President Obama in campaign mode for Florida trip
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image toon - 1st fnn reps libs = Oby still campaigning
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Organized crime's new target: Medicare
Subject: txt 1st hcare -
Organized crime gangs are exploiting a new target for illegal profit: Medicare and Medicaid. Experienced in running drug, prostitution and gambling rings, crime groups of various ethnicities and nationalities are learning it's safer and potentially more profitable to file fraudulent claims with the federal Medicare program and state-run Medicaid plans.
"They're hitting us and hitting us hard," said Timothy Menke, head of investigations for the Office of Inspector General at the Department of Health and Human Services. "Organized crime involvement in health care fraud is widespread."
Los Angeles is among the hot spots for health care fraud, where Russian, Armenian and Nigerian gangs have been caught by federal agents.
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Medicare Fraud - $60 Billion and Growing
Subject: txt 1st hcare -
Steve Kroft traveled South Florida with the FBI to investigate fraudulent medical equipment suppliers and fake self-storage garage pharmacies collecting millions of dollars per month from Medicare and then disappearing quickly.
Several interesting facts: Medicare has 3 investigators for the state of Florida; however a convicted criminal states that there are over 2000 people in the Miami area alone participating in Medicare fraud.
The woman in charge of enforcement at Medicare makes the lame excuse that their enforcement budget is too small. [It's government; the budget will always be 'too small'.]
The criminals have left drug dealing because Medicare fraud is easier, less dangerous, offers shorter prison terms if convicted, and is way more profitable.
This fraud casts serious doubt on the government's ability to run any program that doles out lots of cash.
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Medicare Fraud Raises 'Troubling Questions About Our Government's Ability to Manage a Medical Bureaucracy'
Subject: txt 1st hcare -
"60 Minutes" did a fabulous exposé Sunday on Medicare fraud that should be required viewing for all people who support a government run healthcare program in this country.
The facts and figures presented by CBS's Steve Kroft were disturbing as were the details concerning how shysters bilk the system for an estimated $60 billion a year.
As Kroft warned viewers in the segment's teaser,
"We caution you that this story may raise your blood pressure, along with some troubling questions about our government's ability to manage a medical bureaucracy"
(video embedded below the fold with partial transcript, h/t Marc Sheppard):
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Medicare Fraud:A $60 Billion Crime
[HT:LDot:
If you missed the 60 Minutes expose last night on this horror, track it down and watch. Appalling
.
Adaquate?
Subject: txt 1st hcare mny =
"The [Medicare] HI trust fund is not adequately financed over the next 10 years. At the beginning of 2009 the assets of the HI trust fund were $321 billion and are projected to be exhausted during 2017, under the intermediate assumptions. The HI trust fund does not meet the short-range test of financial adquacy."
Board of Trustees of the Federal Hospital Insurance and Federal
Supplementary Medical Insurance [Medicare] Trust Funds, May 2009.
Supplementary Medical Insurance [Medicare] Trust Funds, May 2009.
Medicare Trust Fund
Source: Office of the Actuary for Medicare.
Medicare expenditures (% GDP) in 2008: 3.2%.
Projected for 2035: 7.3%.
Projected in 75 years: 11.4%.
[That's not our government - it's one program within it - >10% of GDP.]
Source: Office of the Actuary for Medicare.
Total Defense expenditures (% GDP) for the years 2004-2007 [while fighting two wars]: 4.0%.
[We're following the Europeans toward mortgaging our defense capabilities for ever expanding welfare programs. The critical difference being that there's no remaining superpower to protect us when they're gone.]
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Navy surrenders one new aircraft carrier in budget battle
[UK]
The Royal Navy has agreed to sacrifice one of its two new aircraft carriers to save about £8.2 billion from the defence budget.
The admirals, who have battled for a decade to secure the two new 65,000-ton carriers, have been forced to back down because of the soaring cost of the American-produced Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) aircraft due to fly off them.
The move will leave the navy without a carrier when the Queen Elizabeth goes into refit, leaving open the possibility that it might have to borrow one from the French navy.
In a meeting with Brown last year, Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, had suggested that refits of French and British aircraft carriers should be 'co-ordinated'.
