WASHINGTON — President Obama, who once considered government spending freezes a hatchet job, told Americans on Wednesday it’s now part of his solution to the exploding deficit. He didn’t explain what had changed.

His State of the Union speech skipped over a variety of complex realities in laying out a “common-sense” call to action.

A look at some of his claims and how they compare with the facts:

OBAMA: “Starting in 2011, we are prepared to freeze government spending for three years. Spending related to our national security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security will not be affected. But all other discretionary government programs will. Like any cash-strapped family, we will work within a budget to invest in what we need and sacrifice what we don’t.”

THE FACTS: The anticipated savings from this proposal would amount to less than one percent of the deficit — and that’s if the president can persuade Congress to go along.

Obama is a convert to the cause of broad spending freezes. In the presidential campaign, he criticized Republican opponent John McCain for suggesting one. “The problem with a spending freeze is you’re using a hatchet where you need a scalpel,” he said a month before the election. Now, Obama wants domestic spending held steady in most areas where the government can control year to year costs. The proposal is similar to McCain’s.

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President Obama’s approval rating on handling health care is at an all-time low, according to a new CBS News poll, something that is helping to drag down his overall approval rating.

Just 36 percent of Americans approve of Mr. Obama’s handling of health care, according to the poll, conducted from Jan. 6 – 10. Fifty-four percent disapprove. In December of last year, 42 percent of Americans approved of the president’s handling of health care, and 47 percent approved in October.

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Organizations and lawmakers opposed to the health care reform package are getting their legal briefs in a bunch, threatening to challenge the constitutionality of the sweeping overhaul should it make its way to President Obama’s desk.

Republicans have agreed to allow the Democratic-led Senate to move up the time for a final vote to 8 a.m. Thursday so that lawmakers and their staff can go home for Christmas. But GOP supporters aren’t backing down on their threats to put a stop to the legislation using whatever legal means possible.

Two key issues seem to be attracting the bulk of the legal threats: a mandate for individuals to purchase health insurance and the special treatment that states like Nebraska are getting in the bill.

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Washington (AP) – Twice now, abortion was almost a deal-breaker. This time, it was a deal-maker. But of the hundreds of deals cut to keep health care legislation alive, the hardest to retain may be the Senate’s abortion compromise — achieved after 13 hours of negotiation.
 
The volatile issue remains the biggest threat to getting a history-making bill to President Barack Obama.
 
Deals are the lifeblood of legislation. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana got $100 million more for her state, Connecticut’s Joe Lieberman stripped the bill of a government insurance plan and Ben Nelson won a slew of favors for Nebraska — all in exchange for their votes.
 
Nelson was also pivotal in the abortion compromise. The abortion-rights foe cast the 60th vote Monday to prevent Republicans from burying the bill.

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(CNSNews.com) – Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) repeated their opposition to a “public option” in a final Senate health care bill when CNSNews.com asked if there were any circumstances in which they would vote for cloture on the bill if it includes a government-run insurance program. (Cloture means debate on a bill must end and the legislation is voted upon.)

“I cannot see one for this reason,” Lieberman said. “This is a good bill in many ways, and it achieves what I have always believed – for the years I’ve been working for health care reform – are the main purposes for health care reform: to begin to contain and control the never-ending increases of the cost of health care; to extend coverage by enabling millions of people who can’t afford health insurance to have health insurance; and to regulate the insurance companies so they treat consumers better.”

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Hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants could receive health care coverage from their employers under the bills winding their way through Congress, despite President Obama’s explicit pledge that illegal immigrants would not benefit.

The House bill mandates, and the Senate bill strongly encourages, businesses to extend health care coverage to all employees. But the bills do not have exemptions to screen out illegal immigrants, who usually obtain jobs by using false identities and are indistinguishable from legal workers.

A rough estimate by the Center for Immigration Studies suggests that the practical effect of the mandates would be that about 1 million illegal immigrants could obtain health insurance coverage through their employers.

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A quick search of the Senate health bill will bring up “secretary” 2,500 times.

