Another Lie About Ebola?

Another lie about ebola may be developing.  There is a large body of evidence that temperature-monitoring accomplishes nothing in preventing ebola-carriers from entering the USA and spreading the disease.  Indeed, neither Thomas Duncan nor Dr. Craig Spencer showed an abnormal temperature when they entered the country.

These scientific studies show that airport Ebola screenings are largely ineffective

Washington Post 11/3/14 (excerpt)

"The Department of Homeland Security last week imposed new travel restrictions for anyone arriving from Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, requiring those passengers to come through one of five major U.S. airports in Atlanta, Chicago, New Jersey, New York and Virginia.

Those travelers now have to submit to temperature checks and questioning. But scientific studies published by the National Institutes of Health have shown that similar protocols were largely ineffective during an outbreak of Swine Flu in 2009, as Government Executive pointed out in an article last week.

Indeed, temperature checks didn’t work for Liberian Thomas Eric Duncan, who died from Ebola this month after arriving in Dallas. Duncan did not have a fever when he landed in Texas on Sept. 28, and he said he had not been in contact with Ebola patients in his native country, although that later proved to be a false statement."

Current State of Obamacare Issues

So many disasters are occurring both at home and in the outside world (Ferguson, IRS, Illegals swamping the border, Muslim terrorism and butchery, Jihadist advances throughout the Middle East, ebola); the issues associated with Obamacare have been swept off the front page.

This is a report listing the current state of those issues, which still need to be exploited by Republicans in the election this year.

1. Big premium hikes are slated for 2015. Because the country erupted in outrage over the millions of policies cancelled under Obamacare, which made a lie of the president’s vow, “If you like your insurance you can keep it,” the White House reversed course and allowed people to maintain existing coverage. As a result, the Obamacare exchanges were starved of the healthier people needed to pay for the sick and poor previously without insurance. Insurers are now planning to raise premiums.

According to PwC Health Research Institute, the average premium increase request for 2105 in North Carolina is 10.8 percent; in Iowa the hike is 11.5 percent. Many in Louisiana are looking at almost a 20 percent increase, and in Arkansas nearly 12 percent. That’s big, unpleasant news for Democrats.

2. Critics claim the Obama administration is fudging the ACA enrollment numbers. The White House trumpeted that 8 million Americans had signed up for Obamacare, but that total has been shrinking. Aetna, one of the program’s biggest players, reports that of their 720,000 enrollees, only about 600,000 are paying for their coverage, a number they expect will drop to about 500,000 by year-end. Other insurers indicate fall-off as well.

3. People are angry about the narrower choices of doctors and hospitals available to them.  In New Hampshire, Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield was the sole insurer participating in the marketplace; it eliminated 10 of the state’s 26 hospitals from its network. According to Politico, such is the uproar about shrinking choices that “since the beginning of 2013, more than 70 bills have been introduced in 22 states to clarify the network rules, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.” In California, more than one group has sued Anthem Blue Cross, charging that the insurer misrepresented the scope of its doctor network
.
Related: Up to 300,000 Could Lose Obamacare on Federal Exchange
4. The ACA was constructed incompetently. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit recently ruled illegal the federal subsidies paid to Obamacare enrollees in states that have not set up their own exchanges -- a stark reminder of how badly the healthcare bill was implemented. This and other unintended consequences are excellent arguments for significantly overhauling the ACA – an undertaking that might be possible under a Republican Senate but that has little or no hope otherwise.

5. Obamacare highlights the president’s imperial tendencies. Mr. Obama has single-handedly changed the ACA some 24 times, delaying important provisions such as the employer and individual mandates. The president has rigged the rollout of the ACA to political advantage, putting off the most painful aspects of the bill and front-loading the goodies. Republicans should remind voters we have yet to encounter, for instance, the 40 percent Cadillac tax, which has been pushed back until 2018, but which is expected to raise as much as $214 billion by 2023.

6. Obamacare undermines job creation. The ACA has been the most important of a number of White House policies that have discouraged job creation at a time when the country is struggling to put people back to work. At last tally, there were 92 million adult Americans who are not working (like stay-at-home moms), are unemployed, retired or disabled. The workforce participation rate is at a decades-long low. This is unsustainable, and Obamacare is not helping. Companies have limited their hiring and also the number of hours their employers work because of the bill and have faced increased uncertainty. Meanwhile, because of the ACA, Americans no longer need to work to get health benefits – maybe a good thing for individuals, but not for a country whose safety net must be funded by an ever-greater workforce.

In short, there’s still meat on the bones of the Obamacare carcass; Republicans running for office should get out their knives and forks.