[Two (2) carriers for all of Britain - and that's the ramped-up sum.
Again, when next enlightened socialist points to Europe managing to survive its high welfare budgets, remind them that they've mortgaged their defense capabilities the past 30 years to do so.]
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Swedish soldiers forced to train in soleless boots
[Another one, reported the same day as above]
Shortages in standard issue military clothing have forced Swedish conscripts to wash their uniforms at home and train in boots without soles.
''The soldiers’ boots lacked soles and in some cases had been previously issued to other soldiers up to eight times,''
Nitz writes in his report. Furthermore, the regiment is so short on uniforms that soldiers are forced to continue wearing their only set of military clothing for days on end without washing...
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Obama Economic Advisor Touts 'Cadillac Tax' as No. 1 Cost Saver
Subject: txt 1st hcare =
President Obama's chief economic forecaster went to bat on Monday for a tax on high-priced insurance plans, the so-called ''Cadillac tax,'' calling it
"probably the number one item that health economists across the ideological spectrum believe is likely to stem the explosion of health-care costs.''
[It enables high cost to continue by finding a scape goat for them. Only open price competition will bring it down - an approach missing from all 'reform' proposals in congress.]
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Public option 'mirage'
Subject: txt hcare - 1st -
Those of us who oppose Obamacare's "public option" insurance plan may be advocating the wrong reasons for doing so, says columnist Robert Samuelson in the Washington Post.
While pointing up some of the obvious drawbacks, the real downer for the public option is that those who believe in its stated benefits - or posit dire consequences from its passage - are looking at a mirage:
The promise of the public plan is a mirage. Its political brilliance is to use free-market rhetoric (more "choice" and "competition") to expand government power.
This is why the liberals want to go "all in" on the public option. The artificially low premiums - subsidized by taxpayers - would eventually force private insurers to the sidelines where only the wealthy could afford the coverage. The rest of us would be stuck with lower quality care, less of it, and ever expanding taxpayer subsidies as the cost of health care continued upwards.
Samuelson calls for an honest debate on these consequences. He is dreaming. Democrats want these consequences to come to pass which is why they are pushing so hard for the public option in the first place.
[Its got nothing to do with providing health care.]
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Shirking cost control
Subject: txt 1st hcare mny -
The "public option" is dangerous not for what it might do but for what it allows the politicians not to do.
From the start, the Obama administration has said that health-care reform has to make health care both more accessible and less costly .
If Congress does the first without the second -- guarantees a new entitlement without controlling costs -- it will bankrupt us ...
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POLL: Government Health Care: Raise Costs, Reduce Quality, Don't Want
Subject: txt 1st hcare =
If the health care plan proposed by President Obama and congressional Democrats passes, 57% of voters nationwide believe it will raise the cost of health care, and 53% believe the quality of care will get worse. That’s part of the reason that just 45% support the plan.
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 51% are opposed to it. Those numbers include 23% who Strongly Favor the plan and 40% who are Strongly Opposed.
Just 18% say passage of the congressional plan will reduce costs, while only 23% believe it will lead to better care. Still, despite the less-than-enthusiastic support, 54% say passage of the plan is at least somewhat likely this year. Thirty-five percent (35%) say it is not.
Voters under 30 are most likely to support the health care proposal while those over 65 are the least supportive.
[Amazing. Have they not done the math? {rhetorical: obviously not}]
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Reid: Senate Bill Will Include Government-Backed 'Public Option'
Subject: txt 1st hcare =
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Monday that Senate Democrats will include in the health care reform bill a government-backed health insurance program that allows states to opt out if they can come up with an alternative. '
[Evidently our betters know better than us.]
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Pelosi: Health care 'public option' needs new name
Subject: txt 1st hcare =
A government-sponsored "public option" for health care lives, though it may be more attractive to skeptics if it goes by a different moniker, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Monday. In an appearance at a Florida senior center, the Democratic leader referred to the so-called public option as "the consumer option." Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., appeared by Pelosi's side and used the term "competitive option."
[The daily insult.]
