tsmith7559
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First real GAllup Poll of 2012 race
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tsmith7559
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Socialism is defined, in part, by a system of wealth redistribution – collected and controlled by government. In the end, however, while the people may have an “equal share” of the pie, it is government itself which controls the biggest portion of that pie; it is government, by socialistic design, which holds the deed for all the wealth, including the wealth they redistributed to the people. It is government, by socialistic design, which has power over the people, because while the people have an “equal share” it is never enough to secure independence. An “equal share” of the wealth does not mean, nor is it ever intended to mean, the people will ever be wealthy.
Socialism, by design, is an “equal share” in government dependence. Socialism, by design, is an “equal share” in the perpetual poverty of the whole population. Socialism, by design, is meant to make government all powerful and to equally disenfranchise the whole population. Socialism, by design, is monarchy, theocracy, autocracy, disguised as something less frightening, more benevolent. Socialism, by definition, is really nothing more than absolute government control over the people. Socialism, by design, is dictatorship!
The people, having been lied to, misled, brainwashed by socialism’s so called “good nature”, it’s “tax the rich, give to the poor” idealism and “wealth redistribution”, it’s call for revenge and retribution against the “evil” and “greedy” rich, its anti-capitalist ideology that millions of Americans have not had an opportunity to share in is appealing enough to those people who cannot escape the poverty they are living through.
If someone (such as Democrats and liberals do) promises to give them something they never had, they never thought they would have, and all that had to be done to make that happen was to raise taxes on the rich, that is enough to instill loyalty in an ideology that, if one were to examine closely, would understand is no different from any type of previous government dictatorship.
If this is not what Obama is advocating, if this is not what Obama is selling, if this is not what Obama is pursuing, if this is not what Obama and the Democrat Party have become, then, if not socialism, what else do you call it?
Socialism, by design, is an “equal share” in government dependence. Socialism, by design, is an “equal share” in the perpetual poverty of the whole population. Socialism, by design, is meant to make government all powerful and to equally disenfranchise the whole population. Socialism, by design, is monarchy, theocracy, autocracy, disguised as something less frightening, more benevolent. Socialism, by definition, is really nothing more than absolute government control over the people. Socialism, by design, is dictatorship!
The people, having been lied to, misled, brainwashed by socialism’s so called “good nature”, it’s “tax the rich, give to the poor” idealism and “wealth redistribution”, it’s call for revenge and retribution against the “evil” and “greedy” rich, its anti-capitalist ideology that millions of Americans have not had an opportunity to share in is appealing enough to those people who cannot escape the poverty they are living through.
If someone (such as Democrats and liberals do) promises to give them something they never had, they never thought they would have, and all that had to be done to make that happen was to raise taxes on the rich, that is enough to instill loyalty in an ideology that, if one were to examine closely, would understand is no different from any type of previous government dictatorship.
If this is not what Obama is advocating, if this is not what Obama is selling, if this is not what Obama is pursuing, if this is not what Obama and the Democrat Party have become, then, if not socialism, what else do you call it?
tsmith7559
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ObamaCare is designed to have the government crowd out the private insurers. The end game with ObamaCare in place will be a nationalized health-care system, which is why it’s important to stop it before that crowd-out process begins.
Its not just the stock ownership...its the control they have by promoting stuff like the Volt, with there stock interest they can do it.
Socialism is an economic system characterised by social ownership and control of the means of production and cooperative management of the economy and a political philosophy advocating such a system.
Last edited:
grandy
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Socialists don't even think Obama is socialist
If a space alien landed on American soil tomorrow, it could be forgiven for thinking the president of the United States also represents a place called "Socialism."
A quick tour of the Web turns up hundreds of socialist-inspired images of Barack Obama-- Obama as Che Guevara on "Che Obama Socialist" t-shirts; Obama as a radical Marxist at Obama4Socialism.net. Even the Investor's Business Daily penned a series of editorials on the Obama agenda called, "The Audacity of Socialism."
And when President Obama announced he'd be giving a back-to-school message to students, now-famous Florida GOP'er, Jim Greer, said it would "spread President Obama's socialist ideology."
So if the United States has elected a socialist president, the socialists must be pretty excited, right? Claiming just a single U.S. Senator (Vermonter Bernie Sanders) and exactly zero members of the House of Representatives as their own, putting a socialist in the White House would represent the greatest achievement of any socialist alive today.
But there's just one problem. The socialists won't claim Obama as their own. They won't even call him a socialist.
Frank Llewellyn, the National Director of the Democratic Socialists of America, the country's largest socialist organization, said Obama is most definitely not one of them. "He's not any kind of socialist at all," Llewellyn told me this week. He called the president "a market guy," which is hardly a compliment coming from a man with serious reservations about market capitalism.
