June, 2014 Political Class Insanity, Part 2: Debating The Merits Of Yogurt, Unintended Heroin Consequences In Afghanistan, and More

This is our second post this month in our recurring monthly series on political class insanity. We do this update every month in order to stay on top of the never ending wasteful spending, idiocy, inane comments, and ineffective programs that the American political class continually piles on us, the nation, our freedoms, and the economy. 

1) Over Memorial Day weekend, traditionally a heavy car traveling time, the Obama administration set another dubious record relative to not having a comprehensive and strategic energy plan and vision for the country, a plan that would reduce energy costs while protecting the environment. 

May 26 marked the 1,251th consecutive day that the national average for a gallon of regular gasoline in this country cost more than $3 a gallon, according to AAA data. Recall that when Obama came into office, the average price for that same gallon of regular gas was about $1.89. Thus, during the first five and a half years of this administration, the cost of gas has gone up about 93% relative to today’s average price of just over $3.62 a gallon.

And given the Washington political class’s inability to think strategically or agree on just about anything, it is highly doubtful that the American consumer and driver will see any kind of breakthrough in this area in the near or distant future. Constantly high gas prices force consumers and households to divert their income and wealth to energy needs and not for growing the economy.

2) The next one I love since it proves that at whatever level of government a politician is residing, they almost always have the wrong priorities and work on the little stupid issues that no one really cares about in these time of high unemployment, failing public schools, a lost war on drugs, leaky borders, etc.

State senators in New York were hard at work recently spending legislative time on whether or not to make yogurt the official state snack. Let me let that statement sink in for a minute. Of all the problems facing New Yorkers, these buffoons are not only proposing that yogurt become the official snack of the state they are actually DEBATING the issue. You cannot make this lunacy up.

The following video clip from Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart highlights the best moments of this debate. Take note how one legislator actually wants to argue the definition of what a snack is:

http://blog.heritage.org/2014/05/12/joke-new-york-senate-passes-bill-making-yogurt-state-snack/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social

3) In a previous insanity post we had discussed the idiocy of having people on the payroll in Washington D.C. that are actually responsible for dictating how street crosswalks are to be designed and implemented. I guess they did not think that local politicians and local citizens could figure out how to implement safe school crossing signs. Such a waste of taxpayer wealth on Federal bureaucrats that add nothing to anyone’s life.

But this type of transportation related idiocy is not confined to street crossings. When the Federal government gives back each state a cut of the gasoline tax that the states collected in the first place, they dictate that 2% of those funds be used or set aside for Transportation Alternatives Programs or TAP.

TAP options include such things as sidewalks, streetlamps, bicycle paths and beautification. While some of these things might be necessary, e.g. sidewalks, does it make sense to force states to pay for shrubbery and bike paths when the country’s infrastructure is falling apart?

Is it better to fix a failing bridge or to plant some nice bushes next to a bike trail? Every dollar for beauty is one less dollar spent on safety. For example, the state of Pennsylvania is required to set aside $27.5 million for TAP programs in 2014 and NOT use that money to fix the 5,218 deficient and failing bridges in the state. Insanity that some nameless, faceless bureaucrat can dictate the priority of a bush over the safety of citizens.

4) The Obama administration has had an ugly and expensive tendency of betting taxpayer money on the wrong businesses and industries over the duration of its term. It lost tens of billions of dollars trying to prop up failing alternative energy companies, almost all of whom had contributed money to Obama’s election campaigns. These companies include but are not limited to, Solyndra, A123, Beacon, Evergreen, Spectra, and others.

Another failed bet, a bet that wasted billions and billions of taxpayer wealth, is General Motors. According to a May 15, 2013 Associated Press report, this is what we are getting from a quality perspective for our billions of dollars: 

• General Motors is recalling more than 140,000 2014 Chevrolet Malibu cars to fix a problem with the power-assisted brakes. 
• The recall affects models with 2.5-liter four-cylinder engines and stop-start technology that shuts off the engine at red lights. 
• The Malibus were part of a larger recall involving 2.7 million vehicles.
• The biggest component of the recall, 2.4 million midsize cars from model years 2004 to 2012, is concerned with brake lights that can fail.
• GM confirmed it knew about the defective brake light problem as early as 2008, about when the bailout plan involving tens of billions of tax dollars was starting to being formulated.
• This latest recall comes on the heels of another recall of 2.6 million smaller cars earlier this year for faulty ignition switches. 
• GM knew about that problem for at least a decade, well before Washington rewarded this type of behavior with a bailout.
• The ignition switch problem, which can unexpectedly shut down a car's engine, has been linked to at least 13 deaths.
• In total, GM has already recalled more than 11 million cars and trucks in the U.S. so far this year.

Three main insanity issues here. First, the Washington political class gave GM billions of dollars despite the many product problems it had that were likely killing Americans. Second, the Federal government, which is supposed to be protecting Americans from faulty products, failed miserably to act for over a decade despite being financed for all of these years with taxpayer money. And finally, did GM management intentionally cover up these fatal defects in order to have their company and careers saved by a taxpayer bailout? If so, is that a criminal act?

In any case, wasting money on defective products should never be a government function

5) About 80% of the world’s heroin supply is cultivated in Afghanistan, according to a recent Sacramento Bee article that was summarized in the February 21, 2014 issue of The Week magazine. Yes, the country where we were involved in the longest warfare in our history, a place where we wasted probably hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of American servicemen’s lives, is now the premier producer of illegal heroin.

Under the Taliban, the entire Afghan heroin industry was almost totally wiped out. Under the corrupt government we helped install, the heroin trade is now worth about $3 billion a year or about 15% of the country’s GDP. 

Thus, another incremental cost of our Afghan military venture will be the cost and destruction of heroin right here in this country’s streets from drug addiction. Talk about unintended consequences. But unintended consequences are a staple of the American political class who never attempt or never have the ability to think through what problems their actions might result in before jumping in without a long term strategic plan in place.

That will do it for today, but more insanity will follow at least into tomorrow. Until then, consider joining our movement to impose term limits on all Federal politicians, one and done. 

Because really, how much worse could it get if we replaced all of the current politicians in Washington, the same ones that botched the whole Afghanistan mission, the same ones that took our money and gave it to their corporate cronies for nothing in return, the same ones that rate shrubbery more important than road conditions, etc. Let’s replace the current ones with a new set of people who might be a lot smarter and a lot more concerned with the future of the country than what we are stuck with now:

www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

June, 2014 Political Class Insanity, Part 1: Exposing Our Own Spy's Cover, Our Lost Freedom Of The Press, Losing Libya, and More

It’s the beginning of another month, which means time for one of our regular features, political class insanity. The political class of America has been working overtime in the past month or so on their idiocy so we probably have a substantial number of days ahead of us to get all of the insanity in.

1) We have often made the case that we really no longer live in a free country. You cannot live in a free country when:

• The government controls most of your retirement income via Social Security.
• The government controls most of your retirement medical needs via Medicare.
• The government controls much of the pre-retirement medical needs via Obama Care.
• The government taxes you so much that in many states you do not starting working for yourself and your family until April of each year.
• The government decides that it can assassinate American citizens without legal due process.
• The government decides that it can hold citizens in custody for an unlimited amount of time without due process.
• The government spies on just about every piece of electronic communications that you use.
• The government controls most of the election processes that allows ill performing Washington politicians to manipulate those processes to stay in office despite their ineptness.

We could go on and on but you get the idea, anyone who still thinks we are living in a free country has not been paying attention.

And we now have another item to add to that list of our dwindling freedoms. The state of the free press in the U.S. is also on the endangered freedom list, according to the latest 2014 World Press Freedom Index. This index is annually compiled by Reporters Without Borders (Reporters sans frontières).

Unbelievably, in their current analysis the U.S. was ranked 46th among the 180 nations surveyed relative to freedom of the press in this country. This is a dismal drop of 13 places since last year. Finland, the Netherlands and Norway are among the most free nations for journalists. Iran, China and North Korea are among the most restrictive for reporters.

America's bad ranking was based on the conviction of WikiLeaks' informant Bradley (Chelsea) Manning and the treatment of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, along with the Obama administration's "increased efforts to track down whistleblowers and the sources of leaks." These infractions include but are not limited to:

• In 2013, it became known that the Justice Department had secretly obtained phone logs of Associated Press reporters. The Justice Department was also caught monitoring the personal email account for FOX News reporter James Rosen in order to discover government officials speaking to the press.
• They also monitored and sought the testimony of James Risen of the New York Times to testify against a former CIA employee accused of leaking classified information.
• Obama said in May 2013 that he was "troubled" at the possible overreach by the Justice Department and ordered the agency to review its guidelines on dealing with press investigations.
• The latest analysis accused the Obama White House of shielding the President from the press by not allowing the White House Press Corps sufficient access to photograph and question Obama during his official duties.

And when the Obama friendly New York Times agrees with the general conclusion of this analysis and index, you know things are getting bad from a freedom of the press perspective: "I would say it is the most secretive White House that I have ever been involved in covering," New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson told Al Jazeera America in late January. "The Obama administration has had seven criminal leak investigations. That is more than twice the number of any previous administration in our history. It's on a scale never seen before." 

2) The Obama administration violated the Constitution when it involved the U.S. and our military forces in an illegal and unnecessary military action in Libya several years ago to oust Ghadaffi. The actions put U.S. military personnel in harm’s way and ate up well over a billion dollars of taxpayer wealth.

And we did all of this for apparently no gain since earlier this week, the State Department issued a warning and advised all Americans who remained in Libya to evacuate immediately: “The Department of State warns U.S. citizens against all travel to Libya and recommends that U.S. citizens currently in Libya depart immediately. The security situation in Libya remains unpredictable and unstable. The Libyan government has not been able to adequately build its military and police forces and improve security following the 2011 revolution.”

The State Department explained that a number of threats by “various groups” have been made against Americans in the nation while reinforcing the reality that its capability to offer protection or emergency services at this time is “very limited.” Staffing at the U.S. Embassy in Libya’s capital city of Tripoli has been pared down as a result of the ongoing threats, the statement indicated.

Thus, by not having a long term strategy or knowledge of the whole Libyan situation, our participation in that internal civil war has resulted in a lawless, terrorist infested land that apparently has no sense of gratitude for us helping the Libyan citizens get rid of their long term dictator and tormentor. But this insanity should come as no surprise, this administration and the Washington political class have repeatedly shown absolutely no ability to think strategically and long term, think and act within established legal parameters, or generally get anything done right. The evacuation of Libya is just another failure on a long line of foreign policy failures of Washington over the past fifty years, regardless of who is in office in the White House or in Congress.

3) But American politicians are just as good as wasting money within our own borders as they are in wasting money in far flung disasters around the world. Researchers from George Mason University’s Mercatus Center recently completed a corporate cronyism study which found an incredible amount of taxpayer money being given out freely to corporations. A small sample of the wasteful spending includes:

• As of 2013, Walmart had received at least 260 special state benefits worth more than $1.2 billion. But for every 100 new Walmart jobs, an average of 50 existing jobs disappear as other retailers are crowded out so the incremental benefit of Walmart jobs is offset substantially by the killing off of other state jobs. 
• Apple got $370 million in state tax breaks for setting up in North Carolina. Since only 50 jobs were created within the state, North Carolina taxpayers ended up paying $7.4 million per incremental job created within the state. 
• New York granted aluminum giant Alcoa free electricity for more than 30 years (estimated value: $5.6 billion). In return, Alcoa pledged to make a $600 million investment and promised not to fire more than 165 workers. Subsequently, to pay for the deal, New York had to raise taxes multiple times on its citizens. This deal was even worse than the Apple/North Carolina deal since if we divide the 165 saved jobs into the $5.6 billion spent to save those jobs, the cost per saved job comes out to over $38 million per job.

Total insanity. Don’t these politicians know how to do simple math: spending taxpayer money at the rate of millions of dollars per job is no way to expand an economy. Stupid is too tame a word to use for these examples and others pointed out in the study.

4) The CIA has been around for about seventy years. The White House has been around for over two hundred years. Given the longevity of each, one would have thought they both would know how to keep a secret. After all, the CIA is our primary spy organization within the Federal government. They should be keeping all kinds of secrets and have processes in place to do so since a broken secret is highly likely to get somebody killed who is inside the CIA or working for the CIA and its spying and covert activities.

