PelosiCare: Reaction Roundup featuring Sarah Palin, Thomas Sowell, The Anchoress, Dr. Helen, Tom Jacobson, John Locke and Doctor Zero

The anger of the American public is only just beginning

Dr. Helen's message is inspiring:

You are never doomed until you are dead. There is always something that can be done. The anger of the American public is only just beginning. It is an energy that will be needed in the coming days, weeks and months to protest, stand up, debate, argue and get in the face of every government official, public figure and others who support a bill that leads us down The Road to Serfdom.

The people who gave us Fannie Mae now want to run health care

Sarah Palin is on fire:

We’ve got to hold on to hope, and we’ve got to fight hard because Congressional action tonight just put America on a path toward an unrecognizable country.

The same government leaders that got us into the mortgage business and the car business are now getting us into the health care business...

...Speaker Pelosi has broken her own promises of transparency to ram a health “care” bill through the House of Representatives just before midnight. Why did she push the 2,000 page bill this weekend? Was she perhaps afraid to give her peers and the constituents for whom she works the chance to actually read this monstrous bill carefully, if at all? Was she concerned that Americans might really digest the details of a bill that the Wall Street Journal has called “the worst piece of post-New Deal legislation ever introduced”?

This out-of-control bureaucratic mess will be disastrous for our economy, our small businesses, and our personal liberty. It will slam businesses at a time when we are at double-digit unemployment rates – the highest we’ve seen in a quarter of a century. This massive new bureaucracy will cost us and our children money we don’t have. It will rob Americans of more of our freedom and further hamper the free market.

Make no mistake: we’re on course to have government commandeer one-sixth of our economy. The people who gave us Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac now want to run our health care.

The Day the Blue Dogs Died

The John Locke Foundation calls it "The Day the Blue Dogs Died":

...more than half (28 out of 52) of the supposedly fiscally conservative Blue Dog Democrats voted FOR HR 3962 — the nearly 2,000-page bureaucratic monstrosity that, if implemented, will stifle the economic prospects of this generation, and many generations to come. I cringe when I think about what is to come for my stepdaughter’s small children, who will enter the work force in the next 15 to 20 years...

...To illustrate the clean break between what the Blue Dogs profess, and what the majority of them voted for last night, be sure to visit the coalition’s home page, which carries a national debt tally.

The shadow of the jackboot...

The Anchoress is realistic:

We’d best prepare ourselves for an America we could not have imagined even 9 years ago, and a world besieged by an ideology that seems to be heading to a victorious ascendancy.

Will government-run health care be better or worse?

Thomas Sowell's questions are piercing:

What is so wrong with the current medical system in the United States that we are being urged to rush headlong into a new government system that we are not even supposed to understand, because this legislation is to be rushed through Congress before even the Senators and Representatives have a chance to read it?

...Will a government-run medical system make these things better or worse? This very basic question seldom seems to get asked, much less answered.

Maybe this time...

Doctor Zero hits another grand-slam.

The Heritage Foundation’s estimate of $2.4 to $2.6 trillion over 10 years, beginning when the House bill transitions from front-loaded tax hikes to full Daffy Duck freak-out spending in 2014, is the most logical projection of its true costs I’ve seen.

Even this will likely prove to be an underestimation of the true long-term costs. No other Big Government program has ever stayed within an order of magnitude of the promises made when it was signed into law. Medicare originally cost about $3 billion, when it began in 1965, and was projected to cost about $12 billion by 1990, adjusted for inflation. The actual cost in 1990 was nearly ten times that figure, $107 billion. It was up to $440 billion by 2007. The architects of the program would have been run out of town on a rail, if these future costs had been known to the voters of 1965.

The difference between promised benefits and expected revenues for Social Security and Medicare amounts to about $107 trillion dollars, which Doug Bandow of the Cato Institute points out is double the annual Gross Domestic Product of the entire world. The most strident opponent of the New Deal would never have dreamed of predicting this level of cost overrun. Name any government program that has been around for more than five years, and the odds are good it costs at least triple what its opponents originally said it would cost.

In The End: No Public Option, No Abortions, No Pelosi, No Reid

William A. Jacobson has a hopeful analysis of a possible endgame.

Keep in mind, Nancy Pelosi cut a deal to get her health care bill through the House (by a mere 5 votes) by allowing a floor vote on the Stupak Amendment, which reiterates existing federal law banning federal funding for abortions, and takes that law several steps further by requiring any health plan which participates in the newly established exchanges to offer competing plans, one which covers abortion and one which does not. The Stupak Amendment makes clear that any plan offering abortion coverage must be self-funding, with no federal funds used directly or indirectly. As many left-wing bloggers are screaming, the Stupak Amendment guts Roe v. Wade in reality (but not in law) by creating a subclass of health insurance coverage which will cost more and be less available than alternatives without abortion coverage.

So Harry Reid needs to drop the public option to get a bill through the Senate. Nancy Pelosi needs to drop abortion coverage even for most private plans, to get a bill through the House.

The end result: If a bill is to pass both houses of Congress, it will have no public option and no abortion coverage.

The left-wing will take care of dropping Pelosi and Reid from their leadership positions. And if Obama were to sign such a bill, who knows whether he would be dropped in 2012.

From his lips to God's ears.