Dick Morris

Joseph Stubbs, president of the American College of Physicians — the second-largest doctors’ group in the country — confirms that “the supply of doctors just won’t be there” for the 30 million new patients President Barack Obama wants to cover.

Don’t assume that the 38 Democrats who voted against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) extremist version of healthcare reform wouldn’t have supported it if their votes had been needed. The days before the final passage on Saturday were not filled with stirring appeals to get Democrats to back the bill so much as an auction to decide whom to let off the hook.

As Santayana said, “Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it.” Congressional Democrats: Take note!

After more than a decade of public healthcare with mandatory coverage, so many Canadian doctors have left the practice and so many young people have entered other fields that Canada ranks 26th of 28 developed nations in its ratio of physicians to population. Once, Canada ranked among the leaders in the number of physicians, but that was before government healthcare drove doctors out of the practice in droves.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) had two problems. How would he get the healthcare bill out of the Senate Finance Committee without revealing the glaring potential fissures in his party over the public option on healthcare? And how could he lend a veneer of bipartisanship to a one-party bill?

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has fallen for Iran’s line that it is not developing nuclear weapons, but only wants the ability to develop one to achieve its place in the sun among the great nations of the earth.

Will a young, healthy, childless individual or couple buy health insurance costing 7.5 percent of their income, as required by Obama’s health legislation? Not until they get sick. Then they can always buy the insurance, and the Obama bill requires the insurance companies to give it to them. And if the premiums come to more than 7.5 percent of their income because they are now sick, no problem. Obama will subsidize it.

Watch how Maine Republican Olympia Snowe and Arkansas Democrat Blanche Lincoln vote in the Senate Finance Committee on the Baucus version of the Obama healthcare plan. As Snowe and Lincoln go, so will the Congress.

While all eyes were on the rantings of Ahmadinejad at the United Nations, the United States — under President Barack Obama — was surrendering its economic sovereignty at the G-20 summit. The result of this conclave, which France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy hailed as “revolutionary,” was that all the nations agreed to coordinate their economic policies and programs and to submit them to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for comment and approval. While the G-20 nations and the IMF are, for now, only going to use “moral suasion” on those nations found not to be in compliance, talk of sanctions looms on the horizon.

Now that the various healthcare plans are being reduced to print, the financial details are emerging and with them a fundamental conclusion is becoming evident: The Obama plan is a giant tax increase for much of the American people (not just the rich).