VA Today, Obamacare Tomorrow

This describes the future of medical care in the USA if Obamacare is not stopped:

How VA hospitals are a government-run disaster

By Michael D. Tanner

May 16, 2014 New York Post

The news is shocking: Patients dying on the waiting list for government-provided healthcare. But this is not a report from Canada or the British National Health Service. It’s right here in America, in the health system administered by the Department of Veterans Affairs.

The problems first surfaced in Phoenix, where the wait to receive care at VA facilities had grown so long that 1,400 to 1,600 sick veterans were forced to wait months to see a doctor. As many as 40 veterans reportedly died because they couldn’t get the care they needed. VA administrators tried to cover up the problems by establishing secret waiting lists and falsifying reports.

The scandal has now spread to other veteran facilities. VA employees at an outpatient clinic in Fort Collins, Colo., falsified appointment records to hide the fact that as many as 6,300 veterans treated at the outpatient clinic waited months to be seen for treatment. In Wyoming, whistleblowers have accused officials of manipulating records to hide wait times.

VA officers in San Antonio and Austin, Texas, have been accused of similar efforts to hide long waits. And in Pittsburgh, VA officials are accused of covering up the death of several patients after the water in a VA hospital became infected with bacteria. The officials reportedly tried to hide the information not only from patients and superiors, but even from hospital staff.

Earlier this month, the American Legion called for Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki to resign. No doubt Gen. Shinseki was asleep at the switch. But the problem goes well beyond an incompetent cabinet secretary or a few corrupt local bureaucrats.

Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has long touted the VA system as the epitome of government-run healthcare. “Exhibit A for the advantages of government provision [of healthcare] is the veterans administration, which runs its own hospitals and clinics, and provides some of the best-quality healthcare in America at far lower cost than the private sector,” Krugman claims.

And he is right . . . at least about the VA being exhibit A for government healthcare.

Like all single-payer health systems around the world, the VA controls costs by imposing a “global budget” — a limit to how much it can spend on care. Thus year-to-year funding varies according to the whims of Congress, not according to what consumers want or are willing to spend.

With tens of thousands of wounded soldiers returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the demand for care is rising dramatically. Enrollment in VA services has increased by 13% from 2007 to 2012. Despite a 76% increase in expenditures ($24 billion) over that period, the program still suffers from chronic budget problems. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that it would require as much as a 75% increase in inflation-adjusted funding for the VA to treat all veterans.

When resources can’t meet demand in a given year, the VA does what other single-payer systems do: It rations.









Even accessing the system can be a major problem. Currently, the case-processing backlog exceeds 344,000 claims. Although the VA says it has a policy of processing claims within 125 days, it actually takes an average of 160 days for a veteran to gain access to his health benefits. Moreover, the VA itself estimates that it has at least a 9% error rate in processing claims. Outside groups claim the error rate is much higher.

Appealing a VA decision can be an even more arduous process. A veteran who takes an appeal through all available administrative steps faces an average wait of 1,598 days, according to VA figures for 2013.

Moreover, because funding decisions are determined through the political process rather than by patient preference, the money is often misallocated. VA hospitals with low utilization rates are built or kept open not out of need, but because they reside in the districts of powerful congressional committee leaders. At the same time, other hospitals without political clout are overflowing.

The same issues beset other government-run health-care programs.

Take Medicaid. A study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that Medicaid recipients were six times more likely to be denied an appointment than people with private insurance. And according to a second study, when they do get an appointment, they wait an average of 42 days to see a doctor, twice as long as the privately insured.

In fact, Medicaid may not even be better than being uninsured altogether. The Oregon Health Insurance Exchange study, the first randomized controlled study of Medicaid outcomes, recently concluded that “Medicaid coverage generated no significant improvements in measured physical-health outcomes.”

Even Medicare, by far the most popular government-run healthcare program, has problems with access and quality. Studies have long shown that there is little correlation between Medicare spending and healthy outcomes. In fact, some of the regions where Medicare spends the most per patient have the poorest results.

As Harvard economists Katherine Baicker and Amitabh Chandra point out, higher Medicare spending “is not merely uncorrelated with the quality of care provided” but “negatively correlated with the use of effective care.”

Moreover, the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice have found that one “unintended consequence of [Medicare’s] administered pricing systems has been to make some hospital services extraordinarily lucrative and others unprofitable. As a result, some services are more available (and others less available) than they would be in a competitive market . . . which may or may not reflect consumers’ needs and preferences.”

As the federal government takes over more and more of the healthcare system, there should be a lesson for us. Simply promising more healthcare does not mean delivering more healthcare. And government healthcare systems have a very poor record of delivering what they promise.

Michael D. Tanner is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.

Hitler's Reaction to Obamacare

Hitler's Reaction to Obamacare

If this were not so true, it would be hilarious:

If you have difficulty viewing this video, go here.

