Welcome to the brave new world of government-run medicine.

As governments try to squeeze savings, providers will exit this system. This won’t just happen with pharmacists. An Investor’s Business Daily survey which was conducted last fall found that 45 percent of doctors say they will consider leaving medicine if this health care legislation passes. Another survey conducted in December had similar findings. Undoubtedly many of these doctors, already sick of spending so much of their time complying with the existing bureaucracy and paperwork, worry that increased government involvement will mean even more red tape.  Too low government reimbursement rates are surely also part of the problem.

An exodus of medical professionals will lead to longer wait times; those wait times will be even worse since more widely available health insurance will mean a greater consumption of medical care.  So we will have more patients and fewer doctors. It’s no wonder that our recent  poll found that a majority of voters from swing states believe that the health care system will be made worse by this legislation.

Members, are you listening?

IWV President and CEO Heather Higgins on Fox News and Friends to discuss the latest Health Care poll commissioned by IWV

by: Bill Pascoe

For weeks now, the Democratic congressional leadership and its allies in the White House have been trying to convince recalcitrant back-benchers (and more than a few front-benchers) that voting for the Senate version of health care reform legislation would not be the biggest act of mass suicide since followers of a radical religious messiah invented the phrase “drink the Kool-Aid” in a place called Jonestown.

To make this argument, they’ve relied on their reading of various public opinion polls’ “internals” — the responses to questions that usually aren’t considered newsworthy enough to warrant discussion in polite company.

Not for them the toplines of the public surveys; no, for them, one must go deep inside a poll to see what others cannot.

For example, White House adviser David Axelrod, appearing yesterday on ABC’s “This Week,” responded to host Jake Tapper’s question, “But according to the polls, the American people do not agree with what you think — ” thusly:

The polls are split, Jake. I mean, one of the interesting things that has happened in the last four or five weeks is that if you look at — if you average together the public polls, what you find is that the American people are split on the top line, do you support the plan? But again, when you go underneath, they support the elements of the plan. When you ask them, does the health care system need reform, three quarters of them say yes. When you ask them, do you want Congress to move forward and deal with this issue, three quarters of them say yes. So we’re not going to walk away from this issue.

It’s an artful dodge, worthy of Jack Dawkins.

But a new poll from Kellyanne Conway’s the polling company, inc./WomanTrend, commissioned by Independent Women’s Voice — the qualified 501(c)(4) arm of the Independent Women’s Forum — raises serious doubts about Axelrod’s claims.

The poll went where no other public survey has yet gone — right into the House districts of 35 targeted Democrats, 20 of whom had voted “Yea” on health care reform last November, 15 of whom voted “Nay.” Each is considered a target for suasion efforts, and it is in their districts that the battle is now being waged, one radio ad and one billboard at a time.

And what did the survey find?

When presented with five different options and asked what should Congress do next on health care reform, the single largest group (40 percent) said “Congress should start from scratch with a bipartisan proposal,” while the second-largest group (20 percent) said Congress should “stop working on healthcare legislation this year.”

Contrary to Axelrod’s declaration that the tide of momentum has shifted in favor of his favored reform effort, the survey showed otherwise. Asked “Has what what you’ve seen, read, or heard about healthcare reform over the last week to 10 days made you more supportive or less supportive of healthcare legislation being considered in Washington?” 29 percent said they were more supportive, while a whopping 55 percent said they were less supportive. Worse for Axelrod, 42 percent said they were much less supportive.

In a question aimed right at the heart of wavering Democrats, balancing their party leadership’s demands against their own priority — to wit, reelection in November — the survey asked, “Would you be more likely to vote for or vote against a candidate who opposes the current version of healthcare reform and wants to start over?” Fully 60 percent of the sample responded that they would be more likely to vote for the candidate who opposed the current legislation — and 38 percent would definitely vote for that candidate. Just 32 percent said they would vote against the candidate who opposed the current bill.

And this is a survey that was taken across 35 congressional districts controlled by Democrats.

Then survey respondents were then given three scenarios about how their Member of Congress had voted in the past, and how he might vote in the future:

• He voted against healthcare reform in November, and votes for healthcare reform next time through
• He voted for healthcare reform in November, and votes against healthcare reform next time through
• He voted against healthcare reform in November, and votes against healthcare reform next time through

The Member of Congress who voted against the legislation in November and votes against it next time has the most to gain — 58 percent said they would be more supportive, against only 34 percent less supportive.