That’s because Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius would be awarded unprecedented new powers under the proposal, including the authority to decide what medical care should be covered by insurers as well as the terms and conditions of coverage and who should receive it.

“The legislation lists 1,697 times where the secretary of health and humans services is given the authority to create, determine or define things in the bill,” said Devon Herrick, a health care expert at the National Center for Policy Analysis.

For instance, on Page 122 of the 2,079-page bill, the secretary is given the power to establish “the basic per enrollee, per month cost, determined on average actuarial basis, for including coverage under a qualified health care plan.”

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Obama-Care passed another perilous milestone Saturday evening when — on a strictly partisan vote (without one Republican supporting the measure) — the Senate voted to bring H.R. 3590, the federal takeover of U.S. health care, to the floor for amendment and debate.

Sometime after Thanksgiving, the Senate will take up nationalized health care in earnest. Crucial to understanding the most dangerous piece of legislation in our lifetime is the following:

• In its present form, the bill is a 1,990-page monstrosity. It’s not because the issue is that complex. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid made the bill much longer than “War and Peace” for a reason – to discourage voters from reading it. Congressmen and Senators haven’t read it either, and won’t before a final vote. Pelosi and company defeated a bill to require House members to actually read the bill before they voted on it.
• It will cost as much as $2.5 trillion over the next decade, and that’s on top of the record-breaking deficits President Obama has already rolled up in his first 10 months in office. The piper will be paid with higher taxes, job-annihilating inflation or a combination thereof.
• If Obama-Care becomes law, it will increase the cost of medical insurance for the 88% of Americans who already have it. Once the system is implemented, those who refuse to buy insurance will be fined and could even go to jail.
• It will result in a complete government takeover of the health insurance. Under the direction of a misnamed “Health Choices Commissioner” (there will be no choice), private insurers will be told what to charge, what coverage to offer, what must be covered and so on. To cite one example, insurers will be forced to cover prior conditions (including lung cancer from decades of smoking and life-style diseases the AIDS). The goal is to bankrupt private insurers — insuring that the “public option” is the only option.
• Nothing in the legislation (including the Stupak amendment in the House version), will prevent the plan from being used to fund abortion, assisted-suicide and the rationing of medical services. One proposal would eliminate routine mammograms for women under-50 (including those in high-risk categories).

The so-called Senate moderates (Blanche Lincoln, Ben Nelson, Mary Landrieu and Joe Lieberman), who all voted to bring the bill to the floor, are claiming it was merely a procedural vote. That’s nonsense, to put it mildly.

As my friend Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) explains: “Let’s be clear: Any Senator who votes to proceed to this bill is voting for a government takeover of health care. Senators who hide behind procedure and claim they just want to allow for debate are not being honest, they are trying to deceive their voters while helping to pass this terrible bill that will make health care more expensive.” Exactly.

The fight is far from over. We can still kill federalized health care by upholding an all-but-certain Republican filibuster. Harry Reid needs 60 votes to invoke cloture (end a filibuster). We have 40 solid votes. All we need to do is peel off one Democrat or Independent, and the bill is doomed in this session.

Recall the warning of President Ronald Reagan, spoken almost a half-century ago: “One of the traditional ways of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine.” This is a war we must not lose.

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Dr. Rick Scarborough founded Vision America in 1998 as an organization whose mission is to “inform and mobilize Pastors and their congregations to become salt and light, becoming pro-active in restoring Judeo-Christian values in America.” He has published the widely acclaimed 252-page book appropriately entitled, Enough is Enough; a Call to Christian Involvement. Other published works include, In Defense of Mixing Church and State and It All Depends on What Is…Is. In 2007 he published Liberalism Kills Kids.

What does it take to get a wavering senator to vote for health care reform?

Here’s a case study.

On page 432 of the Reid bill, there is a section increasing federal Medicaid subsidies for “certain states recovering from a major disaster.”

The section spends two pages defining which “states” would qualify, saying, among other things, that it would be states that “during the preceding 7 fiscal years” have been declared a “major disaster area.”

I am told the section applies to exactly one state:  Louisiana, the home of moderate Democrat Mary Landrieu, who has been playing hard to get on the health care bill.

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