"He's not challenging the power of the corporations," Llewellyn added. "The banking reforms that have been suggested are not particularly far reaching. He says we must have room for innovation, but we had innovation -- look where it got us. So I just...I can't..I mean it's laugh out loud, really."
Llewellyn offered his belief that Republicans have historically called opponents "socialists" in order to stop moderate reforms, and that the new stickiness of the Obama/socialist association is one part misinformation, one part ignorance. "The Republicans are doing the same thing they did when Roosevelt was president -- confusing somebody who is trying to save capitalism from itself with somebody who is trying to destroy it. (Obama) is not trying to destroy capitalism."
Llewellyn did, however, have kind words for GOP Chairman Michael Steele, to whom he suggested -- and it sounded only half-in-jest -- he owes a thank you note. "We have more media attention as a result of this stuff than anything else in the last 10 years," he said.
Below is the full Q&A with Mr. Llewellyn, who in his previous life owned a small business.
Q. Where on the scale does Obama fall on socialism?
A. There are many ways we can say that Obama is not a socialist, and that he is in fact governing as a centrist, but that doesn't necessarily get people to listen. Clearly the Republicans are saying it since that's all they've got to say. I don't believe they're going to stop making this charge.
It's good for me, we have more media attention as a result of this stuff than anything else in the last 10 years. When I announce our membership numbers, I'm contemplating sending Michael Steele a letter thanking him.
Q. Is there anything in President Obama's agenda that does ring true to socialists? Is there any element that has its roots in socialism?
A. We don't have a blueprint for socialism. We're not a party, we're a membership organization. We haven't organized ourselves as a party precisely because socialism as a political construct is so weak in this country.
We actually did support Obama over Bush and we often will make political choices if we think they're important. They're not based on which one is socialist, because usually in most cases, unless it's Bernie Sanders, there isn't a socialist alternative. But many times it's important to make a choice and we'll do that. We certainly thought Obama would be a better president for the country than John McCain.
Q. On health care reform, are you advocating any particular path?
A. We've always been single payer people. We were for single payer back when Clinton proposed health care reform, and we've done a lot of work to educate people about that. But single payer is not what I would call a "socialized" medical system. It doesn't make health care professionals employees of a government-run entity; it just says who is going to write the check.
Q. Your best case scenario would be if doctors were employed by the government?
A. I would say the only country where you can talk about socialized medicine is in Britain where you have a national health service where they're paid by the government and most costs are run through the government. I would say that's a socialized system. You can have national systems, most of them we would argue if you allow for-profit insurance you're not going to get effective health insurance. And it's certainly not going to be cost-effective health insurance because of the huge profits these health insurance companies want to make.
So if you look at other countries that have national health systems that include private insurance, there are usually requirements that they're not for-profit. There could be other avenues of approaching it, but we happen to think the single payer model along the lines of the Canadian system is what would work here.
Q. Is there a particular tax system that would be a "socialist" tax system?
A. Generally speaking, we support a progressive income tax system. Certainly we support rolling back the Bush tax cuts, and we would say you have to go back further to roll back the Reagan cuts if you're going to implement the reforms that are necessary and pay for them. It's amazing that conservatives don't want to pay for anything. In Europe, they have income taxes, but they also have VAT; we think that's not progressive. I wouldn't say there's a 100 percent agreement among socialists around the world on taxes, but most would believe that taxes ought to be based on the ability to pay.
Q. On the school controversy, what was your reaction to people saying that the president speaking to schools is socialist? What goes through your mind?
A. The same thing that's gone through my mind every time the Republicans talk about socialism. It's silly, surreal, uninformed, and it certainly doesn't reflect what modern socialists think, and it doesn't reflect what Obama thinks. Obama's a market guy! Obama believes in markets. He probably spoke more about the role of the markets in the primary than Clinton did. So, there's no question that the Republicans are doing the same thing they did when Roosevelt was president -- confusing somebody who is trying to save capitalism from itself with somebody who is trying to destroy it. He's not trying to destroy capitalism.
And this school thing is just ridiculous.
Q. Is Obama a socialist?
A. No.
Q. Is he a secret socialist?
A. He's not a secret socialist. He's not any kind of socialist at all. He's not challenging the power of the corporations. The banking reforms that have been suggested are not particularly far reaching. He says we must have room for innovation. But we had innovation -- look where it got us. So I just...I can't...I mean laugh out loud, really.
I was on Glenn Beck recently and he said Canada is a socialist country. Well, there is a party in Canada that's called "socialist" within the Democratic party, that's won some provincial elections, never won a federal election. It would be news to them that Canada is socialist. So it's just unserious.
They always use socialism to try to defeat moderate reforms...just because something is government run doesn't mean it's socialist. I've never heard anybody say we have a socialist army.
