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Herman Cain's Commentary Archive 2009-2012

March 12, 2012

Mainstream Media Protects Obama

by Herman Cain
March 12, 2012

You probably heard last week what a radio host said about a law student, but you didn’t hear the news that really matters. That’s because the dinosaur media in this country doesn’t report the news that really matters.

In fact, if you’re like most Americans, you’ve never even heard of the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB). It sounds like some obscure committee buried deep in the bowels of government, but it is actually a creation of ObamaCare that has the power to deny you vital treatment that could be essential to your health.

When people laughed at Sarah Palin for speculating about “death panels” in ObamaCare, they either didn’t know – or ignored – the reality of the IPAB. Maybe that’s why the media ignored a 17-5 vote last week by a crucial House subcommittee to eliminate the IPAB – a vote that gained support from two Democrats on the committee. Why did they vote to get rid of the IPAB? Because it is an unelected, unaccountable group of so-called “experts” that ObamaCare would empower to decide which kinds of health care deserves to be covered.

This is the dirty little secret behind the Obama claim that ObamaCare controls costs. The claim is absurd on its face because any time you make a service free by forcing a third party to pay for it, you drive demand through the roof and costs will go up. That is so basic you can’t even call it Economics 101. It’s the first day in class.

If ObamaCare had existed six years ago when I was diagnosed with Stage IV cancer and my insurance company had to follow ObamaCare rules, the IPAB might have looked at my 30 percent chance of survival and denied my surgery and chemo treatment. I am now six years totally cancer free because I could choose my surgery and chemo treatment, not the government.

Plain and simple, the IPAB is the government agency that will direct health care rationing once ObamaCare causes demand to run laps around supply, which is inevitable.

ObamaCare’s defenders claim disingenuously that Congress has oversight powers to override IPAB rulings, just as they have had oversight powers over Fannie and Freddie, and the Federal Reserve. How’s that working out for us?

There is no requirement for an affirmative vote in Congress to approve the IPAB’s decisions, and that means 15 unelected people will have an awful lot of power to decide how people will be treated – or not treated.

So why didn’t the media report on the House vote this week? A Google news search turns up nothing from the AP, the major newspapers, networks or cable news channels. You only find a handful of press releases and references on conservative news sites.

There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that the mainstream media doesn’t cover actual policy substance, which is why you got your fill of Sandra Fluke but nothing about IPAB. Another big reason is that the mainstream media protects Obama. They do so on matters large and small. Obama’s claim that his father served in World War II may well have been a slip of the tongue intended to reference his grandfather. His father was born in 1936 and he would have had to enlist at the age of five. Impossible!

But I could live with their failure on small matters like this, if they would report things that actually matter. They don’t. They completely ignored the fact that Obama double counted $500 billion in “savings” in the scoring of ObamaCare. There have been precious few headlines reporting on the failure of Democrats in Congress to pass a budget since 2009 – a failure that Obama spokesman Jay Carney said recently the White House has no problem with. The mounting failures of the “green energy” companies Obama has subsidized have been headline news in alternative conservative media, as you would expect, but they receive scant coverage in the MSM.

It’s tough to defeat an incumbent president when the news media protect him by ignoring his failures – not to mention his “accomplishments” that are bad for the country, like ObamaCare and the establishment of the IPAB. So it should come as no surprise that the House subcommittee vote to eliminate the IPAB got such little attention, even though the vote was bipartisan.

If we want the public to understand Obama’s real record, then we’ll have to report it ourselves, because the MSM will not do it. That’s why nearly 50 percent of the public continues to think President Obama is doing a good job.

They are clueless and the MSM media wants to keep it that way.