A Conversation About Obamacare

Screw You, Mickey Kaus

Screw You, Mickey KausBy Ann Coulter  March 27, 2014  RealClearPolitics

I've been thrown off my health insurance -- THANKS, OBAMACARE! -- and have spent hours and hours over the past month trying to figure out my options now that the Democrats have made my old plan, which I liked, "illegal." (I prefer to think of my plan as "undocumented.")

Whom do I bill for the hours of work Obamacare forced me to perform? How about you, Mickey? You're the smartest living liberal (faint praise), and you assured us that Obamacare was going to be fantastic.

By now, Obama has issued "waivers" from Obamacare to about 99 percent of the country. (Perhaps you've heard, there's a big midterm election this year.) As one of the few Americans not granted a waiver, I'm here to tell you: You have no idea what's coming, America.

I thought I had figured out the best plan for me a month ago after having doctors and hospital administrators look at the packets of material I was sent by my old insurance company -- the same mailing that informed me my old plan was "illegal" under Obamacare.

But when I checked online recently, I discovered the premier plan -- the "platinum," low-deductible, astronomically expensive plan that might be accepted by an English-speaking doctor who didn't attend medical school in a Hawaiian shirt and board shorts -- does not include treatment at any decent hospitals.

That's sort of unfortunate because THAT'S THE ONLY REASON I WANT INSURANCE! That's the only reason any sane homo sapien wants health insurance: to cover health care costs in the event of some catastrophic illness or accident -- not to pay for Mickey Kaus' allergy appointments. But my only options under the blue-chip plan were hospitals that also do shoe repair.

I called Blue Cross directly to ask if its most expensive insurance plan covered the only hospital I'd ever go to in an emergency. Since that's all I wanted to know, that's what I asked. (I like to get to the point that way.)

But -- as happens whenever you try to ascertain the most basic information about insurance under Obamacare -- the Blue Cross representative began hammering me with a battery of questions about myself.

First my name. (Does that make a difference to what hospitals its plans cover?) Then my phone number. By the time he got to my address, I said, CAN YOU PLEASE JUST TELL ME IF ANY OF YOUR PLANS COVER XYZ HOSPITAL? I DON'T EVEN KNOW IF I WANT TO SIGN UP WITH YOU!

Finally, he admitted that Blue Cross' most expensive individual insurance plan does not cover treatment at the hospitals I named. Their doctors are "out of network" (and the person who designed this plan is "out of his mind").

This was the rest of the conversation, verbatim:

ME: None of your plans cover out-of-network doctors?

BLUE CROSS: No.

ME: Why is it called "Premier Guided Access WITH OUT-OF-NETWORK PLAN"?

BLUE CROSS: Where did you see that?

ME: On Blue Cross' own material describing its plans.

BLUE CROSS: Oh. I don't know why it's called that.

ME: None of your plans cover (the good hospital)?

BLUE CROSS: No.

ME: I don't know who you are, but I have a very specific set of skills that will help me find you. And when I find you, I am going to kill you. (Click.)

True conversation. Except the last sentence. That was my fantasy.

I decided to approach it from the opposite direction and called one of the nation's leading hospitals to ask which plans it accepted. The woman listed a series of plans, but she couldn't tell me if I was eligible for any of them. For that, she said, I'd have to go to the Obamacare website.

Does Obamacare cover suicide?

I went to "healthcare.gov" and -- I guess I had heard this, but had blocked it from my memory like a rape victim unable to remember her attack -- you can't even peek at the available plans until you've given the government reams of personal information about yourself.

How about they let me look at the merchandise first?

Inasmuch as the cost of health insurance under Obamacare is so high that it will generally make more sense just to pay for your own catastrophic health emergencies, I was not interested in telling Kathleen Sebelius everything about me in order to have the privilege of glancing at the government's crappy plans.

But that's the only choice. As the Obamacare website directs:

(1) Create an account. (Name, password.)

(2) Tell us about yourself and your family. (Every single thing.)

(3) Choose a health insurance plan. (That's where you finally get to see the plans.)

I wonder if other consumer-oriented businesses will start demanding names, addresses, passwords and phone numbers before the customer is allowed to browse the merchandise. Maybe Williams-Sonoma could pick up a few sales tricks from Ezekiel Emanuel! Oh, you'd like to see the bronze muffin tin? Sure, but first I'll need your Social Security number, date of birth and mother's maiden name. Sign here, here and here.

The main point of the Obamacare website is to encourage people other than me to get a government subsidy. There's also a section helping you register to vote. You just can't see the insurance plans. (Guess which one you need a government ID for?)

With zero help from the Obamacare website, I eventually figured out that there was one lone insurance plan that would cover treatment at a reputable hospital. The downside is, no doctors take it.

So my only two health insurance options -- and yours, too, as soon as the waivers expire, America! -- are: (1) a plan that no doctors take; or (2) a plan that no hospitals take. You either pay for all your doctor visits and tests yourself, or you pay for your cancer treatment yourself. And you pay through the nose in either case.

