Obama strategies - Abracadabra! Obama’s MagicWand!

Barack Obama, the political magician who will likely be our next president, has a national magic wand for transforming the health system and America society as a whole.

With a few flicks of his magic wand, Obama proposes and promises the following.

• A national mandate to offer workers’ insurance or pay a tax

• A new national public plan (similar to Medicare) for the uninsured and small businesses

• A new national insurance exchange that would offer choice of private plans for everyone

• A new national mandate to cover all children

• New expanded national coverage paid for by all those making over $250,000 and by savings on EMR, disease management, and prevention

• National regulation of all private insurers forcing them to cover all regardless of pre-existing illness.

• National incentives to expand EMRs

• National elimination of private Medical HMOs

• National government negotiation of drug prices.

So Much for Health Care

So much for health care, Obama also has other magic tricks up his sleeve. According to an October 10, 2008 piece in the Wall Street Journal by Kimberly Strassel, and I quote,

And now, America, we introduce the Great Obama! The world’s most gifted political magician! A thing of wonder! A thing of awe!

To kick off our show tonight, Mr. Obama will give 95% if America’s working families a tax cut, even though 40% don’t pay income taxes!

For his next trick, the Great Obama will jumpstart the economy, and he will do it by raising taxes on the very businesses that are today adrift in a financial tsunami! That will include all those among the top 1% of taxpayers who are in fact that nation’s biggest employers who currently pay the highest corporate taxes in the developed world. Mr. Obama will, with the flick of his fingers, show how to create more jobs with less money. It’s simple, really. He has a wand.

And just watch the Great Obama perform a feat never yet managed in all history. He will create an enormous new government health program, spend billions to transform our energy economy, provide financial assistance to former Soviet satellites, invest in infrastructure, increase education spending, provide job training assistance, and give 95% of Americans tax cuts – all without raising the deficit a single penny! And he’ll do it in the midst of a financial crisis! And with falling tax revenues! Voila!

And what about a little magic from Mr. McCain? He has none - just straight talk and a deep belief in American entrepreneurship and innovation. Unfortunately, he’ll need all the magic he can muster if he is to catch the Great One!

Speaking of entrepreneurship and innovation, Thomas L. Friedman, the New York Times international columnist and author of Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution and How It Can Renew America (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. 2008), the magic word is Green, as in Green Revolution, Going Green, and Green not Greed.

Friedman, a brilliant writer, is no fool. He knows the salvation of America lies not in a single word, but in a magic formula based on systematic innovation that
cools the planet, and develops “clean” alternatives to “dirty” fossil fuels.

His magic formula is REEF-IGDCPEERPC TTCOBCOE, which stands for: a Renewable Energy Ecosystem for Innovating, Generating, and Deploying Clear Power, Energy Efficiency, Resource Productivity, and Conservation < The True Cost of Burning Coal, Oil, and Gas.

There are those, such as T. Boone Pickens, who think America’s current financial crisis resides in the $700 billion we spend each year to import oil. That may be, and it may be one reason we can’t finance Obama’s ambitious health and national restructuring.

Maybe some politician will be able to wave a magic wand to get us out of this morass, but I agree with Thomas L. Friedman, who says in his October 12 New York Times column, “The Post--Binge-World,” of government’s workout plans to bail out the economy,

” This workout promises to be painful, complicated, and protracted. But it must regulate the excesses without smothering the underlying innovative, entrepreneurial, and risk-taking attributes of our economy, which is what will ultimately bail us out – and they always have.”