June, 2014 The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care, Part 4: By The Numbers... And the Numbers Are Not Good

This is our fourth update this month on the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. Today we have put together a set of analyses and research that are very numbers oriented. Thus, the title of today’s approach, “By The Numbers.” By understanding the numbers better we can more fully see what a disaster Obama Care really is.

While everyone might have an opinion about reality, there really is only one true set of numbers that describe reality. The set of numbers we hope to explain below and a set of numbers that show how much the whole Obama Care effort has failed to accomplish its original goals is our objective today.

1) One of the original selling points the President made about Obama Care is although it was a massive piece of confusing legislation, somehow out of the confusion there would be no incremental negative impact on the national debt. Despite massive Federal subsidies to lower income Americans, a bailout fund for health insurance companies, dozens of new taxes, thousands and thousands of pages of new regulations, somehow all of this confusion was going to be national debt neutral or even a little positive.

Specifically:

• In March 2010, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that the Obama Care health insurance provisions would cost the Federal government $788 billion between 2010 and 2019. 
• That cost would be more than offset by $511 billion in Federal government spending cuts, primarily to Medicare, and $420 billion in new Obama Care revenue streams, much of it generated by new taxes on hospital insurance and manufacturers of drugs and medical devices. 
• Thus, the CBO estimated at the time, the health care law would somehow miraculously reduce the national debt by $143 billion over 10 years, compared to the CBO’s non-Obama Care baseline view.
• The vast majority of the savings, about $124 billion, was supposed to come from the health care portion of the law and another $19 billion would be derived from changes to student loans and grants.

But things are not working out so well relative to this overly, overly optimistic view that helped get the legislation passed:

• Several programs within Obama Care that were supposed to be financially positive, e.g. the CLASS program, turned out to be bombs and were terminated early on, robbing a lot of the $124 billion surplus of a positive financial flow.
• The Obama administration illegally and unilaterally starting postponing the rollout of many elements of the plan, further reducing the offsetting revenue planned against the ever increasing costs of the legislation.
• The original ten year view that had arrived at the $124 billion surplus, basically included ten years worth of revenue but only seven years worth of costs. As we have gotten to a full rollout of the law, a new ten year view includes both a ten year view of Obama Care revenue and a ten year view of Obama Care costs and the original $788 billion ten year cost estimate is now over $2 trillion.

These are the current realities of the top line numbers of Obama Care. A more than doubling of the cost while the anticipated revenue streams have either been terminated or delayed. 

In fact, things have gotten so bad, so confusing, and so out of control that the CBO has actually made the following public statement that the CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation “can no longer determine exactly how the provisions of the ACA [Obama Care] that are not related to the expansion of health insurance coverage have affected their projections of direct spending and revenues.” In other words, things are so screwed up that we cannot even figure out anymore what is going on relative to revenue, costs, impacts on the national debt or much of anything else.

Really bad when you have put forth a piece of legislation that is so large and so convoluted that budget and audit experts can no longer figure out what is actually going on. Consider the words of Charles Blahous, a senior research fellow at George Mason University, on why CBO’s inability to estimate the net effect of the law is “a real problem:” “The ACA’s financing provisions were assumed to be effective so as to get a favorable score out of CBO upon enactment, but no one is keeping track of whether they’re being enforced. We receive occasional updates on the gross costs of the law, but none on whether the previously projected savings provisions are producing what was originally projected.”

This is also known as flying blind and when the political class and government fly blind, it is usually the taxpayers that have to pay.

2) Let’s talk about a really interested set of numbers from a recent blog post in Amy Ridenour's National Center Blog. “If Obama Care Saves Lives, It Does So Very Inefficiently.” The piece and the analysis within was done by David Hogberg.

The analysis approach is very creative and sound. At the very base level, if the real reason for having a health care industry is to save lives, than a measure of any health care program or law should be how well and how efficiently it saves lives. Now, one could easily and correctly make the case that the purpose of a health care industry is also to alleviate pain and I would agree. But for this analysis, let’s see how well or how poorly Obama Care saves lives, a very basic measure of health care effectiveness.

The basis of this approach is to use the historical mortality data from the so-called Massachusetts Romney Care program that was launched in that state several years before Obama Care was launched nationally. In many respects, both health care laws are similar except for the fact that we have some actual historical numbers and data on Romney Care that we can use to extrapolate the likely impact of mortality by Obama Care. 

The analysis was embedded in the study, “Changes in Mortality After Massachusetts Health Care Reform. ” The study compared certain counties in Massachusetts with other, similar counties in the U.S. with similar demographic characteristics, both before and after Romney Care was implemented. The analysis and findings then proceed as follows:

• This comparative analysis found that after Romney Care was launched, Massachusetts counties had an average mortality rate 2.9% lower relative to the other counties. 
• The authors concluded that about every “830 adults gaining health insurance [prevented] 1 death per year.”
• Using costs associated with Romeny Care in Massachusetts, the blog post cites an analysis done by a Michael Cannon which estimates that $4 million was spent to save that one life out of 830 adults.
• The blog cites another similar analysis done by a Professor Harold Pollack which came up with a slightly less expensive figure of $3.3 million, less expensive but still not cheap.
• Combining these analysis with a formula developed by the Institute of Medicine shows that nationally about 30,395 people die each year from lack of insurance. 
• The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the Obama Care exchanges and the Medicaid expansion will cover 25 million, or 46 percent, of the 55 million uninsured by 2017. 
• Putting all of these numbers together and doing the Massachusetts calculations on a national basis we find that there would be 13,982 more lives saved nationally in 2017.
• The CBO has previously estimated that the net cost of expanding coverage under Obama Care will be about $142 billion in 2017. 
• If we divide that cost by the 13,982 lives saved by Obama Care providing insurance to Americans who were previously uninsured, the cost of saving one life is a staggering $10.1 million, far more than the very high Massachusetts cost of about $3-4 million per life saved.