That's not insurance! It's a huge transfer of wealth from people who work for a living to those who don't, accomplished by forcing the workers to buy insurance that's not insurance. Obamacare has made actual health insurance "illegal."

It's not "insurance" when what I want to insure against isn't covered, but paying for other people's health care needs -- defined broadly -- is mandatory.

It's as if you wanted to buy a car, so you paid for a Toyota -- but then all you got was a 10-speed bike, with the rest of your purchase price going to buy cars, bikes and helmets for other people.

Or, more precisely, it would be like having the option of car insurance that covers either collisions or liability, but not both. Your car insurance premium would be gargantuan, because most of it would go to buy insurance, gas and air fresheners for other people in the plan.

If you have employer-provided health care, you may not have to make the 400 phone calls I had to, but the result will be the same: You're not getting what is commonly known as "insurance." You're getting a massive bill to pay for other people's chiropractors, marriage counselors, birth control pills, smoking cessation programs, "preventive care" appointments and pre-existing conditions.

Health insurance has been outlawed, replaced with a welfare program that has been renamed "insurance."

When Matt Drudge decided he'd rather pay for his own health care, liberals hysterically denounced him for not buying an Obamacare transfer-the-wealth, fake "insurance" plan. It used to be shameful to be a public charge. Now it's shameful to pay for yourself.

And it's shameful to work for yourself. The self-employed are currently the only Americans subjected to Obamacare. (In a way, it's lucky for the Democrats that there aren't enough of us to hurt them in this year's midterm elections!)

But we're the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. You may have an employer-provided plan now, but the waivers can't go on forever. If you live in America, your health insurance is going to disappear, too.

The government simply cannot force all insurance companies to give subsidized health care to a third of the country, to ignore the pre-existing health conditions of its customers, to pay for every little thing tangentially related to health -- like smoking cessation programs, marital counseling and pediatric dental care -- and also expect them to cover your cancer treatment.

It doesn't matter if you've been paying for insurance your whole adult life. That policy is now "illegal." Put your hands in the air, nice and easy, and step away from the policy ...

You 99-percenters still unaffected by Obamacare will blithely go to the polls this November and vote on some teeny-tiny issue, completely unaware of the total destruction of health insurance in America. The waivers have worked.

Now we'll have to wait 40 years for a future Mickey Kaus to come along and expose the disastrous consequences of this horrendous government program, just like the real Mickey Kaus did with welfare. But for now, I say: Screw you, Mickey Kaus. 

 

Critical Reading for Seniors

Many seniors may have forgotten that when the Democrats passed Obamacare (with no Republicans voting in favor and by means of parliamentory chicanery), they authorized a transfer of $500 billion (that’s billion) in future Medicare funding to help pay for their new program.  It’s not only younger people who are losing their doctors and having to wait for tests and treatment, it’s started for seniors as well.  Medicare Advantage is the first program to feel the cuts, but traditional Medicare is following closely.

Vote out every Democrat who runs in 2014 and in 2016 so this trainwreck of a healthcare program can be repealed and replaced.

Obamacare vs. Medicare

Jeffrey H. Anderson  March 10, 2014 Weekly Standard

One of President Obama’s greatest political challenges has been hiding the fact that Obamacare is largely financed by siphoning huge sums of money out of Medicare. In particular, Obamacare cuts—or guts—Medicare Advantage, the popular program that allows seniors to get their Medicare benefits through private insurers. In fact, it’s only these Medicare Advantage cuts that allow the Congressional Budget Office to pretend that Obamacare won’t raise deficits—an implausible notion that polling indicates only a very small percentage of particularly credulous citizens believe.

Late on Friday, February 21, in a 148-page, after-hours communication, the Obama administration declared that cuts to Medicare Advantage, long put off, will finally take effect in 2015. Predictably, and understandably, many conservatives responded by criticizing the announcement.

The cuts are bad in and of themselves, but cuts to the program have been a part of Obamacare’s written text from day one. So the real question is not whether Obamacare will cut Medicare Advantage; it’s whether the Obama administration—which doesn’t want those cuts to become evident when Medicare’s open-enrollment period begins on October 15, less than three weeks before Election Day—will take unilateral, lawless executive action to stop the cuts from taking place. That’s what has happened to date.

In the lead-up to Obama’s reelection, he and his administration weren’t satisfied with having mailed out full-color, taxpayer-funded propaganda brochures and run millions of dollars’ worth of taxpayer-funded TV ads featuring Andy Griffith, all touting Obamacare to seniors. They knew that such nonsense would quickly be exposed if Obamacare’s prescribed Medicare Advantage cuts were to take effect: Seniors would have started noticing those cuts on October 15, 2012.

