Democrats and the Benghazi Investigation

I’ve written elsewhere about the troubling nature of the Democrats’ reluctance to actively investigate the Benghazi failure.

Now, after weeks of publicly professed angst, the Democrats have agreed to appoint members to the House Select Committee whose express purpose is to investigate that mess.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) named her members while insisting that

Democrats’ participation was the only way to assure Americans of a “fair process.”

She also claimed that Democrats must participate in order

to make [the investigation] a “fair process” and to bring “openness and transparency” to the investigation.

Elijah Cummings (D, MD), the Ranking Democrat on the Select Committee, added this:

I believe we need someone in the room to simply defend the truth.

With the Democrats approaching this insisting that Republicans are fundamentally dishonest, though, how will it be possible to trust the Democrats’ objectivity, and their own integrity, as they pretend to carry out their responsibilities on this committee and during this investigation?

Oh, and Congressman Pelosi: you keep using this term “openness and transparency.” I do not think it means what you think it means.

ER Visits Up with the Advent of Obamacare

Stephanie Armour and Louise Radnofsky pointed this out earlier in the week in The Wall Street Journal.

Among other things, they mentioned

The median ER charge was more than $1,200 for the most frequent outpatient diagnoses in a study of over 8,000 ER visits in 2006-08….

This is right before Obamacare was enacted.

Notice that ER charge. A significant fraction of the deductibles on Obamacare health coverage plans is larger than that—ranging from $2,000 to above $10,000, depending on family size, the specific plan selected, and so on.

Since the ER charge is less than the deductible, even if these ER patients had an Obamacare plan, where is their incentive to see a doctor in his office? He’s still paying those $1,200 out of his pocket. The proud possession of a health plan is irrelevant to that.