Q. What do you want people to know about socialism?
A. There have been hundreds and hundreds of books about that. But to put it simply, I would say socialists want to constrain and restrict the tremendous destructive capacity and outcomes that can come out of the capitalist system. We're going through something right now where people are in denial about the aftershocks that we're going to have as a result of the financial crisis. We think that you cannot have a equitable system unless you constrain the power of corporations to do things and you constrict the markets in same ways. The markets can do good things. We'd like to keep the good things that markets do but we'd like to constrain the negative.
http://www.politicsdaily.com/2009/09/09/top-u-s-socialist-says-barack-obama-is-not-one-of-them/
If a space alien landed on American soil tomorrow, it could be forgiven for thinking the president of the United States also represents a place called "Socialism."
A quick tour of the Web turns up hundreds of socialist-inspired images of Barack Obama-- Obama as Che Guevara on "Che Obama Socialist" t-shirts; Obama as a radical Marxist at Obama4Socialism.net. Even the Investor's Business Daily penned a series of editorials on the Obama agenda called, "The Audacity of Socialism."
And when President Obama announced he'd be giving a back-to-school message to students, now-famous Florida GOP'er, Jim Greer, said it would "spread President Obama's socialist ideology."
So if the United States has elected a socialist president, the socialists must be pretty excited, right? Claiming just a single U.S. Senator (Vermonter Bernie Sanders) and exactly zero members of the House of Representatives as their own, putting a socialist in the White House would represent the greatest achievement of any socialist alive today.
But there's just one problem. The socialists won't claim Obama as their own. They won't even call him a socialist.
Frank Llewellyn, the National Director of the Democratic Socialists of America, the country's largest socialist organization, said Obama is most definitely not one of them. "He's not any kind of socialist at all," Llewellyn told me this week. He called the president "a market guy," which is hardly a compliment coming from a man with serious reservations about market capitalism.
"He's not challenging the power of the corporations," Llewellyn added. "The banking reforms that have been suggested are not particularly far reaching. He says we must have room for innovation, but we had innovation -- look where it got us. So I just...I can't..I mean it's laugh out loud, really."
Llewellyn offered his belief that Republicans have historically called opponents "socialists" in order to stop moderate reforms, and that the new stickiness of the Obama/socialist association is one part misinformation, one part ignorance. "The Republicans are doing the same thing they did when Roosevelt was president -- confusing somebody who is trying to save capitalism from itself with somebody who is trying to destroy it. (Obama) is not trying to destroy capitalism."
Llewellyn did, however, have kind words for GOP Chairman Michael Steele, to whom he suggested -- and it sounded only half-in-jest -- he owes a thank you note. "We have more media attention as a result of this stuff than anything else in the last 10 years," he said.
Below is the full Q&A with Mr. Llewellyn, who in his previous life owned a small business.
Q. Where on the scale does Obama fall on socialism?
A. There are many ways we can say that Obama is not a socialist, and that he is in fact governing as a centrist, but that doesn't necessarily get people to listen. Clearly the Republicans are saying it since that's all they've got to say. I don't believe they're going to stop making this charge.
It's good for me, we have more media attention as a result of this stuff than anything else in the last 10 years. When I announce our membership numbers, I'm contemplating sending Michael Steele a letter thanking him.
Q. Is there anything in President Obama's agenda that does ring true to socialists? Is there any element that has its roots in socialism?
A. We don't have a blueprint for socialism. We're not a party, we're a membership organization. We haven't organized ourselves as a party precisely because socialism as a political construct is so weak in this country.
We actually did support Obama over Bush and we often will make political choices if we think they're important. They're not based on which one is socialist, because usually in most cases, unless it's Bernie Sanders, there isn't a socialist alternative. But many times it's important to make a choice and we'll do that. We certainly thought Obama would be a better president for the country than John McCain.
Q. On health care reform, are you advocating any particular path?
A. We've always been single payer people. We were for single payer back when Clinton proposed health care reform, and we've done a lot of work to educate people about that. But single payer is not what I would call a "socialized" medical system. It doesn't make health care professionals employees of a government-run entity; it just says who is going to write the check.
Q. Your best case scenario would be if doctors were employed by the government?
A. I would say the only country where you can talk about socialized medicine is in Britain where you have a national health service where they're paid by the government and most costs are run through the government. I would say that's a socialized system. You can have national systems, most of them we would argue if you allow for-profit insurance you're not going to get effective health insurance. And it's certainly not going to be cost-effective health insurance because of the huge profits these health insurance companies want to make.
So if you look at other countries that have national health systems that include private insurance, there are usually requirements that they're not for-profit. There could be other avenues of approaching it, but we happen to think the single payer model along the lines of the Canadian system is what would work here.
Q. Is there a particular tax system that would be a "socialist" tax system?
A. Generally speaking, we support a progressive income tax system. Certainly we support rolling back the Bush tax cuts, and we would say you have to go back further to roll back the Reagan cuts if you're going to implement the reforms that are necessary and pay for them. It's amazing that conservatives don't want to pay for anything. In Europe, they have income taxes, but they also have VAT; we think that's not progressive. I wouldn't say there's a 100 percent agreement among socialists around the world on taxes, but most would believe that taxes ought to be based on the ability to pay.
Q. On the school controversy, what was your reaction to people saying that the president speaking to schools is socialist? What goes through your mind?
A. The same thing that's gone through my mind every time the Republicans talk about socialism. It's silly, surreal, uninformed, and it certainly doesn't reflect what modern socialists think, and it doesn't reflect what Obama thinks. Obama's a market guy! Obama believes in markets. He probably spoke more about the role of the markets in the primary than Clinton did. So, there's no question that the Republicans are doing the same thing they did when Roosevelt was president -- confusing somebody who is trying to save capitalism from itself with somebody who is trying to destroy it. He's not trying to destroy capitalism.
And this school thing is just ridiculous.
Q. Is Obama a socialist?
A. No.
Q. Is he a secret socialist?
A. He's not a secret socialist. He's not any kind of socialist at all. He's not challenging the power of the corporations. The banking reforms that have been suggested are not particularly far reaching. He says we must have room for innovation. But we had innovation -- look where it got us. So I just...I can't...I mean laugh out loud, really.
I was on Glenn Beck recently and he said Canada is a socialist country. Well, there is a party in Canada that's called "socialist" within the Democratic party, that's won some provincial elections, never won a federal election. It would be news to them that Canada is socialist. So it's just unserious.
They always use socialism to try to defeat moderate reforms...just because something is government run doesn't mean it's socialist. I've never heard anybody say we have a socialist army.
Q. What do you want people to know about socialism?
A. There have been hundreds and hundreds of books about that. But to put it simply, I would say socialists want to constrain and restrict the tremendous destructive capacity and outcomes that can come out of the capitalist system. We're going through something right now where people are in denial about the aftershocks that we're going to have as a result of the financial crisis. We think that you cannot have a equitable system unless you constrain the power of corporations to do things and you constrict the markets in same ways. The markets can do good things. We'd like to keep the good things that markets do but we'd like to constrain the negative.
http://www.politicsdaily.com/2009/09/09/top-u-s-socialist-says-barack-obama-is-not-one-of-them/
tsmith7559
Well-known member
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- Aug 6, 2011
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grandy
Senior Member
- Joined
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PolitiFact's Lie of the Year: 'A government takeover of health care'
By Bill Adair, Angie Drobnic Holan
Published on Thursday, December 16th, 2010 at 11:30 p.m.
In the spring of 2009, a Republican strategist settled on a brilliant and powerful attack line for President Barack Obama's ambitious plan to overhaul America's health insurance system. Frank Luntz, a consultant famous for his phraseology, urged GOP leaders to call it a "government takeover."
"Takeovers are like coups," Luntz wrote in a 28-page memo. "They both lead to dictators and a loss of freedom."
The line stuck. By the time the health care bill was headed toward passage in early 2010, Obama and congressional Democrats had sanded down their program, dropping the "public option" concept that was derided as too much government intrusion. The law passed in March, with new regulations, but no government-run plan.
But as Republicans smelled serious opportunity in the midterm elections, they didn't let facts get in the way of a great punchline. And few in the press challenged their frequent assertion that under Obama, the government was going to take over the health care industry.
PolitiFact editors and reporters have chosen "government takeover of health care" as the 2010 Lie of the Year. Uttered by dozens of politicians and pundits, it played an important role in shaping public opinion about the health care plan and was a significant factor in the Democrats' shellacking in the November elections.
Readers of PolitiFact, the St. Petersburg Times' independent fact-checking website, also chose it as the year's most significant falsehood by an overwhelming margin. (Their second-place choice was Rep. Michele Bachmann's claim that Obama was going to spend $200 million a day on a trip to India, a falsity that still sprouts.)
By selecting "government takeover' as Lie of the Year, PolitiFact is not making a judgment on whether the health care law is good policy.
The phrase is simply not true.
Said Jonathan Oberlander, a professor of health policy at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill: "The label 'government takeover" has no basis in reality, but instead reflects a political dynamic where conservatives label any increase in government authority in health care as a 'takeover.' "
An inaccurate claim
"Government takeover" conjures a European approach where the government owns the hospitals and the doctors are public employees. But the law Congress passed, parts of which have already gone into effect, relies largely on the free market:
• Employers will continue to provide health insurance to the majority of Americans through private insurance companies.
