In April or May 2011, the federal government will bump up against its statutory authority to borrow more money. The current debt ceiling is $14.294 trillion, and when you borrow $4 billion every day you tend to reach your credit card limit in a hurry.

House Republicans should demand that President Barack Hussein Obama and Senate Democrats agree to repeal Obamacare and cut other federal spending as the price for an agreement to raise the national debt ceiling and for passing a continuing resolution (CR).

The March 14, 2011 Rasmussen Poll shows that 62% of likely voters favor repeal of Obamacare, 61% believe Obamacare will cause healthcare costs to rise, 59% believe it will increase the federal deficit, and 54% think it will be bad for the country.

The American people elected eighty-seven freshmen Republicans to the U.S. House of Representatives in November 2010 to give the G.O.P. majority control for two purposes: 1) To repeal Obamacare, and 2) To cut federal spending.

The house passed a bill to repeal Obamacare, but the Democrat-controlled Senate refuses to go along. House Republicans can force them to go along by refusing to raise the debt ceiling if they don’t.

There is no other way to repeal Obamacare.

The back-up plan is to hope Obama gets defeated in 2012 so that the new president would sign a repeal bill. That’s a foolish strategy.

First, the chances of defeating Obama are 50-50 at best. Second, even if he’s defeated and the Republicans retain majority control of the House, they would still have to get sixty votes in the Senate to pass a repeal bill. They now hold only 47 seats in the Senate.

What are the odds that they’ll have a net gain of 13 seats in November 2012? Answer: 20% at most.

Waiting for the Supreme Court to rule Obamacare unconstitutional is also foolish. It’s never possible to predict with certainty how the Supremes will rule. This is a complex law and there are complex constitutional issues to consider. Additionally, it could take the Court two years from now to issue a final ruling.

The Republican plan to defund Obamacare can’t work either.

The Heritage Foundation recently discovered that when Obamacare was passed, the Democrats snuck into it a provision that provides $105 billion in taxpayer funds to keep it going for the next seven years, whether or not Congress votes to cancel the money. Normally, Congress would authorize spending and then pass separate appropriations bills each year so that new Congresses could reflect the will of the people as to ongoing government spending.

In this case, however, Obama, Pelosi and Reid knew that Democrats were likely to lose their majority because 60% of the American people were opposed to Obamacare from the start, so they rigged the system with advanced appropriations to keep Obamacare funded forever.

In other words, it’s a self-propelled Frankenstein which Congress is powerless to stop, unless Obamacare is completely repealed.

Guess what the $105 billion is being used for. Section 4002 gives late-term abortion lover H.H.S. Secretary Kathleen Sebelius $15 billion to use at her discretion through fiscal year 2019, and then $2 billion per year thereafter in perpetuity. Under the clever guise of “sustained national investment in prevention and public health programs”, she can use it to fund Planned Parenthood, homosexual indoctrination of your kindergarten children in “health class”, end-of-life “counseling” to convince your grandmother to commit suicide, or to make contributions to the public employees’ pension funds in Wisconsin.

To make sure the kids are indoctrinated early into believing that healthcare should be provided to them from cradle to grave at public expense, the Secretary of HHS is authorized to spend over $200 million from 2010-2014 to establish “school-based health clinics” for “underserved populations”.

That’s Obamacare at work with your tax dollars.

The debt ceiling will be reached at some point in April or May, and Mr. Obama and the Democrats want the Republicans to agree to raise it.

Forget it.

The House freshmen should refuse the Democrats’ bullying and the Republican leaders’ “appeals to reason” and simply do that for which they were elected: repeal Obamacare and cut federal spending.

Mr. Obama says that Republicans should not use the budgetary process to achieve policy objectives, but that’s exactly what he and the Democrats did when they used advanced appropriations to make it impossible to defund Obamacare.

The Democrats and Wall Street claim that failure to raise the debt ceiling would have serious, negative long-term consequences for the country. They’re absolutely right, which is why Obama will cave if the House Republicans hold firm.

