ObamaCare Will Increase Insurance Premiums

One of the fundamental promises of Democrats is that their massive takeover of health care would deliver lower costs, delivering an economy of scale.

The problem is that government has never been very good at lowering the cost of anything.  Quite the contrary.

And what has always been true before turns out to be true again.

Let’s get right to the nitty gritty of the CBO report:

“CBO and JCT estimate that the average premium per person covered (including dependents) for new nongroup policies would be about 10 percent to 13 percent higher in 2016 than the average premium for nongroup coverage in that same year under current law. About half of those enrollees would receive government subsidies that would reduce their costs well below the premiums that would be charged for such policies under current law,” the report says.

Now, Democrats are trying to argue that about the “about half of those enrollees” who would have lower premiums due to receiving government subsidies.  But understand: the costs are objectively higher by 10-13% than they would have been had we done absolutely nothing at all.  The mere fact that some people are getting transfer (i.e., welfare) payments from the government (i.e., from still more government taxing and borrowing) doesn’t in any way change that fact.

Stop and think about it: it would be a lot cheaper for the government to provide people with subsidies based on the lower costs of doing nothing else to mess with the health care system.  It is an outright fraud for Democrats to say they will lower costs.

I like the way Mitch McConnell put it:

“The bottom line is this: After 2,074 pages and trillions more in government spending, massive new taxes and a half-trillion dollars in cuts to Medicare for seniors, most people, according to the Congressional Budget Office, will end up paying more or seeing no significant savings,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said in a statement. The health insurance industry’s lobbying arms also proclaimed that the report confirmed their similar warnings.

This is just a terrible bill, and a terrible philosophy.

Democrats have done absolutely NOTHING that will reduce the costs of healthcare.  They are diametrically opposed to tort reform, which would lower the costs of premiums by lowering doctors’ exposure to risks, simply because the sharks – I mean lawyers – who sue everything that walks, crawls, swims or flies are a major Democrat special interest group.

In the same way, Democrats talk about “increasing competition,” and yet they are fundamentally opposed to actually doing anything of the sort.  A primary reason healthcare costs have increased so much is due to the fact that insurance companies are specifically forbidden from being allowed to compete across state lines.  Republicans want competition; Democrats do not.  Rather, Democrats want to continue to mandate special interests-based coverage by dictating to insurance companies what coverage they must offer.

The other thing is that Democrats talk about the fraud they are offering is “deficit neutral.”  It is no such thing.  They played budget gimmicks, taxing for four years before having to pay out any benefits.  If you look at the costs of the NEXT ten years – when benefits will actually be paid out for all ten years – the cost will be $2.5 trillion, rather than the $848 billion that the Demcorats talk about in their tax-for-ten-year-spend-for-six plan.

Taxes will be raised by over $500 billion.  Medicare will be cut by $500 billion.  $500 billion is another way of saying half a trillion dollars.  That’s how the Democrats get their “savings”: they bleed it from taxpayers, and they steal it from their previous commitments to senior citizens.

The Democrats’ bill raises taxes, guts Medicare, and raises premiums.  You can start to understand why the Dean of the Harvard School of Medicine gave the bill a failing grade.

Mainstream Media Touts $848 Billion Senate Health Bill, Ignores Actual Cost Of At LEAST $2.5 Trillion

Democrats have done a good job – along with the loyal participation of a leftwing propaganda machine – of projecting their takeover of the health care system as “only” costing a “mere” $848 billion.

They think the American people are dumb enough to buy their fraud, and maybe they are.

But the actual cost of this program over ten years of its actual implementation will be at least $2.5 trillion.  And that is $107.5 trillion more than we’ve got.

Updated November 19, 2009
Senate Health Bill Price Tag, Rosy Deficit Estimate Assailed as ‘Fantasy’

by FOXNews.com

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid claims that his health care bill costs about $848 billion in the first 10 years, well under President Obama’s $900 billion target. That’s for 10 years of revenue-gathering, but only six years of service.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid claims that his health care bill costs about $848 billion in the first 10 years, well under President Obama’s $900 billion target.

That’s for 10 years of revenue-gathering, but only six years of service, according to the analysis by the Congressional Budget Office.