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Painful but Winable
Subject: txt gwot -
Rajiv Chandrasekaran writes in the Washington Post about the Marines’ success in pacifying Nawa in southern Afghanistan — the same story I mentioned in my New York Times op-ed. Chandrasekaran’s article is excellent and adds more details than I could include in a brief opinion piece. He suggests, as did I, that the relative success in Nawa — admittedly fragile and limited — indicates “that after eight years of war the United States still may be able to regain momentum in some areas that had long been written off to the Taliban.”
To expand such successful efforts across southern and eastern Afghanistan will require more troops, more time, more money — and more casualties. It’s a painful process, but what choice do we have unless we want to risk Afghanistan reverting to its pre-9/11 state? Options such as “reintegration” — offering incentives to lure Taliban fighters to lay down their arms (described in this USA Today article) — are unlikely to work until foreign and Afghan troops have changed the facts on the ground to convince the Taliban they can’t win. Other shortcuts such as the counterterrorism option or training Afghan forces can complement a large ground-force commitment but can’t substitute for it.
For an explanation of why there is no credible Plan B in Afghanistan — any more than there was in Iraq when the surge was being debated — see this New Republic article by my Council on Foreign Relations colleague Stephen Biddle.
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There’s No Substitute for Troops on the Ground
Subject: txt gwot -
“I HOPE people who say this war is unwinnable see stories like this. This is what winning in a counterinsurgency looks like.”
Lt. Col. William F. McCollough, commander of the First Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment, is walking me around the center of Nawa, a poor, rural district in southern Afghanistan’s strategically vital Helmand River Valley. His Marines, who now number more than 1,000, arrived in June to clear out the Taliban stronghold. Two weeks of hard fighting killed two Marines and wounded 70 more but drove out the insurgents. Since then the colonel’s men, working with 400 Afghan soldiers and 100 policemen, have established a “security bubble” around Nawa.
The key to success in Nawa — and in other key districts from Garmsir in the south to Baraki Barak in the center — has been the infusion of additional United States troops. ...
Some in the White House and Congress imagine that our troops can muddle along at current levels while training the Afghan security forces to take over.
But this ignores the brutal logic of war: Either you have the initiative or the enemy does.
Poor governance is an argument for, not against, a troop surge.
Only by sending more personnel, military and civilian, can President Obama improve the Afghan government’s performance, reverse the Taliban’s gains and prevent Al Qaeda’s allies from regaining the ground they lost after 9/11...
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Karzai questions US reliability as partner
Subject: txt gwot - 
Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai questioned the reliability of the United States as a partner Sunday, as he fought off criticism of his government's legitimacy following fraud-marred elections. ..
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Biden’s Response to Cheney Criticism: ‘Who Cares?’
Subject: txt gwot nsec -
Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. had a blunt response Friday to the latest broadsides from former Vice President Dick Cheney:
“Who cares?”
[Is our Vice President really that foolish?]
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Covering for Obama MSM Play Vietnam Defeat Song in Afghanistan
Subject: txt gwot -
Three weeks after their gushing praise of President Obama's meeting with Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the media have taken a cue from the lack of action that followed.
It was a good run while it lasted.
Word from the conflict became more dire almost by the day as Obama's cabinet squabbled. The American media, having sensed Afghanistan could be lost without action, chose to cover for their favorite president and begin the process of mentally preparing the public for defeat.
The Washington Post published a perfect example of the new meme in Howard Kurtz's column on October 23. Kurtz attacked Republicans as "armchair quarterbacks" for their criticism of Obama's stalling and said it was "rich" of Dick Cheney to demand a new plan.
As for what that plan might be, Kurtz's Vietnam defeat song sounded all too familiar...
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No, Mr. President ~ Not Again
Subject: txt gwot -
No, Mr. President and all members of the Senate and the House - we will NOT allow our Finest to be a part of your political games. You sit there in your warm and cushy offices, all safe and sound from the horrors of war and diddle with our kids lives.
You stand up every now and then when photo ops abound or political points can be scored and reporters wait breathlessly to take down every golden word from your lying lips. I was told that actions speak louder than words and I have found that to be true time and time again over the decades I have been alive. Your actions - or lack thereof speak volumes. Words are cheap, but our kids’ lives are not. We are done with your words.