The Member of Congress who voted for the legislation in November and votes against it next time begins to salvage his chances for reelection — 49 percent said they would be more supportive, against 40 percent who said they would be less supportive.

But the Member of Congress who voted against the bill in November, and then voted for it next time? That Member is a dead man walking — fully 61 percent of survey respondents said they would be less supportive, against a paltry 29 percent who said they would be more supportive.

The question these Members must ask themselves is simple: Am I dependent on the Democratic leadership for my job, or my constituents?

Independent Women’s Voice has given them their answer. But will they listen?

IWV President and CEO, Heather Higgins discusses Tranparency and FOAAs on FOX News

Before meeting with the Speaker, those female Members should do a little reading. First, they should check out IWV’s new poll, which shows that despite what the Speaker might say, voters emphatically want them to vote against this health care monstrosity. They also might be surprised to learn that eight in ten women disagree with the statement “It is the responsibility of the federal government to mandate that everyone have government-approved health insurance and to be penalized if they do not.”

Female Members should also be sure to read this article by Grace-Marie Turner in the Wall Street Journal which examines Massachusetts experiment with mandatory health insurance. Here’s some highlights:

While Massachusetts’ uninsured rate has dropped to around 3%, 68% of the newly insured since 2006 receive coverage that is heavily or completely subsidized by taxpayers. While Mr. Romney insisted that everyone should pay something for coverage, that is not the way his plan has turned out. More than half of the 408,000 newly insured residents pay nothing, according to a February 2010 report by the Massachusetts Health Connector, the state’s insurance exchange….

Mr. Romney’s promise that getting everyone covered would force costs down also is far from being realized. One third of state residents polled by Harvard researchers in a study published in “Health Affairs” in 2008 said that their health costs had gone up as a result of the 2006 reforms. A typical family of four today faces total annual health costs of nearly $13,788, the highest in the country. Per capita spending is 27% higher than the national average. …

Further, insurance companies are required to sell “just-in-time” policies even if people wait until they are sick to buy coverage. That’s just like the Obama plan. There is growing evidence that many people are gaming the system by purchasing health insurance when they need surgery or other expensive medical care, then dropping it a few months later. …

The Bay State is also suffering from what the Massachusetts Medical Society calls a “critical shortage” of primary-care physicians. As one would expect, expanded insurance has caused an increase in demand for medical services. But there hasn’t been a corresponding increase in the number of doctors. As a result, many patients are insured in name only: They have health coverage but can’t find a doctor.

Fifty-six percent of Massachusetts internal medicine physicians no longer are accepting new patients, according to a 2009 physician work-force study conducted by the Massachusetts Medical Society. For new patients who do get an appointment with a primary-care doctor, the average waiting time is 44 days, the Medical Society found….

The difficulties in getting primary care have led to an increasing number of patients who rely on emergency rooms for basic medical services. Emergency room visits jumped 7% between 2005 and 2007. Officials have determined that half of those added ER visits didn’t actually require immediate treatment and could have been dealt with at a doctor’s office—if patients could have found one.

Finally, Members should remember that voting against this version of health care reform isn’t a vote for the status quo. There are plenty of ways that Congress can and should change the health care system to make the system work better for everyone—and particularly for women.

By: James Taranto

The latest effort to psychoanalyze President Obama comes from Fred Hiatt, editorial page editor of the Washington Post. Hiatt offers “a theory about why President Obama is having a tough political time right now: He doesn’t seem all that happy being president.”

But Hiatt gets it backward. Obama isn’t having political difficulty because he’s unhappy; he’s unhappy because he’s having political difficulty. Or, as the president himself put it in an Ohio ObamaCare speech yesterday:

The American people want to know if it’s still possible for Washington to look out for their interests and their future. They are waiting for us to act. They are waiting for us to lead. And as long as I hold this office, I intend to provide that leadership. I don’t know about the politics. But I know what’s right.

He knows what’s right. And he cares so much about the American people that he is determined to do what is right, whether we want it done to us or not. Yet he keeps coming up against delays and obstructions. Where’s the fairness in that? If he’s omniscient and benevolent, doesn’t he deserve to be omnipotent too?