Adding in expenses beyond the 10-year mark drastically skews the overall cost, making the $848 billion a mere fraction of the long-term price tag of overhauling America’s health care system — and that’s if no changes are made to the legislation during that time.

The additional claim touted by Senate Democrats — that the bill will reduce the deficit by $130 billion over the first 10 years — is also coming under fire as “fantasy.”

Republicans have countered the CBO estimate with a figure of their own: $2.5 trillion, an estimate that comes out of the Senate Budget Committee minority’s analysis of Reid’s plan.

“This is a lousy bill that’s going to cost American taxpayers like mad for the rest of our lives,” Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, a fierce critic of the health care legislation, told Fox News on Thursday.

Part of the problem with the CBO estimate is that it covers a 10-year period from 2010-2019 — however, the health care reform plan is not fully implemented until 2014. That means the federal government is raking in billions in taxes and savings for the first four years without spending on the new program. The $2.5 trillion estimate is for the 10-year window starting in 2014, after implementation of the program begins.

Under the timetable in the CBO estimate, the government spends $9 billion in the first four years, but $838 billion in the last six when the overhaul goes into full force.

The revenue significantly ramps up in the latter half of the decade to keep pace with spending, but the nearly $100 billion in deficit savings in the first four years is not necessarily in the piggy bank either.

Democrats are holding up estimates that show the second decade of health care reform yields even more deficit reduction.

President Obama said in a statement Wednesday night that the unveiling of the is a “critical milestone” and cited one estimate showing the second 10 years would yield up to $650 billion in deficit reduction.

Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, cited the same estimate, telling Fox News that Reid’s bill is “going in the right direction” and yields significant savings.

“That to me is the most encouraging part of this,” he said.

Budget analysts say that the early revenue cannot be fenced off, much like Social Security money is spent despite a trust fund for that purpose. The funding gets absorbed into the general federal budget, presumably to go toward reducing the deficit on a yearly basis.

However, this creates the possibility that Congress could spend that money twice, by using the up-front savings as fun money for new projects and then having to pay the bill for health care reform down the road. Holtz-Eakin called this a worst-case scenario.

“The government’s incapable of segregating funds. You can’t put the money in a cigar box and bury it behind the Treasury Department,” said Michael Tanner, senior fellow with the libertarian Cato Institute.

Tanner pointed to two other “gimmicks” that make the price seem smaller than it is.

One deals with the so-called “doctor fix,” which would be an act of Congress to ensure Medicare doctors don’t face steeps cuts in federal reimbursements. This would cost at least $210 billion over 10 years, and it’s a “fix” that Democrats are trying to separate from the health care reform bill.

That alone erases the $130 billion in deficit savings claimed by the CBO’s latest health care estimate.

Tanner also pointed to the CLASS Act, a long-term care program in the bill that takes in billions in revenue early on but does not pay out in any significant way until the next decade.

“If you use honest accounting … then this bill’s not paid for,” Tanner said. “It’s smoke-and-mirrors accounting.”

The Budget Committee document estimating the actual cost to be $2.5 trillion over years five through 14 of the program also showed $126 billion in deficit reduction in that period. It estimated even more down the road.

But Holtz-Eakin called that “fiction,” since it relies on more than $1 trillion in cuts to Medicare and Medicaid.

He said there’s no way the government can sustain and increase those cuts and expect the program to work.

The biggest problem of all is that the CBO – regardless of how well-intentioned or “objective” it is – have routinely underestimated the costs of government programs – especially health-related government programs – by a factor of ten.

The Senate Democrat health bill includes the public option.  It guarantees a government takeover of healthcare.

We are talking about clear matters of life and death.  We are talking about 1/6th of the U.S. economy.  And Democrats are playing games of smoke and mirrors.  What they are doing is beyond unconscionable.

$1 trillion in cuts to Medicare?  Bye-bye, old people.  In the words of Obama adviser Robert Reich, “We’re going to let you die.”

Liberal Newsweek has it’s “Case for Killing Granny.”  Newsbusters points out:

For good measure the magazine also promises readers to explain “Why We Should Insure Illegals” and how “Health Reform Could Combat Crime” in related articles linked on the front page. More illegal immigration, fewer criminals and old people. What a deal!

Please don’t be so naive and so stupid as to believe that these people aren’t serious.  And I mean deadly serious.