Well, one could think that but one would be wrong. In one of the most dangerous and idiotic goof ups of the Obama administration,

 the White House inadvertently blew the cover of the CIA’s top officer, its station chief, in Kabul. Afghanistan during President Obama’s recent surprise trip to Afghanistan. Unbelievably, the name of the spy agency’s station chief in Kabul was included on a list provided to news organizations participating in Mr. Obama’s visit with U.S. troops.

Nobody had to hack a CIA computer to get the name of the local CIA boss. Nobody had to capture and torture a CIA operative to get the information. Nobody had to plant a mole deep inside the CIA to ferret out the name of the CIA station head. No, the Obama administration just typed the name out on a piece of paper and then distributed it freely to many people.

You cannot make up this type of incompetence. If you went to Hollywood and had a movie idea that involved the President’s staff freely handing out the name of its top spy in one of the most dangerous areas of the world, they would laugh you out of the office. But that is what happened and that is why I continue to assert we are living through a period of our nation’s history where the most inept and incompetent people are in charge in Washington.

That will do it for today but plenty more insanity will be headed this way over the next week or so so brace yourself for more wasteful spending, ineffective programs, and the ongoing lunacy that is the political class.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

May, 2014 The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care, Part 4: Another Politicians Sepaks From Another World, Cancer Patients Cannot Afford Their Obama Care Drugs, Maryland Uninsures More Than It Insures and More

This is our fourth and final update post this month to the continuing saga, “the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care.” Despite being live in the market for well over six months, every day there seems to be another fiasco or unintended negative consequence of this law. That is why every month since last August we have had to dedicate multiple posts every month to discussion on what this disastrous law is doing to Americans, their health, the economy, and our freedoms.

1) We usually get our silly quotes or out of this world quotes from Nancy Pelosi, as we have already shared this week. However, she apparently does not have a monopoly on inane statements as we see from what U.S Senator Angus King said on a Sunday morning news show: “There’s no such thing as Obama Care. You can’t sign up for Obama Care. You sign up for an Anthem policy, or an Aetna policy, or a Welthorn policy. It’s private insurance.”

Who knew, there is no such thing as Obama Care. That 2,500 page piece of legislation that Reid, Pelosi, and Obama rushed through for passage was apparently a mirage. The fact that millions and millions of Americans have lost their insurance because of that piece of legislation is just a smoke screen. The fact that the American taxpayer spent billions of dollars on non-working health insurance websites because of the legislation was just a piece of mass hypnosis.

Of course it is private insurance, driven by the OBAMA CARE legislation. Again, what world, what reality do these Washington politicians live in? Pathetic.

2) On May 19, 2014, the website of Judicial Watch put out a public relations release that described the chaos and ineptness of the Obama Care rollout’s initial days and how that ineptness was likely still affecting the numbers that the Obama administration have been hyping as proof of success. Specifically, Judicial Watch’s Freedom of Information Act request went after “any and all records concerning, regarding, or related to the number of individuals that purchased health insurance through Healthcare.gov between October 1, 2013, and October 4, 2013.”

October 1, 2014 is critical since that was the first day that people could sign up for health insurance via the Federal Obama Care web portal/website. As you may recall, those first few days were an unmitigated disaster from a data systems perspective despite the government having over three years and having spent probably over a billion dollars trying to get ready.

The Judicial Watch posting reminds readers how it was impossible to get a total number of enrollees during those early days in October from the administration: “Marilyn Tavenner, head of the HHS Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, refused to disclose the number of people who had purchased insurance through the site saying, “We have just decided not to release that yet.””

We now know, via this Freedom Of Information Act effort, why the government was a little reluctant to tell what the enrollment numbers were:

