And that’s before rationing their health care.
Barack Obama thinks he can seize upon Paul Ryan’s plan as a foil for his re-election.
Democrats still smarting from their 2010 mid-term defeat see Republican Rep. Paul Ryan’s controversial plan to overhaul Medicare as political aspirin, a cure for just about everything that ails them.
But for Barack Obama it’s more like Geritol — a targeted treatment for his chronic aches and pains with older voters.
If the elderly are exposed to the truth, they’ll find that Ryan’s plan is their only hope, because Obama’s plans for the elderly are brutal.
It’s no secret that Barack Obama wants pretty much every kind of energy to cost more in this country. Obama is on record as desiring higher gasoline prices. His Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has said that he would not want any domestic drilling even if gas went to $10 a gallon.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0FcNNeuf0E&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]
Obama’s Energy Secretary Steven Chu said
“Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”
Gasoline is nearly $10 a gallon in the United Kingdom. It sounds as though the Obama price target is somewhere north of $10 a gallon for gasoline.
Food prices were already on the rise last year.
An inflationary tide is beginning to ripple through America’s supermarkets and restaurants, threatening to end the tamest year of food pricing in nearly two decades.
Prices of staples including milk, beef, coffee, cocoa and sugar have risen sharply in recent months. And food makers and retailers including McDonald’s Corp., Kellogg Co. and Kroger Co. have begun to signal that they’ll try to make consumers shoulder more of the higher costs for ingredients.
Food prices are up 5% this year already, and this is before the full effect of rising gas and oil prices has made itself felt.
Home heating oil is up 33% over the last year.
Gasoline prices are up by at least a dollar over the last year.
Electricity rates are up by the at least 5%.
While Barack Obama has been quick to criticize Paul Ryan and his efforts to bring fiscal order to the country, Obama has not been forthcoming about his own Medicare plans. Rationing and death panels are back.
Mark Hemingway on IPAB
Here’s how IPAB works. It’s a panel comprised of 15 presidential appointees who are tasked with reducing Medicare spending. The panel is is given certain spending targets that kick in in 2014. At first those targets are on a sliding scale, but by 2018 the spending targets are set at the rate of GDP growth with an additional half of a percentage point tacked on. (Originally, it was GDP plus a full percentage point, but according to the “framework” released prior to the President’s speech the spending target has been reduced.)
Any recommendations IPAB makes about Medicare spending automatically become law. Congress can only override IPAB with a three-fifths majority vote, which is a very high legislative hurdle, or they can pass their own Medicare plan that meets the same spending target. There’s no administrative process for doctors or citizens to challenge the board’s decisions. There’s a school of thought that says IPAB is even more blatantly unconstitutional than the individual mandate, as its power sounds legislative in nature — its declarations would have the force of law — and therefore cannot legitimately be delegated to an executive entity.
Obama hid this from everyone. Stanley Kurtz:
The IPAB issue also brings out a second and less well understood aspect of the Obama puzzle. Obama’s gradualism and ideological stealth have helped to mask significant distinctions between his own position and that of many other Democrats. IPAB was never included in the original House version of the health-care bill. In fact, in January of 2010, 72 House Democrats joined Republicans in sending a letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi asking that IPAB be excluded from the bill. (This mixed moderate Democrats opposed to rationing with some far-left Democrats worried that a future Republican president could use the board to gut Medicare.) Imagine how many more moderate Democrats would have opposed IPAB in 2010 had Obama been honest about his ambitious long-term plans for IPAB rationing. Even now some (mostly) moderate Democrats are beginning to join again with Republicans aiming to repeal IPAB. So on the American political spectrum, Obama and his core left-Democratic allies remain ideological outliers. That is precisely what their habitual stealth is designed to disguise–and what the truth about Obama’s past reveals.
James Capretta points out just how nefarious and disingenuous Obama’s plan is:
President Obama’s 2012 budget has rightly been lambasted as completely detached from fiscal and economic reality. Even under the budget’s own rosy assumptions, the country would accumulate $7.2 trillion in deficits over the coming decade. Under more realistic assumptions, it’s a plan for trillion-dollar deficits every year, with no end in sight. By 2021, government debt would likely approach $21 trillion under this budget, up from $5.8 trillion at the end of 2008.
This might lead one to think there is no Democratic plan for closing the fiscal gap. But actually, the president and his allies do have a plan of sorts. They just don’t want voters to know what it is. Indeed, it is their hope that they can get their plan adopted by stealth — and that voters never fully realize that the government has adopted it.
So now Obama’s plans for the elderly start to come into focus.
Starve them with high food prices, strand them with high gas prices, freeze them with his high heating oil prices and ration them to death with health care. If nothing else, it could be argued that Obama’s plan for the elderly is comprehensive.
DrJohn has been a health care professional for more than 30 years. In addition to clinical practice he has done extensive research and has published widely with over 70 original articles and abstracts in the peer-reviewed literature. DrJohn is well known in his field and has lectured on every continent except for Antarctica. He has been married to the same wonderful lady for over 30 years and has three kids- two sons, both of whom are attorneys and one daughter on her way into the field of education.
DrJohn was brought up with the concept that one can do well if one is prepared to work hard but nothing in life is guaranteed.
Except for liberals being foolish.