials told Haaretz that alongside the clauses reported in the media - which are similar to elements of Netanyahu's call for "economic peace" between Israel and the Palestinians - Fayyad's plan also contains a classified, unreleased portion stipulating a unilateral declaration of independence.
The plan specifies that at the end of a designated period for bolstering national institutions the PA, in conjunction with the Arab League, would file a "claim of sovereignty" to the UN Security Council and General Assembly over the borders of June 4, 1967 (before the outbreak of the Six-Day War, during which Israel took control of the West Bank and Gaza).
Fayyad is also seeking a new Security Council resolution to replace Resolutions 242 and 338 in the hope of winning the international community's support for the borders of a Palestinian state and applying stronger pressure on Israel to withdraw from the West Bank.
Several Israeli officials told Haaretz that Fayyad had spoken to them of positive responses he had received over the plan from prominent EU member states, including the United Kingdom, France, Spain and Sweden. Fayyad added that he presented the proposal to the U.S. administration and did not receive any signal of opposition in response.
Netanyahu's "kitchen cabinet" has held a number of meetings on the matter in recent months. "It's a very dangerous move," said a senior Israeli foreign-policy official. "More and more cabinet ministers understand that diplomatic inaction on Israel's part is likely to bring international support for the Fayyad program."
Israeli sources said Netanyahu discussed the proposal in meetings with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and special Mideast envoy George Mitchell and requested that the U.S. tell Fayyad that it would not support his proposal and would veto it in the Security Council. Netanyahu has yet to receive a clear response from Washington on its stance on Fayyad's plan.
Netanyahu is to arrive in Washington today for a brief visit. He is scheduled to address the United Jewish Communities General Assembly, preceded by Defense Minister Ehud Barak.
On Tuesday Netanyahu is to fly to Paris, where he is scheduled to meet with President Nicolas Sarkozy on Wednesday. The prime minister's Paris visit comes just two days before that of Syrian President Bashar Assad, who will also meet with Sarkozy. Netanyahu has not signaled interest in renewing negotiations with Damascus, but stagnation in talks with the Palestinians may force him to do so.
Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, a mediator between Israel and Syria during Ehud Olmert's term as prime minister, said Friday in Paris that Turkey seeks to resume its role as an intermediary between the two countries, and that his government can be an "honest broker" in such talks.
Netanyahu has expressed reluctance over Turkish mediation due to ongoing diplomatic tension between Ankara and Jerusalem.
4)Making Health Care Worse
By Thomas Sowell
What is so wrong with the current medical system in the United States that we are being urged to rush headlong into a new government system that we are not even supposed to understand, because this legislation is to be rushed through Congress before even the Senators and Representatives have a chance to read it?
Among the things that people complain about under the present medical care system are the costs, insurance company bureaucrats' denials of reimbursements for some treatments and the free loaders at hospital emergency rooms whose costs have to be paid by others.
Will a government-run medical system make these things better or worse? This very basic question seldom seems to get asked, much less answered.
If the government has some magic way of reducing costs-- rather than shifting them around, including shifting them to the next generation-- they have certainly not revealed that secret. The actual track record of government when it comes to costs-- of anything-- is more alarming than reassuring.
What about insurance companies denying reimbursements for treatments? Does anyone imagine that a government bureaucracy will not do that?
Moreover, the worst that an insurance company can do is refuse to pay for medication or treatment. In some countries with government-run medical systems, the government can prevent you from spending your own money to get the medication or treatment that their bureaucracy has denied you. Your choice is to leave the country or smuggle in what you need.
However appalling such a situation may be, it is perfectly consistent with elites wanting to control your life. As far as those elites are concerned, it would not be "social justice" to allow some people to get medical care that others are denied, just because some people "happen to have money."
But very few people just "happen to have money." Most people have earned money by producing something that other people wanted. But getting what you want by what you have earned, rather than by what elites will deign to allow you to have, is completely incompatible with the vision of an elite-controlled world, which they call "social justice" or other politically attractive phrases. The "uninsured" are another big talking point for government medical insurance. But the incomes of many of the uninsured indicate that many-- if not most-- of them choose to be uninsured. Poor people can get insurance through Medicaid.
Free loading at emergency rooms-- mandated by government-- makes being uninsured a viable option.
Within living memory, most Americans had no medical insurance. Even large medical bills were paid off over a period of months or years, just as we buy big-ticket items like cars or houses.
This is not ideal for everybody or every situation. But if we are ready to rush headlong into government control of our lives every time something is not ideal, then we are not going to remain a free people very long.