You say you support the troops ~ Put your money where your words come from. Stop apologizing for the country and Law of the Land that our kids are defending every day. Stand up and really support our Troops. Get comfortable with the word, “Victory” or get out of the way. A defeatist CIC just gets more of our kids killed.
And that, Sir, will not do.
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Hoffman calls for introduction of flat tax
Subject: txt mny - 
SYRACUSE - Congressional candidate Doug Hoffman said Thursday he would be willing to sacrifice a sizeable portion of his income if it meant the adoption of a simpler, fairer tax code.
Armey, who joined Hoffman at Thursday's press conference, called the flat tax "the best option available to us."
He said the current tax system is used to redistribute wealth and for social engineering, when the only legitimate purpose of taxes is to raise revenue for governments.
But if history is any indication, Hoffman won't be facing a loss of revenue any time soon...
[It's justice we're after - and what's that got to do with fairness? No chance.]
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Hoffman is the Obvious Choice
Subject: txt gdd reps othr - 
Conservatives do not always have obvious choices when deciding whether or not to support a RINO. The situation is entirely different in the 23rd Congressional District of New York in the special election.
[What good is electing a 'republican' if their policies are liberal? Much better to fight the long war, and insist on conservative representation even if a few election cycles need be lost to make the point.]
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Campaigning for Integrity
txt reps gdd othr - 
I do not live in New York’s 23rd congressional district, and I’ve never hiked the Adirondacks, which run through it. I’ve never met Doug Hoffman, who is running for Congress there, and hadn’t heard his name until fairly recently. But he’s my guy this November. Since I’m not a constituent, my support for a candidate is about integrity, as it is in a few other races I’m following closely.
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Hoffman and Palin: 'Get Back the Soul' of the GOP
Subject: txt palin -
Doug Hoffman, the Conservative Party candidate challenging liberal Republican Dede Scozzafava and Democrat Bill Owens in New York’s 23rd congressional district, has had quite a week.
“I’ve been overwhelmed by all of the national support,” Hoffman tells NRO. “Sarah stands up for what she believes in and is a commonsense conservative, a Reagan Republican,” says Hoffman. “I feel like I’m an average citizen. Sarah reflects those kinds of values.”
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Pawlenty bucks GOP, endorses Hoffman
Subject: txt reps gdd -
Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R) became the latest Republican to buck his own party Monday, wading into a New York special election to offer support for Conservative Party nominee Doug Hoffman instead of the GOP nominee.
"We cannot send more politicians to Washington who wear the Republican jersey on the campaign trail, but then vote like Democrats in Congress on issues like card check and taxes,"
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NY23: First Palin, Now Pawlenty -- Will Huckabee Endorse Hoffman Next?
Subject: txt reps gdd othr -
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Hoffman Leading?
Subject: txt reps gdd -
The blogosphere is abuzz over a new poll showing Conservative candidate Doug Hoffman leading Democrat Bill Owens and Republican Dede Scozzafava in the race to replace Congressman John McHugh (R), who resigned to become Obama's Secretary of the Army. The Club for Growth-sponsored poll by Basswood Research shows Hoffman with 31%, Owens with 27%, and Scozzafava at 20%.
In the absence of a few more datapoints from non-partisan pollsters, this race remains in the "who knows what's really going on" category. But a Hoffman victory doesn't seem as improbable as it did a week ago...
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Ideals trump party
Subject: txt reps gdd othr - palin - for Pali
Sarah Palin's decision late last week to endorse the Conservative Party candidate over the Republican nominee in a special U.S. House election in Upstate New York is the latest example that the former Alaska governor's allegiance is to her conservative principles rather than the party's edicts. "
Conservatives around the country are sending an important message to the Republican establishment in their outstanding grassroots support for Doug Hoffman: no more politics as usual,"Palin wrote on her Facebook page.
[Exactly. Also, to those doubting Thomas' re: my OPEN {On-line Partyless Electorate Nominating} electoral process, note the woman is consistantly capturing the national spot via her Facebook postings... It's the caliber of the idea, not the medium.]
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