• On October 1, there were 43,208 accounts created and a grand total of…one enrollment.
• As of October 31, 2013, there were 1,319,425 accounts created nationwide, resulting in only 30,512 actual enrollments in Obama Care, an enrollment closure rate of a measly 2.3%.
• At the end of the first day of open enrollment for Obama Care, October 1, 2013, the Senior Advisor at Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Brigid M. Russell, sent out an email to her staff with a subject line celebrating “2 enrollments!” The body copy of the email read: "We have our second official FFM enrollment! The first two Form 834s sent out are to: 1) CareSource in Ohio, 2) BCBS of North Carolina."
• Serious problems were not restricted to ordinary American citizens since all 24,000 Congressional staffers that are required to use Obama Care also faced numerous failures and delays. An October 2, 2013 email from HHS Special Assistant Marianne Bowen indicated serious problems with Congressional enrollments: “The Congressional issue (68 attempts for Direct enrollment) was an issue stemming from incomplete applications being sent through (started, not finished, sent anyway) and the way the issuers are assigning unique numbers. Turns out there were only 4 complete Direct Enrollment applications that went through, the other 64 were not complete."
• On October 2, 2013, the Obama Care website had 70 million page views but only 5 million were unique visitors, and a whopping 48% of registrations failed. 
• And here is the truly critical take away from the Judicial Watch information cache. On April 17, 2014, President Obama announced that eight million people had signed up for health insurance on Obama Care health insurance exchanges. However, this number may be seriously over estimated since, according to testimony earlier this month by the America’s Health Insurance Plans Association in front of the House Commerce Committee Subcommittee on Oversight, “Because of the challenges that surfaced with the launch of the Exchanges in October 2013, some consumers were advised to create a new account and enroll again. As a result, insurers have many duplicate enrollments in their system for which they never received any payment.”

Pathetic performance despite billions of dollars spent in systems development and government salaries dedicated to probably the worse product launch in the history of mankind. And eight months later, we still do not know how solid that 8 million number is, given the multiple accounts that the same people put into the fatally flawed system to begin with.

3) One Obama administration person who was in the thick of the whole chaos and disaster was HHS Secretary Kathleen Sibelius. She is no longer in that position, having left government employment a few months ago once the initial Obama Care enrollment period ended. 

Given how awful the launch was back in October, it is quite beyond belief that she was not booted out of her job long before she left due to incompetence. However, that is a story for another post, namely how incompetent does one have to be as a government employee before being fired for being…incompetent? 

During the chaos of the launch, a local Oklahoma television reporter was interviewing Ms. Sebelius and discussed the fact that Obama Care was very unpopular. He then paused, waiting for a reaction to that observation from the Secretary. Embarrassingly, Ms. Sebelius just sat silently, at a loss for words in reaction to his statement. 

After about seven awkward seconds without a response, the reporter speaks up and says that perhaps the sound isn’t working. Sebelius replies that the sound is working just fine. She just didn’t have anything to say. The video clip on how she was stunned to think that Obama Care was unpopular can be seen at:

http://www.ijreview.com/2014/03/125684-awkward-moment-reporter-tells-sebelius-unpopular-obamacare-speechless/

This is a “deer in the headlights” embarrassing from the government leader that was supposed to hold it all together but who could not even react to a simple question.

4) One of the emerging problems of Obama Care that is just being talked about is the high out of pocket costs that Obama Care patients have to pout out before they start seeing any benefits of their Obama Care policies. Apparently, in their previous policies, policies that were killed by the Obama Care legislation, they did not have the large out of pocket costs that they have to live with now.

A recent Associated Press report had some examples of what this new potentially deadly wrinkle is:

• One of the problems is that Obama Care policies have little or no flexibility when it comes to out of pocket costs, just about everyone is treated the same way.
• Breast cancer survivor Ginny Mason can now no longer afford her arthritis medication, Celebrex, under Obama Care because of her higher out-of-pocket costs. 
• To keep taking Celebrex, Mason would have had to pay $648 a month up to a $1500 deductible, and then a co-pay of $85 a month: “I was grateful for the Affordable Care Act because it didn't turn me down but ... it's like where's the affordable on this one,” Mason said. 
• Brian Rosen, senior vice president for public policy for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society explained in the article that specialty cancer drugs are prohibitively expensive under Obama Care: “The challenge is for the sickest patients, the ones that need access to these specialty drugs, the costs are going to come in most cases from that out of pocket cap ... they are likely to hit that $6,350 ceiling and in some cases quickly.” 
• In other words, in many Obama Care policies, the ailing customer will have to put out over $6,000 of their own money before seeing any benefit from their policy. Many people do not have $6,000 available in their household cash flow to afford such an outlay upfront. That is why their previous policies may have higher costs per month but avoided large cash outlays upfront.
• This is very distressing and potentially fatal since a recent study from the University of North Carolina School of Medicine “found that patients with higher co-payments were 70 percent more likely to stop taking their cancer treatment and 42 percent more likely to skip doses.”
• Thus, many Oabma Care patients may be faced with a decision that is critical and contingent on their cash flow: do they scale back taking their medicine because of the high upfront costs of their Obama Care policy deductibles or do they skip a mortgage payment of a college tuition payment. The North Carolina study looks like they will skip the medicine, imperiling their health.