To avoid that, the Obama administration launched an $8.3 billion “demonstration project.” The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services say such projects are meant “to test and measure the effect of potential program changes.” This one, though, was a shameless and almost certainly illegal effort to hide Obamacare’s Medicare Advantage cuts from seniors until they could no longer express their displeasure at the ballot box. How big a tally is $8.3 billion? It’s about seven times what Obama’s campaign raised in total.

The Government Accountability Office identified this “demonstration project” as a sham. The GAO highlighted the project’s myriad “design shortcomings,” including its excessive focus on 2012, its awarding “most” of its “quality bonus[es]” to plans that didn’t perform at above-average levels, and its lack of a control group. The GAO, not known for its bluntness, concluded by writing that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius “should cancel” the project and perhaps consider conducting “an appropriately designed demonstration” in the future. A few months later, the GAO reiterated that all demonstration projects “must meet the criteria set forth” in law, which the Obama administration had “not established” it had done, leaving the GAO “concerned.”

At the time, Nebraska Republican Ben Sasse, HHS assistant secretary for planning and evaluation until January 2009 and now a Senate candidate, said, “If a presidential administration can simply make up the authority to make law and give itself the power of the purse to implement its new law—which not only isn’t designed to make existing law work but is actually against the purpose of existing law—why do we need a Congress?” Sasse added, “In scope and intention, this is something completely new, and if it’s allowed to establish precedent, the only limit on what future administrations could spend money on, or how much they could unilaterally spend, would be their own electoral calculations about what they could get away with.”

Were Medicare demonstration projects typically so huge or so lacking in legal justification pre-Obama? Actually, they were usually small and uncontroversial. The GAO said that from 1995 through the onset of Obama’s ploy—a period spanning the bulk of the Clinton administration, all of the George W. Bush administration, and beyond—85 Medicare demonstration projects were conducted. Obama’s $8,300,000,000 gambit cost more than all 85 of those prior projects combined.

Now, two years later, the “demonstration project” is over, and Medicare Advantage is back on the chopping block. The CBO says that if Obama’s centerpiece legislation is implemented as written, about $200 billion will be funneled out of Medicare Advantage and into Obamacare over the next decade. Like low-premium health plans and their accompanying health savings accounts, both of which Obamacare aims to diminish or eliminate, Medicare Advantage has proven extremely popular: Its enrollment more than doubled, according to the New York Times, in just the past eight years. With over 15 million seniors now in the program—more than a quarter of all Medicare beneficiaries—Obama-care’s $200 billion raid amounts to about $13,000 per current Medicare Advantage enrollee.

But Medicare Advantage is hardly the only part of Medicare that is scheduled to be looted by Obamacare. The CBO projects that, over the next decade, about $1 trillion that would otherwise have been spent on Medicare will be rerouted to Obamacare. That represents more than 10 percent of Medicare’s entire projected funding—which helps explain why Medicare’s Office of the Actuary has projected that, by 2020, Medicare will reimburse doctors and other health care providers at lower rates than Medicaid will. Imagine if Obama had pitched Obamacare by saying, Folks, we’re going to pass health reform, and to pay for it, we’re going to divert more than 10 percent of the money that’s projected to be spent on Medicare. That pitch would have made Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech look like a triumph of political rhetoric. But, as the CBO notes, that’s exactly what Obamacare will do.

To be sure, Medicare badly needs to be reformed, and less should be spent on it. But at a time when we are $17 trillion in debt and our Army is shrinking to pre-World War II levels, money shouldn’t be reallocated from Medicare to finance a highly unpopular, $2 trillion overhaul of American medicine.

Similarly, Medicare Advantage needs to be protected, and Obamacare shouldn’t pilfer from it. But it would be far more objectionable for Obama once again to refuse to faithfully execute the law as written in hopes of extricating himself—and his vulnerable Senate allies—from a political thicket of their own creation. Conservatives should be a lot more concerned about abridgements of the rule of law and the separation of powers than about cuts to this or that program—even popular and worthwhile ones.

All of this—the Medicare Advantage cuts, the siphoning of more than 10 percent of all projected Medicare spending, the lawlessness—points to the need to repeal the monstrosity that is Obamacare. And it points to the need to advance a well-conceived conservative alternative to pave the way to full repeal. The 2017 Project has proposed one such alternative. It would free Americans from Obamacare’s unprecedented individual mandate, its skyrocketing health costs, its weakening of job prospects, its fiscal irresponsibility, its consolidation of power and money at the expense of Americans’ liberty, and all the rest of its 2,700 pages of federal largess. At the same time, it wouldn’t touch the employer-based tax break for health insurance for most Americans or fail to provide help to the poor and near-poor who get the vast majority of aid under Obamacare, thereby foreclosing a potentially huge political opening for Obamacare supporters. What it would do is fix what the government had already broken before Obamacare was passed. It would provide real reform by eliminating the unfairness in the tax code by offering a non-income-based tax credit to all Americans who purchase health insurance in the individual market, dealing with the problem of preexisting conditions through commonsense regulations and high-risk pools, and lowering health costs by facilitating a real, vibrant market and encouraging as little involvement by middlemen (whether the government or insurers) as possible. It’s the opposite of Obamacare’s failed approach.