Now, if you are that one person who is getting their life saved even at a cost of upwards of $10 million, then you do not care what the cost is. But consider what other approaches could have been used to save far more lives at a far less cost than Obama Care, as identified in the blog post:

• A 2009 research effort and article found that anti-smoking efforts had a median cost of $4,400 per year of life saved. 
• Other research shows that the cost per year of lives saved via hypertension screening efforts is about $79,832 per life. 
• Annually, the country loses an estimated 480,000 people due to smoking and 26,634 due to hypertension, far more than we lose due to a lack of health insurance.
• Outside of the blog post numbers, consider a recent article from Business Week which cited industry sources when explaining that there are about 5 million Americans today that suffer from nondurable Alzheimer’s disease, the number of sufferers will triple by 2050, and that the disease probably kills about 500,000 Americans a year.

These are root causes of our ever escalating health care costs, Eliminate or reduce these sources of death and suffering, and you would easily reduce the nation’s health care costs without a 2,500 page law that no one understands or can track. Obama missed a great legacy opportunity, similar to the legacy John F. Kennedy carved out for himself when he challenged the country to put a man on the moon within the decade of the 60s. 

How much more historic would it have been if Obama had declared that the country would wipe out half a million unnecessary deaths a year from smoking within the next ten years and put a plan together to do so? 

How much more historic would it have been if Obama had declared that the country would wipe out half a million unnecessary deaths a year by finding a cure for Alzheimer’s within the next ten years and put a plan together to do so? 

So much more good could have been done at a much lower cost from a mortality/saving Americans’ lives perspective than the failed approach of Obama Care. The numbers do not lie.

3) One final numbers discussion today. A recent analysis by Roll Call showed that the online health care exchanges were still having substantial problems more than  nine months after the launch back in late 2013. The Roll Call approach involved emailing health officials in all 50 states and Washington D.C. Their findings and the associated numbers include the following:

• There is probably at least 2.9 million individuals that still had not had their Obama Care applications processed. 
• 2.9 million unprocessed applications is equivalent to the combined populations of Montana, Wyoming and North and South Dakota. 
• Additionally, the 2.9 million unprocessed forms is only the estimate for people that are waiting for their INITIAL application to be processed. There are probably other delays still pending beyond the initial application process blockade.
• The survey also found that the largest piles of unprocessed applications were in states with very large populations: California (900,000 residents), Illinois (330,000), North Carolina (at least 298,840), Ohio (212,090), Virginia (183,643), Georgia (at least 159,313), Michigan (at least 123,381) and South Carolina (at least 113,429).

Nine months after rollout and millions of people still do not know their status relative to Obama Care health insurance coverage. A pathetic set of numbers no matter how you cut them. 

That will do it for our Obama Care unfolding disaster series for this month. We could go over other disasters but that is just too depressing to do at this point in time, given the grave disasters we have reviewed over the past four days. I am sure that next month will provide another juicy and depressing set of fiascos, lunacies, and expenses that will continue to spring up from the worst piece of legislation ever enacted.

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: Obama Care Increases Costs and the Number of Uninsured, Fining The Poor Becuase They Are Too Poor, and Rube Goldberg Would Be Proud

This is our third post in our regular monthly series on the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. We have been documenting this disaster for the past several years but over the past year or so we have had to go to multiple posts every month just to keep up with the waste, the lunacy, and failures of Obama Care.

The first post in this month’s updates can be accessed at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2014/06/june-2014-unfolding-disaster-that-is_6417.html

Past posts can be found by just entering “the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care” in the search box above.

1) One of the big promises of Obama Care and its supporters is that lower income people would see most of the benefits and little, if any, of the financial pain of the legislation’s tenets. However, according to a recent Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis and report, that is nothing more than another broken promise of this administration:

• According to the analysis, about one million low-income Americans will pay a fine under Obama Care.
• These one million Americans are among the estimated four million Americans who will need to pay the individual mandate penalty for not having health insurance by 2016 as a result of Obama Care: “All told, CBO and [the Joint Committee on Taxation] JCT estimate that about four million people will pay a penalty because they are uninsured in 2016 (a figure that includes uninsured dependents who have the penalty paid on their behalf). An estimated $4 billion will be collected from those who are uninsured in 2016, and, on average, an estimated $5 billion will be collected per year over the 2017–2024 period.”
• A chart included in the report revealed that 200,000 of those estimated to be paying the Obama Care penalty will be earning less than 100 percent of the poverty line. 
• An additional 800,000 Americans are considered low-income, earning between 100 and 199 percent of the poverty level, will also be paying Obama Care penalties

What makes this situation doubly ironic is 1) the President claimed that health care costs would go down $2,500 on average for American families, and now we are seeing poorer American families being financially penalized for not making enough money to afford health care insurance and 2) at one point Obama actually campaigned against this mandatory insurance coverage option back in 2008. This happened during a debate with his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, because he realized the insanity of a mandate for imposing fines on people who could not afford health insurance to begin with.

Apparently, that view was just for the campaign since his signature piece of legislation, Obama Care, did exactly that, mandated poor Americans to pay a fine for not buying something they could not afford. Insanity.

2) In another illegal move by the Obama administration, it is again going against the schedule and requirements of passed legislation by allowing 18 states to continue delaying a key part of Obama Care’s health insurance exchange for small businesses, “employee choice.” This latest delay puts off this component of the legislation until 2016, if then.

Which raises the same question that has been raised any number of times after this administration unilaterally and arbitrarily delayed numerous pieces of this legislation: if the President thinks he can change approved legislation according to any whim that strikes him, then why are we still paying the 500 members of Congress? We apparently do not need them if their only function is to pass legislation that turns into mere suggestions, rather than law, and Obama does what he wants? Obama Care is not only the worst piece of legislation ever passed it is turning into the most lawless piece of legislation ever passed.