• Contrary to the claim, more people will get private health coverage. The law sets up "exchanges" where private insurers will compete to provide coverage to people who don't have it.
• The government will not seize control of hospitals or nationalize doctors.
• The law does not include the public option, a government-run insurance plan that would have competed with private insurers.
• The law gives tax credits to people who have difficulty affording insurance, so they can buy their coverage from private providers on the exchange. But here too, the approach relies on a free market with regulations, not socialized medicine.
PolitiFact reporters have studied the 906-page bill and interviewed independent health care experts. We have concluded it is inaccurate to call the plan a government takeover because it relies largely on the existing system of health coverage provided by employers.
It's true that the law does significantly increase government regulation of health insurers. But it is, at its heart, a system that relies on private companies and the free market.
Republicans who maintain the Democratic plan is a government takeover say that characterization is justified because the plan increases federal regulation and will require Americans to buy health insurance.
But while those provisions are real, the majority of Americans will continue to get coverage from private insurers. And it will bring new business for the insurance industry: People who don"t currently have coverage will get it, for the most part, from private insurance companies.
Consider some analogies about strict government regulation. The Federal Aviation Administration imposes detailed rules on airlines. State laws require drivers to have car insurance. Regulators tell electric utilities what they can charge. Yet that heavy regulation is not described as a government takeover.
This year, PolitiFact analyzed five claims of a "government takeover of health care." Three were rated Pants on Fire, two were rated False.
'Can't do it in four words'
Other news organizations have also said the claim is false.
Slate said "the proposed health care reform does not take over the system in any sense.' In a New York Times economics blog, Princeton University professor Uwe Reinhardt, an expert in health care economics, said, "Yes, there would be a substantial government-mandated reorganization of this relatively small corner of the private health insurance market (that serves people who have been buying individual policies). But that hardly constitutes a government takeover of American health care."
FactCheck.org, an independent fact-checking group run by the University of Pennsylvania, has debunked it several times, calling it one of the "whoppers" about health care and saying the reform plan is neither "government-run" nor a "government takeover."
We asked incoming House Speaker John Boehner's office why Republican leaders repeat the phrase when it has repeatedly been shown to be incorrect. Michael Steel, Boehner's spokesman, replied, "We believe that the job-killing ObamaCare law will result in a government takeover of health care. That's why we have pledged to repeal it, and replace it with common-sense reforms that actually lower costs.”
Analysts say health care reform is such a complicated topic that it often cannot be summarized in snappy talking points.
"If you're going to tell the truth about something as complicated as health care and health care reform, you probably need at least four sentences," said Maggie Mahar, author of Money-Driven Medicine: The Real Reason Health Care Costs So Much. "You can"t do it in four words."
Mahar said the GOP simplification distorted the truth about the plan. "Doctors will not be working for the government. Hospitals will not be owned by the government," she said. "That's what a government takeover of health care would mean, and that's not at all what we"re doing."
How the line was used
If you followed the health care debate or the midterm election – even casually – it's likely you heard "government takeover" many times.
PolitiFact sought to count how often the phrase was used in 2010 but found an accurate tally was unfeasible because it had been repeated so frequently in so many places. It was used hundreds of times during the debate over the bill and then revived during the fall campaign. A few numbers:
• The phrase appears more than 90 times on Boehner's website, GOPLeader.gov.
• It was mentioned eight times in the 48-page Republican campaign platform "A Pledge to America" as part of their plan to "repeal and replace the government takeover of health care."
• The Republican National Committee's website mentions a government takeover of health care more than 200 times.
Conservative groups and tea party organizations joined the chorus. It was used by FreedomWorks, the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute.
The phrase proliferated in the media even after Democrats dropped the public option. In 2010 alone, "government takeover” was mentioned 28 times in the Washington Post, 77 times in Politico and 79 times on CNN. A review of TV transcripts showed "government takeover" was primarily used as a catchy sound bite, not for discussions of policy details.
In most transcripts we examined, Republican leaders used the phrase without being challenged by interviewers. For example, during Boehner's Jan. 31 appearance on Meet the Press, Boehner said it five times. But not once was he challenged about it.
In rare cases when the point was questioned, the GOP leader would recite various regulations found in the bill and insist that they constituted a takeover. But such followups were rare.
An effective phrase
Politicians and officials in the health care industry have been warning about a "government takeover" for decades.
The phrase became widely used in the early 1990s when President Bill Clinton was trying to pass health care legislation. Then, as today, Democrats tried to debunk the popular Republican refrain.
When Obama proposed his health plan in the spring of 2009, Luntz, a Republican strategist famous for his research on effective phrases, met with focus groups to determine which messages would work best for the Republicans. He did not respond to calls and e-mails from PolitiFact asking him to discuss the phrase.
