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It is instructive to watch President Obama talk to the American people using center-right language about choice and incentives. But he is talking not about choices and markets but about a comprehensive and mandatory administrative program of staggering complexity. It will not deliver choice and efficiency; it will not deliver more health care for more people with less money. It will further rigidify and constrain health care options and, where it subsidizes use of health care resources, run up the costs.
And the whole exercise is a classic demonstration of government trying to get out of a jam caused by administrative compulsion and subsidy -- with, what else? more compulsion and subsidy.
Most likely the president will get some sort of a bill out of Congress and declare victory. And then a few months later the think tanks will report that the Medicare unfunded liability is now the ObamaCare unfunded liability, and it just doubled from $30 trillion to $60 trillion.
Hey. It's just your money.
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Tuesday, August 4, 2009
Fixing Government's Health Care Mess With Our Money
Wyden-Bennett bill merits debate
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The health care reform proposal that Utah Republican Sen. Bob Bennett co-sponsors with Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden, known as the Wyden-Bennett plan, has mostly been ignored on Capitol Hill ... until recently.
We think it's time for Congress to take a close look at the senators' Healthy Americans Act. It has enough innovative ideas that merit consideration.
The Wyden-Bennett plan has two advantages:
- * It is a real bipartisan health care reform bill that has not achieved "bipartisanship" through tortorous, lobbyists-influenced negotiations.
- * Second, and perhaps most importantly, it is scored by the CBO -- which, remember is nonpartisan -- as having no adverse effect on the budget deficit.
In a nutshell, the Wyden-Bennett plan would allow workers to move away from employer plans and into national or state health insurance exchanges. The pools of health care insurance options would drive down costs. Employees who moved out of a worker health plan would get a pay increase that matched the cost of their new, outside plan.
There is tough medicine in the plan. It would end the tax exemption for employer-paid insurance. But that may be a reality to face if we want a health care system that can pay for adding the uninsured to health care insurance rolls. Wyden-Bennett also promises to provide legitimate competition in public insurance. That has real potential to drive down costs. Its incentives to shop for health care coverage would spur much-needed competition in the industry.
We're not offering an endorsement of the Healthy Americans Act. Given the realities of what politicians have the courage to vote for, the entire bill remains a longshot. However, it would be wise to start thinking about the Wyden-Bennett bill before final legislation lurches out of Congress.
To see a PDF draft of the Healthy Americans Act, go to:
http://wyden.senate.gov/issues/Healthy%20Americans%20Act/HAA_How_It_Works.pdf
full draft >
http://wyden.senate.gov/issues/Healthy%20Americans%20Act/HAA_Section_by_Section.pdf
[Not perfect, but perhaps the path to - in that nothing will ever be fixed about the run-away costs of health care until we undo the disastrous separation of paying customer (employers) and consumers (employees). Only a truly free market with folks spending their own money on care can provided the honest leveling that needs to take place - it's past time we start the job. This bill seems to be that first step toward providing individual insurance competition just as we already have for auto insurance - it's the right {only} long term solution that can't be 'gamed' by special interests at our expense.]
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then >
"DEBATE Wyden-Bennett 'Healthy Americans Act'"
Whitehouse: mailto:president@whitehouse.gov
Senate-Reid: http://reid.senate.gov/contact/index.cfm
YOUR Senator: http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm
or: Speed Message them with your personal distribution list...
CBS Sees ‘Runaway Success’ in Failing ‘Cash for Clunkers’ Program
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Reporting on the Obama administration’s ‘Cash for Clunkers’ car buying program running out of money, CBS correspondent Nancy Cordes offered a mixed message:
"‘Cash for Clunkers’ has been such a runaway success....The program is so popular...word spread it would be suspended...because of fears that sales would soon swallow up the $1 billion for rebates the government had set aside."
In her report, Cordes cited one new car salesman who happily remarked:
"People are loving it. It’s wonderful. It’s a great stimulus package."
However, she later concluded that the failing program let:
"a lot of car sales and cash hang in the balance. So the two big questions for lawmakers and the administration today. Number one, how could they have so vastly overestimated how long this money would last? And number two, where will they find the cash infusion to keep ‘Cash for Clunkers’ going?"