If he shuts down the government, they should refuse to budge until he agrees to repeal the healthcare law.

As the Rasmussen Poll indicates, 54% of likely voters think that Obamacare will be bad for the country. It is an unconstitutional, unworkable monstrosity. To date, over 1,000 waivers of its onerous provisions have been granted to Mr. Obama’s union thugs and to the corporations that sent him campaign contributions and give him political cover. The rest of us have to live with it.

The G.O.P. freshmen claimed that they were going to Washington not to start careers, but to represent their constituents and do the right thing.

Now is their chance to prove it.

This is one of those rare times in Washington when the power and the opportunity to do the right thing coincide.

If the Republicans refuse to use their power to force repeal of Obamacare by holding the national debt ceiling and the CR hostage, then they are of no use whatsoever and should go back home.

Repeal Obamacare now or shut down the government.

With that and similarly deceptive rhetoric, Obama convinced 54% of American Catholics that electing him President of the United States would lead to worldwide ‘social justice’.

Jesus said: “Love one another as I have loved you”.

The Catholic Church has a long, distinguished history of acting on this commandment through social service (charity, or direct help for those in need).

On occasion it has engaged in social action (an attempt to change institutions perceived as perpetuating privation and/or oppression).

The Church considers vast disparities in wealth among individuals as a lack of social justice and has advocated policies which it believes would narrow those gaps.

In the past, it has recognized that Communism and socialism expand poverty and create oppression, but has expressed also its view that free-market Capitalism has limitations and that some regulation of it is a requisite for social justice.

Pope John Paul II was a formidable opponent of Communism and played a significant role in its overthrow in his native Poland, but spoke disapprovingly of the accumulation of wealth without regard for the suffering of those who fail to provide for their own needs.

More recently, the Church has advocated the concept of healthcare as a right worthy of enforcement by the federal government, and has pushed aggressively for immigration “reform” that would grant amnesty to illegal aliens and create another wave of immigration in pursuit of the ‘social justice’ of family reunification.

Obama played the social justice card skillfully in 2008. He trotted out heartbreaking stories of mothers desperately seeking healthcare for their uninsured children and spoke of his own mother’s problems with her health insurance company in the final months of her vain struggle against cancer.

Few Americans would have denied the imperative of access to medical care, and most had had experience with recalcitrant insurance companies. Obama’s pitch struck a responsive chord with Catholics intent on working for their concept of social justice, and he won the Catholic vote over John McCain by 54%-45%.

In practice, however, Obama’s stint as an Illinois state legislator bore little resemblance to the teachings or beliefs of the Catholic Church.

His concept of “making healthcare a right for all Americans” didn’t extend to the most vulnerable among us, the babies who survive botched abortions.

On the floor of the legislature in 2001, Obama said: “Number one, whenever we define a previable fetus as a person that is protected by the equal protection clause or the other elements in the Constitution, what we’re really saying is, in fact, that they are persons that are entitled to the kinds of protections that would be provided to a — a child, a nine-month-old — child that was delivered to term. That determination then, essentially, if it was accepted by a court, would forbid abortions to take place. I mean, it — it would essentially bar abortions, because the equal protection clause does not allow somebody to kill a child, and if this is a child, then this would be an antiabortion statute.”

That doesn’t quite square with “I’ve tried to apply the precepts of compassion and care for the vulnerable that are so central to Catholic teachings to my work…”, does it.

Fast forward to the passage of Obamacare in the United States Congress on March 21st, and the carnival atmosphere at The White House yesterday when Obama signed it into law, and consider whether the abortion and euthanasia provisions in the law resemble in any way the tenets of the Catholic Church.

Obamacare requires everyone to buy health insurance and subsidizes with federal money those who can’t afford the premiums. Insurance policies will pay for abortions, and the subsidies will pay for the insurance. While the law requires “segregation” of federal funds, that provision is an exercise in accounting semantics.

Before he caved and voted for passage, Congressman Bart Stupak made a show of winning a meaningless executive order from the President which would bar the use of federal funds to pay for abortions.