The 28-page memo he wrote after those sessions, "The Language of Healthcare 2009," provides a rare glimpse into the art of finding words and phrases that strike a responsive chord with voters.
The memo begins with "The 10 Rules for Stopping the 'Washington Takeover' of Healthcare.” Rule No. 4 says people "are deathly afraid that a government takeover will lower their quality of care – so they are extremely receptive to the anti-Washington approach. It's not an economic issue. It's a bureaucratic issue."
The memo is about salesmanship, not substance. It doesn't address whether the lines are accurate. It just says they are effective and that Republicans should use them. Indeed, facing a Democratic plan that actually relied on the free market to try to bring down costs, Luntz recommended sidestepping that inconvenient fact:
"The arguments against the Democrats' healthcare plan must center around politicians, bureaucrats and Washington ... not the free market, tax incentives or competition."
Democrats tried to combat the barrage of charges about a government takeover. The White House and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi repeatedly put out statements, but they were drowned out by a disciplined GOP that used the phrase over and over.
Democrats could never agree on their own phrases and were all over the map in their responses, said Howard Dean, former head of the Democratic National Committee.
"It was uncoordinated. Everyone had their own idea," Dean said in an interview with PolitiFact.
"The Democrats are atrocious at messaging," he said. "They've gotten worse since I left, not better. It's just appalling. First of all, you don"t play defense when you"re doing messaging, you play offense. The Republicans have learned this well."
Dean grudgingly admires the Republican wordsmith. "Frank Luntz has it right, he just works for the wrong side. You give very simple catch phrases that encapsulate the philosophy of the bill."
A responsive chord
By March of this year, when Obama signed the bill into law, 53 percent of respondents in a Bloomberg poll said they agreed that "the current proposal to overhaul health care amounts to a government takeover.”
Exit polls showed the economy was the top issue for voters in the November election, but analysts said the drumbeat about the "government takeover" during the campaign helped cement the advantage for the Republicans.
Rep. Earl Blumenauer, an Oregon Democrat whose provision for Medicare end-of-life care was distorted into the charge of "death panels" (last year's Lie of the Year), said the Republicans' success with the phrase was a matter of repetition.
"There was a uniformity of Republican messaging that was disconnected from facts," Blumenauer said. "The sheer discipline . . . was breathtaking."
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-m.../16/lie-year-government-takeover-health-care/
By Bill Adair, Angie Drobnic Holan
Published on Thursday, December 16th, 2010 at 11:30 p.m.
In the spring of 2009, a Republican strategist settled on a brilliant and powerful attack line for President Barack Obama's ambitious plan to overhaul America's health insurance system. Frank Luntz, a consultant famous for his phraseology, urged GOP leaders to call it a "government takeover."
"Takeovers are like coups," Luntz wrote in a 28-page memo. "They both lead to dictators and a loss of freedom."
The line stuck. By the time the health care bill was headed toward passage in early 2010, Obama and congressional Democrats had sanded down their program, dropping the "public option" concept that was derided as too much government intrusion. The law passed in March, with new regulations, but no government-run plan.
But as Republicans smelled serious opportunity in the midterm elections, they didn't let facts get in the way of a great punchline. And few in the press challenged their frequent assertion that under Obama, the government was going to take over the health care industry.
PolitiFact editors and reporters have chosen "government takeover of health care" as the 2010 Lie of the Year. Uttered by dozens of politicians and pundits, it played an important role in shaping public opinion about the health care plan and was a significant factor in the Democrats' shellacking in the November elections.
Readers of PolitiFact, the St. Petersburg Times' independent fact-checking website, also chose it as the year's most significant falsehood by an overwhelming margin. (Their second-place choice was Rep. Michele Bachmann's claim that Obama was going to spend $200 million a day on a trip to India, a falsity that still sprouts.)
By selecting "government takeover' as Lie of the Year, PolitiFact is not making a judgment on whether the health care law is good policy.
The phrase is simply not true.
Said Jonathan Oberlander, a professor of health policy at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill: "The label 'government takeover" has no basis in reality, but instead reflects a political dynamic where conservatives label any increase in government authority in health care as a 'takeover.' "
An inaccurate claim
"Government takeover" conjures a European approach where the government owns the hospitals and the doctors are public employees. But the law Congress passed, parts of which have already gone into effect, relies largely on the free market:
• Employers will continue to provide health insurance to the majority of Americans through private insurance companies.
• Contrary to the claim, more people will get private health coverage. The law sets up "exchanges" where private insurers will compete to provide coverage to people who don't have it.
• The government will not seize control of hospitals or nationalize doctors.
• The law does not include the public option, a government-run insurance plan that would have competed with private insurers.