You can see why this is frustrating for the president. No one doubts what needs to be done for the people–no one, that is, except the people. They tell anyone who’ll listen that ObamaCare scares them to death. They even voted a Republican into the U.S. Senate from Massachusetts!

An Independent Women’s Voice poll of voters in 35 “key swing districts,” all represented by Democrats, finds that 60% think Congress should scrap ObamaCare and either start over or give up entirely. A plurality say they’d be more likely to support their congressman if he voted for ObamaCare in November and against it now.

Obama knows what’s right, and he keeps telling us, but we refuse to get the message. As a result, Jim Clyburn, the House majority whip, tells McClatchy Newspapers he’s not sure ObamaCare will come to the floor before Easter. That suggests that he and other Democratic leaders are having trouble rounding up the 216 votes they need to pass the legislation. You can see why they would be, if they listen to their poor deluded constituents.

That’s why President Obama is unhappy. The American people voted for change. Dammit, why won’t we change?

Bushism of the Day–I
“Well, a lot of those folks, your employer it’s estimated would see premiums fall by as much as 3,000 percent [sic], which means they could give you a raise.”–President Obama in Strongville Ohio, March 15, as quoted on the White House Web site

Bushism of the Day–II
“And she upped her deductible last year to the minimum [sic], the highest possible deductible.”–President Obama, ibid.

Two Papers in One!

• “In a Feb. 26 editorial, we said Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) was ‘posturing’ during the Thursday health-care summit by stacking the voluminous Senate bill before him. Mr. Cantor says that he had the bill with him, well-tabbed, not for show but so that Republicans could respond if specific provisions of the bill came up for discussion. That makes sense, and we should not have characterized his purpose as we did.”–correction, Washington Post, Feb. 27
• “House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) used the legislation as a visual prop at last month’s health-care summit, stacking the pages until they stood nearly a foot high.”–news story, Washington Post, March 16

So Much for the Wealth of Nations
“Adam Smith Unswayed by Chamber Ad Blitz on Health Bill”–headline, Seattle Times, March 15

Accountability Journalism
The Associated Press’s Jennifer Loven hasn’t lost that Loven feeling:

Just back from a recent day trip to Georgia, President Barack Obama walked into the Oval Office and told his senior staff to get a grip.

“We all rise and fall together,” he declared that afternoon, as Washington neared fever pitch over tensions on his team. Keep your eyes on the prize, Obama directed, not on the daily ups and downs.

It was classic Obama, again summoning one [of] his tenets: the Long View.

It’s a high-minded notion that elected leaders love to invoke, both privately and publicly. It makes politicians seem above the dirtiest aspects of campaigning and governing.

They rarely adhere to it. With all of the House and a third of the Senate going before the voters every two years, and a media environment that moves by the minute, the long view can get pretty short. Scoring a point – now – can itself feel like a do-or-die achievement in the long slog to pass prized legislation or survive re-election.

But for Obama, it’s been a crucial prescription he reaches for when times get tough . . .

You thought our lead item above was over the top? At least we were being sarcastic!

Tomorrow’s Forecast: Weather, With a 50% Chance of Climate
Saturday night found us braving rough weather in New York’s Meatpacking District. First the wind ripped our umbrella into pieces, then we got drenched in rain. While waiting to check our coat at the trendy night spot that was our destination, we looked out the door and saw a downpour so intense that it would have been described as biblical had it continued for another 40 days, 39 nights and change.

No wonder the weather was so bad! According to Al Gore, it wasn’t just weather, it was climate. As the Business and Media Institute reports:

Gore, the self-anointed climate change alarmist-in-chief, told supporters on a March 15 conference call that severe weather in certain regions of the country could be attributed to carbon in the atmosphere–including the recent rash of rainy weather.

“The odds have shifted toward much larger downpours,” Gore said. “And we have seen that happen in the Northeast, we’ve seen it happen in the Northwest–in both of those regions are among those that scientists have predicted for a long time would begin to experience much larger downpours.”

But wait. That seems inconsistent with this month-old report from the Hill:

A top Obama administration scientist on Monday struck back at climate skeptics who claim that record snowstorms this winter have undercut evidence of global warming.

“It is important that people recognize that weather is not the same thing as climate,” said Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

So weather isn’t the same thing as climate, except when it is. You can “prove” anything with such heads-I-win-tails-you-lose logic. A decade ago, Gore almost managed to use it to become president.

