Archive for the ‘Obamacare’ Category
Saturday, September 26th, 2020
WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Obamacare’s mandate didn’t work and wasn’t needed, yet Joe Biden wants to bring it back
| September 17, 2020 Editorial
Joe Biden, as part of his campaign to revive the Obama years and be the anti-President Trump, has repeatedly vowed to bring back one of the least popular policies of the prior administration: the individual mandate.
The requirement forcing individuals to purchase health insurance under the threat of a penalty was already the subject of one high-stakes Supreme Court case. It is about to be at the center of another. But in practice, it has proven to be completely ineffective.
When Obamacare was first being debated, most healthcare experts believed it was necessary to include a requirement to purchase insurance, so as to corral young and healthy individuals into the insurance market and offset the cost of forcing insurers to cover those with preexisting conditions. Absent the mandate, the logic went, only sick people would purchase insurance, and insurers would find it impossible to continue operating, leading to a so-called death spiral of insurers leaving the market.
Though Barack Obama himself famously opposed the mandate in his 2008 campaign, he flip-flopped under pressure from healthcare experts, the insurance lobby, and the Congressional Budget Office, which warned that the price tag of any healthcare legislation would be much higher without the mandate.
The CBO’s belief in the importance of the mandate has also had dramatic policy implications during the Trump administration. It effectively tanked the effort to repeal Obamacare because all Republican plans called for the elimination of the mandate, which the CBO predicted would alone lead to 13 million people losing coverage. Projections of massive coverage losses gave pause to centrist Republicans and doomed the repeal effort.
It turns out, however, that the mandate did very little. Although lived experience has shown this to be true for years, forcing even the CBO to change its tune, this fact was further confirmed with a new report from the Census Bureau, which conducts the most widely cited survey on health insurance coverage in the United States.
What the Census data shows is that in 2019, which is the first year without the mandate’s penalties in effect, 92% of people had health insurance for at least part of the year — compared to 91.5% in 2018, the last year with the mandate in place. In other words, insurance coverage went up slightly despite the elimination of the mandate.
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Posted in 2020 Census, Big Government, Congress, Democrats, Donald Trump, Election 2020, Healthcare, Joe Biden, Liberalism, Obama, Obama Administraiton and Policy, Obamacare, Progressive Movement, Socialism, Transparency, Women's Issues | No Comments »
Wednesday, May 27th, 2020
This is one of the best articles that Victor Davis Hanson has written and that is saying something as he is a brilliant writer and historian !!!! You’ll have to click on the link to read the article as National Review makes it too difficult to copy and paste their articles. Thanks to Martha Jenkins for sharing this exceptional article. Nancy
The Remains of an Administration
Obama’s policies are in tatters, and the worst scandals of his White House are coming to light.
by Victor Davis Hanson May 26,2020
“One is not struck by the truth until prompted quite accidentally by some external event.”
— Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day
EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE:
Gilded Socialism
Finally, the Obama post presidency did not help his cause. After eight years of lecturing the nation about the proper time to profit, or identifying the point after which there was no need to make additional money, or that private businesspeople did not really build their businesses, or the need to spread the wealth around, Obama liberated from office almost immediately rushed to the life of private jets and luxury yachts.
He signed multimillion-dollar tech and media deals characterized by requiring little expertise and less work but the promiscuous use of his brand and name. The erstwhile lecturer in chief about redlining and insidious bias bought a mansion in Washington’s toniest district; and after warning about rising seas, coastal flooding, and the need to lower them, he bought a seaside estate at Martha Vineyard, for the fire sale price of just under $12 million. In other words, he knew no time to stop profiting; there was no point when he had enough money; he saw no reason to spread his wealth around; and he really did build his own empire,
The less charismatic purveyors of the Obama legacy have not done well.
Hillary Clinton hired a foreign national to compile a dirty dossier on Trump and seed it in the Obama administration. She blew an election and ended up babbling and fixated permanently on her failure, before pathetically joining the “Resistance.” Joe Biden in his dotage may be spared her angst, given his own seeming inability to know exactly where he is and what he is supposed to say. Obama was supposed to have jump-started the careers of dozens of young, charismatic “diversity” imitators in the presidential arena, such as Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, Julian Castro, Deval Patrick, Kamala Harris, and Andrew Yang. All crashed and burned in the Democratic primaries, whether because they were not the Obama Adonis or because they reminded voters of his shallowness.
