Dropping off a cliff

Dick Morris: Behind the president's whining to the Black Caucus, begging them to "quit grumbling," is a decline in his personal popularity among African-American voters that could portend catastrophe for his fading reelection chances. According to a Washington Post/ABC News survey, his favorability ratings among African-Americans has dropped off a cliff, plunging from 83 percent five months ago to a mere 58 percent today -- a drop of 25 points, a bit more than a point per week. 

Dick Morris: When you donate money to the RNC, you are wasting your money.

Dick Morris: The election of Scott Brown was so momentous that Obama will never pass another piece of legislation.

"Let's just stop for a second and understand the magnitude of the earthquake that hit Massachusetts... ultimately this is the end of the Obama ascendancy..."

Maybe a little overstated.

Dick Morris sums up the contents of the Reid bill at least where it stands now.

• No public option, so the bill has no teeth
• Relatively few new people will get health insurance. Many young and healthy people will decide to pay the fine. (They are making a good bet in my judgment.)
  
• Rationing may not be as bad as feared since new patients won't flood into the system
• Medicare cuts are proposed but may not ever happen, since Congress will have to have the guts to pass them, which historically they have not. This will run up the deficit.
  
• Medicaid will expand to cover more of the poor and working poor up to everyone making 150 percent or less of the poverty level. In Arkansas, for example, anyone whose income is less than $27,000 will be eligible. This will call for a tax increase.
  
• Medicare Advantage will be gutted and replaced by Medigap insurance, which costs more. This change will adversely affect 10 million elderly.
  

After health care reform

Dick Morris: Can Blanche Lincoln really believe that she is going to return to the Senate?

Senate bill consequences

Philip Klein:

In another blow to Democrats' health care claims, the Congressional Budget Office released an analysis on Monday projecting that the Senate health care bill would raise premiums by more than $2,000 on family policies compared to what the cost otherwise would be if Congress were simply to do nothing.
The report, prepared at the request of Sen. Evan Bayh, found that premiums on policies individuals purchase on their own or through the government-run exchanges would cost 10 percent to 13 percent more in 2016 than under current law. In dollar terms, in 2016 an individual policy would cost $5,800 and a family policy would cost $15,200 if the Senate bill were enacted, according to the CBO, compared with $5,500 and $13,100 under the status quo.

Dick Morris: State taxes will go up dramatically under Obamacare because states must expand Medicaid eligibility. Arkansas, for example, will have to increase spending by $402 million.

UPDATE: The WSJ has an article on future premiums. As usual, information is conflicting.

John Brummett, an Arkansas columist, writes about Dick Morris.

Dick Morris appeared at a rally in Little Rock yesterday calling the health-care overhaul bill "the most serious threat to our lives and our liberties we Americans have faced since World War II."

They group met on the steps of the Capitol, not at the Clinton library. I wonder why.

He cited a new Zogby poll that finds only 28 percent of the state, in Morris' words, "that's demented enought to support this bill, but there is 64 percent of the state tht opposes it." Actually this was a poll of likely voters in Arkansas.

Morris also said that illegal immigrants "should be covered [by insurance], but by a prison  policy."

Dick Morris and Eileen McGann explain how health care reform, so called, might play out in defeat.

Dick Morris discusses the deals with the AMA and AARP that made PelosiCare possible.

* The AARP got a financial windfall in return for its support of the healthcare bill. Over the past decade, the AARP has morphed from an advocacy group to an insurance company (through its subsidiary company). It is one of the main suppliers of Medi-gap insurance, a high-cost, privately purchased coverage that picks up where Medicare leaves off. But President Bush-43 passed the Medicare Advantage program, which offered a subsidized, lower-cost alternative to Medi-gap. Under Medicare Advantage, the elderly get all the extra coverage they need plus coordinated, well-managed care, usually by the same physician. So more than 10 million seniors went with Medicare Advantage, cutting into AARP Medi-gap revenues.

Wake up call

Dick Morris and Eileen McGann: Republican Bob McDonnell's victory in Virginia, a swing state that Obama carried last year, demonstrates that marginal Democratic Congressmen cannot survive Obamacare. A vote in favor of Obamacare is a career-ending vote.

This video shows Dick Morris comparing Obama's reaction to his critics with Roosevelt's reaction during the New Deal. He says Roosevelt ran to the right in the early New Deal, but he realized he couldn't get unemployment down any lower. So in 1936 or so, he launched his attacks against the "economic royalists" and so on. He he lost control of Congress after 1938 and the New Deal was over.

Morris may be wrong about some of his interpretation, but he claims that Obama is following the same pattern: he can't get unemployment down any lower than it is (in fact it may go up), health care legislation is stalled, foreign policy problems are intractable, so he's attacking Fox News, the chamber of commerce, etc. He hopes this will rally the Democrat base against all opposition.

Dick Morris shows how Obamacare will increase the cost of health care.

Dick Morris has some comments on Obama's health care plan that resonate with me:

Nobody has the president’s huge microphone. But we all have voices and, when they swell to a chorus, they dominate the national dialogue.

It is, essentially, a program to force people who don’t need it to buy health insurance so as to lower costs for those who do and to subsidize part of the price tag by cutting medical care to the elderly.

Dick Morris, the former Clinton adviser, says that Obamacare is losing just about all segments of voters, old and young, etc. The process started with seniors who worry about their Medicare, and now young, middle class workers are finding out they will face a stiff tax (excuse me, a fine) if they don't buy medical insurance. Even people on Medicaid will face high premiums.

Morris sums it up like this:

In other words, health-care "reform" is a health-care tax dressed up as a program to cover the uninsured.
No matter how Democrats get the money to cover those who need insurance, they offend supporters that they need to pass the bill:
* If they get the money from more Medicare cuts, they alienate the elderly still further.
* If they get it from raising the deficit, they lose moderates.
* If they hike taxes to do it, they lose the "Blue Dog" Democrats who've gone on record as opposing such increases.
* If they don't increase the subsidies, they lose the uninsured themselves.

Why does college cost so much?

Dick Morris: ". . .[T]he high cost of college is entirely avoidable! There is one higher education institution – York College in Pennsylvania – that shows that if colleges required their faculty to work harder (approximating the work week the rest of us find normal), held down administrative spending, and reined in borrowing for capital improvements, that these institutions could charge half of what they now do in tuition and fees."

Note: he said colleges could cut their tuition in half.

In short, the full-time faculty work part-time and the administration is top-heavy.

Dick Morris: "The president’s plan is, essentially, a program to take medical care away from the elderly and give it to those who are not younger, healthier, and - in the main - richer."

Dick Morris: How can any medical reform plan treat 50 million new patients without extra doctors?

Morris also shows that seniors have defected from the Democrats in larger percentages than any other group because they understand what they are doing.

The Democratic Party, led by Obama, is systematically converting the elderly vote into a Republican bastion. The work of FDR in passing Social Security in 1937 and of LBJ in enacting Medicare in 1965 is being undone by the president's healthcare program. The elderly see his proposals for what they are: a massive redistribution of healthcare away from the elderly and toward a population that is younger, healthier and richer but happens, at the moment, to lack insurance. (Remember that the uninsured are, by definition, not elderly, not young and not in poverty - and if they are, they are currently eligible for Medicare, Medicaid or SCHIP and do not need the Obama program.)

Seniors just can't wait until November 2, 2010.