The 2% solution - From the AP: "After all the fuss, public health plan covers few." It turns out that the CBO has determined that the House health care plan will attract only 2% of Americans. If the government-run plan is designed to be a low-cost counterweight to the private insurance companies, it will inevitably draw high risk patients who cannot get regular insurance. Without a pool of younger, healthier Americans joining the program, costs will spiral out of control especially since coverage cannot be denied. And who will benefit? Those evil for-profit insurance companies who will be happy to shed their problem patients.

Extra - From Gateway Pundit: Americans aren't buying what Nancy Pelosi is selling.

Hey, it's Halloween, not April Fools Day

NY Times: "Democrats push for plan to cut deficit" Clearly this brilliant plan involves passing one trillion-dollar expenditure after another. Have they seen this graph?

Boo!

Ford is punished for staying solvent

Well, moral hazard has raised its ugly head again. The UAW workers at Ford Motor have rejected contract changes to cut labor costs.

Ford sought the deal to bring its labor costs in line with Detroit rivals Chrysler Group and General Motors, both of which won concessions from the union as they headed into bankruptcy protection earlier this year.

Tough luck, guys. Next time get your fat government bailout.

Related - From The Truth About Cars, we'll find that Cash for Clunkers was a big success, General Motors is on the pathway to solvency, and both those statements are untrue.

NY-23 shocker - Four days before the special election, Scozzafava drops out.

Clinton tells it like it is - I have to say it: I was pleased to see Hillary Clinton tell Pakistan that we'd like some help rooting out Al Qaeda. "That's a nice multi-billion dollar foreign aid package you got there - shame if anything happened to it."

The Pelosicare bill

Here's a roundup from the AP. And here's all you need to know:

It costs a trillion dollars.

It's paid for by taxes that won't be collected and cuts to Medicare that will never happen.

Extra – From Critical Condition: "The insanity of the House bill"

The bill unveiled today by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi should put to rest for good the thought that this year’s legislative process will produce anything other than a total fiscal and health policy disaster.

To sum it up, the House bill is nothing but a massive, uncontrolled federal entitlement expansion - at a time when the central, looming threat to the nation’s long-term prosperity is the unaffordable health-care entitlements already on the federal books. To create the impression of fiscal responsibility, the bill is jury-rigged with budget gimmicks, implausible eligibility rules, and arbitrary, government-dictated price controls - that have been tried repeatedly without success - to make it look like it costs “only” $900 billion over a decade.

Yee-ouch! Let's debate!

More - Legal Insurrection: "The message of this bill is...do not add employees." That's OK, there are plenty of jobs out there.

Not the Delorean! - Business Week: "Fifty ugliest cars of the past 50 years."

Schwarzenegger's note - According to this professor on NPR, it's really unlikely that the letter placement came together by coincidence.

Just say "neigh"

Some have called the public option in health care reform a "Trojan horse" while others have called it a "stalking horse" but the meaning is the same: sneak up on the enemy in a non-threatening manner and then spring the trap.

Over at National Journal, former HHS secretary Mike Leavitt explains what will happen once the government gets into the health insurance biz:

A government-run plan is dangerous for three reasons: One, it would be cheaper for employers to stop offering private insurance and funnel their employees into the government-run plan. Employers, not employees, would get to make that choice. Two, the government-run plan would use the coercive force of government to dictate the prices that could be charged by others - by doctors, nurses, and hospitals - in a way that private entities cannot. Three, the government-run plan would be subsidized by American taxpayers, while private plans are not.

Let no one be deceived into thinking that Congress would not subsidize the government-run plan. Once in place, Congress would favor it with all kinds of innovative provisions designed to “help” participants “make the right choice.”

Also, the "opt-out" ploy is a big scam:

Financial subsidies for a public plan, whether direct or indirect, would be financed by taxpayers - by taxpayers in all fifty states. States would not be allowed to opt out of having their residents pay these federal taxes. They would only be allowed to opt out of receiving their share of the federal subsidies.

Harry Reid appears intent on at least bring the public option up for a vote but, if the "doc fix" vote is any indication, there are quite a few moderate Democrats unwilling to plunge into this wide, expensive world of government-run health care.