We were supposed to see a fundamental transformation of the country between 2009 and 2025, as the Obama-Clinton 16-year regnum finally made America right and correct. Instead, we witnessed eight years that ended in scandal whose full dimensions of criminality will take years to process.
NRO contributor VICTOR DAVIS HANSON is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of The Case for Trump. @vdhanson
Posted in Administrative State, American History, Big Government, CIA, Clinton, Community Organizers, Congress, Corruption/Crime, Deep State, Democrats, Donald Trump, Election 2016, Election 2020, Environmental Issues, FBI, FBI Director, Foreign Policy, Global Warming, Globalists, Globalization, Hillary Clinton, History, Illegal Immigration, Intelligence, International Affairs, Iran, Iran Nuclear Deal, Joe Biden, John Brennan, Justice Department, Liberalism, Media, Middle East, Mueller, National Defense, National Security Advisor, Obama, Obama Administraiton and Policy, Obamacare, Open Borders, Political Correctness, Political Corruption, Progressive Movement, Radical Left, Redistribution of Wealth, Resistance, Russia, Russian Reset, Same Sex Marriage, Social Justice, Socialism, Supreme Court, Transparency, Tyranny, Victor Davis Hanson, Women Candidates | No Comments »
Saturday, March 21st, 2020
Posted in Big Business, Big Government, Biodefense, Center For Disease Control, Center For Disease Control - CDC, China, Coronavirus, Dept of Defense, Healthcare, Italy, Medical/Drugs, National Defense, Obama Administraiton and Policy, Obamacare, Videos, Women's Issues | No Comments »
Friday, March 6th, 2020
ICON Lecture will take on ‘progressive agenda roadmap’
By A.P. Dillon March 5, 2020
For those interested in hearing more, Michel’s ICON Lecture will take place on March 17. For more information and to purchase tickets, visit
www.iconlectureseries.com/.
CHAPEL HILL — A lecture on government spending, which highlights the high cost of progressive programs, will be taking place next month as part of the ICON Lecture series.
Adam Michel, a senior policy analyst on tax and debt with the Heritage Foundation, will be giving a talk titled “The progressive roadmap to soak the middle class.”
The Heritage Foundation is a conservative D.C. think tank that advocates for limited government, free-market economics and expanded individual opportunity.
The lecture comes along just as socialist Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has gained steam towards becoming the Democratic Party’s nominee
“The progressive agenda, as it is articulated by any of the prominent Democrats and some on the left — taken in whole or in segments — is an incredible departure from fiscal sanity,” Michel told NSJ.
“It is arithmetically impossible to fund the progressive agenda with taxes on the rich alone,” said Michel.
Sanders’ recent publication of a fact sheet on how he plans to fund his agenda items is largely a list of steep tax increases. Michel saw this coming and warns that taxes on the rich will not be nearly enough to pay for Sanders’ wish list.
“If you were to confiscate every dollar earned by every taxpayer with incomes over $200,000 a year, you would only pay for about half of what is being promised by the progressive, left agenda,” said Michel.
Michel warns that if corrective actions aren’t taken, government expenditures will require much larger tax increases on middle-class Americans and even higher taxes on a much larger number of taxpayers.
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Posted in Administrative State, Big Government, Congress, Conservatism, Corporate Cronyism, Deep State, Democrats, Economy, Election 2020, Elizabeth Warren, Entitlements, Healthcare, Liberalism, Medicare/Medicaid, Obamacare, Progressive Movement, Radical Left, Spending, Transparency | No Comments »
Tuesday, March 3rd, 2020
Thanks to Victor Davis Hanson for reminding us of all the illegal and corrupt actions taken by Obama during his presidency. Just makes your blood boil that he got away with it all ! Would love to see him do a similar article on Hillary. He certainly would have plenty of material to work with !!! Nancy
Do not insult our collective intelligence by suggesting that Donald J. Trump abused the Constitution and the office of president in a way that would have been unthinkable to Barack Obama.
Obama was not impeached not because he did not do things that Donald Trump did, but because his opposition in the House did not do what Democrats later most willingly did: attempt a coup to remove a president without cause
By Victor Davis Hanson March 1, 2020
New Impeachment Rules Would Snare Obama
March 2, 2020
Barack Obama’s eight-year tenure was detrimental to the United States, but like most of his nonbelievers, I harbor no animosity for his person.