Make no mistake: Democrats are voting for the national economic suicide of the United States, and for the deaths by medical-resource rationing of millions of Americans who otherwise would have lived.

How CBO Scored Baucus Health Care Plan As Defict Neutral

Suppose I told you that I can fly by flapping my arms at a rate of 40 miles an hour, and I were to ask you how long it would take me to get to the top of a hill located 30 miles away.  The correct answer would be to say, “45 minutes.”

In actual point of fact, of course, I can’t fly by flapping my arms, I can’t walk at anywhere near the rate of 40 miles an hour, and I would likely have to take a considerably longer route up to the hilltop.  It would probably take me a good two days to get to that hilltop, if I were operating in the realm of factual reality.  But your job wasn’t to check whether I had wings; it was to score the math in my proposal.

That’s basically the sort of answer the Congressional Budget Office gave to the $829 billion (so far) Baucus health plan.

When the Senate Finance Committee handed the abbreviated version of the Baucus plan to the CBO, the CBO assumed that Congress would do exactly what the plan said Congress was supposed to do.  And if Congress does ONLY what is in the bill without adding ANYTHING, and imposes EVERY unpopular (even with Democrats) tax that the bill calls for, the CBO claimed that the Baucus plan would cost a deficit-neutral $829 billion over ten years.

Here are some things that would have to happen for the deficit-neutral $829 billion cost projection to be even close to correct:

First, the Medicare budget – which has never been cut or reduced in spite of repeated attempts to do so in the past – would have to be slashed by $404 billion over ten years.  Senior citizens would absolutely freak.  It will not happen.  If it did happen, Democrats would lose every single seat in the next election, as Republicans simply promised that if they are voted in, they would overturn the bill.

So add that $404 billion back in.  And the bill is already no longer even CLOSE to being “deficit neutral.”

Second, there are $201 billion in taxes for the so-called “Cadillac” health care plans.  And while there are some bigwig execs that collect such benefits, the overwhelming majority of the plans go to union employees.

Question: do you truly believe that Democrats won’t exempt the Democrat-supporting unions – which will just go to show what a truly partisan plan the Democrats are truly offering – before all is said and done?

So you can subtract a whopping load of the $200 billion in tax revenue.   It aint going to happen.  And that deficit this bill will create will go up by another giant amount.

Third, the Baucus plan is going to impose $121 billion in taxes – with $29 billion of that just discovered hidden in the byzantine language of the bill  – on insurers and medical device suppliers – which the CBO has said would simply be passed on to customers in higher prices.

This amounts to a tax on customers that is passed off as “fees” for the business that will pass the taxes on to customers.  It is simply a cowardly way to raise taxes.

And this goes to the heart of what is wrong with “the public option.”  If you tax the insurers and the providers in order to generate revenue for the public option, what obviously happens?  You undermine the private companies in order to supplant them with the government.  It will drive the private industry out of the industry, leaving only the government to fill the vacuum that it created in the first place.

In addition to those taxes, there will also be $27 billion in taxes collected from those who will be forced to buy insurance.  So much for Obama’s promise that people making under $250,o00 won’t see their taxes go up a single dime.  Unless you want to argue that “$27 billion is NOT a single dime,” so Obama was telling us the truth.

Healthy younger people who have historically decided they could forgo insurance will HAVE to pay significantly into the Democrats’ system in order to “spread the risk and share the burden.”  Too bad they didn’t know that when they voted for Obama.  What can I say except, “Surprise!”

Fourth, it needs to be pointed out that after that ten years, the costs of the Baucus bill would absolutely skyrocket.  Why?  Because the Baucus plan – if passed – would begin collecting taxes/fees beginning next year, but would not actually begin supplying benefits and thus accumulating costs until after 2013 — and don’t go fully into effect until 2015.  The Baucus plan will therefore have three to as much as five years to collect revenue before having to pay out any money.  That makes it a lot easier to be “deficit neutral.”  But it’s based on smoke and mirrors.  And of course outright lies.

But unfortunately, the CBO only scores the plan for the first ten years.

