Back to Basics

Jim Pethokoukis spotlights a new Health Affairs study on how Romneycare laid the foundation for Obamacare, and what it portends for the federal health insurance scene. In short: Expanded government coverage, higher taxpayer costs. Read here for details and analysis. His conclusion:

The authors conclude that based on the Romneycare experience, Obamacare will improve coverage and not kill employer-based insurance, but containing costs will be a “considerable challenge.” That is probably the avenue Romney should use to a) attack Obamacare and b) present his own national health reform. But this study will perpetuate the meme that Romneycare was the prototype for Obamacare. Santorum hammered Romney on this point at the last debate more effectively than any other candidate throughout this campaign season, probably because he understands the issue better than his rivals. We’ll see if he or Gingrich follows up tonight.

No surprises, of course. We already heard from Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber in October:

The Obama administration may have relied much more heavily on Romney’s Massachusetts healthcare legislation as a blueprint for Obamacare than was previously believed.

White House visitor logs obtained by NBC News revealed that three of Romney’s healthcare advisers had up to a dozen meetings with senior administration officials, including one in the Oval Office presided over by President Barack Obama.

“They really wanted to know how we can take that same approach we used in Massachusetts and turn that into a national model,” MIT economist and Romney healthcare adviser Jon Gruber told NBC.

And back in September, I noted the analysis by Suffolk University’s Beacon Hill Institute showing the depths of the economic damage that Romneycare did in the Bay State.

Flashback:

Romney’s baggage. It is so heavy:

The Bay State’s controversial 2006 universal health-care plan — also known as “Romneycare” — has cost Massachusetts more than 18,000 jobs, according to an exclusive blockbuster study that could provide ammo to GOP rivals of former Gov. Mitt Romney as he touts his job-creating chops on the campaign trail.

“Mandating health insurance coverage and expanding the demand for health services without increasing supply drove up costs. Economics 101 tells us that,” said Paul Bachman, research director at Suffolk University’s Beacon Hill Institute, the conservative think tank that conducted the study. The Herald obtained an exclusive copy of the findings.

“The ‘shared sacrifice’ needed to provide universal health care includes a net loss of jobs, which is attributable to the higher costs that the measure imposed,” said David Tuerck, the institute’s executive director.

…Despite Romney’s vaunted business acumen as a successful venture capitalist, Bachman said the former governor “was a little naive about what would become of the law.”

The Beacon Hill Institute study found that, on average, Romneycare:

•    cost the Bay State 18,313 jobs;

•    drove up total health insurance costs in Massachusetts by $4.311 billion;

•    slowed the growth of disposable income per person by $376; and

•    reduced investment in Massachusetts by $25.06 million.

And remember that RomneyCare relied on FedGovCare as a sturdy crutch: “He also noted the state’s health-care costs have been heavily subsidized by billions of dollars in federal aid through a Medicaid waiver program.”

The SEIU may be attacking Romney in Floridanow, but Big Labor radicals made out well under Romneycare.

Even if Soros wasn’t a leftwinger, he would undoubtedly be an Obama supporter simply because of how much money the Obama administration is sending his way. From the Heritage Foundation:

George Soros, a billionaire investor and major backer of President Obama, stands to reap a windfall from legislation promoting natural gas-powered vehicles. The White House unveiled a proposal on Thursday that would do just that.
The proposal would offer incentives for companies to buy and use trucks powered by natural gas. Obama announced the effort at a UPS facility in Las Vegas that received stimulus funding to buy natural gas vehicles and build a fueling station for them.
The proposal is remarkably similar to the New Alternative Transportation to Give Americans Solutions (NAT GAS) Act.
One company that stands to benefit handsomely from the president’s proposal is Westport Innovations. The company converts diesel engines to be fueled by natural gas. Wall Street analysts predicted a boom for the company if the NAT GAS Act were passed. CNBC analyst Jim Cramer said he “expects shares to absolutely explode” in the event the legislation were to pass. . . .

From Fox News:

With just weeks until the U.S. Supreme Court considers the constitutionality of President Obama’s health care law, there are new calls for Justice Elena Kagan to recuse herself from the case.
Her critics point to a 2010 case regarding a San Francisco health measure, in which then-Solicitor General Kagan’s office filed an amicus brief touting the newly passed health care law.
In May 2010, after Kagan had been nominated to the nation’s highest court, Principal Deputy Solicitor General Neal Katyal sent her a memo outlining the cases in which she had “substantially participated.” Kaytal specifically referenced the Golden Gate case, noting that it had been “discussed with Elena several times.”
That’s enough to convince Heritage Foundation Senior Legal Fellow Hans von Spakovsky that Kagan shouldn’t take part in the current health care case before the high court.
“I don’t see how any ethical lawyer adhering to professional codes of conduct could not consider that they need to recuse themselves from this case,” he said. . . .

For some people, the crop of Republican presidential candidates has left their thirst for conservatism as unwhetted as Michael Moore’s appetite at a vegan restaurant. Sean Hannity is becoming concerned that the criticism this leads to might be playing into the hands of Obama when the general election rolls around, and last night he asked my blog partner and columnist extraordinaire Michelle Malkin why she seems to offer more critique than praise of the candidates — one of whom we’ll need to defeat Obama in November.