It’s meaningless because the Secretary of Health and Human Services, the pro late-term abortion Kathleen Sebelius, will simply declare that the federal funding of abortions which Obamacare compels does not in fact constitute federal funding for abortions.

If you’ve read “The Gulag Obama”, you’ve seen the citations to Obamacare, beginning on page 693, that empower Ms. Sebelius to determine who gets medical care and who doesn’t, which conditions get treated and which don’t, and which elderly people and special needs people will be denied life-saving medical care based upon the remaining ‘usefulness’ of their lives.

In ObamaWorld these two classes of vulnerable people aren’t worthy of “compassion and care” and the government is empowered to deny medical treatment to them.

Or, as Obama said on ABC, “Maybe you’re (grandma) better off not having the (life-saving) surgery, but taking the pain pill”.

In fairness, 50 Catholic bishops urged Catholics not to vote for Obama, and Catholics who attend mass every week voted for McCain 55%-43%.

The Church’s pursuit of social justice via the avenue of government compulsion, however, led directly to the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States, a pro-abortion Democrat Congress, and the enactment of a law which commands the government to prey upon the least of us.

Over one million American babies are killed in the name of “choice” every year. Obamacare now compels taxpayers for the first time in our history to pay for some of those abortions, and it is an unhappy fact that the Catholic Church will be complicit in the deaths of those children.

Social justice is best pursued through fidelity to the Constitution of the United States, which was written by brilliant men who designed it as a restraint on government and a guarantee of individual liberty and responsibility.

The Catholic Church doesn’t have a monopoly on virtue, and before it again pursues ‘social justice’ and ‘change’ at the expense of our institutions and traditions, it would be wise for it to remember that the road to perdition is paved with good intentions.

Yes, we’re settling into middle age, and ‘excitement’ has been defined down. Besides, who wants to sit in a crowded theater full of “Avatar” fans? (First weekend’s box office $232 million, and it snowed!)

The Cowboys were expected to fold in New Orleans, which was 13-0 at the time, and we’d seen that movie before.

Faced with this choice of horrors we compromised: We turned on the TV but muted it and sat down with Harry’s 383-page tome in our lap. Sexy.

If you’ve read our editorial, “Harry Reid to Cancer Patients: Wait Until Next Year”, you know that the previous version of the bill allowed insurance companies to set annual limits on dollar amounts of medical care. If you have cancer, for instance, and you reach your annual limit by July, you might not make it until next year for resumption of cancer treatments.

President Obama vowed to fix that. He didn’t. The amendment says that for insurance coverage that commences prior to January 14, 2014, annual limits are at the discretion of the Secretary of Health And Human Services. There are no provisions for plans after that date.

Politicians lie. We’re shocked! Shocked!

We looked up from our reading just in time to see Tony Romo complete a perfectly timed and executed pass to Miles Austin, streaking down the left sideline for a touchdown to give the Cowboys a 7-0 lead on their first possession.

We harrumphed cynically and plunged back into our civic duty.

Here’s what we discovered:

1. Government officials, community groups such as ACORN, and unions such as SEIU will conduct “Wellness and Prevention Programs” which will collect data about the habits of individual U.S. citizens and the manner in which their habits impact their health. Databases will be constructed to conduct longitudinal studies to track people over their lifetimes.
2. Legal ownership of firearms and ammunition will be exempted from No. 1 above, but weight, smoking, drinking, exercise, occupation, marital status, sexual status, income, age, and political affiliation will all be covered, as well as any other information deemed relevant by the Secretary, ACORN and SEIU.
3. HHS, ACORN and SEIU will form a “Working Group” to measure the effectiveness of treatment and the appropriateness of allowing doctors and hospitals to treat various acute, chronic conditions, based upon the age, race and wealth of the patient. If you’ve read our editorial, “The Gulag Obama”, you’ve seen our citations to passages in the main bill.
4. Patients will be allowed to appeal their denial of medical care to bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. You’d have as much success at that as you might getting waited on with a smile at the Post Office.
5. Exclusions of coverage for pediatric care are permissible.
6. Medicare will be cut by $470 billion. If you aren’t aware, Medicare is an insurance program for the elderly. They’ve been paying insurance premiums into it for forty years. The federal government has been borrowing that money from the Medicare Trust Fund, and Medicare is now scheduled to go broke within the next few years. The Democrats’ solution is to cut one-half trillion dollars in Medicare benefits to the elderly, not to stabilize the program, but to give medical coverage to other people.
7. The other people mentioned in No. 6 above are illegal aliens. That’s right, this bill does not in any way prohibit taxpayer-funded healthcare for illegal aliens.
8. Medical care for the elderly will be rationed in two ways. First, the aforementioned cuts to Medicare will result in lower reimbursement rates to the doctors who treat seniors. As a result, doctors will accept fewer Medicare patients. Second, the previously mentioned “Working Group” of bureaucrats, ACORN and SEIU will decide who gets to have medical treatment and who doesn’t.
9. The liberals’ doctrine of Comparative Effectiveness dictates that people who are old, or who are very young and have not yet been educated or become productive members of society, should and will be denied expensive medical procedures and medication. If you’re too old, you won’t be allowed to have hip replacements, kidney dialysis, or surgery for colon or breast cancer. If you’re born prematurely you’ll be allowed to die.
10. “Peer Review” by the Secretary, ACORN and SEIU will become part of the process for determining acceptable levels of coverage and for determining which hospitals and which doctors have achieved acceptable patient outcomes. Do you think that doctors might be extorted for campaign contributions at the time of their periodic evaluations? Peer Reviews…they worked so well for the climate hysterics. (See “Copenhagen, We Have A Problem”).
11. Ten million people, including seniors, will be forced into Medicaid. Medicaid is the federal government’s medical welfare program for the poor. The treatment they get is infamous for its inadequacy, and the World War II generation is going to be forced into it.
12. The states administer and pay for part of the Medicaid program. This massive expansion of Medicaid will strain severely state budgets, such that spending for public safety and education will have to be cut. Senator Ben Nelson (D-Nebraska) sold his all-important 60th vote to Harry Reid in exchange for permanently exempting Nebraska from making those Medicaid expansion payments.
13. Abortion will henceforth be funded by U.S. taxpayers. Ben Nelson made a big show of representing the pro-life position on this issue, but he caved. If this bill passes, elective abortions will be funded with federal dollars. The amendment contains meaningless language about segregating federal subsidies to people who can’t afford their own health insurance so that they can’t be used for abortion, but that would be like segregating the water in the deep end of your pool from the water in the shallow end. Moses might be able to do it.
14. The Secretary, ACORN and SEIU are empowered by the bill to engage in “Outcome Measurement” for primary and preventative care for “distinct populations such as healthy children, chronically ill adults or infirm elderly patients”. It’s not bad enough that the Democrats have engaged in identity politics to segregate us by race, wealth, religion and gender, but now they want to classify us according to our illnesses.
15. The bill raises taxes in total by $500 billion. Part of that is an increase of the Medicare payroll tax for people earning more than $200,000 annually, but it’s not adjusted for inflation. Those familiar with the Alternative Minimum Tax understand that this tax will soon apply to the middle class. The remainder of the taxes are on medical devices and insurance companies, and they’ll be passed on to the middle class as well.
16. The taxes begin immediately, but the benefits don’t commence for another three years.

In summary, the federal government will become deeply involved in your medical care, will collect data on the most intimate aspects of your life, will pay your doctor based upon his adherence to their rules rather than the choices that you and your doctor make, and for the purposes of controlling costs and buying votes, will deny coverage to seniors and to very young and infirm people.

As we said in “The Gulag Obama”, Marxists (in this case, disguised as “Democrats”) view people as fungible commodities rather than as God’s Children. Old people, in their eyes, are useless and should be thrown away so that they won’t consume resources.

