Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Democrat Congressman Argues AGAINST Hearing on Obamacare’s Costs

At the House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing this morning, Democrat Congressman Charlie Gonzalez noted in his exchange with CBO Director Doug Elmendorf that “it doesn’t require a hearing” to find out the budgetary impact of the health care law.  That position is of course contrary to the position taken by candidate Obama, when he made repeated campaign promises claiming that health care negotiations would be televised on C-SPAN.

It’s not altogether surprising that a Democrat Congressman would make such a claim.  Speaker Pelosi herself laughed at the concept of televising the negotiations on C-SPAN, publicly mocking the President’s campaign pledges.  And the former Speaker famously said we had to pass the bill to find out what’s in it.  But many may question how the “most transparent” Administration could pass a $2.6 trillion health care bill and have Democrats claim that a public hearing examining its budgetary impact was a mere trifling inconvenience.

UPDATE: As a follow up on this issue, the Medicare actuary just testified that Speaker Pelosi did not make efforts to ascertain whether or not the Medicare actuary would complete his analysis of the legislation prior to a vote on final passage.  In other words, passing the bill by an arbitrary deadline set by the Democrat leadership was more important than finding out whether or not it would reduce national health care costs, as the President promised it would.  (It turns out the actuary concluded the law will INCREASE costs by $310,800,000,000.)