3) We have previously discussed the top line results of a recent University Of Minnesota study that concluded that health care costs will accelerate because of Obama Care and that there will actually be more uninsured Americans five or so years down the road then there are today as a result of Obama Care. 

I recently came across a more in depth discussion of that work by one of the analysis’s authors, Mr. Parente, who is an associate dean of the Carlson School of Management and director of the Medical Industry Leadership at the University of Minnesota. Highlights of his analysis and what drives his conclusions include the following:

• Health-insurance companies who deal with Obama Care policies are expected to soon begin releasing insurance policy rate estimates for next year's plans, with most industry experts expecting consumers to experience far significantly higher premiums. 
• It is not expected by that Federal subsidies will increase by the same amount to keep current Obama Care policy holders financially whole, meaning that those policy holders will experience higher out of pocket costs in 2015.
• If this happens, both in 2015 and in the follwing years as expected, lower-income and some middle-income consumers will be forced out of the private insurance market, viewing the expense as more and more unaffordable.
• Using the 2014 health-insurance exchange enrollment data and a micro-simulation model funded in part by the Department of Health and Human Services, Mr. Parente estimated the national and state impact of Obama Care on insurance prices and enrollment from 2015-24 to illustrate this phenomenon.
• The average premium for an individual exchange health plan (Silver) will increase by $1,375 by 2019 while the average family premium for the same plan will increase by $4,198. 
• The steepest price increases will not occur until 2017 and after, when three things happen.
• First, Obama Care‘s "essential benefits" requirements will kick in. All Obama Care insurance plans, including those currently exempted for hardship and old plans extended for various reasons, must provide all of the law's mandated benefits from January 1, 2017. On average, roughly 15% of plans offered in 2013 do not qualify for sale on the insurance exchanges once all of the time extensions run out. Depending on the state, as many as 60% of the plans sold in 2013 would not be permitted for sale going forward since they do not cover all of the essential and mandated benefits, forcing people to buy more expensive plans or drop health insurance altogether..
• Second, Obama Care’s program to subsidize those insurance companies that provide Obama Care policies will also expire in 2017, i.e. the bailouts end in 2017. 
• Other insurance companies subsidies also end in 2017. For example, health insurers will no longer be able to bill the government for 80% of a patient's health-care costs when they make more than $45,000 in annual claims. As all of these subsidies end, the insurance companies are highly likely to pass the now unsubsidized costs unto their policy holders, further increasing the cost of Obama Care policies, leaving consumers to pick up the tab through premium payments. Federal subsidies will be unable to keep up with such dramatic rate spikes. 
• Faced with all of these upward cost pressures, consumers will react the only way they know how: by looking for cheaper options such as the remaining high-deductible health plans offered by private companies and the exchanges as well as plans with very limited physician and hospital networks established to maximize efficiency but not quality care for the average patient. These plans are likely to provide no or limited access to specialized facilities and physicians. 
• And finally, rising premiums will create a death spiral exodus from insurance plans, with increasing departures forcing insurance companies to raise premiums even more on the remaining customers to make up for the shortfall which will drive out more customers from Obama Care plans, etc. 
• And these disasters and death spirals exclude what might happen with employer provided health insurance plans. It is expected that many businesses will find it less expensive to drop their company insurance plans and pay the Obama Care fines, forcing millions (the Congressional Budget Office estimate that the ACA will lead to a seven-million person decline in insurance provided by employers by 2020) of Americans to find health insurance coverage on the individual market at the same time that individual market insurance policy costs are spiraling upwards.

This leaves the newly uninsured with two options: If they qualify by their income, sign up for Medicaid or stay uninsured and face a penalty. Many will choose the first option but that will cover a relatively minor set of uninsured Americans since those people exceed the income limits of Medicaid. 

Whatever these millions of Americans do, there will be a significant number of uninsured Americans unwilling or unable to pay for the constantly increasing cost for health insurance available on the exchanges and forced to pay penalties. By 2024, the authors of this analysis and research estimate that there will be more than 40 million uninsured, roughly 10% more than today.

Thus, here we have another well researched and thought out piece of analysis that shows again that Obama Care will do the exact opposite of what it set out to do: rather than decreasing the cost of health insurance and making health insurance affordable for millions of Americans, it will make health insurance more and more unaffordable for every American and eventually result in a net gain of uninsured Americans when it was supposed to reduce the number of uninsured Americans.

4) One last piece of bad news today to chew on about Obama Care. The original legislation is supposed to be about 2,500 pages long. The number of pages of regulations that were created to implement the law is reported to be well over 10,000 pages. As we have said many times before, there is nothing elegant about this legislation. It is a Rube Goldberg-like contraption that is so complicated it will eventually collapse and implode into itself from its own complexity and idiocy.

Someone actually tried to flowchart the actual information and process flows of Obama Care. This is legitimately what they came up with:






No way something this complicated has any chance of ever succeeding, especially if the Washington political class and Federal government bureaucracy are operating the levers.

Based on this flowchart, one of my favorite sayings comes to mind: “Try to pare things down, Very few moves to a lot.” It looks like Obama Care got this wisdom backwards, like it got everything else backwards: “Never pare things down. A lot of moves, spread over 2,500, pages accomplishes very little." 

We will finish up our latest Obama Care analyses tomorrow. As you read through these posts it becomes very clear that we have been right all along. We have always maintained that the legislation never went after the root causes of our escalating health care problems, a view we will explore tomorrow using some very interesting data and research. 

Because at the end of the day, regardless of what Obama Care does, Americans will still be overweight, they will still eat too much of the wrong kind of foods, they will not exercise enough, and they will still smoke too much. Those and a few other factors are the drivers behind our escalating health care costs, not whether or not someone has a bronze insurance plan from Obama Care. Obama Care will never succeed since it never understood the root causes of the problem, mistaking a public health crisis for a health insurance coverage crisis.