There sometimes is a tendency to believe that the last few days, months, and sometimes years of life are not worth living. Our mother died recently at the age of 89. Ten years before her death she had life-saving surgery which would have been denied to her under Obamacare because of her age and the cost of the procedure and subsequent care. She recovered and was well until her final two years.
Six month’s before her death we hired a young woman to assist with her care. To protect her anonymity, we’ll call her “Sally”.

Mom loved Sally, and Sally was remarkable with Mom.

Sally lost every one of her worldly possessions in hurricane Ike in September 2008. She and her family lost their houses and everything in them. She lost her cars, and she and her husband lost their jobs. They had to send their three young children to live with relatives in another state so that they could move to a large city and find work.

Two or three weeks before Mom passed away, Sally and her husband moved back home. She’s now working three jobs and is hoping to have her children back with her soon.

Here’s what she wrote to us after Mom’s passing:

“I got all the stuff you sent me. I loved it all but must say it made me miss her. She was such a special woman. I think the time I had with her was a gift from God. I still feel bad for not being there for her in the end but honestly I am not sure I could have endured it. She was part of my healing. In a time of much sadness in my life she brought me joy and made me see the good things in life. She made me strong again. When I first met her I had lost all those things. She was such a blessing. I will always cherish the time I had with her, Sally”.

If you love your parents and your children, and if you voted for Barack Obama and the Democrats, you made a bad choice.

Final score: Cowboys 24-Saints 17; Democrats $2.6 trillion-America’s middle class…screwed.

Gulag means Chief Directorate of ‘Corrective Labor Camps’ (read concentration camps), and the word ‘archipelago’ compares the system of concentration camps spread out across the U.S.S.R. with a vast chain of islands known only to those unfortunates imprisoned in it and the Communist dictatorship responsible for creating and running it.

The Gulag Obama is President Barack Obama’s proposed healthcare system which will create a vast federal bureaucracy designed not to improve the quality, availability and affordability of medical care, but to make Americans subservient and beholden to, and enslaved and taxed by, Obama’s favored political groups, ACORN and Service Employees International Union (SEIU).

This conclusion is derived from:

1. The contents of the bill; and
2. An understanding of who authored it and why.

For convenience, we have attached a copy of the proposed Senate bill, which you can access by clicking here.

Begin on page 693, and note that the Secretary of HHS has been tasked with developing a ‘National Strategy For Quality Improvement In Healthcare‘, and “through a transparent collaborative process, shall establish a national strategy to improve the delivery of health care services, patient health outcomes, and population health”.

Excellence in medicine is not a government ‘collaborative process’. It’s an accomplishment of exceptionally intelligent and highly motivated people, focused on the dispassionate pursuit of science, truth and skill.

Leaving that aside for the moment and the fact that neither the Secretary nor any other bureaucrat has the relevant knowledge, skills, experience or incentive to accomplish such a goal, consider that on page 699, the President is instructed to assemble an Interagency Working Group On Healthcare Quality known as the ‘Working Group‘.

The goals of the Working Group shall be to establish “collaboration, cooperation, and consultation between federal departments and agencies with respect to developing and disseminating strategies, goals, models, and timetables that are consistent with the national priorities” for healthcare improvement.

We are loathe to waste space with a recitation of facts, but it’s instructive to note which agencies shall be responsible for this effort, and here they are:

The Department of Health and Human Services, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration, the Health Resources and Services Administration, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the Administration for Children and Families, the Department of Commerce, the Office of Management and Budget, the United States Coast Guard, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the Federal Trade Commission, the Social Security Administration, the Department of Labor, the United States Office of Personnel Management, the Department of Defense, the Department of Education, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Veterans Health Administration, and any other federal agencies and departments with activities relating to improving health care quality and safety, as determined by the President (perhaps the U.S. Postal Service).

They couldn’t deliver H1N1 vaccines in time for the epidemic, but we’re supposed to believe that they’ll efficiently and effectively create an entire new, national healthcare system which will improve quality, increase accessibility and reduce costs?

Imagine the expansion of budgets these agencies will experience, and the bureaucrats who will have vast new avenues for career advancement. Now try to conceive of any way that their involvement in your healthcare will improve your health or lower your costs.