ABC’s Good Morning America provided the most comprehensive and critical report on the program. Unlike CBS and NBC, the ABC morning show highlighted major problems with the government website design to handle rebate requests. Consumer correspondent Elizabeth Leamy reported:
....The computer crashes have caused a backlog. As many as 25,000 transactions that dealers have made, but the government hasn't yet officially approved....Now, dealers are worried they'll be stuck holding the bag....Some dealers are actually now making people sign something, saying they will return their shiny, new car, if the government reneges on the deal...
[They can't manage a 1 billion dollar program. One Trillion $ Health Care anyone?]
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Police foil suicide plot to storm Australian Army base
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(Sydney) Several Australian men have been arrested in a series of counter-terrorism raids across Melbourne after police uncovered a plot by Islamic extremists linked to al-Qaeda to mount a suicide attack on an Army base.
Authorities believe the group, of Somalian and Lebanese background, was at an advanced stage of preparing to storm an Army barracks in retaliation for Australia’s military involvement in Muslim countries...
[GWOT]
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Thinking the unthinkable
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When the 9/11 Commission issued its report, it complained that federal agencies had a colossal “failure of imagination.” Nobody could accuse Newt Gingrich of suffering from that shortfall.
When he delivered a major address on national security last week, the former House speaker went after Defense Secretary Robert Gates for planning for the future the Pentagon wants, rather than dealing with the many serious problems it may actually face.
Gingrich mentioned one challenge that many find too terrible to contemplate — which is why our government should spend a lot more time doing exactly that...[snip]
EMP is not normally addressed when talking about nuclear attack because most strikes are planned as low-air bursts where most of the energy, EMP included, goes straight into the ground. A deliberate EMP attack, however, would be different. If, for example, an enemy detonated a nuclear weapon carried on a ballistic missile 200 miles or so above Earth, people on the ground might never know an attack occurred.
But if the explosion happened high enough over North America, the blossom of EMP might cover the entire United States... [snip]
The entire U.S. electrical grid might be gone and all the instruments of daily life that depend on electrical power useless. Just keeping modern-day America fed would be virtually impossible without working transportation or communications systems. Water-pumping and sewage-treatment plants would be offline. Modern medical care would be virtually nonexistent. Even if the rest of the world mustered the largest humanitarian mission in human history, the suffering would be unprecedented.
EMP attacks are often thought off of as attacks against the U.S. infrastructure. But the truth is a large-scale one would be an instrument of genocide... [snip]
Washington, D.C. is truly out to lunch on this one. Homeland Security doesn’t even include an EMP as one of their disaster-planning scenarios. As for the Pentagon, Gates just cut 10 percent of the missile-defense budget — the best weapons we have to prevent EMP attacks. Congress is equally in la-la land. Having commissioned the EMP report and accepted its findings, last week the Senate joined the House in rubber-stamping Gates’ missile-defense cuts.
The idea that someone would attack the U.S. with jet airliners once seemed unthinkable...
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US urges Iran reply by September
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US Defence Secretary Robert Gates has urged Iran to respond to US diplomatic overtures by September. His Israeli counterpart Ehud Barak indicated that military action remained an option on Iran, following talks with Mr Gates in Jerusalem.
Senior US officials are engaged in a drive to breathe new life into faltering regional peace moves. On Monday, Mr Gates said the US offer to Iran was ''not open-ended''...
[Ok, we're 'urging'. Terrific.]
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It's Crunch Time for Israel on Iran
After years of failed diplomacy no one will be able to call an attack precipitous
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Legions of senior American officials have descended on Jerusalem recently, but the most important of them has been Defense Secretary Robert Gates. His central objective was to dissuade Israel from carrying out military strikes against Iran’s nuclear weapons facilities. Under the guise of counseling “patience,” Mr. Gates again conveyed President Barack Obama’s emphatic thumbs down on military force.
Mr. Obama has no new strategic thinking on Iran. He vaguely promises to offer the country the carrot of diplomacy—followed by an empty threat of sanctions down the road if Iran does not comply with the U.S.’s requests. This is precisely the European Union’s approach, which has failed for over six years...
Under the worst-case scenario, Iran will continue improving its nuclear facilities and Mr. Obama will become the first U.S. president in history to tie the issue of Israel’s nuclear capabilities into negotiations about Iran’s.
Relations between the U.S. and Israel are more strained now than at any time since the 1956 Suez Canal crisis. Mr. Gates’s message for Israel not to act on Iran, and the U.S. pressure he brought to bear, highlight the weight of Israel’s lonely burden.
Absent Israeli action, prepare for a nuclear Iran.