Stop and think: the federal budget deficit for 2009 was just announced to be a an absolutely staggering $1.4 TRILLION – which is more than THREE TIMES more than Bush’s all-time high 2008 deficit of $459 billion.  Which incredibly cynical Democrats pounced upon as “fiscally irresponsible.”  And Obama’s 2009 deficit will represent an astounding and utterly unsustainable 9.9% of the nation’s entire gross domestic product (it was 3.2% in spend-crazy 2008).  There is utterly no possible way we will be able to afford to see our spending continue to skyrocket in future years as it will under the Baucus plan.

And fifth, it turns out that Joe Wilson was more right when he shouted “You lie!” at Obama for saying that illegal immigrants would not be covered than many first realized.

According to what we’re being told, the Baucus plan would cover 94% of the population by 2019.  That means about 25 million people would not be covered.  Including illegal immigrants.  From the AP:

It said that by 2019, “the number of nonelderly people who are uninsured would be reduced by about 29 million,” either through private insurance or by enrolling in federal programs. That would leave an additional 25 million uninsured, about one-third of them illegal immigrants who are not eligible for coverage under the bill.

At the time that Wilson made that outburst, the language in the plans actually proved that Obama was factually wrong — and the Democrats’ proposals WOULD have covered illegals.  They since tightened up the language such that illegals are excluded.

But ARE they excluded?  It turns out that this is just another fantasy, smoke-and-mirrors illusion as well.  The fact of the matter is that the Supreme Court has been very consistent in its interpretation of the word “persons” over the last couple of decades.  The SCOTUS has repeatedly ruled the “persons” means ALL people in the country, whether citizen or illegal alien whenever government social plans have been at issue.

Do you know what that means?  It means that the only way to prevent illegal immigrants from being allowed to obtain benefits from a big government social program is to not have the big government social program in the first place.

Illegal immigrants WILL ultimately be covered under this plan.  Don’t be so naive as to think otherwise.  That will cost us plenty.  And nobody is factoring it in.

Medicare has cost more than NINE TIMES more than projected by 1990:

In 1966, the House Ways and Means Committee estimated Medicare would cost $12 billion a year by 1990; in 1990, however, Medicare cost $107 billion, nine times more than its estimate.

And the Medicare program is so deep in the bottomless pit of red ink that Newseek says it could go bankrupt as soon as NEXT YEAR.

Does anyone think the government will do better counting its cost now than it ever has in the past?  Does anyone truly believe that a president who created a deficit THREE TIMES higher than Bush’s historic 2008 deficit (again, $1.4 TRILLION vs. $459 billion) will be able to control spending?

Think about it: Medicare is about to go bankrupt even as Democrats are voting to raid some half trillion dollars from it to pay for their new liberal health gimmick.

We need to fix and reform Medicare rather than create a giant system that will make the coming health care collapse all the greater.

Iran And The Bomb: What Are We Going To Do?

Remember that National Intelligence Estimate saying that Iran had ended its nuclear weapons program five years ago? A December 2007 Washington Post article cast it this way:

A major U.S. intelligence review has concluded that Iran stopped work on a suspected nuclear weapons program more than four years ago, a stark reversal of previous intelligence assessments that Iran was actively moving toward a bomb.

The new findings, drawn from a consensus National Intelligence Estimate, reflected a surprising shift in the midst of the Bush administration’s continuing political and diplomatic campaign to depict Tehran’s nuclear development as a grave threat. The report was drafted after an extended internal debate over the reliability of communications intercepts of Iranian conversations this past summer that suggested the program had been suspended.

If Iran ever truly did in fact suspend its nuclear weapons program, it did so immediately after – and obviously as a direct result of – the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Understandably Iran didn’t want to be the next country to face the consequences for illegal weapons programs.

When the story came out that Iran had suspended its nuclear weapons program (the one Iran claimed it never had in the first place), Democrats and liberals immediately pounced all over President Bush’s claim that Iran continued to represent a nuclear weapons threat. President Bush was called a liar, he was called a warmonger, for continuing to describe Iran as a threat. The left openly mocked conservatives for calling for a tough stance against Iran. We didn’t need to worry about Iran, they said.

The Washington Post claimed that Iran was actually ten years from developing the bomb.

Given these reports, liberals made the argument that any “threat” from Iran was theoretical or academic. And President Bush was merely proving that he was the paranoid neo-con that they had been casting him as all along.

When Barack Obama initially said that Iran did not represent a threat, he was merely assuming the longstanding standard doctrinaire liberal mentality. It was only when he began to be presented with the overwhelming evidence to the contrary that he “refined” his remarks to acknowledge that Iran was in fact a threat.

