The polling firm Rasmussen Reports reports:

Support for repeal of the new national health care plan has jumped to its highest level ever. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 63% of U.S. voters now favor repeal of the plan passed by congressional Democrats and signed into law by President Obama in March.

Prior to today, weekly polling had shown support for repeal ranging from 54% to 58%.

Currently, just 32% oppose repeal.

The new findings include 46% who Strongly Favor repeal of the health care bill and 25% who Strongly Oppose it.

Repeal the bill.

Support for Repealing ObamaCare Hits 63 Percent is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The American people don’t want President Obama’s health care plan (see below). Massachusetts voters don’t want it.

The White House knows that the people don’t want it.  In Ohio last week, President Obama said:

the process has been less than pretty. When you deal with 535 members of Congress, it’s going to be a somewhat ugly process…when you put it all together, it starts looking like just this monstrosity. And it makes people fearful. And it makes people afraid. And they start thinking, you know what, this looks like something that is going to cost me tax dollars and I already have insurance so why should I support this.

Yet Democrats still want ObamaCare to become law, and they are very close to making it happen.  If Speaker Nancy Pelosi bribes enough House members to reach that magic number of 218 votes, she could hold the vote with as little as 24 hours’ notice.  And ObamaCare would become law.  Done and done.  Comments from David Axelrod and other administration officials this weekend indicate that they haven’t given up on the Senate bill, and suggest that they are likely pressuring House Democrats to support it.

On ABC News’ This Week, Axelrod said, “People will never know what’s in that bill until we pass it.”  He was right, though not in the sense that he meant it.  As bad as the American people think this legislation is, they won’t really know until Nancy Pelosi bribes her way to 218 votes.

ObamaCare Could Become Law at Any Time is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Last year I tried to compile a list of all the taxes President Obama and his allies were maneuvering to impose. But each week brings new ideas. Just recently we’ve heard about a bank tax, applying the Medicare tax to capital gains and other “passive” or “unearned” income, raising the Medicare tax rate, raising or broadening the capital gains tax, an income tax “surtax,” a tax on tanning — and of course the tax on private health insurance to pay for the expansion of government insurance has moved to the top of the list.

And all of these on top of these ideas proposed or publicly floated by President Obama and his aides and allies:

• Raise the top income tax rates from their current 33 percent and 35 percent rates to 36 percent and 39.6 percent in 2011
• Limit itemized deductions for people paying high rates
• Increase capital gains and dividend taxes by 33 percent for people paying high income tax rates
• Impose a value-added tax (VAT) on all goods and services
• Raise the Social Security tax by lifting the cap
• Raise a variety of business taxes by $353 billion over 10 years, including repeal of LIFO rules, restoring Superfund taxes, seven tax increases on energy companies, and more
• Tax employer-provided health benefits
• Implement a cap-and-trade system for emissions permits, the functional equivalent of a massive new tax
• Tax drivers on their mileage
• Change rules to raise gift taxes
• Restore the estate tax at 45 percent
• Raise cigarette tax by 62 cents a pack
• Raise taxes on beer, wine, liquor, and soda
• Eliminate health savings accounts and flexible savings accounts
• Tax employer-provided cellphones
• Tax AIG employee bonuses
• Raise taxes on overseas corporate earnings

Back in July the Wall Street Journal reported:

President Barack Obama’s health-care plan is in jeopardy because of serious concerns that costs will spin out of control. As much as anyone, it’s White House budget director Peter Orszag’s job to save it…

After his TV appearances, he went straight to the Senate Finance Committee, where he spent three hours with committee aides brainstorming about how to pay for the trillion-dollar legislation. At one point, they flipped through the tax code, looking for ideas.

Flipping through the tax code, looking for ideas on how to relieve us of more of our money. That’s a great visual of Obama’s Washington. President Obama and his allies look at the vast abundance in America, and all they see is wealth that they don’t yet control. It annoys them. They could do so much good with that money. How dare bankers and businesses, farmers and entrepreneurs, widows and foundations hold tight to their wealth, when government has so many plans to fund? “Let’s go and get it from those who’ve got it,” they cry, in the immortal words of Sen. Barbara Mikulski.

But perhaps Thomas Jefferson’s words are even more immortal and equally applicable: “He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.”

Democrats’ Voracious Search for New Tax Revenue is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

President Obama gave what seems like his thousandth exclusive health care interview last night, this one to ABC News’s Charles Gibson.  In trying to sell his health care plan, the president warned that if Congress does not pass legislation controlling health care costs, the federal government “will go bankrupt.”  He also warned that unless health care is reformed, “your premiums will go up.”

 The president is absolutely correct about that.  The only problem is that, according to the president’s own chief health care actuary, the bills that Congress is now considering do nothing to restrain either federal health care spending or total health care costs.  In fact, Rick Foster, chief actuary at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) says that if Congress passes the bill now before the Senate, health care spending will actually increase by $234 billion more over the next 10 years than if we did nothing. 

And, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the congressional bills do little or nothing to reduce the growth in insurance premiums. Even if a bill passes, premiums will roughly double by 2016, and keep rising after that.   But for millions of Americans the bill will actually make things worse.  According to CBO, the Senate bill would actually increase insurance premiums by 10-13 percent for Americans who buy their insurance through the non-group market, that is those who don’t receive insurance from their employer.  Those 10-13 percent increases are over and above the increases that would occur if we did nothing.    