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2,000-year-old ritual cup found in Old City of Jerusalem
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U.S. archaeologists have found an extremely rare 2,000-year-old limestone cup inscribed with 10 lines of Hebrew script near the Zion Gate of the Old City of Jerusalem...
[Anyone still buy the 'Palestinian narrative' that it's Jews that are interlopers/squatters in that part of the world? {Sadly, you'll find many who answer 'yes' in the UN and, now, the US State Department}]
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Islam just isn't into us
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“I have the highest respect for the religion of Islam, and recognize the heroic efforts of many religious leaders in contemporary Iran to stand up to the repressions wrought by the ruling system,”
says Jewish human rights activist Irwin Cotler as preface to his main point;
Dear fellow Jews, what is so hard to understand about “we hate your guts, and will continue to kill and maim you”?
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The Religion of Peace
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On Saturday, a frenzied mob of three thousand Muslims stormed the tiny Pakistani Christian village of Gojra . Enflamed by (unconfirmed) charges that a Christian had burned pages of the Qur’an, the mob burned down fifty homes, burned eight Christians alive, and wounded twenty others. Thousands of Christians fled the area.
Last Thursday, enraged by the same report of blasphemy, another Muslim mob torched seventy-five Christian homes, along with two churches, in Koriyan, a village near Gojra.
On July 18, Muslims in Alexandria , Egypt kidnapped a sixteen-year-old Christian girl, Amira Markos, while she was on her way to work. Shortly thereafter her mother received a phone call:
“At 10 o’clock of the same morning someone called me and asked if I was Amira’s mother. He introduced himself as Sheikh Mohammed, and said that my daughter is fine and will convert to Islam. When I cried and begged him to let me have my daughter back, he said he would let me see her again after her conversion to Islam, and ended the call.”
Amira’s mother went to a local mosque, where matters got even worse. A Muslim sheikh told her:
“Listen, mother of Amira, I am warning you not to report the abduction to the police or do anything, the price will be your son Meena [a nine-year-old boy] being slaughtered in front of your own eyes. I am not threatening, I’m talking seriously. Listen, your daughter Amira will convert to Islam next Friday, and we are now preparing her for that. Now go home and stay indoors until everything is quietly over.”
This is nothing new... [snip]
Yet these incidents have received only scant attention in the mainstream media.
And not only the international media, but also the human rights establishment and the United Nations, continue to take no notice. In their conceptual framework, only Westerners can do evil, and Christians cannot possibly play the role of victim.
The sooner the world casts off these Leftist/jihadist fantasies, the better off we’ll all be. But there are no signs that such an awakening will take place anytime soon, if ever.
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BTW: the NYT's title for a story on the same atrocity?
"Hate Engulfs Christians in Pakistan"
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EU warns Georgia, S.Ossetia against raising tension
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Brussels - The European Union urged Georgia and South Ossetia Monday not to raise tensions around the rebel territory, calling for ''unrestricted access'' for EU monitors to both sides of its administrative boundary..
[Hypocritical EUnuchs.]
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THE NATIONALIZATION OF YOUR BODY
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Health care is a game-changer. The permanent game-changer.
The pendulum will swing, and one day, despite their best efforts, the Republicans will return to power, and, in the right circumstances, the bailouts and cap-&-trade and Government Motors and much of the rest can be reversed. But the government annexation of health care will prove impossible to roll back. It alters the relationship between the citizen and the state and, once that transformation is effected, you can click your ruby slippers all you want but you’ll never get back to Kansas.
Government-directed health care is a profound assault on the concept of citizenship. It deforms national politics very quickly, and ensures that henceforth elections are always fought on the left’s terms. I find it hard to believe President Obama and his chums haven’t looked at Canada and Europe and concluded that health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture... [snip]
Ultimately, it’s not the nationalization of health care but the nationalization of your body.
Right now, if you want an MRI, it’s between you and your doctors. In a government-run system, if you want an MRI and you can’t get one, it’s the government’s fault. And the government should do something about it. Not give you the MRI, of course (that’s too obvious, as well as too expensive), but at least introduce a new Patient’s Bill of Rights, as Gordon Brown’s just done, promising every Briton the “right” to hospital treatment --- within 18 weeks...
[Are we really this foolish?
Long-ish - Highly Recommended > ]
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Biggest revenue drop since 1932
The recession is starving the government of tax revenue, just as the president and Congress are piling a major expansion of health care and other programs on the nation's plate and struggling to find money to pay the tab. The numbers could hardly be more stark: Tax receipts are on pace to drop 18 percent this year, the biggest single-year decline since the Great Depression...