Few critics that I know advocated that Obama be impeached, much less removed from office, before his reelection bid—even amid his worst scandals and dangerous policies. But we are now in a new age, whose protocols might have made it impossible for the Obama Administration to have finished two terms.
Remember, his administration ran some 2,000 guns to Mexican cartels in some hare-brained scheme to monitor violence spilling into the United States. Under the new customs, he should have been impeached for instructing Attorney General Eric Holder to refuse to testify to Congress about Fast and Furious, or at least for not handing over subpoenaed documents. Imagine a Trump gun-walking scheme in Mexico.
It was bad enough that Holder was the first attorney general to be held in contempt of Congress, well aside from the embarrassment of his unhinged outbursts about “my people” (hint: his “my” did not mean Americans of all races and creeds). We all remember Holder’s lunatic dismissals of his own country as “a nation of cowards.” (Imagine Bill Barr referring to “my people” or calling Americans cowards)
Fine—politicians and bureaucrats misspeak. It is no surprise that radical progressives like Holder are both partisans and tribalists or that they don’t always have positive thoughts about America, past or present. But Obama won the election. So voters had ample warning from his past that he would likely put as many leftists as he wished into government. He had the legal right and political rationale to do so, without his opponents inventing crimes to remove them.
At least he did before the Trump hysteria.
Criminalizing Politics
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Posted in American History, Benghazi Terrorist Attack, Chuck Schumer, CIA, Clinton, Clinton Foundation, Congress, Constitution, Corporate Cronyism, Corruption/Crime, Deep State, Democrats, Donald Trump, Election 2012, Election 2016, Election 2020, Eric Holder, FBI, FBI Director, Foreign Policy, Government Regulation, Healthcare, Iran Nuclear Deal, IRS, Israel, James Comey, John Brennan, Justice Department, Legal Issues, Liberalism, Middle East, Military, Missle Defense, National Defense, Netanyahu, Obama, Obama Administraiton and Policy, Obamacare, Osama Bin Laden, Pelosi, Political Corruption, Politics, Progressive Movement, Putin, Radical Left, Resistance, Russia, Russian Reset, Sanctuary Cities, Saudi Arabia, Transparency, Ukraine, Victor Davis Hanson | No Comments »
Saturday, February 29th, 2020
Socialized Medicine Killed Princess Diana, Surgeon Tells CPAC
NATIONAL HARBOR, MD — Congressman Steve Scalise introduced a panel discussion called “Prescription for Failure: The Ills of Socialized Medicine” at CPAC on Thursday. He established what was at stake in 2020: “2020 will be a contrast election,” he said, between Trump’s freedom agenda or socialism.
“You don’t want socialism, you surely don’t want socialized medicine,” he said. “Tens of thousands of Canadians come to America for life-saving treatment. Do you see Americans going to Canada for life-saving treatment?” he asked rhetorically.
“Healthcare is only one example of what’s at stake in this election,” he said, before concluding that individual freedom will win out in 2020 and predicted that Republicans will keep the Senate and win back the House.
Author Dr. David Schneider, an orthopedic surgeon from Colorado, explained how with socialized medicine, wait times for care “are disastrous.” In Canada, the wait time to see a specialist is two years, and then another two years to get the procedure.
“People in this country would go crazy if you were told you had to wait four months,” he said.
Then he explained how Princess Diana would be alive today, if not for socialized medicine. “Princess Diana was in the car accident in France,” he explained. “They actually don’t have any trauma specialists in France.”
“For the first hour after that accident, she was still in that tunnel,” he continued. “And after an hour, they took her to a nearby hospital and she was alive for another three hours and they couldn’t control the bleeding from her pulmonary artery.”
Schneider explained that “there were no trauma-trained people there.”
He continued, “I really believe, knowing what I know about her care and comparing it to what Congressman Scalise had, Princess Diana would have lived had that accident happened here in America.”
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Posted in Big Government, Canada, Election 2020, England, Europe, France, Healthcare, Liberalism, Medical/Drugs, Medicare/Medicaid, Obamacare, Progressive Movement | No Comments »
Monday, February 17th, 2020
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
The Incompetence Party
The Democrats’ biggest problem isn’t Bernie Sanders. It’s that many voters doubt the party’s ability to govern anymore.