Saving a few dollars upfront on an Obama Care insurance policy just to face a life or death decision on a higher cost impact on a household’s cash flow is not solving the nations’ high health cost problem, it is only redefining it in ways that may prove fatal.

5) One last Obama Care disaster before we sign off for this month. Back in early April, the head of the Maryland Health Insurance Exchange testified in front of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that only 60,000 Maryland residents had signed up for Obama Care through the state’s exchange. But it was noted at the hearing that it was well known and accurate that about 73,000 Maryland residents had lost access to their current insurance policies because of Obama Care. 

Thus, the net gain, or in this case loss, of health insured residents in Maryland was negative 13,000. Only in Washington can you try to get more people health insurance and after years of prep and billions of dollars of expense, in at least one state, Maryland, you end with FEWER insured people eight months after you launch your program…to get people insured. 

That will do it for this month’s disasters. Unfortunately, I am pretty sure we will be right back here at the end of next month reviewing even more disasters from the worst piece of legislation ever enacted by the most inept set of politicians ever to be in power.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

June, 2014 The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care Update, Part 3: Refusing To Treat Sick Kids, Creating More Uninsured Americans, and More

This is our third post this week as a we continue our monthly series on the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. The first post in this month’s review can be seen at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2014/05/may-2014-unfolding-disaster-that-is_9001.html

We will need at least today’s discussion to cover the idiocy and futility of the Obama Care fiascos from the past month or so. Previous month’s fiascos can be seen by typing “the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care” in the search box above.

1) In what may be one of Obama Care’s scummiest tenets is recent news that has been uncovered relative to non-profit hospitals. Recall that under the Obama Care law, every American is required to purchase health insurance or face fines via IRS procedures for not purchasing.

However, many of America’s hospitals have treated sick kids for a long time whose families do not have health insurance policies in effect. If that behavior was to continue into the future, the Federal government, under Obama Care, could fine those hospitals thousands of dollars for each instance of serving a sick uninsured kid or eventually revoke that hospital’s non-profit status, if it was non-profit, causing the hospital to now pay taxes to the Federal government. 

Under Obama Care’s newly created IRS Section 501, financial penalties will be incurred by hospitals that provide care for uninsured, poor Americans. The underlying, and underhanded reason, for this approach is that by providing needed medical care to sick kids the kids families might not be anxious to sign up for Obama Care insurance policies. By threatening hospitals for serving the needy, it can force the needy to buy insurance as required by Obama Care.

The situation is better described by John Kartch of Americans For Tax Reform: 

“Failure to comply, or to prove this continuing need, could result in the loss of the hospital’s tax-exempt status. The hospital would then become a for-profit venture, paying income tax— hence the positive revenue score. Obama Care advocates turned over every rock to find as much tax money as possible.”

Pretty sad when a Washington law goes after more tax revenue at the expense of sick kids.

2) Almost as despicable as using sick kids to attain your political goals is to accuse anyone who disagrees with your view of being a racists. Critics of Obama Care have been called racists for years under the assumption that if you disagree with what an African-American President says, it must be because you are a racist. 

Has nothing to do with expressing an opinion or holding an honest and legitimate contrary view, a view that has been proven right over the years. Disagree with Obama, you must be a racist. Senator Jay Rockefeller repeated this tired cliché recently relative to critics of Obama Care:

“I’ll be able to dig up some emails that make part of the Affordable Care Act that doesn’t look good — especially from people who made up their mind that they don’t want it to work because they don’t like the president. Maybe he’s of the wrong color, something of that sort. I’ve seen a lot of that and I know a lot of that to be true. It’s not something you’re meant to talk about in public but it’s something I’m talking about in public because that is very true.”

Hey Senator, maybe we do not want Obama Care to work because, as we have reviewed many times in this blog:

• The legislation makes the cost of insurance premiums and deductible go up in cost.
• Millions of Americans have lost their health care coverage as a result of Obama Care.
• The legislation never understood or attacked the underlying root causes of our high health care costs so it has little chance of being successful.
• It only signed up a net two million people to health insurance policies despite spending untold billions of dollars.
• It is causing millions of Americans to lose work hours, lose their jobs, or not get access to jobs that would have been created without Obama Care.
• The cost of the program is now well north of two trillion dollars.
• Americans are losing access to their preferred doctors and hospitals and the top hospitals in the country.

