This thing smells

The president is just giving us the same old same old with a new package--like we're a brain-dead package or something. There's that expression, going postal, gee, how well will it translate to healthcare. And we know the unions are trying to put FedEx out of business. What's with these phony comparisons of the government to the private sector--it's not a level playing field at all. There's no element of choice with the government. Megan McArdle, rationing by any other name:

The rationing is, first of all, simply worse on a practical level: goods rationed by fiat rather than price have a tendency to disappear, decline in quality, etc. Government tends to prefer queues to prices. This makes most people worse off, since their time is worth much more than the price they would pay for the good. Providers of fiat-rationed goods have little incentive to innovate, or even produce adequate supplies. If other sectors are not controlled, the highest quality providers have a tendency to exit. If other sectors are controlled, well, you're a socialist, and I just agreed not to call you a socialist, because you're not a socialist.

But there is also a real difference between having something rationed by a process and having it rationed by a person.

Well, and the process of the market is arrived at by the decisions of millions of individuals. The price reflects our choices. The president can talk about boogeymen scaring people but most people don't like the idea of an unaccountable bureaucrat making life and death decisions. (And probably a corrupt one to boot. The Obama Master Plan.):

Babies in peril: Democracy in America

August 11, 2009 12:07pm bbh, There isn't much difference in the process, just naming it from different perspectives. The President himself is campaigning for a panel to make cost-benefit analysis for health resource allocation, including providing care to high-risk infants. The last time President Obama was involved in a health panel (Illinois Health Facilities), he worked with Tony Rezko and Rod Blagojevich to choose the members. I think it is a valid question to ask if we want Pres. Obama to be involved in more such panels, especially those that have some capabilities of deciding how treatment resources are allocated to infants, the elderly, people requiring expensive treatment etc. JBP

Dorothy Rabinowitz, Obama's tone deaf campaign. Not only disingenuous--don't words mean things any more?--but out of touch. Just admit your plan stinks like a fish Mr. President. Start over, and tell the truth this time.

More. Support for Congressional Health Care Reform Falls to New Low. Rasmussen. Obama's Euthanasia Mistake:

Where is Obama coming from? Why is such an apparently humane man not more strongly condemning a utilitarian initiative straight out of Victorian England? A good part of the explanation has to do with the University of Chicago Law School milieu that Obama comes out of. By far, the most influential figure in that world is Judge Richard Posner, who teaches law at Chicago and publishes streams of pompous, robotically written books that are much praised and little read.

Judge Posner is both an enthusiastic advocate of euthanasia and an energetic eugenicist. He once wrote of Oliver Wendell Holmes’ ideas about eugenics—Holmes believed that a just society “prevents continuance of the unfit”—that “we may yet find [Holmes’] enthusiasms prescient rather than depraved.”

Cass Sunstein, who is Obama’s nominee for regulatory czar, is a disciple of Posner and believes in what Time magazine describes as “the statistical practice of taking into account years of life expectancy when evaluating a regulation.” In other words, Sunstein believes that the lives of younger people have a greater value than those of the elderly. This, obviously, would have a radical bearing on end-of-life considerations.

Barack Antoinette, a heartless elitist.

And Obama is losing seniors. Dick Morris.