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, Part 2: Higher Costs Continue, Another State Exchange Bites The Dust, and More

This is our second post in this month’s update series of the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. For years and especially the past nine months, we have done a monthly review of all the idiocy, costs, an d ineffectiveness of the legislation known as Obama Care. It is a piece of legislation that was supposed to lower health care costs in this country but in general has caused health care costs to spike upward while destroying many of the good assets of the health care industry in this country. 

To review past discussions of this disastrous legislation just browse the menu on the right side of this page of put the phrase, “the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care” in the search box above. The following news articles and analyses are just the most recent findings and unintended bad consequences of the worst piece of legislation ever written.

1) A recent study by the Manhattan Institute found that Obama Care will actually increase the cost of health insurance more expensive rather than less expensive in this country: 

• Obama Care will increase the underlying health insurance premiums by 41% on average. 
• The greatest increases will be for young healthy males who are the guinea pigs for subsidizing others who are generally older and sicker than young healthy males.
• Obama Care subsidizes will primarily benefit those nearing retirement, another indication that younger Americans are being used to subsidize the health care of older Americans, an age group that is usually wealthier than younger people just starting out in life and their careers.
• Overall, 41 states plus D.C. will experience health insurance premium rate increases. 
• According to Forbes, commenting on this Manhattan Institute analysis, “This nearly-complete analysis finds that the average state will face underlying premium increases of 41 percent. Men will face the steepest increases: 77, 37, and 47 percent for 27-year-olds, 40-year-olds, and 64-year-olds, respectively. Women will also face increases, but to a lesser degree: 18%, 28%, and 37% for 27-, 40-, and 64-year-olds.”
• In addition, the eight states that will experience the largest premium increases are southern and western states: Nevada (179 percent increase), New Mexico (142 percent increase), Arkansas (138 percent increase), North Carolina (136 percent increase), Vermont (117 percent increase), Georgia (92 percent increase), Dakota (77 percent increase) and Nebraska (74 percent increase).

Thus, another third party analysis of reality, confirming what we have pointed out previously from other third part, impartial analyses, Obama Care is doing the exact opposite of what it was supposed to do, it is raising and not lowering the cost of health care and health insurance in this country. This is a far throw from what the President promised, I.e. that the average family would see an average $2,500 reduction in their annual health care insurance premiums.

2) But some people would correctly point out that the above mentioned analysis did not take into count the Federal government subsidies that the legislation provides to lower income Americans. For that point of view, consider the following graph from an analysis done by Forbes:






The Forbes analysis came to similar conclusions:

• For those Americans aged 27, Obama Care will raise their health insurance premiums 52% on average for males (going from $133 a month to $201 a month) and 22% for females.
• This is to be expected since the Obama Care legislation is based on forcing younger Americans to pay more for insurance they are far less likely to need to subsidize older and sicker Americans who are much more likely to need health care and insurance.
• Once the Federal subsidies are figured in for those that are eligible, the increase for 27 year old males is still a whopping 41% while the female cost actually goes down a little by 5%.

In no case to we come close to the Obama promise of a $2,500 a year decrease in health insurance premiums.

3) Let's stay with this increasing of health insurance premiums trend by reviewing once again a recent University of Minnesota analysis of what impact the legislation will have on consumer costs. Although we have discussed the findings in previous posts, it is worthwhile going over them again since this is a third analysis that proves again what we just proved above, namely that Obama Care is a cost increaser and not a cost decreaser.

The University of Minnesota analysis forecasted the insurance cost increases at the national level and in 10 key states into the future:

• The Annual Cost Of An Obama Care Individual Exchange Health Plan Will Increase $1,375 Within 5 Years.
• The Annual Cost Of A Family Obama Care Exchange Health Plan Will Increase $4,198 Within 5 Years. 
• The Largest Cost Increase For An Obama Care Individual Exchange Health Plan ($1,677) Within 5 Years Will Be In New Hampshire.
• At The National Level, 489,000 MORE Individuals Will Be Uninsured Within The Next 5 Years compared top when the legislation was enacted.

Only in Washington can you pass legislation that is supposed to dramatically reduce costs and get more people health insurance and end up with dramatically higher costs and fewer people covered by health insurance, at least according to the University of Minnesota study, and many other scholarly analyses.

4) According to a recent Associated Press news report, the bureaucracy of managing and administering the entire Obama Care process is still really screwed up:

• At least 2 million newly Obama Care insured Americans are at risk since of being in trouble with the IRS and law according to a recent government report.
• Government officials determined data from Obama Care application forms do not match what was in other government records, which could affect how much consumers pay for their health plans or if they are even legally eligible for benefits and Obama Care subsidies.
• And this estimate could actually be too low, meaning that millions of Americans may not be eligible for the subsidies they are receiving.
• That would make them liable for repaying those subsidies at tax time next year or be prosecuted for perjury if they intentionally put misleading information on their Obama Care applications.
• This is worst news than what government officials told The Washington post a few months ago that more than 1 million of those enrolled in Obama Care plans may have received incorrect subsidies, and that the government was unable to fully fix the errors. 
• And it gets worse since a recent survey done by Roll Call reported that, based on its 50-state survey, at least 2.9 million Americans who signed up for Medicaid as part of the Obama Care enrollment process STILL have not had their applications processed, many of which are over six months old. 

What a mess and what a disgrace. Three years lead time and billions of dollars spent and still the political class and Federal government could not get it right, from an embarrassingly bad website design that failed immediately to paying out taxpayer wealth to millions of people who may not deserve it under the legislation’s guidelines to still not being able to process peoples’ applications six months or more after they were submitted. I am not sure you could have done a worse job of implementation if you were trying to screw it up.

5) One last disaster from Obama Care for today, as if the first four were not enough. After spending about $130 million to build a faulty website, Maryland state government officials decided to flush good money after bad and voted to spend $43.5 million more to transition the state’s health insurance exchange site to new technology that is supposed to fix the original enrollment snafus.