In any event, as the United States began to succomb to increasing internal division over the war in Iraq, and as the United States began to bog down, the facts now overwhelmingly reveal that Iran clearly decided to restart its nuclear weapons program.

How long until Iran develops enough nuclear material to build a bomb? Ten years, like the elite media says?

Try six months to one year. That abstract academic threat is getting real concrete and very, very real.

Israel has been warning for some time now that Iran could have the bomb far more quickly than many Western experts were willing to acknowledge. They’ve been claiming that Iran could have enough material to build a bomb far earlier than most estimates stated. But they were ignored. After all, in the leftist view of the world, Israel is the biggest and most paranoid warmonger of all (or at least a very close second to the United States).

But now someone else is affirming that President Bush and the state of Israel were right all along.

And it’s not some neo-con warmonger saying this but none other than the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency director-general, Mohamed ElBaradei:

Mohamed ElBaradei: “If Iran wants to turn to the production of nuclear weapons, it must leave the NPT, expel the IAEA inspectors, and then it would need at least… Considering the number of centrifuges and the quantity of uranium Iran has…”

Interviewer: “How much time would it need?”

ElBaradei: “It would need at least six months to one year. Therefore, Iran will not be able to reach the point where we would wake up one morning to an Iran with a nuclear weapon.”

Interviewer: “Excuse me, I would like to clarify this for our viewers. If Iran decides today to expel the IAEA from the country, it will need six months…”

ElBaradei: “Or one year, at least…”

Interviewer: “… to produce [nuclear] weapons?”

ElBaradei: “It would need this period to produce a weapon, and to obtain highly-enriched uranium in sufficient quantities for a single nuclear weapon.”

Sadly, ElBaradei – in the words of one writer – “seems to be more obsessed with politics than with doing his job. His job is to monitor the nuclear developments of countries, such as Iran, and to prevent them from developing nuclear weapons. That’s what he should be concerned about. Instead, he’s concerned with what countries may do when other countries ignore the UN and develop nuclear weapons regardless of world opinion.” Mohamed ElBaradei has claimed that any attack on Iran would be “unnecessary” and that he would resign if such an attack were to occur. That’s a pretty political statement from a supposedly apolitical weapons inspector.

And meanwhile Iran is getting closer and closer to the bomb with each passing day.

What would happen if Iran actually got the bomb? Many pooh pooh the possibility that Iran would start World War III by attacking an also nuclear-armed Israel. But only a fool would ignore the numerous “death to Israel” statements from both Iran’s president and its Ayatollah. What is particular frightening is that these Iranian rulers hold to an apocalyptic interpretation of Islam which holds to the doctrine that the last Imam will return during a period of crisis.

But Iran doesn’t actually have to use its nuclear weapons to make use of them. Ask yourself: would the United States dare attack a nuclear Iran? Even if Iran – through its terrorists surrogates – carried out another 9/11 attack against it?

Will they share nuclear technology and materials with terrorist organizations, and attempt to carry out nuclear attacks by proxy?

Iran is and has been the leading source of terrorism around the world. If they obtain a nuclear weapons capability, you can only expect them to be more emboldened and feel more invulnerable to meaningful retaliation than they have ever felt before. President Ahmadinejad has said, “I Have a Connection With God, Since God Said That the Infidels Will Have No Way to Harm the Believers”; “We Have [Only] One Step Remaining Before We Attain the Summit of Nuclear Technology”; The West “Will Not Dare To Attack Us.”

Are you ready for that? Are you ready for the kind of hell that a rogue, terrorist, totalitarian, jihadist, and Armageddonist state could unleash upon the world given the impunity of being protected by nuclear weapons?

What are you willing to do to prevent that nightmarish scenario from occuring?

One thing is certain: we absolutely cannot count on diplomacy to prevent this catastrophic threat to world stability and security.

Russia and China – both veto-wielding permanent United Nations security council members – have both repeatedly disallowed any meaningful sanctions against Iran. I write about this in detail in an article.

There’s all kinds of evidence of their refusal to all for any sanctions that would have any chance of forcing Iran to comply.

