February, 2021, Part 1, Political Class Insanity: Cuomo Screws Up Everything He Touches, Biden Would Rather Let Americans Go Hungry, and Canada Is Politically Insane Also

It is the beginning of another month which means it is time again to review the latest political class insanity from the American political class. Each month it takes us multiple posts to cover the wasteful spending, incompetent government organizations and employees, government programs that usually make a problem worse than resolving it, inane and idiotic politician comments, etc.

To review past posts on this insanity and idiocy, just click on the first few posts in each month listed to the right of this page. After reviewing just a handful of these insanity posts we think you will agree that we are currently being served by the worst set of American politicians ever to hold office in our entire history.

1) There are a lot of inept governors out there today but quite possibly the worst of all is New York’s Andrew Cuomo. Residents are fleeing his state because of higher and higher taxes and crime rates, he is facing a major budget shortfall, the state has been so bad in setting up covid vaccination plans that vaccines are expiring before they can be administered, and he blames everyone else for his failures.

But probably his worst failure and most fatal was when he forced nursing homes to accept covid patients back into their facilities without providing the support to segregate these infected folks from healthy elderly folks. As a result, covid ripped through state nursing homes and killed thousands of nursing home residents and staff. He forced this situation even though there were severely underutilized medical facilities where covid patients could have been cared for, away from healthy vulnerable people, e.g. the Jacob Javits Center in NYC that was converted into a medical location but hardly used, a U.S. Navy ship that Trump had sent to NYC, etc.

And now it appears that even more people died as a result of his ill fated decision to co-mingle covid folks with healthy folks in state nursing homes:

• The state attorney general recently completed a report that indicates that far more New York nursing home residents died from the virus than previously thought.
• Attorney General, Letitia James, estimates that the undercounting could be as high as 50% based on her analysis of discrepancies between the number of deaths reported by the state Department of Health and the number of deaths reported by the actual nursing homes.
• According to state Representative Elise Srefanik: “This is now more than a nursing home scandal, this is a massive corruption and coverup scandal at the highest level of New York State Government implicating the Governor, the Secretary to the Governor, the New York State Health Commissioner and the Governor’s staff. Every New Yorker deserves transparency, accountability and answers regarding the orchestration of this illegal coverup.”
• In a sample of 62 nursing homes, the homes reported covid deaths of 1,914 while the state only reported 1,229 deaths in those 62 nursing homes.
• This sample then represents a 56% under reporting of covid deaths.
• Apparently the state decided that if you got sick in a nursing home because of Cuomo’s policy but eventually died in a hospital from covid then that nursing home death did not count.
• The current Cuomo estimate of nursing home deaths is just over 8,700 but if the Attorney General is right, the truer number is over 13,000.
• This analysis is consistent with a previous Associated Press report which put the under counting at 65%.

Such incompetence that had unnecessary fatal consequences for thousands of New Yorkers. And that incompetence continues today, with the state having to throw out about 40% of the vaccine supply it received because the Cuomo administration did not have the ability or find the time to put in place an efficient and effective vaccine dispersal process. 

These people knew that at some point in time they would need a vaccine process and for ten months since the beginning of the pandemic they apparently did little to make that process a reality. As a result, the delay in vaccinating New Yorkers is likely causing even more unnecessary deaths due to political incompetence.

2) But at least in Cuomo’s eyes, none of this is his fault, it is always the fault of others, as seen by his latest cry baby tantrum:

• Cuomo recently threatened the Biden administration unless he gets them to fork over $15 billion of Federal tax money to cover up his inability to operate within a budget.
• In a childish tantrum, he said if he does not get what he wants, he will bring a lawsuit.
• He claims, without any proof, that New York is “unique in the nation” in the amount of economic damage the pandemic caused.
• Specifically: “The COVID assault on New York was caused by federal negligence. And, second, New York was used as a political piñata.”
• If he does not get his way and the $15 billion, he will enact tax hikes on New York residents to close the budget gap.
• Since New York usually leads the nation in people moving out of the state, this is like shooting yourself in the foot: higher taxes will drive more people out of the state which will further reduce the tax base and tax revenue stream which will require higher taxes and the financial death spiral is on.