I liked this exchange because it was cordial yet pointed. Click the pic to see watch the video at The Right Scoop:

*****

My view on on the primary season is that it’s sort of like boot camp, with the candidates being the recruits and the voters as the drill instructors. Part of the DI’s job is to weed out those who either can’t cut it or won’t be able to withstand the assault when the actual sh*t comes down. Primary season not as much a time for “hey, great job” as it is for kicks in the pants for purposes of course correction. This is training for political battle, not a Miss America contest (well, okay, sometimes it is). Hannity believes we must be supportive because one of these guys has to defeat Obama. I think voters need to be tough and thoroughly vet them… for exactly the same reason. Simply not being Barack Obama won’t be enough to win in November.

Then again, I’m speaking as somebody who isn’t completely sold on any of the final four yet. Your mileage may vary.

When the story of the Department of Energy’s green loan program is written someday, the entire book will be contained in chapter 11:

After months of financial turmoil, an Energy Department-backed lithium ion battery company has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

The company, Ener1, received a $118 million grant from DOE in 2010 as part of the president’s stimulus package. The money, which went to Ener1 subsidiary EnerDel, aimed to promote renewable energy storage battery technology for electrical grid use.

But despite generous federal support for the company, Ener1 was racked by problems last year. In October, NASDAQ delisted the company due to non-compliance with Securities and Exchange Commission filing requirements. A month later, the company’s president, chief executive, and top financial officer were fired.

On Thursday, Ener1 announced it will initiate a pre-packaged Chapter 11 bankruptcy plan as part of an agreement to restructure the company’s debt obligations.

The problem? Something the government often fails to take into account when spending tons of other people’s money because they think it can be artificially created later on: Product demand:

In a statement announcing the company’s bankruptcy, CEO Alex Sorokin said that the company’s business plan was crippled by insufficient consumer demand.

“We moved aggressively to reduce costs and shift focus when the marketplace did not evolve as quickly as anticipated. Our business plan was impacted when demand for lithium-ion batteries slowed due to lower-than-expected adoption for electric passenger vehicles,” Sorokin wrote.

Translation: You’re not buying Volts fast enough, America!

Not long ago, Ener1 was the proud recipient of a big sloppy Recovery Summer kiss of death from our very own Sheriff Joe Biden:

From CNS News:

Ener1–a company that manufactures batteries for electric cars, and that received $118.5 million in federal stimulus money, and that Vice President Joe Biden visited last year the day after President Obama’s State of the Union Address—announced today that it has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

In last year’s State of the Union Address, delivered Jan. 25, 2011, President Obama set a national goal of having a million electric vehicles on the road in the United States by 2015—a goal that would be achieved, Obama said, by taking money out of the oil industry and “investing” it in new technology.

“With more research and incentives, we can break our dependence on oil with biofuels and become the first country to have a million electric vehicles on the road by 2015,” said Obama.

“We need to get behind this innovation,” he said. “And to help pay for it, I’m asking Congress to eliminate the billions in taxpayer dollars we currently give to oil companies. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but they’re doing just fine on their own. So instead of subsidizing yesterday’s energy, let’s invest in tomorrow’s.”

The next day, Biden visited the Ener1 plant in Greenfield, Ind.—which the White House said at the time had received a $118.5 million grant from the Department of Energy and was the type of investment the president was talking about in his State of the Union. . . .

As we move down the presidential primary path, most of the media attention is rightly focused on who the Republicans will pick to be their nominee. With Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum each having won a single state primary or caucus in January heading into the Florida primary, it is looking like this race could extend for months before finally settling on a candidate. It might not get resolved until the Republican convention in late August in Tampa Bay, Florida. The script has changed so many times already that no one can comfortably predict what will happen, and when this will become a contest between Republicans and Democrats—as opposed to among Republicans—over their competing visions for the future of this country.

But it is highly questionable if this November’s election is really going to come down to a simple matter of competing visions. There are numerous other factors—and potential factors—already at work, with still others being planned that could play a major role in the outcome of the election.

It is becoming increasingly clear that President Barack Obama’s estimated billion-dollar campaign machine is planning a multi-front battle plan to win re-election. To a certain extent that is the reality of political contests today. However, evidence is mounting that this election will be like none before it, both in terms of the role of the media and the specter of legal and political maneuvering being undertaken to help ensure victory for Obama.

With the RealClearPolitics average of polls showing that 65% of likely U.S. voters say the country is on the wrong track, the Republican nominee, whoever that turns out to be, should be able to defeat Obama. The unemployment rate and the massive deficits normally would be enough to ensure that. But the question this year is whether or not Obama can convince enough voters that a) the mess he inherited was worse than everyone thought, but at least we’re moving in the right direction; b) his vision is kinder, more fair, and ultimately better for the country than whomever the Republicans run against him; and c) if the Republicans hadn’t obstructed him at every turn, we would be much farther along.

For many reasons, those are all tough sells. But Team Obama is not taking any chances, and they are attempting to create enough havoc and diversions that they can win the election, regardless of the state of the economy, the overwhelming sentiment to repeal ObamaCare, and the widely held belief that Obama prefers to ignore Congress, and the Constitution, and run the country through a series of unaccountable “czars,” bureaucratic regulations and executive orders.

A recent attempt to end-run Congress and the Constitution was the recess appointments of Richard Cordray to head up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a creation of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, and three members of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), at a time when the Senate was not actually in recess. When President Obama announced the appointments, he said that he refused “to take no for an answer.” He said that when Congress doesn’t act, he has an obligation to do so. Actually, the system of keeping the Senate in pro forma sessions so that the president cannot make such appointments was established by Sen.