[But they keep - on - spending...]
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NBC, CBS Skip Study on Massive New Obama Spending
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Of the three network morning shows, only ABC highlighted a new study by the Heritage Foundation that reported how the federal government's massive spending will average almost $34,000 per household in 2009, up $8000 from last year.
On Monday, Good Morning America news anchor Chris Cuomo also appeared amazed at wasteful, bureaucratic errors:
"Seventy two billion dollars spent by our government to the wrong people in either double payments or mispayments."
The report explained,
"The 2009 version of ‘Federal Spending by the Numbers’ shows spending and deficits surging at a pace not seen since World War II."
NBC’s Today and CBS’s Early Show have, thus far, not reported on the Heritage study.
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Decline in GDP 'Hopeful Sign' for NY Times -- Yet Gain During Bush Years Meant Recession
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Is there a double standard in how the struggling economy is being portrayed during the Obama presidency vs. the Bush administration?
Saturday's lead story by Catherine Rampell and Jack Healy focused on the Gross Domestic Product figure issued by the Commerce Department, showing a 1% contraction in the U.S. economy in the second quarter of 2009. The Times portrayed it in positive terms in a triple deck of headlines: "In Hopeful Sign, Output Declines At Slower Pace -- Economy Contracts 1%"
In fact, Friday's figures mark the first time in decades that the economy has contracted for four straight quarters. But the Times buried that finding in the 21st of 25 paragraphs:
"The economy withered during each of the last four quarters, its longest string of declines in at least 60 years."
By contrast, one year ago, the Bush administration released GDP figures showing the economy had grown 1.9% in the second quarter of 2008, a substantial increase [doubling] from 0.9% in the first quarter of 2008.
Did the Times celebrate that uptick in growth during a Republican administration?
Hardly. The headline over Peter Goodman's August 1, 2008 story:
"More Arrows Seen Pointing to a Recession"
[What bias?]
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THE DANGERS OF HOT AIR
The real purpose of the Waxman-Markey climate bill is to vastly expand the scope, power and authority of the federal government...
The Waxman-Markey climate emissions bill is one of the oddest and most far-reaching pieces of legislation ever advanced. Though it passed the House by a slim margin, a 219-212 vote, most of America's states and communities didn't like the bill.
No wonder, for it would regulate many things -- energy, wages, imported goods, corporations, states, cities, buildings and houses. It would be without question the biggest expansion of federal government control over our economy since the 1930s. According to the Heritage Foundation:
- The bill would reduce America's real gross domestic product by $400 billion each year -- a cumulative loss of $9.4 trillion by 2035 -- leading to almost 2.5 million job losses, and raise inflation-adjusted electricity rates by 90 percent.
- For a household of four, it would cost on average $2,979 annually and in 2035 the total family cost would be over $4,600 for everything, including power, food, supplies, gasoline and transportation.
- The federal government would have full control over global-warming matters; states would not be permitted to create their own cap-and-trade programs, but could be given emission allowances by which they could sell to generate funds for clean energy programs.
- The federal government would also have control over the carbon permit process.
- It would give away 85 percent of the permits to utility companies, refineries and other politically connected businesses, and these no-cost permits could be used by companies to continue to crank out historically high CO2 emission levels, or be sold to other companies for real money.
- Next would come the expansion of American protectionism that would end up hurting American businesses.
[We've been warned.]
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White House Science Adviser Advocated 'De-Development' of the United States
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President Obama’s top science adviser, John P. Holdren, advocated the ''de-development'' of the United States in books he published in the 1970s.
'
'A massive campaign must be launched to restore a high-quality environment in North America and to de-develop the United States,''
Holdren wrote in a 1973 book the need for ''de-development'' of the United States demanded a redistribtuion of wealth...
[The kids are truly dangerous in their extreme radicalness]
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Britain To Put CCTV Cameras Inside Private Homes
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As an ex-Brit, I’m well aware of the authorities’ love of surveillance and snooping, but even I, a pessimistic cynic, am amazed by the governments latest plan: to install Orwell’s telescreens in 20,000 homes. £400 million ($668 million) will be spend on installing and monitoring CCTV cameras in the homes of private citizens.
Why?
To make sure the kids are doing their homework...
[Government run 'education']
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