There are other worthwhile conservative alternatives on the table—including a proposal by Senators Tom Coburn, Richard Burr, and Orrin Hatch, and one from the House’s Republican Study Committee—and there is still much discussion to be had about shaping an alternative to bring about desired results. But it should be less doubtful than ever that full repeal is both crucial and achievable, and that advancing a well-conceived conservative alternative is the key to that quest.

 

 

 

My Pal, Speaker Boehner

I am reading many stories about conservative criticism of Speaker Boehner.

As an original Tea Party patriot, I am sometimes distressed by the actions of other Tea Partiers, who confuse ‘standing on principle’ with winning elections and the need for occasional compromise in a constitutional republic such as ours.

We have the biggest issue in our favor in my memory, Obamacare, heading into the 2014 and 2016 elections, and we have the repeated experience of being blamed for government shutdowns also in our memory.  Why on earth would we endanger that advantage by resisting another debt increase, having a government shutdown, and then give in again?

Kudos to John Boehner for finessing this issue.  Now we have to prevent local Tea Parties from backing terrible candidates like Christine O’Donnell and Sharon Angle, who did us in and snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

The GOP’s flash of brilliance

By Kathleen Parker, February 19, 2014 Washington Post (excerpt)

“Republicans have excelled at concealing their brilliance in recent years, and Democrats have exulted in their good fortune.

Whether discussing women’s reproductive systems or offering up candidates who are not electable — “I am not a witch” might have been a tipoff — Republicans couldn’t stop handing gifts to their opponents. As for tactics, a GOP Trojan horse is . . . a horse. And an Orca project is a whale-fishing expedition.Meanwhile, Democrats successfully labeled the GOP as the “party of no,” assisted by Republicans’ consistent opposition to everything and always flogging their own in an endless war between the party’s wacko birds (Sen. John McCain’s term) and establishment players who were referred to as RINOs (Republicans in Name Only) or Republicrats.

The Democrats weren’t wrong.

But then, President Obama apparently lost his magic ring. The sun broke through the pall of Republican despair, the fires of Mordor ceased and the spell of buffoonery and pettifoggery that had plagued the elephant herd was miraculously lifted.

Congress raised the debt limit without drama; Republican leaders shelved divisive issues such as comprehensive immigration and tax reform and shifted the focus to unifying messages about which RINOs and tea partyers can agree and lock pinkies: Obamacare is a failure and Barack Obama is an imperial president.

In essence, Republicans destroyed the Democrats’ sharpest weapon and absconded with their slogan. No more the party of no, the GOP suddenly is the party of “Yes, we can!”

Quite a transformation, that. And all along the message of House Speaker John Boehner, even though his tea party colleagues, gladiators armed with certitude, couldn’t hear him. Rather than listen to reason, they heard only the whispers of their beloved Wormtongue, whose identity I leave to you, dear reader, in hopes you have read J.R.R. Tolkien.” Washington Post

 

The Ultimate IRS Outrage

I stopped calling acts by Obama and his administration “outrages” long ago.  There were too many to keep straight, and it got almost tiresome after awhile.  But this involvement by the corrupted IRS has to be the ultimate outrage – persecution of a thought.  Will no-one try to stop this man?  Is there an honest Democrat anywhere?  This is right out of the communist playbook.

Fox News is reporting that the IRS will monitor terminations by employers to find out if any are due to an attempt to avoid Obamacare, and if an employer lies about his intentions, he will be hauled in for perjury.

Businesses must swear to the IRS that Obamacare had nothing to do with firings

Rick Moran February 12, 2014 American Thinker

google_ad_client = "pub-4560167926987914"; google_ad_width = 300; google_ad_height = 250; google_ad_format = "300x250_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; //2006-11-22: AT - Articles - 300 by 250 google_ad_channel = "0110545599"; google_color_border = "336699"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "999966"; google_color_text = "000000"; google_color_url = TTTTTTTTTTTTTT      The most coercive law in American history just got more coercive.

In delaying the employer mandate - again - the White House made it clear that businesses thinking of downsizing their company to avoid Obamacare mandates better think again.

