Obama’s Health Care Town Hall UPDATE: AARP Gaffe UPDATE: More Scare Tacits, Plus Strange Political Connections

I didn’t watch Obama’s health care town hall today, primarily because I enjoy having a large number of brain cells, but I did read and see a couple of quotes.

From reading the news reports and watching some video it seems the Obama administration carefully combed over everyone who entered the room. I find it hard to believe that town halls across the country on a daily basis have been interrupted by frustrated Americans, but when Obama holds one everyone is on their best behavior and no one disagrees. Obama clearly made sure the vast majority of the crowd agreed with what he was saying.

Or maybe they couldn’t understand what he was saying.

I have two favorite quotes from the town hall.

1. “For all the scare tactics out there, what is truly scary is if we do nothing.” – Obama made clear that the people disrupting town halls and those who come out against his health care plan are simply pushing scare tactics. So, to push back against these scare tactics he, uses a scare tactic. Saying it’ll be “truly scary if we do nothing” is a scare tactic in of itself.

A scare tactic is okay if it’s rooted in fact. The facts are Obama’s plan would not be deficit neutral, it would add trillions to the national debt, his plan would indeed force people out of their private insurance, and over time his plan would eliminate private sector insurance. Those are not scare tactics, they are facts.

2.

I. Love. This. Quote. Why? Because it’s a Swiss Cheese quote, there are many holes. It’s not so much a quote as a gaffe.

For starters, UPS and Fedex don’t directly compete with the postal service. Allow me to explain. The postal service is almost entirely an exchange of mail. Small parcels that don’t require boxes, but rather envelopes. UPS and Fedex are an exchange of packages, usually in boxes. And when UPS and Fedex overlap with USPS, UPS and Fedex kick the postal service’s butt.

Obama also uses the comparison to say that the postal service is entirely self sufficient and competes with private companies. Only that’s not entirely true.

While USPS doesn’t receive taxpayer money for general operations, Congress routinely grants them a suspension of payments. Most recently they suspended the postal services requirement to pay retiree health benefits. The suspension saved USPS $7 billion. Do you think UPS and Fedex get that perk? Nope. If they promise money to someone, they have to pay it.

The third hole is the fact that USPS is a government run operation that is somewhat like proposed health care, and it’s failing. The postal service is based on a flawed business model. It makes no sense to charge one flat rate when it costs more to send a piece of mail from Michigan to California than it does to send the same piece of mail from Michigan to Ohio.

If you walk into a Fedex store and want to send a first class parcel from Michigan to California, it will cost more than to send it to Ohio. It simply makes sense. However, the postal service continues to charge one flat rate.

The reason every government run operation fails is because politicians don’t know how to run a business. Sure, some have come from the business sector, but the vast majority of politicians started off as lawyers, what do lawyers know about running a business?

It shouldn’t comfort you that Obama wants to run health care like the post office, it should frighten you. How many times has the cost of stamps gone up in the last 10 years? The answer is six times, the most times in any ten year span. The government decries that type of price increase in the private health care industry, yet their post office example shows they’ll do the same.

Americans are learning more about this health insurance bill, and they are growing more afraid of it. It’s not that those against the bill are attempting to make it sound frightening, the facts are just that scary.

UPDATE: This was a very gaffe-tastic town hall.

Obama claimed at two points during his town hall meeting that his health care plan was endorsed by the AARP. The only problem is that it’s, uh, not.

The country’s largest advocacy group for Americans over 50 issued a statement after the event saying, “While the President was correct that AARP will not endorse a health care reform bill that would reduce Medicare benefits, indications that we have endorsed any of the major health care reform bills currently under consideration in Congress are inaccurate.”

UPDATE: As the night rolls on and I watch and read more about this Obama town hall, I realize just how much Obama firmly planted his foot inside of his mouth.

In this video clip he explains that currently doctors have more of a monetary incentive to amputate a diabetic’s foot than to administer preventive care. Yeah, it’s only the wacko right wing that’s spewing scare tactics.

Thought it couldn’t get worse? It does.

As I mentioned before, there’s no question that the Obama administration stacked this crowd with pro-Obama supporters to make the president look good on national television. And let me just say, that’s nothing out of the ordinary. Presidents always stack nationally televised events with a supportive crowd, but I guess I just associate that kind of behavior with the “politics of the past.”

Anyway, during the town hall a little girl asked a peculiar question. She asked, “How do kids know what is true, and why do people want a new system that can — that help more of us?” It was softball question and had no substantive use in the debate. It was handpicked by the Obama administration to give him an opportunity to decry the dissents of his plan.

But it looks like the situation runs much deeper.

According to some people at AR15.com, the girls mother, Kathleen Manning Hall, has donated literally thousands of dollars to the Obama campaign. And when I say thousands, I mean at least $3,200. She’s done so individually and through her law firm.

Is it a coincidence that a little girl of a major Obama supporter and donor got to ask a softball setup question at the Obama town hall? I doubt it.

H/T Michelle Malkin

–jb

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