According to the Associated Press, the additional funding includes a $29.3 million, five-year contract with Xerox to host this new technology that has already been used in Connecticut’s health exchange Obama Care. Another $14.2 million, three-year contract was approved for Deloitte to handle software licensing, whatever that means.

Fortunately, Maryland officials claim that more Federal money will not be requested to fix the botched website process. Which is only right since the American taxpayer had already given the state of Maryland received $180 million to fund its botched Obama Care health insurance exchange.

That will do it for today, more disasters to follow and review tomorrow. Through all of these realities and analyses a few things become crystal clear:

1. The Federal government and the political class that operate it are totally inept when it comes to implementing anything of any magnitude. Obama Care and the latest scandal in the Veterans Administration and its poor health care treatment of veterans are just two examples of this principle of incompetence.
2. The unintended consequences of the legislation are far more devastating then if nothing had been done, e.g. higher insurance costs, less freedom, lower health care quality and coverage, etc.

More of the same tomorrow.

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 1: A Young Girl Suffers, The Nation Suffers Through a Foreseen Botched Rollout, and Emergency Room Volumes Are Up

Every month for the past few years and especially last August, we have been reviewing the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. Since last August, as the ill fated program began to rollout, we have usually had to dedicate at least a half a dozen posts every month to cover all of the damage.

And although a lot of other crisis have been taking up the headlines lately, e.g. the dissolution of Iraq, the Veterans Administration scandal, the IRS scandal, etc., that does not mean that Obama Care has stopped being a disaster. It just has not been on the front burner because of the rest of the Obama administration implosions, explosions, and criminal acts.

Past reviews can be accessed by going back to previous months' posts using the listings on the right side of this page. Within those past posts, we have provided a comprehensive plan that should have been implemented to resolve the problem of escalating health care costs in this country, a plan that would have worked without the heart break and fiascos of Obama Care.

Thus, over the next few days, we will not be going back over our solution but focusing on the unfolding disasters that is Obama Care. Those of you interested can review our plan at these back posts at your leisure.

1) Consider a mother of a young daughter who has had a serious heart condition since birth. As a result of the entire health care industry upheaval as a result of Obama Care, Holly Fisher’s daughter lost access to the trusted heart care specialist doctors that have been helping her daughter survive her heart condition.

It seems that the Obama Care health exchange insurance policy that she was forced to sign up for does not give her access to her daughter’s current doctors. Like any caring mother whose child is now facing even longer odds of survival, she is lashing out at what Obama Care has done to her family’s lives despite the fact that the President constantly reminded us that “if you like your doctors, you can keep your doctors," a promise that has turned out to be one of the biggest Presidential lies of all time. Shame on him at least in this case of extra stress for a caring family.

Also recall that Harry Reid once called people like Holly Fisher liars themselves for telling the world of their plight. Shame on him also.

For a history of the situation and a desperate mother’s tweets, please go to:

http://twitchy.com/2014/06/19/distraught-mom-obamacare-takes-away-all-of-my-babys-heart-doctors/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=fbpage&utm_campaign=twupdate

2) The rollout of the Obama Care legislation was an unmitigated disaster in so many ways. But the most visible and probably the most embarrassing component was the utter failure of the online sign up process for Obama Care. People could not get into the system, the system bombed on them, the system provided bad information, the system turned out to be a identify thief’s paradise, etc.

It was truly amazing that so much could fail despite having three years and hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions of dollars, to get it right. But a recent Washington Examiner investigative report, based on a recently released U.S. Senate report, has shed some light on how the Obama administration and Kathleen Sebelius were able to embarrass itself and the country in such a dramatic way:

• Apparently, politics was the overriding driver of the disaster since the White House pressured everyone involved to launch the exchange website on time regardless of its condition and state of readiness.
• This was done despite the now public knowledge of previously unknown warnings from consultants and those working on the site that it was insecure, untested, and would likely crash if just 500 people accessed the site at the same time.
• According to the Senate report: “The White House continually meddled in technical decisions and put pressure on [Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services] officials to launch the website on time, regardless of operability and security concerns. As a result, officials ignored countless red flags to launch a website with thousands of defects. In the end, the launch failed miserably, crashing on takeoff.” 
• Senate members and staffs spent months going over government emails, interviewing personnel involved with the site, etc,
• The investigation concluded that top government officials were feeling the pressure to burnish President Obama's health care legacy, and thus rather than doing the right thing, they ignored several warnings and flipped the switch to the website on schedule October 1 way before it was ready for use” "Both metaphorically and factually, the website was designed to be the public face of President Obama's signature achievement."
• As a result, the report concluded: “No one wanted to be the messenger that told the White House that its signature piece of legislation was going to crash at takeoff. The administration prioritized political success over protecting taxpayers."

Great, a President’s fragile ego and self worth resulted in hundreds of million s of dollars wasted, the financial well being of millions of Americans exposed to identity thieves, and mass confusion, frustration, and embarrassment in the eyes of Americans, many of whom were already suspicious and felt that the Federal government bureaucracy was to inept and too incompetent to do anything well, never mind such a massive and untested endeavor like Obama Care.

How bad was the situation and the red flags? The report found the following obvious reasons to delay the whole rollout:

• Just 23% of the site’s coding had been tested.
• Only 40% of security controls had been verified as sound.
• This resulted in the administration fully knowing that they could not be positive they could protect the personal medical and financial information of Obama Care applicants.
• The White House continually placed more changes and new demands on the developers, delaying the project.
• The same White House people then “meddled with the launch with pestering requests and questions.”
• A top official in the administration had actually made the decision to delay the rollout but was overriden by Medicare chief Marilyn Tavenner.
• An outside audit firm, TurningPoint Global Solutions, had warned the administration many times that the development and testing of the site was behind schedule, there were 677 “serious defects,” and 21,000 lines of coding were defective.
• Despite these warnings, a top official noted in their email that Tavenner’s office knew that it would crash if just 500 people were on the website at once.
• The final cost just on the development of the website came to $834 million.