Fox News:

Is the latest delay of ObamaCare regulations politically motivated? Consider what administration officials announcing the new exemption for medium-sized employers had to say about firms that might fire workers to get under the threshold and avoid hugely expensive new requirements of the law. Obama officials made clear in a press briefing that firms would not be allowed to lay off workers to get into the preferred class of those businesses with 50 to 99 employees. How will the feds know what employers were thinking when hiring and firing? Simple. Firms will be required to certify to the IRS - under penalty of perjury - that ObamaCare was not a motivating factor in their staffing decisions. To avoid ObamaCare costs you must swear that you are not trying to avoid ObamaCare costs. You can duck the law, but only if you promise not to say so.

["That's the good thing about being president. I can do whatever I want." - President Obama joking about getting a restricted-access tour of Thomas Jefferson's Monticello.]

War of words - With millions of insurance cancellations and workers dumped from employer-based policies due to ObamaCare, a relatively narrow exemption for medium-sized employers might sound like a trifling thing. But to Obama Democrats desperate to hold the Senate in the face of simmering anger over the botched rollout and false promises of the law, any little bit helps. And having the IRS serve as the talking-point enforcer for businesses tempted to speak out about firings under the law will sure help message discipline. Remember, the administration wants to focus on Americans being "transitioned" to ObamaCare not dumped from existing policies, and "freed" from having to work in order to get insurance rather than quitting their jobs in order to get free coverage.

"Under penalty of perjury..." Apparently, lying to a grand jury about sex is OK but lying to the IRS about Obamacare will land you in jail.

Once again, the IRS is being employed as the administration enforcer in blocking free speech. If several dozen companies end up laying off employees to get below the 50 worker threshold for Obamacare, they will be prevented from blaming the ACA for the firings under penalty of perjury.

So not only does Obama push the bad news rising out of the implementation of the employer mandate past the November mid terms, he stifles the free speech of business owners. Who knows! Perhaps by the time the election rolls around, it will be illegal to criticize the administration about anything. It might become illegal to even say "Obamacare."

Why not? Who's going to stop them?

 

Page Printed from: at February 12, 2014 -

Christmas and the Statists

If we review the history of Russia, China and other countries that were taken over by leftists (or statists, communists, socialists, Stalinists, Maoists – whatever term you wish to use), one of the common denominators you find, no matter what country you examine, is their persecution and destruction of all signs of religion.

Orthodox priests, Catholic priests, Buddhist monks, Jewish Rabbis, Protestant ministers and, sometimes, devoted followers were harassed, brutalized, imprisoned and often murdered.  Churches, temples and synagogues were systematically trashed and destroyed.  This is what they do when leftists take over.

They didn’t start out murdering priests, just like Hitler didn’t start out murdering Jews; first came the rhetoric and ridicule, then came the discrimination, then the smashing of symbols.  They created an atmosphere of hatred that later made it easy to escalate to violence, destruction and murder.

Does any of this sound similar to events happening right now in America as socialists and atheists, often one and the same, trash Christmas, Christians and the Christian religion?   If you think this is an overreaction, you haven’t been following the news, and you never watch Steve Colbert on the Colbert Show or Jon Stewart on the Daily Show, who both almost daily ridicule Christianity.  You have also not noticed that the Obama Administration has been attacking the Little Sisters of the Poor because of their religious beliefs and its conflict with the imposition of a statist position on birth control.

Also Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood would be forced to provide and pay for coverage of abortion-inducing drugs such as the “morning after” and “week after” pills, regardless of their religious or moral objections to doing so. Unless these families get over their deeply held beliefs and get in line with the mandate, they risk steep fines of up to $100 per employee per day. That could mean $1.3 million in fines per day for Hobby Lobby and up to $95,000 per day for Conestoga Wood.

What is the difference between the Nazis’ ridiculing and discriminating against the Jews and what the left-wing comics and the Obama Administration is doing?  What comes next?

 

Lessons for Conservatives

I don’t normally like to post long articles, but this one by George Will says it all.  Liberals have ruined our education system, they have ruined every city they have run, and now they are in the process of ruining our healthcare system.  The irony is that the million or so people Obama claims have signed up are people with no assets who are choosing Medicaid.  They have exposed all their personal data to thieves,  but the thieves have nothing to steal.

2013’s lesson for conservatives

By George F. Will  Dec 27, 2013 Washington Post

This report on the State of Conservatism comes at the end of an annus mirabilis for conservatives. In 2013, they learned that they may have been wasting much time and effort.

Hitherto, they have thought that the most efficient way to evangelize the unconverted was to write and speak, exhorting those still shrouded in darkness to read conservatism’s most light-shedding texts. Now they know that a quicker, surer method is to have progressives wield power for a few years. This will validate the core conservative insight about the mischiefs that ensue when governments demonstrate their incapacity for supplanting with fiats the spontaneous order of a market society.

It is difficult to recall and hard to believe that just three months ago some conservatives, mirroring progressives’ lack of respect for the public, considered it imperative to shut down the government in order to stop Obamacare in its tracks. They feared that once Americans got a glimpse of the law’s proffered subsidies, they would embrace it. Actually, once they glimpsed the law’s details, they recoiled.