• The law gives tax credits to people who have difficulty affording insurance, so they can buy their coverage from private providers on the exchange. But here too, the approach relies on a free market with regulations, not socialized medicine.
PolitiFact reporters have studied the 906-page bill and interviewed independent health care experts. We have concluded it is inaccurate to call the plan a government takeover because it relies largely on the existing system of health coverage provided by employers.
It's true that the law does significantly increase government regulation of health insurers. But it is, at its heart, a system that relies on private companies and the free market.
Republicans who maintain the Democratic plan is a government takeover say that characterization is justified because the plan increases federal regulation and will require Americans to buy health insurance.
But while those provisions are real, the majority of Americans will continue to get coverage from private insurers. And it will bring new business for the insurance industry: People who don"t currently have coverage will get it, for the most part, from private insurance companies.
Consider some analogies about strict government regulation. The Federal Aviation Administration imposes detailed rules on airlines. State laws require drivers to have car insurance. Regulators tell electric utilities what they can charge. Yet that heavy regulation is not described as a government takeover.
This year, PolitiFact analyzed five claims of a "government takeover of health care." Three were rated Pants on Fire, two were rated False.
'Can't do it in four words'
Other news organizations have also said the claim is false.
Slate said "the proposed health care reform does not take over the system in any sense.' In a New York Times economics blog, Princeton University professor Uwe Reinhardt, an expert in health care economics, said, "Yes, there would be a substantial government-mandated reorganization of this relatively small corner of the private health insurance market (that serves people who have been buying individual policies). But that hardly constitutes a government takeover of American health care."
FactCheck.org, an independent fact-checking group run by the University of Pennsylvania, has debunked it several times, calling it one of the "whoppers" about health care and saying the reform plan is neither "government-run" nor a "government takeover."
We asked incoming House Speaker John Boehner's office why Republican leaders repeat the phrase when it has repeatedly been shown to be incorrect. Michael Steel, Boehner's spokesman, replied, "We believe that the job-killing ObamaCare law will result in a government takeover of health care. That's why we have pledged to repeal it, and replace it with common-sense reforms that actually lower costs.”
Analysts say health care reform is such a complicated topic that it often cannot be summarized in snappy talking points.
"If you're going to tell the truth about something as complicated as health care and health care reform, you probably need at least four sentences," said Maggie Mahar, author of Money-Driven Medicine: The Real Reason Health Care Costs So Much. "You can"t do it in four words."
Mahar said the GOP simplification distorted the truth about the plan. "Doctors will not be working for the government. Hospitals will not be owned by the government," she said. "That's what a government takeover of health care would mean, and that's not at all what we"re doing."
How the line was used
If you followed the health care debate or the midterm election – even casually – it's likely you heard "government takeover" many times.
PolitiFact sought to count how often the phrase was used in 2010 but found an accurate tally was unfeasible because it had been repeated so frequently in so many places. It was used hundreds of times during the debate over the bill and then revived during the fall campaign. A few numbers:
• The phrase appears more than 90 times on Boehner's website, GOPLeader.gov.
• It was mentioned eight times in the 48-page Republican campaign platform "A Pledge to America" as part of their plan to "repeal and replace the government takeover of health care."
• The Republican National Committee's website mentions a government takeover of health care more than 200 times.
Conservative groups and tea party organizations joined the chorus. It was used by FreedomWorks, the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute.
The phrase proliferated in the media even after Democrats dropped the public option. In 2010 alone, "government takeover” was mentioned 28 times in the Washington Post, 77 times in Politico and 79 times on CNN. A review of TV transcripts showed "government takeover" was primarily used as a catchy sound bite, not for discussions of policy details.
In most transcripts we examined, Republican leaders used the phrase without being challenged by interviewers. For example, during Boehner's Jan. 31 appearance on Meet the Press, Boehner said it five times. But not once was he challenged about it.
In rare cases when the point was questioned, the GOP leader would recite various regulations found in the bill and insist that they constituted a takeover. But such followups were rare.
An effective phrase
Politicians and officials in the health care industry have been warning about a "government takeover" for decades.
The phrase became widely used in the early 1990s when President Bill Clinton was trying to pass health care legislation. Then, as today, Democrats tried to debunk the popular Republican refrain.
When Obama proposed his health plan in the spring of 2009, Luntz, a Republican strategist famous for his research on effective phrases, met with focus groups to determine which messages would work best for the Republicans. He did not respond to calls and e-mails from PolitiFact asking him to discuss the phrase.
The 28-page memo he wrote after those sessions, "The Language of Healthcare 2009," provides a rare glimpse into the art of finding words and phrases that strike a responsive chord with voters.
The memo begins with "The 10 Rules for Stopping the 'Washington Takeover' of Healthcare.” Rule No. 4 says people "are deathly afraid that a government takeover will lower their quality of care – so they are extremely receptive to the anti-Washington approach. It's not an economic issue. It's a bureaucratic issue."