By Daniel Henninger February 12, 2020
Now that Bernie Sanders—once an obscure socialist senator from Vermont—is officially the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, it is time to confront what that means.
It does not mean the U.S. is flirting with socialism. That’s not going to happen. The meaning of Bernie’s ascent is that the Democratic Party, older even than he is, has simply run out of gas.
The Democrats resemble Europe’s aging political parties—Britain’s Labour, France’s Socialists, Germany’s Social Democrats and Christian Democrats. All have simply deflated with voters.
Signs of public fatigue with the Democrats could be seen in Iowa and New Hampshire.
Besides incompetence, the big story out of Iowa was low turnout. In New Hampshire the story was voter indecision. Once past Bernie’s 25% cement-block base, many voters were flipping a coin in the voting booth to pick from the other candidates.
What does it mean that Elizabeth Warren, by now a household name, got dropped to fourth place? Joe Biden’s humiliating fifth is a personal disaster, but what does that say about the party itself?
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Posted in American History, Bernie Sanders, Big Government, Bloomberg, Congress, Corruption/Crime, Deep State, Democrats, Department of Education, Donald Trump, Election 2020, Elizabeth Warren, Government Regulation, Government Waste and Fraud, Identity Politics, Joe Biden, Liberalism, Medicare/Medicaid, Obamacare, Political Correctness, Progressive Movement, Radical Left, Redistribution of Wealth, Regulations, Social Justice, Spending, Taxation, Taxes, Welfare, Women's Issues | No Comments »
Monday, December 30th, 2019
“Oh My” is right !!! Nancy
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Elizabeth Warren Has a Plan, Oh My
She may not win the nomination, but her ideas show where the American left wants to go
By the Editorial Board, December 27, 2019
She’s the candidate with a plan for everything: That’s Elizabeth Warren’s brand. But even that sells her ambitions short, as we discovered after a tour of her 60-some policy papers. Ms. Warren is proposing a transformation of American government, business and life that exceeds what the socialist dreamers of a century ago imagined.
Her standing in the polls has fallen after missteps over Medicare, but she is still in the top candidate tier. Her ideas deserve to be taken seriously because they show where the American left wants to go:
***
• Wealth tax: Tax net worth over $50 million at 2% a year, and 6% above $1 billion. To prevent the rich from yachting off, add a 40% “exit tax” on assets over $50 million upon renouncing U.S. citizenship. Estimated revenue: $3.75 trillion over a decade from 75,000 households. Most economists, including many Democrats, call that number a fantasy. Courts might also find the tax unconstitutional.
• Medicare for All tax:Charge companies with at least 50 workers an “Employer Medicare Contribution,” equal to 98% of their recent outlays on health care, while adjusting for inflation and changes in staff size. These varying fees “would be gradually shifted to converge at the average health care cost-per-employee nationally.” Estimated revenue: $8.8 trillion over a decade. If receipts fall short, add a “supplemental” tax on “big companies with extremely high executive compensation and stock buyback rates.”
• Global corporate tax: Raise the top business rate to 35%. Apply this as a world-wide minimum on overseas earnings by U.S. companies. Businesses would “pay the difference between the minimum tax and the rate in the countries where they book their profits.” Apply a similar minimum tax to foreign companies, prorated by the share of their sales made in the U.S. Estimated revenue: $1.65 trillion over a decade.
• Corporate surtax: Tax profit over $100 million at a new 7% rate, without exemptions. This would go atop the regular corporate rate. Estimated revenue: $1 trillion over a decade from 1,200 public companies.
• Slower expensing: “Our current tax system lets companies deduct the cost of certain investments they make in assets faster than those assets actually lose value.” Closing this “loophole,” she says, would raise $1.25 trillion over a decade.
• Higher capital gains taxes: Tax the investment gains of the wealthiest 1% as ordinary income, meaning rates near 40% instead of today’s 23.8%. Apply the tax annually on gains via a “mark to market” system, even if the asset hasn’t been sold. Estimated revenue: $2 trillion over a decade.