Three books

I'm a sucker for these kinds of lists but Megan links to a post asking what three books you would recommend to somebody who disagreed with you. We agreed on #1:

"Parliament of Whores" - P.J. O'Rourke

"America Alone" - Mark Steyn

"Heaven on Earth: The rise and fall of socialism" - Joshua Muravchik

Yeah, that'll do for now, although I'll probably think of a couple honorable mentions by tomorrow.

Krugman comes to praise Massachusetts health care

And once you get past his dismissal of inconvenient polls, you'll find this admission:

And the Massachusetts plan hasn’t yet done anything significant to contain costs.

Say what now? I thought the whole point of health care reform was that "the cost of doing nothing is too great." Here's what Obama's teleprompter read this past September:

Finally, our health care system is placing an unsustainable burden on taxpayers. When health care costs grow at the rate they have, it puts greater pressure on programs like Medicare and Medicaid. If we do nothing to slow these skyrocketing costs, we will eventually be spending more on Medicare and Medicaid than every other government program combined. Put simply, our health care problem is our deficit problem. Nothing else even comes close. Nothing else.

And here's Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) on "This Week" yesterday:

"The devil we know is much worse than what we are proposing to do," she said. You can't be a serious deficit hawk," and not pass a bill, she added.

Everything's going to work out fine because President Obama has sworn he will not sign a bill unless it is deficit-neutral. And – you'll see – Congress will buckle down and start making some serious cuts to the budget to pare the deficit.

Or not.

Extra - Via RCP, here's Robert Samuelson: "The public plan delusion."

More - Critical Condition: "The $400 billion in Medicare and Medicaid “savings” will not happen, and Reid and other leaders are still scrambling to find a mix of $500 billion in new taxes that can win enough votes to pass. No one has put together that magic formula." In other words, the funding for the baseline plan isn't in place, even before costs go all Massachusetts on us.

Strike that, reverse it - Robert Samuelson on Newsweek blog: "Now, in the first comprehensive evaluation by a government agency of one of the major congressional health-reform bills, analysts find that it does bend the cost curve - in the wrong direction." As in three-quarters of a trillion dollars over the next decade.

Sales tax sends Mass. shoppers to New Hampshire and the Internet

Today I saw an ad on TV urging consumers in Western Massachusetts to avoid the Internet and shop locally to support the local community. Well, that would have been a noble thought except the sales tax in the Bay State recently jumped up to 6.25% to pay for Beacon Hill's runaway corruption and spending.

The upshot? People are spending more in gas money to trek to New Hampshire than they would ever save in sales tax. Let's say it's out of principle.

Obama plays to a half-empty room - That's the scene at a fundraiser for Massachusetts' terrible governor Deval Patrick. The lower-priced $500-a-plate dinner room was "two-thirds full." Of course, it's tough to swing that price for rubber chicken when taxes are so high. Right, Deval? Buh-bye.

iLawsuit - What's going on with Scandinavia lately? First the Norwegians give the Nobel Prize to Obama and now the Finns at Nokia are suing Apple for patent infringement. Soon we'll see something rotten in Denmark (yuk yuk).

Roll over Beethoven

Fox Business: "Country music is the new rock n' roll"

Here's Taylor Swift, because she's cute:

That sounds like Fox News talk to me - Ruth Marcus of the WashPost thinks the Obama White House is "childish," "petty," and "Nixonesque" in its war with Fox News. You've made the list, Ruth.

Extra - Smash 'em up, the Chicago way.

Spending is forever - This is an unsettling analysis: the tax credits and direct aid from the super-successful $800 billion stimulus bill are unlikely to go away completely, so we're actually looking at another $3 trillion in spending over the next ten years. Which we don't have.

SAMCRO forever - On Tuesday, the FX network's "Sons of Anarchy" beat Jay Leno's show in the ratings. What was NBC thinking? As charming as Leno may be, nobody can watch one guy for five hours a week.

The Born ultimatum - Last night, Frontline (PBS) had a report about the financial meltdown and how one lone woman named Brooksley Born raised the alarm back in the nineties about unregulated over-the-counter derivatives. But the stock market was flying high so everybody, most notably Alan Greenspan, dismissed her. Well, she was right.