The memo is about salesmanship, not substance. It doesn't address whether the lines are accurate. It just says they are effective and that Republicans should use them. Indeed, facing a Democratic plan that actually relied on the free market to try to bring down costs, Luntz recommended sidestepping that inconvenient fact:
"The arguments against the Democrats' healthcare plan must center around politicians, bureaucrats and Washington ... not the free market, tax incentives or competition."
Democrats tried to combat the barrage of charges about a government takeover. The White House and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi repeatedly put out statements, but they were drowned out by a disciplined GOP that used the phrase over and over.
Democrats could never agree on their own phrases and were all over the map in their responses, said Howard Dean, former head of the Democratic National Committee.
"It was uncoordinated. Everyone had their own idea," Dean said in an interview with PolitiFact.
"The Democrats are atrocious at messaging," he said. "They've gotten worse since I left, not better. It's just appalling. First of all, you don"t play defense when you"re doing messaging, you play offense. The Republicans have learned this well."
Dean grudgingly admires the Republican wordsmith. "Frank Luntz has it right, he just works for the wrong side. You give very simple catch phrases that encapsulate the philosophy of the bill."
A responsive chord
By March of this year, when Obama signed the bill into law, 53 percent of respondents in a Bloomberg poll said they agreed that "the current proposal to overhaul health care amounts to a government takeover.”
Exit polls showed the economy was the top issue for voters in the November election, but analysts said the drumbeat about the "government takeover" during the campaign helped cement the advantage for the Republicans.
Rep. Earl Blumenauer, an Oregon Democrat whose provision for Medicare end-of-life care was distorted into the charge of "death panels" (last year's Lie of the Year), said the Republicans' success with the phrase was a matter of repetition.
"There was a uniformity of Republican messaging that was disconnected from facts," Blumenauer said. "The sheer discipline . . . was breathtaking."
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-m.../16/lie-year-government-takeover-health-care/
tsmith7559
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apparently you cant see the first step of what the intent really is......As Obama himself has indicated, this is the 1st step toward a single payer total takeover of the system. Of Course, he couldnt get it through on that basis, but the 3,000 page bill has many avenues to achive his ultimate goal...then were all screwed. Private Insurance companies will "eventually" go out of business... then its over
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090804111322AA7vfaW
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grandy
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So you're speculating on what it will become. In its current form it's not socialism.
tsmith7559
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no speculation at all...its exactly what is happening. Its clear what they ultimately want
http://www.youdecidepolitics.com/2011/03/15/democrats-obamacare-is-the-platform-for-single-payer/
grandy
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Show me where this is stated in the bill.
tsmith7559
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Why, I have the authors verbal statements.....
I have Obama claiming what he wants.....
wake up Grandy, It's a take over and dont be surprised when your employer opts out of providing insurance coverage to you( and it will happen)
grandy
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Still waiting to hear how Obamcare, in its current form, is socialism...especially without a public option.
tsmith7559
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current form, lol, know one knows the current form, as indicated, its a starting point toward a single payer takeover. I'm sorry if you cant see this. The end game is very clear
grandy
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You're still guessing on future legislation. Once the govt passes laws that give them control over hospitals and doctors, feel free to call it socialism. Until then it's really just an unclear mess similar to what Red said.
I'd personally like to see them redo the whole thing, if only to simplify it.
I'd personally like to see them redo the whole thing, if only to simplify it.
Michchamp
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I'd like to see single (gov't) payer become the norm. And so would a lot of companies.
the only people who really stand to lose are health insurers.
Everything I've read indicates other countries that have universal gov't provided health care have it better than we do. I don't believe the health-industry-funded lies we're told.
the only people who really stand to lose are health insurers.
Everything I've read indicates other countries that have universal gov't provided health care have it better than we do. I don't believe the health-industry-funded lies we're told.
tsmith7559
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really? list the countries and the cost of providing such care and the limitation of such care
cheeno
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Michchamp
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***cue standard conservative yarn about a guy they know in canada who has a friend who's uncle bled to death in the emergency room because he couldn't get treatment***
tsmith7559
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cheeno
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Well since the WHO measure of overall responsiveness (speed of service, protection of privacy, quality of amenities; in short:coverage) directly correlates with spending then US coverage is number 1. So, if you spend the most you get the most. However if you look at distributed responsiveness ie average across the population the range of coverage falls from anywhere to 3rd-38th rank by country.
If you talk about efficiency: coverage to spending, many universal health care countries exceed the US.
http://www.who.int/whr/2000/en/whr00_en.pdf
This is the latest full report however I believe the latest update is 2009. Statistical tables at the bottom.
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