Matt Frei’s commentary on the BBC News website, titled Washington diary: Obama’s slump, is so full of BS I don’t even know where to begin. Granted, it’s an opinion piece, but millions of people around the world watch or listen to BBC News every day, and the line between reporting opinions and facts is increasingly blurred, especially at the BBC.

Let’s skip by the “redefining the relationship with the rest of the world” – after all, it looks like Gitmo won’t be closed anytime soon and Iran hasn’t backed down on its nuclear threat. Instead, let’s start with Frei’s supposed neighbor, “Republican Dave”, who voted for Obama because “he could not stomach the thought of Sarah Palin being one heartbeat away from the Oval Office”. How big a factor in President Obama’s election were voters like Dave? According to CNN, 9% of self-identified Republicans voted for Obama. Referring to President Obama, Frei states: “It is the wobbly Obama Republicans – like my friend Dave – that he really needs to worry about.”
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That’s the opinion of Former CBO director Douglas Holtz-Eakin, according to the Washington Times. Apparently the updated 10 year budget projections, while trending towards the CBO’s $9.1 Trillion deficit estimate, selectively include and exclude the impacts of proposed legislation:

Holtz-Eakin said that said the Obama administration wrongly assumes it will receive $640 billion in revenue from the creation of a cap-and-trade system for polluters, which would rely on the passage of an energy reform bill that many Democrats oppose, plus another $200 billion from a controversial proposal to tax international businesses. The Obama administration is also counting on the idea that health care reform will not increase the deficit, which some believe is impossible.

What’s more stunning about this? Counting in contributions from Cap and Trade, or trying to pass off projections that the proposed health care reform package will actually lower the budget deficit? A public option that extends benefits to uninsured Americans while creating a massive new bureaucracy is simply unaffordable. Targeted incentives to make health insurance more affordable combined with meaningful tort reform would be more practical and lead to more probable deficit reductions over the longer term.

* Update: Take it away, Greta:

(Youtube video h/t to Below the Beltway)

In Palin: No health-care reform without tort reform, Ed Morrissey at Hot Air supplements Sarah Palin’s Facebook note on Tort reform with several excellent points:

Defensive medicine comprises as much as 10% of the total cost of American health care. One study puts the average annual cost of defensive medicine as high as $2,000 for a family of four. Estimates range between $100-$178 billion per year of defensive medicine costs.

The referenced study is discussed on the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons website, which points out that:

The medical liability crisis has had many unintended consequences, most notably a decrease in access to care in a growing number of states and an increase in healthcare costs.

Access is affected as physicians move their practices to states with lower liability rates and change their practice patterns to reduce or eliminate high-risk services. When one considers that half of all neurosurgeons—as well as one third of all orthopaedic surgeons, one third of all emergency physicians, and one third of all trauma surgeons—are sued each year, is it any wonder that 70 percent of emergency departments are at risk because they lack available on-call specialist coverage?

Could tort reform also improve quality of care?

In a recent study of residents across specialties, 81 percent of responding residents said that they view every patient as a potential lawsuit…Assurance behavior, reported by 92 percent of physician respondents, involves ordering tests (particularly imaging tests), performing diagnostic procedures, and referring patients for consultation. Avoidance behavior, reported by 42 percent of physician respondents, includes restricting their practice, eliminating high-risk procedures and procedures prone to complications, and avoiding patients with complex problems or patients perceived as litigious…On the therapeutic side, defensive therapeutic measures such as Caesarean sections or invasive procedures such as breast lump biopsies are accompanied by significant risks to patients and increased healthcare expenditures, not to mention the issues of patient safety.

Defensive medicine consumes time and money and delays patient access to needed, proven therapies. How much human suffering is experienced during these delays?

One final, startling point the AAOS article makes:

Excessive litigation and waste in the nation’s current tort system imposes an estimated yearly tort tax of $9,827 for a family of four and increases healthcare spending in the United States by $124 billion. How does this translate to individuals? The average obstetrician-gynecologist (OB-GYN) delivers 100 babies per year. If that OB-GYN must pay a medical liability premium of $200,000 each year (which is the rate in Florida), $2,000 of the delivery cost for each baby goes to pay the cost of the medical liability premium.

A hidden tax of close to $10,000 annually for a family of 4? That probably covers a major portion of the health insurance premium for such a family.

Over at Hot Air Allahpundit has posted an excerpt from Sarah Palin’s Facebook post titled “Statement on the Current Health Care Debate”. I’ll start out by stating that while I don’t agree with her on everything, I consider myself a supporter.

Ms. Palin is correct in asserting

The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course.

I would add the poor as well. All you have to do is travel to a country with a socialized medical system to see the results. The only thing worse than observing the results is being sick in a socialized medicine country (take it from me personally). She’s also quite right in her assertions about the nature of the physician/patient relationship, the life/death decisions that must (regretfully) sometimes be made, and how human rights and dignity must be at the center of those decisions.

But Governor – just wait a minute. Where does this come from?

The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

Governor Palin, you’re right that such a system would be downright evil, but casting a proposed review panel as a tribunal that makes decisions based on subjective expectations of future productivity seems a bit much. Private medical insurance companies utilize such review panels. There’s nothing new here, although the prospect of unaccountable government bureaucrats having review authority of health care decisions is scary.

We need to be careful to not create credibility questions and provide fodder for the left-wingers, thereby enabling them to distract us from making the point we want to make on Health Care reform, which Ms Palin summarizes so well:

Nationalizing our health care system is a point of no return for government interference in the lives of its citizens. If we go down this path, there will be no turning back. Ronald Reagan once wrote, “Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.”

*UPDATE* – CNN’s Political Ticker blog implies the reason for the Governor’s concern is non-mandated advanced planning directive consultations. Such conversations routinely occur in the US, especially with children of aging and ailing parents, and as patients reach the age of 50 and beyond. Ms. Palin needs to clarify her remarks and regain some lost credibility.

*SECOND UPDATE* – Legal Insurrection has a good explanation for the source of the “death panel” remark. While certain groups will always denigrate any statement she may make, Governor Palin’s statement could have been more explicit in this regard.

*LAST UPDATE* – Michelle Malkin has a petty good rundown of how Britain’s NHS treats the vulnerable mentioned in Governor Palin’s statement. If only Ms. Palin had developed the concept of “death panels” differently and provided some concrete examples, perhaps more people would be focusing on the message and reality checks instead of how it was delivered.

In a lengthy article, Carl Cannon points out how the media’s skewering of Sarah Palin is contributing to its own demise.

This New Journalism, if you can call it that, exhibited in 2008 was epitomized by an eradication of the lines between fact and opinion – and, even more troubling, between reporting and propaganda. Some journalists were content to repeat Democratic Party talking points or bloggers’ rumors as though they were established fact, interspersing them with ideological commentary in a kind of toxic stew.

Sarah ‘Barracuda’ Palin and the Piranhas of the Press — Politics Daily.

Asking the obvious about Sarah Palin’s sudden resignation? Andrew Breitbart suggests a tantalizing possibility.

Perhaps resigning from her first term in office may hurt Mrs. Palin’s attempts to run for higher office….But politics is not the most important way to influence our country, and reinforce conservatism’s relevancy in the current global disorder. Media is.

BREITBART: New York Times Barbie strikes again – Washington Times

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