Given these conditions, what rational and sane human being would agree to go ahead with the rollout when faced with these staggering numbers? Ghastly numbers and ghastly decision making processes that resulted in a ghastly and disastrous rollout. All for the egos of a few high ranking government officials and a President who ignored reality and proceeded headlong into a the dead end wall of reality. 

A summary statement from the Senate report sums up this example of massive government incompetence nicely: “This is a staggering amount of taxpayer funds to enroll a few million people. In addition to the waste and inefficiency, the people forced to use the website had to waste time and effort dealing with a dysfunctional system.”

3) One of Obama Care’s supposed big selling points is that the legislation would dramatically reduce the use of hospital emergency rooms since people with insurance would now be more likely to go to the doctors available under their insurance policy rather than emergency rooms. This would theoretically dramatically reduce one of the more expensive components of health care in this country.

But according to a recent Bloomberg report, that assumption so far has proven to be dramatically false also, much like many other promises of Obama Care:

• A survey recently conducted by the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP), found that since the start of the Obama Care era, 46% of surveyed emergency physicians said they have experienced jumps in patients while only 23% reported a decrease;
• 27% said the emergency room volume they are involved with has stayed about the same.
• Doctors surveyed said they expected this, despite the promises made within the Obama Care debate, as discussed Howard Mell, a spokesman for the ACEP and an emergency care physician, told Business Insider: “We told you this was going to happen. We don’t mind that it has. But we’d sure appreciate some support,”
• Furthermore, 86% of emergency physicians expect there to be some level of increase in the amount of emergency room visits in their facilities over the next three years.
• 77% do not believe their facilities are prepared for the expected influx of patients.
• Thus, another Obama Care vow and promise broken, at least in the eyes of the experts in the field and early results at least from this survey. But broken promises are a trademark of this legislation and this administration so no surprise here.

That will do it for today but more updates to follow in the next several days. Today we learned at least one little girl’s health care has been endangered by both her heart condition and Obama Care, the red flags relative to the Obama Care rollout were posted o all along the road but no one in the administration had the smarts, guts, or nerve to slow down, and another broken promise has arisen, this time relative to non-dwindling emergency room visits.

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

Politicians Say The Darnest Things And Most Idiotic Things, Part 3: Featuring The Ramblings Of Nancy Pelosi and Other Washington Denizons

We have spent the past week or so reviewing political class myths and all of the inane quotes from our politicians in support of these myths or in support of the proof that we are being served by the worse set of politicians in the history of the country. The myths they try to pawn off on us and the unbelievable quotes and nonsense that comes out of their mouths would be pretty funny if the consequences of their myths and words were not so serious.

As they fumble around with out of touch stories and denial or ignorance of reality, the major issues of our times, e.g. failing public schools, illegal immigration, a lost war on drugs, a disastrous foreign policy, terrorism, etc., go unattended. Their priorities are certainly screwed up relative to what needs to be done in this country, as today’s quotes fully illustrate:

1) Quote: “Today less than 2 percent of our ocean is considered a marine protected area where there are some restrictions on human activity in order to prevent contaminating the ecosystem. Less than 2 percent of the entire ocean. There isn't anybody here who doesn't believe we can't do better than that. So let's start by finding a way to perhaps bring that number up to 10 percent or more as soon as possible.” Secretary of State John Kerry
Comments: Let’s review: Iraq is imploding and being overrun by a terrorist horde of maniacs, the Ukrainians and Russians are shooting at each other, drug cartels are taking over Central and South America, our arch enemy is about to intercede on Iraq’s behalf, Syria is being torn apart by a civil war, Nigeria is facing a massive terrorism problem, Somalia is still lawless, China is flexing its military muscle in Southeast Asia, and John Kerry, our top international diplomat, is worried about the ocean and taking time out of his day to make a major presentation on the percentage of the oceans that are protected. 

I am all for protecting the vitality and health of oceans. But come on, John, the world is falling apart and that is where your focus should be, not on a percentage of oceans being protected. Pathetic set of priorities.

2) Quote: “They [Congressional Republicans] have an amendment that recommends more white potatoes than intuitionists recommend.” Nancy Pelosi talking about an agricultural bill in the House.

Comments: Really? One of the most powerful politicians in the country and the world, in light of the problems we mentioned above that John Kerry is ignoring, is taking time out in a press conference to discuss how many white potato servings kids should be eating? Really? 

I am all for combating obesity in this country, especially for our kids. But we have over 20 million Americans under employed or unemployed, our national debt is closing in on $18 TRILLION, our southern border is facing a massive juvenile humanitarian crisis, and Nancy Pelosi is worried about white potatoes. How scary is it that she was once third in line for the Presidency behind Obama and Biden.

The video of relatively incoherently trying to make the case against white potatoes can be seen at:

http://www.ijreview.com/2014/06/147563-pelosi-vows-fight-deadly-assault-dreaded-white-potatoes/

3) Quote: "Immigration reform will "reduce the deficit by nearly $1 trillion, secure our borders, unite our families, protect our workers and provide an earned pathway to citizenship." Nancy Pelosi

Comments: As usually, Ms. Pelosi provides absolutely no back up analysis or research to justify the TRILLION number. Since the deficit this year is estimated to still be astronomically high but still less than a TRILLION dollars, is what she saying is that if simply pass some illegal immigration law we will somehow miraculously wipe out the annual deficit and have a Federal government surplus?

Wow, we should have done that years ago, we would have no where near an $18 TRILLION national debt at this point since we would have been running budget surpluses just by making illegal immigrants legal. How simply….and how inane. Doe she even think when she says stuff like this? Every number that has come out of her mouth over the past few years has been sheer nonsense.

