Government Health Care Sticker Shock - UPDATE

Now that sticker shock is setting in, Obamacare is proving a tough sell. Around the news and blogosphere today, there was more evidence of how hard this is getting for the administration.

First, the President himself did not appear to know the details of the bill, as pointed out by Dean. He was asked about the provision outlawing private health insurance and couldn't give a coherent answer, other than punting the question. Without the TOTUS by his side, Obama continues to flounder.

Second, outlandish claims of future efficiencies and more unicorns are not selling well either. Congressman Carnahan (D-MOron) is shown here trying to sell the big lie:



The sticker shock of the CBO's $1 Trillion dollar cost estimate seems to be giving people some buyer's remorse as Obama's poll numbers continue to fall.


Also, Democrats from tonier districts are getting nervous over all this tax the rich talk. From the Wall Street Journal:

A group of Democrats elected in recent years from some of the country's richest congressional districts have emerged as a stumbling block to raising taxes on the wealthy to pay for President Barack Obama's ambitious health-care overhaul just as the plan has begun to meet increasing resistance over its cost.

I think there is an opening to put forward an alternative health care financing reforms that are far less costly and less intrusive. I know that the Democrats demagogued social security reform to death, without a credible alternative, but that isn't a strategy for a long term majority party. Do we really want to be like them?

UPDATE #1

I can't believe I missed this one, hat tip to Pop for pointing it out. Obamacare also means pressuring seniors into refusing care and therefor dying to save us all money. From the New York Post article where former Lt. Gov. McCaughey of New York states:

One troubling provision of the House bill compels seniors to submit to a counseling session every five years (and more often if they become sick or go into a nursing home) about alternatives for end-of-life care (House bill, p. 425-430). The sessions cover highly sensitive matters such as whether to receive antibiotics and "the use of artificially administered nutrition and hydration."
This mandate invites abuse, and seniors could easily be pushed to refuse care. Do we really want government involved in such deeply personal issues?

And oh by the way, wasn't Roe v Wade decided on the issue of privacy, i.e. the government couldn't invade the privacy of the doctor-patient relationship by regulating abortion? Is Obamacare arguing that the constitutional principals that case are no longer valid? To quote 'Dawg, just because he's studied the constitution, don't mean he agrees with it.

From the wikipedia article:

The opinion of the Roe Court, written by Justice Harry Blackmun, declined to adopt the district court's Ninth Amendment rationale, and instead asserted that the "right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment's concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or, as the District Court determined, in the Ninth Amendment's reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy."

But apparently no other decision between a doctor and a patient would be so protected by constitutional scholar Obama. I look forward to myriad court challenges to Obamacare on this basis should it pass.