If you can bear it, begin reading page 702 to understand the depth of involvement these agencies will have, along with ACORN and SEIU, in determining the types of medical care doctors may provide, and when and to whom they may provide it.

Here’s a synopsis:

The Secretary will be empowered to develop measurement standards and tools to determine the quality and cost-effectiveness of care delivered by your doctor. She will grant contracts to outside parties, who may include community organizing groups such as ACORN, and unions such as SEIU, to develop those standards and tools.

They also will be tasked with measuring “equity of health services and health disparities across health disparity populations“. ‘Multi-Stakeholder Groups‘ will be nominated by the public to participate in this process.

The quality, availability and delivery of your healthcare will become an exercise in ‘fairness’, determined by ‘stakeholder groups’, not medical professionals.

They will have the power to establish “varying payments to doctors who order advanced diagnostic imaging services (such as mammograms) according to the equity of health services and health disparities across health disparity populations for ordering such services as determined in consultation with physicians, specialty groups, and other stakeholders”.

‘Varying payments’ means that your doctor will get paid less for providing you with services that don’t conform to the dictates of these community groups. In other words, if you’re a ‘rich, white woman’ living in a nice suburb, you’re not a member of a ‘health disparity population‘. ACORN will reallocate resources away from your doctor and your hospital in order to address ‘health disparities across health disparity populations’.

This entire process is a scheme for wealth redistribution, and you will be taxed to pay for it.

The healthcare reform plan was written by the President’s good friend, Andy Stern, who heads SEIU, which contributed $60 million to the 2008 Obama campaign. SEIU also gave millions to Health Care For America NOW!, which advocates a plan, not surprisingly, that is nearly identical to the President’s.

Click here to read Mr. Stern’s opinion about the Senate’s version as of December 17, 2009.

SEIU has two million members, and one of its officials admits that a significant percentage of them are illegal aliens. Contrary to the President’s claims, the health care reform bill does not prohibit publicly subsidized medical care from going to illegal aliens.

The President’s plan does gut Medicare, the entitlement program which pays the medical expenses for elderly Americans. Seniors have paid insurance premiums into Medicare for the past forty years.

Obama wants to cut one-half trillion dollars from it over the next ten years. The money will not be reinvested in Medicare, it will be used to fund this giant redistribution of wealth.

Under the guise of ‘Comparative Effectiveness‘, ACORN and SEIU will determine which medical procedures are effective, which aren’t, and which members of the population will be entitled to receive them.

As an example, if a medical surgery to treat colon cancer costs $100,000, a fifty year-old patient with a life expectancy of twenty years will be allowed to have it, as the cost averages $5,000 per year. A seventy year-old with a life expectancy of ten years will be denied the surgery because the cost averages $10,000 per year.

In the jargon of Obamacare, the older patient has less life potential and therefore less right to call on communal resources. That’s the problem with Marxism: It treats people as fungible commodities rather than as God’s children (see Marxist! Marxist! Marxist!, which we wrote more than a year ago).

The doctor/patient relationship will be replaced by the government/doctor relationship. Doctors will be compensated based upon their adherence to government mandates regarding which procedures may be performed on which patients.

The real kicker is that SEIU will organize and unionize all hospital personnel. Go wait in line at the Post Office, and then contemplate lying in a hospital bed with similarly dedicated union members in charge of your care.

If our wealthy, liberal friends think they won’t get caught in Obama’s healthcare gulag, they should remember that liberals always get shot first in a Marxist regime.

The future of the Democrat Party is not senior citizens or middle class Americans of any race; it’s union members from Mexico and Central America and government-dependent U.S. citizens.

Barack and the Democrats will throw grandma from her scooter and give it to Jose, and they’re willing to vote in the dead of night to do it.

Whether the healthcare legislation contains a public option and/or funding for abortion is beside the point.

Obamacare is a Third World healthcare system concocted by our Third World president and the union and community organizing thugs who helped elect him, and who stole the Minnesota U.S. Senate seat for Al Franken.