4) Quote: “Obama Care Will Probably Save Taxpayers More than a Trillion Dollars.” Nancy Pelosi

Ms. Pelosi must be on a trillion dollar kick lately, seeing as the country can save a trillion dollars a year just by making illegal immigrants legal and the country will save another trillion dollars as a result of Obama Care. Maybe she has not heard but:

• The original estimate of the ten year cost of Obama Care for the Federal government from the Congressional Budget Office has more than doubled from what it was just a few years ago.
• An independent actuarial analysis by real actuaries, not politicians, has shown that the cost of health insurance in the individual market has gone up for residents in 45 of the 50 states as a result of Obama Care.
• The taxpayer is likely going to have to bailout out the financial results of insurance companies that cater to Obama Care customers, requiring tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer wealth to be diverted to another big industry bailout.

Again, she provides no background, data or research to support this wild assumption that Obama Care is going to save anyone or any government entity in his country a trillion dollars. Again, we wonder what the color of the sky is in her world when the reality of the numbers in this world are almost always completely at odds with what she spouts.

More details about her next trillion dollar claim can be seen at:

http://www.theminorityreportblog.com/2014/04/03/delusional-pelosi-obamacare-will-probably-save-taxpayers-more-than-a-trillion-dollars/

5) Quote: “Every dollar invested in this initiative [extending unemployment benefits (UI)] yields $1.52 in economic growth, and an extension of UI could produce as many as 300,000 jobs.” Nancy Pelosi

Comments: Again, she makes these claims without providing any backup. How does she know that every dollar in UI benefits magically results in $1.52 in economic growth? How did she compute a growth in jobs of 300,000 as a result of extending UI benefits? I know of no economist who ever correctly predicted the growth in jobs as a result of a government economic program (e.g. the disaster that was Obama’s economic stimulus package jobs forecast) but somehow Nancy Pelosi knows that 300,000 jobs would be created?

Think through this logically: if she was right, than the best way to get the high unemployment rate down is to make sure that more people are unemployed! You see, if more people were unemployed, more people would be getting UI benefits which would increase economic activity by more than 50% which would create even more jobs. Thus, in her world, the more people that are unemployed, the more jobs that will be created. Insane.

What she does not understand is that by taking money out of the economy and giving it to Washington politicians that give it back out to other people, you have not created anything new or increased economic activity. You have just shuffled some wealth around from one part of the economy to another part, and probably shuffled it around inefficiently, since Washington politicians had their hands all over it.

6) Quote: “Americans can be very confident in the strength of our economy.” Nancy Pelosi 

Comments: She may think we can be confident in our economy but most Americans of this reality would probably disagree. Over twenty million Americans are either unemployed or under employed, economic growth in the first quarter of this year was negative one percent, inflation spiked last month with eggs, milk, and meat hitting their most expensive levels ever, the price of gas is going up again and is about twice the price it was when Obama came into office, the national debt is fast approaching $18 TRILLION and recent opinion polls show that the majority of Americans have no faith and confidence that the current presidential administration can get the job done and an overwhelming majority of Americans think disapprove of the job Congress is doing.

Sorry, Ms. Pelosi, those of us in this world have absolutely no reason to be confident in the strength of this economy.

That will do it for now. Myths, and stories and unsubstantiated numbers, just another week or so for the American political class. And just another week or so when the same people who utter such nonsense were unable or unwilling to attack and resolve the most pressing issues of or times. That is why three steps from “Love My Country, Loathe My Government” are so desperately needed to fix what is broken in our nation’s Capital:

1. Step 34 - Hold Congressional committees and subcommittees accountable for their respective areas of responsibilities, and remove committee members from their committee posts if they do not meet minimal performance criteria.
2. Step 36 - Require all members of the political class, upon election to congress or the White House, to take and pass a course on economic theory and principles. This will better help them understand how their actions will impact the lives of Americans, both short term and long term.
3. Step 39 - Implement term limits for all Federal politicians, one and done.

These three simple steps would go a long way of finally making our politicians accountable to reality and not myths, give them a fighting chance to do the right thing economically rather than politically, and would make sure that folks like John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi, and the rest of the myth builders and inane speakers and quote machines would not be with use for more than a few years.

Now that is hope and change that I could get excited about.

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

Politicians Say The Darnest and Most Idiotic Things, Part 2: Even Hillary Cannot Name A Single Accomplishment, Clueless About Terrorists, and Obama Digs Underage Drinking

Over the past week or so we have been going over political class myths and the related inane quotes that politicians use to perpetuate these myths or to constantly show their ignorance of how far out of touch with reality they are. The first three posts dealt strictly with the myths and began at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2014/06/destroying-political-class-myths-part-1.html

These leaders continue to hide behind myths that have nothing to do with resolving the major issues of our times or are just plain stupid, indicating that they are truly not of this reality that most of us live in. And by not being of our reality, their actions and words are useless as far as making a positive impact on our lives.

The second set of posts, of which we are in the middle of now, deal more with the quotes of politicians and how those quotes reinforce these myths and how they are designed to scare the daylights out of you because these are the supposed leaders of this country. Today we continue with their quotes and how they constantly prove the old axiom: "It is better to remain silent and thought ignorant than to speak to speak up and remove all doubt." 

As you examine these quotes, ask yourself if these are the people you really want in charge of our government and in charge of managing our wealth, our health, and various aspects of our lives/

1) Quote: “I have to say, I do not remember my high school graduation speaker. I have no idea who it was. I’m sure I was thinking about the party after graduation. I don’t remember the party either. I’m just telling the truth.” President Obama, joking about his underage drinking during a graduation speech to high school students.

Comments: The President, his backers, and most of the mainstream media have been trying to forge the myth that President Obama is our first “cool” President. He was the first one with a smartphone, he talked about doing illegal substances in college, he was younger and more energetic, etc. 