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Posted in Anti-Capitalists, Banking, Big Business, Big Government, Congress, Democrats, Donald Trump, Election 2020, Elizabeth Warren, Entitlements, Liberalism, Medicare/Medicaid, Obama Administraiton and Policy, Obamacare, Politics, Progressive Movement, Radical Left, Regulations, Seniors, Small Business, Socialism, Spending, Taxation, Taxes, Transparency, Women Candidates | No Comments »
Tuesday, November 12th, 2019
This should be a concern to all of us. If you think what you are telling your doctor is personal and private, think again !!! Nancy
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Google Amasses Personal Medical Records
Company teams up with one of the U.S.’s largest health systems in ‘Project Nightingale’
BY ROB COPELAND November 12, 2019
Google is engaged with one of the U.S.’s largest health-care systems on a project to collect and crunch the detailed personal- health information of millions of people across 21 states.
The initiative, code-named “Project Nightingale,” appears to be the biggest effort yet by a Silicon Valley giant to gain a toehold in the health-care industry through the handling of patients’ medical data. Amazon. com Inc., Apple Inc. and Microsoft Corp. are also aggressively pushing into health care, though they haven’t yet struck deals of this scope.
Google began Project Nightingale in secret last year with St. Louis-based Ascension, a Catholic chain of 2,600 hospitals, doctors’ offices and other facilities, with the data sharing accelerating since summer, according to internal documents.
The data involved in the initiative encompasses lab results, doctor diagnoses and hospitalization records, among other categories, and amounts to a complete health history, including patient names and dates of birth.
Neither patients nor doctors have been notified. At least 150 Google employees already have access to much of the data on tens of millions of patients, according to a person familiar with the matter and
the documents.
In a news release issued after The Wall Street Journal reported on Project Nightingale on Monday, the companies said the initiative is compliant with federal health law and includes robust protections for patient data.
Some Ascension employees have raised questions about the way the data is being collected and shared, both from a technological and ethical perspective, according to the people familiar with the project. But privacy experts said it appeared to be permissible under federal law. That law, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, generally allows hospitals to share data with business partners without telling patients, as long as the information is used “only to help the covered entity carry out its health care functions.”
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Posted in Big Business, Big Government, Corporate Cronyism, Cyber Security, FDA, Government Regulation, Healthcare, Medical/Drugs, Medicare/Medicaid, Mental Health, Obamacare, Seniors, Social Media, Transparency, Women's Issues | No Comments »
Tuesday, November 5th, 2019
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Warren Has a (Fantasy) Plan
Her financing and savings ideas for Medicare for All bear no relation to reality.
By the Editorial Board November 4, 2019
EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE: There’s a reason every government-run health system in the world rations care. Ms. Warren won’t admit this explicitly about her brave new health world, but she comes close. If U.S. health-care spending exceeds GDP growth, she says, “I will use available policy tools, which include global budgets, population-based budgets, and automatic rate reductions, to bring it back into line.”
In a word, rationing. And that’s no surprise, since she credits the advice for developing much of her plan to Donald Berwick. He was an advocate for ObamaCare’s Independent Payment Advisory Board—known uncharitably as the death panel—that Congress repealed last year in a bipartisan vote.
Now we know why Elizabeth Warren took so long to release the financing details of her Medicare-for-All plan. The 20 pages of explanation she released Friday reveal that she is counting on ideas for cost-savings and new revenue that are a fiscal and health-care fantasy.
You certainly can’t criticize the new Iowa Democratic caucus front-runner for lack of ambition. Despite criticism from fellow Democrats, she is sticking to her plan for a government takeover of American health care, including the elimination of private insurance that 170 million or so Americans now have. She continues to claim that this will cost “not one penny in middle-class tax increases.” She walks on water too.
Start with the overall fiscal math, which by itself is staggering. She concedes that her plan will cost only “slightly” less than the $52 trillion that the U.S. is expected to spend on health care in the next 10 years. She deducts from that what the feds now spend on Medicare and Medicaid, plus $6 trillion that the states contribute to Medicaid, the state-federal children’s health program and government worker benefits.
That leaves $30 trillion to finance, but Senator Warren waves her wand and says the bill will really be $20.5 trillion. She makes the rest vanish by positing magical savings from things like “comprehensive payment reform.” One of her ideas is the hardy perennial known as “bundled payments,” which have failed to reduce costs as promised by Obama Care.
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Posted in Big Government, Democrats, Election 2020, Elizabeth Warren, Europe, Government Regulation, Healthcare, Liberalism, Medical/Drugs, Medicare/Medicaid, Obama, Obama Administraiton and Policy, Obamacare, Progressive Movement, Radical Left, Redistribution of Wealth, Socialism, Transparency, Women Candidates, Women's Issues | No Comments »