Had enough, Senator? These are not racist reasons for opposing Obama Care, these are legitimate realities for resisting Obama Care that have nothing to do with “color.” Stop the nonsense and fix this disaster before you retire in the fall.

3) A recent poll of potential voters in so-called competitive Congressional districts by Politico showed how unpopular Obama Care is with a majority of Americans:

• 89% of respondents said it will affect their votes.
• 60% of respondents said the debate and finality of Obama Care is not over while only 39% said it should be.
• 48% said Obama Care should be repealed, 35% said they would “keep the law, but with modifications,” and only 16% would keep it as is.
• Thus, more than five times as many voters want some changes or the total repeal of the law vs. those that want to do nothing and keep the law as is.

A question to Senator Rockefeller: does that make 83% of those opposed in some way to Obama Care racists? Or are they concerned Americans that realize what a loser this legislation is? Speaking of losers, I would not want to be a Democratic Congress person going against five to one odds in November.

4) We have often talked about and provided examples of government actions and laws that do the exact opposite of what they were intended to. And according to a new study out of the University of Minnesota, Obama Care might actually INCREASE the number of uninsured Americans, the exact opposite of what is was supposed to do.

According to a recent Washington Post article, Professor Stephen Parente and Adjunct Professor Michael Ramlet did an economic analysis of Obama Care and its projected effect on the number of uninsured Americans over the next ten years. They concluded that the number of uninsured will go up starting in 2017, due to the declining purchasing power of the government subsidies. 

In other words, the legislation will not curtail the growth of health care enough to continue to make the Federal subsidies for low income Obama Care policy holders attractive. When the costs go up too fast and the subsidy levels do not keep up, policy holders will drop the Obama Care policies because of the higher out of pocket expense.

They also found that health insurance costs will increase by nearly $1400 for those individuals with “silver” Obama Care plans and $4200 for families with “silver” Obama Care, as they explained in the article from the Post:

Nationally, we estimate an initial decrease in the uninsured with greater use of the private health insurance subsidies, but over time health plan prices are likely to increase faster than the value of the insurance subsidy. As a result of the declining purchasing power of the insurance subsidy, the implementation of the qualified health plan requirements and the end of the reinsurance and risk corridor programs we estimate a significant reduction in the private insurance market in 2017 with steady declines continuing for the rest of the decade.

Great do something and get the exact opposite of what you planned for, only in Washington and only with our politicians.

5) We have often talked about how the web based Obama Care health insurance exchanges that were developed by some of the states have often been a disaster. The state of Oregon wasted tens of millions of dollars on a site that signed up one customer online. Nevada had to opt out of its site as has a number of other states (e.g. Maryland, Massachusetts, etc.).

The reason that these states are getting out of operating their own websites for Obama Care signups is that they could not manage to put together a website system that worked. But other states are having other problems even though their websites for Obama Care signups worked adequately.

It turns out that even if your website works okay, the cost of operating it is getting way out of line of expectations. Apparently, Rhode Island is considering getting out of their website process and letting their citizens default to the Federal website since the estimated annual cost of maintaining and operating their own site is about $23 million, much more than they expected or budgeted for. Illinois is even in worse shape with the annual operating expenses of their Obama Care exchange website likely to be about $100 million. Since the entire state of Illinois is a financial basket case, a large unexpected expense like this can be devastating.

Thus, either because of operational ineptness or overwhelming operating expense, the majority of states that built their own website, at a total costs of probably billions of dollars, will likely dump them anyway and default to the Federal Obama Care website. And given how poorly that website process has worked, adding millions of additional users from these states is sure to make the entire operation collapse under its own weight and incompetence.

Another bad day for Obama Care. Forcing hospitals to not serve uninsured sick kids, opponents are still racists despite the ungodly bad realities of this law, the vast majority of Americans still do not like the law, the law might be doing just the opposite of what it is intended to do, and the political class still cannot build an efficient and cost effective website process. Insane and pathetic and more tomorrow.

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