Dick Morris

By Dick Morris and Eileen McGann

As the suicidal Democratic congressmen proceed to rubber-stamp the Obama healthcare reform despite the drubbing their party took in the ’09 elections, the president trotted out the endorsements of the AMA and the AARP to stimulate support. But these — and the other endorsements — his package has received are all bought and paid for. Here are the deals:

By Dick Morris and Eileen McGann

The more the fiscal details of the healthcare bills emerge, the more appalling they seem. The Senate Finance Committee bill includes a broad provision taxing all manner of medical devices. This tax includes such frivolous luxuries as pacemakers, stents, artificial heart valves, defibrillators, automated wheelchairs, mechanized artificial limbs, replacement hips and knees, surgical gurneys, laparoscopic equipment and the like.

President Obama is planning to reduce the cost of medical care by taxing it!

By Dick Morris and Eileen McGann

Whether or not you now have health insurance, Obama’s healthcare bill will cost you dearly. If you don’t have insurance, you will be required to buy it. The legislation specifies how much you will have to pay for the coverage before any subsidy kicks in. All during the campaign, Obama kept speaking about affordable coverage. Now it appears that his definition of “affordable” might be a bit elastic. 

President Barack Obama has won the Peace Prize, but nobody thinks he deserves the Nobel in economics. Despite $800 billion of economic stimulus and the accumulation of a $1.4 trillion deficit, he has been unable to lower the unemployment rate below 9.8 percent.
 
So why, after nine months of Obama, do voters, in the latest Rasmussen poll, still blame Bush — and not Obama — for the economic situation by 55-37? How can Obama skate by without having to account for the failure of his economic program?

By Dick Morris and Eileen McGann

Faced with a need to scrounge for revenue to fund his plan for healthcare, President Barack Obama and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) have come up with a brilliant new idea: Tax the sick!

In a new amendment to the healthcare bill, they propose to limit the deductibility of medical expenses on income taxes.

By Dick Morris and Eileen McGann

America's elderly are finally realizing that Obama's healthcare changes are largely financed by cuts in Medicare and are rallying against his proposals in increasing numbers.

The latest poll by Scott Rasmussen not only shows national opposition to Obamacare rising — now it is 41-56 against — but also shows the elderly moving against it even more strongly, by 33-59, or almost 2:1.

By Dick Morris and Eileen McGann

The Baucus healthcare bill provides for a tax on “gold-plated” health insurance policies. But, as with the Alternative Minimum Tax, once slated to be imposed only on the wealthy, inflation will make most Americans liable to pay the 40 percent tax in a few years.

The tax applies to all individual policies with premiums above $8,750 and families of four whose premiums exceed $23,000. But the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the average health insurance premium for families of four will reach $25,000 by 2018. The average premium should pass the thresholds in Baucus’s bill by 2016.

By Dick Morris and Eileen McGann

As any good Persian rug dealer knows, you have to hold back a bargaining chit so that you can whip it out at the very end to tie down the sale. That’s how Obama is playing the so-called public option in his healthcare program. His plan seems to be to combine its abandonment with some form of tort reform and try to buy off some Republicans — maybe only Maine’s Sen. Olympia Snowe — to give moderate Democrats enough confidence in the veneer of bipartisanship to win their backing for his bill.

But it’s a fraud and a trick.

Scott Rasmussen, whose poll measures likely voters and is an especially good indicator of public attitudes, now has Obama’s job approval dropping to 46%. Zogby, the other good poll, has him at 45%. These surveys suggest that healthcare reform and the continuing bad economy are driving Obama down at a record clip.

Sen. Joe Lieberman's (I-Conn.) criticism of the Obama healthcare initiative may prove to be a pivotal turning point in the congressional debate over the increasingly unpopular proposal. Previous commentary about the Obama plans has focused exclusively on their impact on healthcare in America. The elderly are increasingly recognizing that, whatever its defenders say, extending coverage to 50 million new people — without any new doctors or nurses or equipment or hospitals — will create a scarcity that will lead to rationing, to the disadvantage of those over 65. Defenders of the free enterprise system have looked with alarm at the socialization of one-sixth of our economy and opponents of single-payer systems have argued that government control of healthcare is the inevitable result of the plan.