On the other hand, if the president were really serious about controlling health care costs and lowering premiums, he wouldn’t need to spend trillions of dollars and take over one-sixth of the US economy; he could try some of the ideas written about here, and here, and here.

Obama on Health Care: Half Right is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Senate Democrats now appear to be jettisoning the idea of creating a new government program to snuff out compete with private insurance companies.  It was an audacious proposal from the start, as it made their health care plan even more left-wing than the Clinton plan, which voters soundly rejected for being too statist.

Yet it was always a sideshow that helpfully distracted the Left, the Right, and the mainstream from what shrewd Democrats and their allies at AHIP have really wanted all along: an individual mandate forcing all Americans to purchase health insurance under penalty of law.

As I argue in this Cato study, an individual mandate gives government more (and more immediate) control over Americans’ health care than even the so-called “public option” would.  As it has in Massachusetts, an individual mandate will allow government to control what kind of insurance you buy, how much you pay, how insurers pay doctors, where doctors report to work, how doctors practice medicine, and what kind of medical care you get.

The question now is whether the Left, the Right, and the mainstream will recognize the Senate health care bill for what it is: a massive $450 billion bailout for private insurance companies that will drive health insurance premiums and taxes higher while reducing quality, all for the benefit of a small cadre of Democrats with a preternatural need to control other people’s health care.

(Cross-posted at Politico‘s Health Care Arena.)

Curtain Call for the ‘Public Option’ Sideshow is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Here’s a striking graphic of the results of continuing New York Times/CBS News polling on the question, “Do you think the federal government should guarantee health insurance for all Americans, or isn’t this the responsibility of the federal government?”

Support for a government guarantee of health insurance starts dropping sharply as the country starts debating the topic. It’s not clear from this graphic, provided by Gallup, but support is at 64 percent in June, 55 in July, and 51 in late September, well after the Long Hot August and just after President Obama’s health care blitz that included his primetime speech to Congress and highly publicized rallies in Minnesota and Maryland. Note also that the question doesn’t mention any downsides of the government guarantee; respondents apparently had figured those out for themselves.

Oddly enough, if you search the New York Times site for this question, nothing comes up. And if you Google the question, the Times isn’t in the search results. It’s almost as if they didn’t want to publicize their very interesting finding. You can find a reference to it here and documentation here.

Another interesting take on support for health care “reform” can be found here — a graph of all the polls on health care plans offered by the president or in Congress, from January to present, showing opposition rising. Also from pollster.com: President Obama’s slipping approval numbers on health care.

Slipping Support for Government Health Insurance is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

• The health care plan now being debated in Congress is not reform. It’s an insurance-company bailout–and you’re going to paying for it.

• The true cost of financial regulation: “A detailed anatomy of the bubble shows that many of the policies and regulations meant to reduce financial risk actually increased it.”

• A great prep for the upcoming G-20 meeting: Here’s a quick crash course in global economics.

• Government: “Hey, let’s start meddling in the Internet business.” A better idea: Preserve net neutrality without regulation. Here’s how.

• Podcast: Do certain climate change policies threaten global commerce? More here.

Monday Links is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The Wall Street Journal notes that Sen. Max Baucus’s allegedly moderate health care plan “would increase the cost of insurance and then force people to buy it, requiring subsidies. Those subsidies would be paid for by taxes that make health care and thus insurance even more expensive, requiring even more subsidies and still higher taxes.” Other than that, it’s not so bad. The Journal also digs up a great graphic produced by the 2008 presidential campaign of a little-known Illinois senator named Barack Obama:

And speaking of health care mandates and how much they’re going to cost young people, as the Washington Post was yesterday, I just had lunch with Clark Ruper, program manager for Students for Liberty, who told me he’d be on the Newshour with Jim Lehrer on PBS tonight. In the interview he told them that as a young healthy person he has voluntarily chosen not to purchase health insurance and instead invests in his own savings. And he thinks a lot of young people make such choices and don’t want a government mandate requiring them to buy government-approved insurance. Check it out tonight on PBS.

That Costly Mandate is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

A front-page Washington Post story today notes that the cost of Obama-style health care reform will fall disproportionately on young adults.

Younger workers are typically more healthy than the population at large, and a significant share of them quite rationally choose not to buy health insurance, as my colleague Mike Tanner explains in a recent op-ed. The major health care plans on the table in Washington would force them to buy coverage. As the Post story explains:

Drafting young adults into any health-care reform package is crucial to paying for it. As low-cost additions to insurance pools, young adults would help dilute the expense of covering older, sicker people. Depending on how Congress requires insurers to price their policies, this group could even wind up paying disproportionately hefty premiums—effectively subsidizing coverage for their parents.

I’m beginning to see a pattern. Those same young workers will be forced to pay the bills for soaring Social Security and Medicare expenditures when the Baby Boomers begin retiring en masse a decade from now. And of course, they will be the ones paying off the $9 trillion in additional federal debt expected to be wracked up from the current explosion in federal spending.

I always thought parents were supposed to support their kids, not saddle them with bigger bills and huge debts.

20-somethings Will Pay for Big Government is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has two charts showing what health care regulation looks like now…

…and what it would look like under the House Democrats’ health care plan:

More Health Care Charts! is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog