The Redhunter

Illegal Aliens

Obama claims that illegals won't get insurance coverage under this plan. However, Democrats have worked to make sure that no one who applies for the "public option" with have his or her immigration status checked. Republican Rep. Dean Heller (R-NV)offered amendments that "would have enforced income, eligibility, and immigration verification screening." However, all Democrats voted against the amendment.

Get it? Apply for the public option and you won't have your immigration status checked. Obviously, people in the country illegally are going to apply, knowing that their secret is safe. Democrats surely know this. The only plausible reason that they voted against the safeguards is that they secretly want benefits to go to illegals.

Death Panels

President Obama says that "the legislation would not establish "death panels"."

This one is a bit more complicated, and I'm indebted to Mike's America for this

(Obama) insisted that it was an "extraordinary lie" to suggest that there would be "death panels" to decide who gets care and who dies. Sarah Palin has already debunked that nonsense and the Senate acknowledged the problem by removing that provision in their version of the bill. And what's more, we have Obama's own words in an interview he gave to the New York Times on April 28 in which he discussed end of life care:

THE PRESIDENT: So that's where I think you just get into some very difficult moral issues. But that's also a huge driver of cost, right?

I mean, the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill out here.

Q: So how do you -- how do we deal with it?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I think that there is going to have to be a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists. And then there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place. It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels. And that's part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance. It's not determinative, but I think has to be able to give you some guidance. And that's part of what I suspect you'll see emerging out of the various health care conversations that are taking place on the Hill right now.

This one is complicated, but I also think that Andy McCarthy and Mark Steyn have it about right. It's important to understand that no, there won't be panels that decide "A lives and B dies," but that they will decide that "this level of care isn't necessary, and gee, it will also save money." Obama and his Democrats are determined to save money, and they're going to do it by cutting end of life care.

Abortion

The president says that "the legislation would not... alter the ban on using taxpayer money for abortions."

Again, not true. As the AP explains,

Health care legislation before Congress would allow a new government-sponsored insurance plan to cover abortions, a decision that would affect millions of women and recast federal policy on the divisive issue...

A compromise approved by a House committee last week attempted to balance questions of federal funding, personal choice and the conscience rights of clinicians. It would allow the public plan to cover abortion but without using federal funds, only dollars from beneficiary premiums. Likewise, private plans in the new insurance exchange could opt to cover abortion, but no federal subsidies would be used to pay for the procedure.

"It's a sham," said Douglas Johnson, legislative director for National Right to Life. "It's a bookkeeping scheme. The plan pays for abortion, and the government subsidizes the plan."

More from the National Right to Life:

As amended by the House Energy and Commerce Committee on July 30 (the Capps-Waxman Amendment), the bill backed by the White House (H.R. 3200) explicitly authorizes the government plan to cover all elective abortions. Obama apparently seeks to hide behind a technical distinction between tax funds and government-collected premiums. But these are merely two types of public funds, collected and spent by government agencies. The Obama-backed legislation makes it explicitly clear that no citizen would be allowed to enroll in the government plan unless he or she is willing to give the federal agency an extra amount calculated to cover the cost of all elective abortions -- this would not be optional. The abortionists would bill the federal government and would be paid by the federal government. These are public funds, and this is government funding of abortion. In 2007 Obama explicitly pledged to Planned Parenthood that the public plan will cover abortions (see the video clip here). Some journalists have reported that Obama "backed off" of this commitment in an interview with Katie Couric of CBS News, broadcast July 21, but Obama actually carefully avoided stating his intentions -- instead, he simply made an artful observation that "we also have a tradition of, in this town, historically, of not financing abortions as part of government funded health care." It is true that there is such a tradition -- which Obama has always opposed, and which the Obama-backed bill would shatter. On August 13, NRLC released a detailed memo explaining the provisions of the pending bills that would affect abortion policy, with citations to primary sources. Many of the "factcheck" articles that have appeared in the news media in recent weeks reflect, at best, unsophisticated understandings of the provisions they purport to be explaining, and also give evidence of a weak understanding of Obama's history on the policy issues involved. The memo is downloadable in PDF format here.

See the trick? The bill doesn't explicity allow for abortions, and technically taxpayer funds don't pay for it. But in the end whether it's a "premium" or a tax it all comes out the same in the end. When asked about it directly,

An Obama administration official refused Sunday to rule out the possibility that federal tax money might be used to pay for abortions under proposed health care legislation.

Peter R. Orszag, the White House budget director, asked whether he was prepared to say that "no taxpayer money will go to pay for abortions," answered: "I am not prepared to say explicitly that right now. It's obviously a controversial issue, and it's one of the questions that is playing out in this debate."

Given the Obama is one of the most pro-abortion politicians in Washington, I think that we can conclude that any public option will cover and pay for abortions.