On a related note, consider this report from London’s Guardian:

When Al Gore was caught running up huge energy bills at home at the same time as lecturing on the need to save electricity, it turns out that he was only reverting to “green” type.

According to a study, when people feel they have been morally virtuous by saving the planet through their purchases of organic baby food, for example, it leads to the “licensing [of] selfish and morally questionable behaviour”, otherwise known as “moral balancing” or “compensatory ethics”.

Do Green Products Make Us Better People is published in the latest edition of the journal Psychological Science. Its authors, Canadian psychologists Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong, argue that people who wear what they call the “halo of green consumerism” are less likely to be kind to others, and more likely to cheat and steal. “Virtuous acts can license subsequent asocial and unethical behaviours,” they write.

The Guardian’s headline is “How Going Green May Make You Mean.” We’re inclined to think the chain of causation runs the other way–that people who are jerks to begin with gravitate toward verdant sanctimony.

Does Not Compute
The Federal Communications Commission today unveils “its much-awaited ‘broadband plan,’ which, among other things, will explain how the government plans to get nine out of 10 Americans online by 2020,” CNN reports:

That’s no easy task, considering less than two-thirds of people in the country have high-speed Internet access at home today, according to a 5,005-person survey published by the FCC in February.

Considering that the number of households with broadband was zero a little over a decade ago, it’s hard to see why we need a “national plan” to go from 67% to 90% in the next 10 years. CNN builds its story around what is supposed to be a tear-jerking human-interest story:

Like a photographer without a camera, or a mechanic who doesn’t own a car, Kelli Fields is a webmaster without high-speed Internet access.

By day, the 42-year-old uses a broadband connection at work to update a university’s Web site, which she built and codes from scratch.

But when she goes home at night, the rural Oklahoman struggles with a dial-up Internet connection so slow, she does chores to pass the time while Web sites load.

When we were young, we hiked five miles through the driving snow in our bare feet to use a 300-baud modem. Well, OK, we made that up, except the part about the 300-baud modem.

If you bother to read all the way through the story, though, you find that the reason Fields doesn’t have high-speed Internet is she doesn’t want to pay for it:

Fields is considering scraping together the money to get satellite Internet at her house. But she doesn’t want to give up services like TV to free up money for an expensive Internet connection.

So if the FCC wants to make broadband more widely available, maybe it should try making television less available.

In a press conference on Capitol Hill today, Rep. David Dreier (R., Calif.), ranking Republican on the House Rules Committee, said the word around the House is that Democrats are still about 10 votes away from securing the 216 they will need to pass changes to the health-care bill. Dreier added that that number might be moving in the wrong direction for Democrats.

And Jeffery Anderson details the hurdles that Democrats face:

If Obamacare’s opponents keep up the pressure on wavering House Democrats, victory is within our grasp. Obamacare faces three major hurdles to passage. You might reasonably assume that these are as follows: It’s a colossally bad bill; it’s an extremely unpopular bill; and members of Congress — despite what President Obama apparently thinks — do care about getting reelected. While you’d be right on all three counts, I’m talking about more specific hurdles related to the concrete numbers in the House.

Things have changed. The Democrats need every member of their caucus who voted “yes” last time to vote “yes” again — or, for every defection, they need to convert a prior “no” vote to their side. They don’t have a single vote to spare…

They need two-thirds of our 40. Andy Wickersham and I have listed the 40 Democrats we think are the most key to passage or defeat. Assuming that all other Democratic members vote the same way as last time — and that all Republicans vote “no” (as they will) — the Democrats need 27 of these 40 to vote “yes” in order to pass the bill. This is a high bar when you consider that 35 of these 40 reside in Republican territory — many of them solidly so — and 24 supported the Stupak Amendment.

Early returns aren’t good for Obamacare supporters….

Other Democrats are more likely to swing against Obamacare than for it. Beyond these 40, the Democrats are far more likely to lose additional members who voted “yes” last time than they are to convert additional members who previously voted “no.”

Hopefully those wavering Democrats have also seen IWV’s new poll that gives them many more reasons to vote against this bad bill.

No one should fool themselves though that the fight is over. Undoubtedly Pelosi and company are trying everything they can to get the numbers they need, so no one in the opposition can afford to let up.