Counterfactual history can illuminate the present, so: Suppose in 2012, Barack Obama had told the truth about the ability of people to keep their health plans. Would he have been reelected? Unlikely. Suppose in 2012, Chief Justice John Roberts, instead of rewriting the health-care law to save it, had been the fifth vote for overturning it. Would Obama be better off today? Probably.

Franklin Roosevelt, emboldened by winning a second term in 1936, attempted to pack, by expanding, the Supreme Court, to make it even more compliant toward his statism. He failed to win congressional compliance, and in 1938 he failed to purge Democrats who had opposed him. The voters’ backlash against him was so powerful that there was no liberal legislating majority in Congress until after the 1964 election.

That year’s landslide win by President Lyndon Johnson against Barry Goldwater, less than 12 months after a presidential assassination, left Democrats with 295 House and 68 Senate seats. Convinced that a merely sensible society would be a paltry aspiration, they vowed to build a Great Society by expanding legislation and regulation into every crevice of Americans’ lives. They lost five of the next six and seven of the next 10 presidential elections. In three years we shall see if progressive overreaching earns such a rebuke.

In 2013, the face of progressivism became Pajama Boy, the supercilious, semi-smirking, hot-chocolate-sipping faux-adult who embodies progressives’ belief that life should be all politics all the time — come on, everybody, spend your holidays talking about health care. He is who progressives are.

They are tone-deaf in expressing bottomless condescension toward the public and limitless faith in their own cleverness. Both attributes convinced them that Pajama Boy would be a potent persuader, getting young people to sign up for the hash that progressives are making of health care. As millions find themselves ending the year without insurance protection and/or experiencing sticker shock about the cost of policies the president tells them they ought to want, a question occurs: Have events ever so thoroughly and swiftly refuted a law’s title? Remember, it is the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

From Detroit’s debris has come a judicial ruling that the pensions that government employees’ unions, in collaboration with the political class, extort from taxpayers are not beyond the reach of what they bring about — bankruptcy proceedings. In Wisconsin, as a result of Gov. Scott Walker’s emancipation legislation requiring annual recertification votes for government workers’ unions and ending government collection of union dues, more than 70 of 408 school district unions were rejected.

This year’s debate about the National Security Agency demonstrated the impossibility of hermetically sealing distrust of government to one compartment of it. Worries about the NSA’s collection of metadata occurred in a context of deepened suspicions about government because of this year’s revelations that the administration has corrupted the Internal Revenue Service, the most intrusive and potentially the most punitive domestic institution. Conservatism is usually served by weariness of government.

The prophet Al Gore has given many hostages to fortune, and this year fortune shot another of them. In 2008, he predicted the North Polar ice cap would be gone “in five years.”

Finally, a regularly recurring fever of progressive indignation about the name of Washington’s professional football team again waned without success, which means Oklahoma will not have to change its name. “Oklahoma” is a compound of two Choctaw words, “okla” meaning people, and “homma” meaning red.

 

Obamacare Website and Identity Theft

If things weren't bad enough, this is John McAfee's opinion of the security situation facing users of the Obamacare website.  The McAfee virus-protection programs run on millions of personal computers:

On Fox Business Network’s “Cavuto” on Wednesday, computer programmer and founder of McAfee, Inc. John McAfee said the online component of Obamacare “is a hacker’s wet dream” that will cause “the loss of income for the millions of Americans who are going to lose their identities.”

For starters, McAfee said the way it is set up makes it possible for fake websites be set up to fool people to think they’re signing up for Obamacare.

“It’s seriously bad,” McAfee said. “Somebody made a grave error, not in designing the program but in simply implementing the web aspect of it. I mean, for example, anybody can put up a web page and claim to be a broker for this system. There is no central place where I can go and say, ‘OK, here are all the legitimate brokers, the examiners for all of the states and pick and choose one.’”

“Instead, any hacker can put a website up, make it look extremely competitive, and because of the nature of the system — and this is health care, after all — they can ask you the most intimate questions, and you’re freely going to answer them,” he continued. “What’s my Social Security number? My birth date? What are my health issues?

According to McAfee, there’s not a quick fix — and as long as it set up this way, it could be a playground for computer hackers.

“Here’s the problem: It’s not something software can solve,” McAfee continued. “I mean, what idiot put this system out there and did not create a central depository? There should be one website, run by the government, you go to that website and then you can click on all of the agencies. This is insane. So, I will predict that the loss of income for the millions of Americans who are going to lose their identities — I mean, you can imagine some retired lady in Utah, who has $75,000 dollars in the bank, saving her whole life, having it wiped out in one day because she signed up for Obamacare. And believe me, this is going to happen millions of times. This is a hacker’s wet dream. I mean I cannot believe that they did this.”