Ironically, it is politicians who have already made medical insurance so expensive that many people refuse to buy it. Insurance is designed to cover risk. But politicians have mandated that insurance cover things that are not risks and that neither the buyers nor the sellers of insurance want covered.
In various states, medical insurance must cover the costs of fertility treatments, annual checkups and other things that have nothing to do with risks. What many people most want is to be insured against the risk of having their life's savings wiped out by a catastrophic illness.
But you cannot get insurance just for catastrophic illnesses when politicians keep piling on mandates that drive up the cost of the insurance. These are usually state mandates but the federal government is already promising more mandates on insurance companies-- which means still higher costs and higher premiums.
All this makes a farce of the notion of a "public option" that will simply provide competition to keep private insurance companies honest. What politicians can and will do is continue to drive up the cost of private insurance until it is no longer viable. A "public option" is simply a path toward a "single payer" system, a euphemism for a government monopoly.
4a)House passes sweeping healthcare overhaul
By John Whitesides and Donna Smith
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The House of Representatives approved a sweeping healthcare reform bill on Saturday, backing the biggest health policy changes in four decades and handing President Barack Obama a crucial victory.
On a narrow 220-215 vote, including the support of one Republican, the House endorsed a bill that would expand coverage to nearly all Americans and bar insurance practices such as refusing to cover people with pre-existing conditions.
Most Republicans criticized its $1 trillion price tag, new taxes on the wealthy and what they said was excessive government interference in the private health sector.
Democrats cheered and hugged when the 218th vote was recorded, and again when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi pounded the gavel and announced the results.
The battle over Obama's top domestic priority now moves to the Senate, where work on its own version has stalled for weeks as Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid searches for an approach that can win the 60 votes he needs.
Any differences between the Senate and House bills ultimately will have to be reconciled, and a final bill passed again by both before going to Obama for his signature.
"Thanks to the hard work of the House, we are just two steps away from achieving health insurance reform in America. Now the United States Senate must follow suit and pass its version of the legislation," Obama said in a statement after the vote.
"I am absolutely confident it will, and I look forward to signing comprehensive health insurance reform into law by the end of the year," he said.
The overhaul would spark the biggest changes in the $2.5 trillion U.S. healthcare system, which accounts for one sixth of the U.S. economy, since the creation of the Medicare government health program for the elderly in 1965.
ABORTION DEAL
The vote followed days of heavy lobbying of undecided Democrats by Obama, his top aides and House leaders. The narrow victory was clinched early on Saturday by a deal designed to mollify about 40 Democratic opponents of abortion rights.
Democrats had a cushion of 40 of their 258 House members they could lose and still pass the bill. In the end, 39 Democrats sided with Republicans against it.
The lone Republican to vote in favor of it was first-term Representative Anh Cao of Louisiana. "It was a bipartisan vote," Democratic leader Steny Hoyer said to laughter among fellow Democrats afterward.
The landmark vote was a huge step for Obama, who has staked much of his political capital on the healthcare battle. A loss in the House would have ended the fight, impaired the rest of his legislative agenda and left Democrats vulnerable to big losses in next year's congressional elections.
Obama traveled to Capitol Hill on Saturday morning to meet with House Democrats and emphasize the vital need for the healthcare reform bill.
Republicans and Democrats battled in sometimes testy debate through the day and into the night on Saturday over the bill, which would require individuals to have insurance and all but the smallest employers to offer health coverage to workers.
It would set up exchanges where people could choose to purchase private plans or a government-run insurance option bitterly opposed by the insurance industry, and it would offer subsidies to help low-income Americans buy insurance.
Congressional budget analysts say the bill would extend coverage to 36 million uninsured people living in the United States, covering about 96 percent of the population, and would reduce the budget deficit by about $100 billion over 10 years.
"We can't afford this bill," said Republican Representative Roy Blunt. "It's a 2,000-page road map to a government takeover of healthcare."
REPUBLICAN PLAN REJECTED
Democrats rejected on a 258-176 vote the much smaller Republican healthcare plan, which focused on cost controls and curbing medical malpractice lawsuits but did not include many of the insurance reforms of the Democratic plan.
The House also approved on a 240-194 vote an amendment that would impose tighter restrictions on using federal funds to pay for abortions.
House Democratic leaders agreed to allow a vote on the amendment to mollify about 40 moderate House Democrats who threatened to oppose the overhaul without changes to ensure federal subsidies in the bill for insurance purchases were not used on abortion.
The move enraged Democratic abortions rights supporters, but they largely voted in favor of the bill in hopes they can remove the language later in the legislative process.
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