From August 5, 2008:

The United States, Britain and France warned Monday — two days after the deadline expired — that they would press for additional sanctions against Iran if it did not respond positively and unambiguously to the offer. The six powers will hold a conference call Wednesday to consider their response to the statement. But they remain divided, with China and Russia reluctant to support tough sanctions.

“I don’t see any reason to believe that the Russians and the Chinese are any more willing today to support really tougher sanctions against Iran,” said Flynt Leverett, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and former Bush National Security Council staffer.

Iran is clearly more interested in becoming a nuclear power than it is in taking any of our carrots. And with the stick being removed from the proceedings, diplomacy simply has no chance of succeeding.

And we’ve seen all this before. I have written a three part series titled, “Iraq War Justified” that points to the fact the United States was placed in this exact same situation prior to 2003 (Part 1; Part 2; Part 3). A pitifully pathetic and corrupt United Nations was absolutely incapable of doing anything. The United States had good reasons to believe that Iraq was engaging in the illegal production of weapons of mass destruction, and inspectors were blocked from carrying out any meaningful inspection program. Iraq was able to use its abundant oil – and even the United Nations’ own oil for food program – to buy allies who would prevent the implementation of tough UN sanctions. And an attitude of anti-Americanism and a view that American influence should be siphoned away in favor of “a multi-polar world” (which is really just a cosmopolitan way of being anti-American) all combined to make it impossible for diplomacy to work in forcing Iraq to open itself up to inspections.

The United States was forced to attack Iraq because every other available option had failed, and we were not willing to allow the possibility of an Iraq armed with weapons of mass destruction.

When we attacked Iraq in the Gulf War, it was learned that Iraq was FAR closer to developing nuclear weapons than had ever previously been believed by Western “experts.” It was also realized that this threat – stopped in 1990 – carried through into the future:

In summary, the IAEA report says that following the August 1990 invasion of Kuwait, Iraq launched a “crash program” to develop a nuclear weapon quickly by extracting weapons grade material from safe-guarded research reactor fuel. This project, if it had continued uninterrupted by the war, might have succeeded in producing a deliverable weapon by the end of 1992. [PBS source: Tracking Nuclear Proliferation, a Guide in Maps and Charts, 1998, Rodney W. Jones and Mark G. NcDonough, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. (1998). p. 191] …

Nuclear physicist and Iraqi defector Khidhir Hamza agrees. He told FRONTLINE that Iraq did not relinquish certain critical components of the nuclear program to the inspectors, and that it retains the expertise necessary to build a nuclear weapon. He believes that Iraq may have one completed within the next couple of years.

Even now, the United Nations is questioning the intelligence pointing to Iran developing the bomb. How are we ever going to attain the “consensus” that liberals demand we have in this sort of perennially hazy political environment?

How can one condemn the Iraq attack and then sanction an Iran attack given all the similarities? On just what logical or moral basis?

It’s the exact same thing happening all over again, and Israel and the United States will be faced with the same choice: Are we willing to allow an Iran with doomsday capability? Are we willing to carry out an attack alone given a pathologically weak, corrupt, and frankly both pathetic and apathetic world?

This is the question that will effect – and possibly haunt – American foreign policy for generations to come.

If we elect Barack Obama, we are tacitly choosing to allow Iran to develop the bomb. Any of his tough-sounding rhetoric aside, you need to realize that Barack Obama has already repeatedly philosophically condemned the very same sort of preemptive attack that would be necessary to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons. And he continues to do so even today. Just how was a preemptive attack on Iraq wrong if a preemptive attack on Iran is right? If Barack Obama believes that our intelligence will be flawless regarding Iran’s nuclear program when it was so flawed regarding Iraq’s program, then he is a genuine fool of the very worst kind. And if he refuses to attack until the evidence against Iran is certain, he is an even greater fool. For Iran would greet our attacking soldiers with mushroom clouds.

Israel is clearly doing far more than threatening to attack Iran in order to prevent this patently anti-Semitic and defiantly evil regime from obtaining nuclear weapons. It is clearly merely a matter of time, with many thinking that Israel might even attack prior to the change in American administrations. If and when they do, we will see just how vulnerable the Democrats have made us over the past thirty years in refusing to allow America to develop its own source of domestic oil as the price of oil goes up to over $300 a barrel and over $12 a gallon for gasoline.