But he is not cool if he thinks that telling or implying to high school students that he was drunk at the time of his high school graduation, so out of if that he does not even remember the post graduation party. The following is why such “coolness” is not cool, according to the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health research:

• Annually, about 5,000 people under age 21 die from alcohol-related injuries involving underage drinking. 
• Approximately 1,900 (38 percent) of the 5,000 deaths involve motor vehicle crashes, 1,600 (32 percent) result from homicides, and 300 (6 percent) result from suicides.
• Underage drinking plays a significant role in risky sexual behavior, including unwanted, unintended, and unprotected sexual activity, and sex with multiple partners. Such behavior increases the risk for unplanned pregnancy and for contracting sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), including infection with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
• Underage drinking increases the risk of physical and sexual. 
• Underage drinking is associated with academic failure. 
• Underage drinking is associated with illicit drug use. 
• Underage drinking is associated with tobacco use.
• Underage drinking can cause a range of physical consequences, from hangovers to death from alcohol poisoning. 
• Underage drinking can cause alterations in the structure and function of the developing brain, which continues to mature into the mid- to late twenties, and may have consequences reaching far beyond adolescence.

So, not cool, myth destroyed. How inappropriate for a President of the United States to speak at a high school graduation and try reinforce what is obviously bad and dangerous behavior of our nation’s youth.

2) Quote: “The Taliban is part of the fabric of Afghanistan — they were part of the leadership of that country before we engaged there. To say that they are terrorists, at this point, is not necessarily accurate.” California Congresswoman Jackie Speier 

Comments: What do you say to such ignorance as this? Of course, they were part of the leadership of the country before we dropped in, they were the entire leadership of the country. They terrorized and murdered their own people, with the death toll estimated to be between 20,000 and 35,000 people, many of whom were killed for minor, minor transgressions. They made sure that women were kept ignorant and subservient to men. They made sure that young girls never got an education. 

On what basis does she think that all of a sudden the Taliban have become caring humanitarians, respectful of women rights and living in a compassionate and law abiding country? You cannot make this stuff up, so out of touch with reality.

3) Quote: “These 5 guys are not a threat to the United States.” Hilary Clinton 

Comments: This is what Hillary said in reference to the five Taliban leaders Obama gave up in exchange for one likely Army deserter. Many, many people in the U.S. intelligence and military communities, experts on this kind of thing, were strongly against the trade and the release of these five terrorists. 

So are we to believe a civilian who botched the whole Benghazi debacle by underestimating the potential reach and violence of the local terrorists in Libya, resulting in the unnecessary deaths of four Americans and the endangering of two dozen others, or the experts who may know a little more than her on what these five have been capable of in the past and are certainly capable of now? 

Remember, Bin Laden masterminded the whole 9-11 disaster while sitting on the floor in a cave in Afghanistan. Most rational people would conclude that these five terrorists, hungry for revenge, are definitely a major danger to American lives.

4) Quote: “We haven’t had a signature doctrine since containment worked with the Soviet Union, uh, but we’ve had presidents who have made some tough calls, some ‘hard choices,’ some of which have worked, some of which have not.” Hillary Clinton

Comments: I am not trying to pick on poor Hillary but it is just so easy. This was her response to a question from a recent Diane Sawyer interview when asked the following question: “When people say ‘Where is the marquee achievement?’…’no sweeping agreements,’ ‘no signature doctrine’…?” Given Hillary’s answer, it is pretty obvious that she falls in the same category of most Americans, she and the rest of us are unable to name a signature State Department or international success story on the international stage under her watch.

While Secretary of State:

• She failed to anticipate the onset and the ramifications of the Arab Spring.
• She failed to anticipate the radical changes that have ripped apart Egypt since the Arab Spring.
• She failed to get the Iranian and North Korean nuclear weapons programs under control.
• She failed to keep Russia from antagonizing its neighbors.
• She failed to get the Israelis and Palestinians to play nice with each other.
• She failed to run a tight organization with many scandals erupting including but not limited the unaccounted loss of $6 billion in taxpayer wealth, security lapses, and other embarrassments.
• She failed to protect our people and our physical property at Benghazi despite repeated warnings that there were serious security lapses.
• She staffed key ambassadorships around the world with Demcoratic fund raisers and not experienced State Department employees.

Against this list of failures, even she could not counter balance them when asked outright to name her achievements as Secretary of State.

5) Quote: “We’re Leaving Behind a Sovereign, Stable and Self-Reliant Iraq” Barack Obama

Subquote: “Iraq is “one of the greatest achievements of this administration.” Joe Biden

Comments: Not quite sure either of these boasts stand up to scrutiny today, given the disaster that is ripping Iraq apart. I know that some readers will blame bush for what is going on there now. Fine, I get that.

But if Obama and Biden are gong to gloat and boast about what a fine job they did there just three short years ago and take credit for the myth that they left behind a “stable and self-reliant Iraq,” they need to be taken to task for the disastrous reality that they truly left behind. This reality is unfolding today in a massive refugee problem, unspeakable violence and the most unlikely scenario where the U.S. would actually welcome Iranian help in this matter. 

If you want the credit when it looks good, you have to take the blame when it goes sour. Thus, these quotes and the myth they support, that Obama and Biden fixed Iraq so well that they deserve credit, is now trashed in less than three years.

That will do it for today, One more set of myth busting via politicians' quotes tomorrow. Tomorrow is a special treat since we will be focusing on our favorite political quote machine of all time, Nancy Pelosi. 

She has been busy spouting off all kinds of gibberish lately, gibberish that would be hilarious if she did not hold an important position within the Federal government. That fact makes these quotes, that are not of our reality, and her views and myths all the more dangerous and logic defying.

Tomorrow we will discuss some steps that need to be taken so that we finally get to a point where political myths stop and real work starts and we finally find a way to get rid of the current set of politicians in Washington and their inane comments and overall idiocy.

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