White House Thuggery and Taxing the Sick and Handicapped

Posted by Tom Sawyer.

This gem showed up in my email inbox this morning. It is slated, I think, to appear later today at Dick Morris dot com.

Obama Taxes Pacemakers, Heart Valves

by Dick Morris

The more fiscal details of the health care 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!

The most recent Gallup Poll reflected that 49% of respondents said they believed that the Obamacare plan will increase their health care costs. Only about 20% said it would lower them. It is taxes like these that substantiate this kind of concern.

The origins of this new medical device tax are troubling as well.

The medical device industry had its day at the White House as did the insurance industry, the drug makers, the nurses, and the doctors. In turn, each group heard the White House request that they come up with voluntary cuts in their health care costs and support Obama's proposed changes in return for assurances that Congress would not impose deeper cuts (or, in the case of the doctors, that it would actually rescind cuts already scheduled under current statutes).

But, unlike all these other groups, the medical device industry refused the deal. This posture enraged the tyrants in the White House who vowed to punish the industry with cuts imposed by Congress. The result was a decision by the revenue-hungry Senate Finance Committee to extract billions in funds from the industry.

The legislation does not work like a sales or excise tax. Rather it follows the model of the punitive tobacco settlement imposed on cigarette companies in the 90s. It assesses an industry-wide payment which firms must make in proportion to their market share. It bars the them from passing along the cost of the assessment by charging more for certain basic products, but allows them to raise the price of others to raise the funds for the fee.

So, the result will be that virtually every piece of advanced surgical equipment will be subject to a price increase to meet the levy from Washington. No matter that these devices often make the difference between life and death and that, in effect, taxing them raises the cost of vital treatments. The vengeful White House will have its pound of flesh from the medical device industry for daring to be independent and to refuse to knuckle down to Administration pressure!

This tax, imposed in a spirit of haughty arrogance, falls on totally inappropriate objects. Valves, prosthetic limbs, pacemakers, hearing aids, and such are essential therapies that make life longer, better, and less painful. To tax them makes no sense. Except in the world of sharp elbows and interest group politics that grips this take-no-prisoners and show-no-mercy White House.

Rush Limbaugh, Libel, and the NFL

Posted by Tom Sawyer.

I am not a great fan of the NFL so it will not be a great sacrifice for me to decide that I have had enough of that organization and will no longer be spending any money or time on it. Decision made.

What has happened over the last week concerning Rush Limbaugh and his bid, as part of a buying group, to purchase the St. Louis Rams, an NFL franchise, has been well-documented in several places. Try here, here, here for a run-down on the political hatchet job that has been done against Limbaugh.

The incident exposes the mainstream media in this country for the leftist hacks that they are (as if they hadn't already exposed themselves in that vein a thousand times over). See this libelous screen shot from CNN for example:

This was not the only false quotation attributed to Rush Limbaugh nor was CNN the only place where it happened. Like lemmings, the entire main stream media followed Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton over that cliff. Everyone knows Rush Limbaugh is a racist, why should anyone actually check facts? Right?

Make no mistake. Rush is the victim of a deliberate and malicious campaign of character defamation perpetrated by our society's self-proclaimed arbiters of civility. (What ever did happen to civil discourse?) And this was done to send a message. Did you get the message?

Here it is: if you disagree with us, keep your mouth shut. If you do open your mouth we will destroy you even if we have to make up quotations out of whole cloth and attribute them to you falsely. We will lie and lie with impunity to destroy you if necessary. So keep your mouth shut.

That's the message from the main stream media and the progressive movement as a whole and it does not just apply to Rush Limbaugh, it applies to the rest of us as well. He was made an example for us.

There is also a message from the NFL and it is this. If you are conservative or libertarian--in other words if you disagree with the current climate of political correctness and progressive/liberal thought--and you dare speak openly about it, you are not welcome. You have proved yourself to be a second-class citizen. We do not want you.

Meanwhile, the real racists, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, are quoted all over the place as if they are authorities on race. The NFL, presumably, would rather be associated with the likes of them than of Rush Limbaugh. Rush Limbaugh, you see, is too polarizing, too controversial. Of course, no one thinks that Keith Olbermann is too polarizing or controversial. No one in the NFL front office thinks he is guilty of hate speech. And the NFL has no problem being affiliated with him. The NFL has chosen sides. They have said "yes" to the Jesse Jacksons, Al Sharptons, and Keith Olbermanns of the world and "no" to conservatives and libertarians. Really, why should we give them our money?

Roger Goodell is an idiot, or a hypocrite. You decide. Maybe just the term "leftist" will suffice.