But the Wall Street Journal reported that Cuomo was facing a $6.1 billion budget gap before the pandemic even hit so to claim that New York is “special” is ridiculous. He has a budget problem because he spends too much money for the revenue stream, and the high taxes that the state endures. Rather than fix what is wrong he stomps his feet like a two year old, trying to stick the rest of us with his ineptness.

3) We have reported how many millions of Americans are in need in this country today:

• At any one time there are likely 500,000 to 600,000 homeless Americans living on the streets of the country.
• Millions of Americans are at risk at any time of not having enough money for enough food.
• Millions of Americans are drug addicted and in need of treatment.
• Millions of Americans are in need of the covid vaccine and their health hangs in the balance until there are enough vaccines available….and inept politicians like Cuomo do not allow them to go to waste.

Yes, a lot of Americans are suffering but what does Joe Biden think is a good use of taxpayer money that avoids addressing the needs of these Americans:

• He recently signed an order that rescinded a regulation that forbid U.S. taxpayer dollars from being used to perform abortions overseas.
• At the same time he is committing additional taxpayer dollars to fund the “United Nations Population Fund,” an organization to control population growth.
• He tried to justify his decision with the following nonsensical and convoluted reasoning:“These excessive conditions on foreign and development assistance undermine the United States’ efforts to advance gender equality globally by restricting our ability to support women’s health and programs that prevent and respond to gender-based violence. The expansion of the policy has also affected all other areas of global health assistance, limiting the United States’ ability to work with local partners around the world and inhibiting their efforts to confront serious health challenges such as HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria, among others. Such restrictions on global health assistance are particularly harmful in light of the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic.”
• So in his mind somehow funding abortions overseas fights malaria, HIV, tubercolosis, etc. which is ridiculous.
• The last year that the U.S. funded that United Nations fund it cost the American taxpayer $69 million.

We have previously discussed the reality that on average, charities across the country spend about $2.94 per meal that they provide for homeless Americans. If that $69 million had been used to help those in need in this country, that $69 million of foreign abortion money could have been used to give 42 meals to every homeless American living on our streets today. That would have been the humanitarian thing to do.

4) To prove political class insanity exists outside of the U.S. also, consider this stupidity up in Manitoba, Canada:

• Obviously, Canada has also been hit hard by the covid pandemic.
• As a result they have put a moratorium on many mass gatherings like sports games, restaurants, and church services.
• In fact, at one point in time, they had forbidden any church services from being held unless they were strictly done online.
• One church decided it was going to broadcast its services over the radio while parishioners sat in their cars in the parking lot of the church, not mingling with anyone else, just them and possibly their family secluded and safely enclosed in their vehicles while they listened to the service.
• Sounds like a rational, unique, and certainly safe way to enjoy a religious ceremony even if it was not online.
• Well, without anything better to do, the local authorities broke up the gathering, actually fining a parishioner over $1,000 for daring to participate in this safe and secure religious ceremony.

Nobody was put in danger, nobody was spreading the virus, nobody was acting irrationally or violently, just some church worshippers looking for a different religious experience than sitting at home looking at their computer screen. And yet, taxpayer funding and resources were used to shut down what was a perfectly safe endeavor. 

In the meantime, governors, mayors and other political “leaders” are going to parties without masks, going on vacation, walking around maskless in public and nothing happens to them. But some poor church going guy in Canada gets hit with a $1,000 fine for doing nothing nearly as bad as politicians who flaunt their own rules.

Okay, that will do it for today's insanity review: Pandemic insanity in Canada, Biden’s double talk and wasting of American taxpayer dollars while Americans go hungry, and Cuomo continues to screw up everything he touches.

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:

https://www.amazon.com/Love-My-Country-Loathe-Government/dp/1604942789/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=love+my+country%2C+loathe+my+government&qid=1607716020&sr=8-1

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

http://www.reason.com

http://www.cato.org

http://www.bankruptingamerica.org

http://www.conventionofstates.com

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

 

 

February, 2015, Part 4, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Single Payer Disaster, Abortion LIes and The Failure To Be Epic

Every month for the past two years or so we have had to dedicate numerous posts each month to cover the many, many unfolding disasters that have been spawned by the Obama Care legislation. This is easily the worst piece of legislation ever enacted by the Washington political class for so many reasons:

• First of all it will never work in reining in the high cost of health care in this country since it never addressed the underlying root causes of our high costs, mistakenly implementing a Rube Goldberg like health insurance solution for what is mostly a public health problem.
• It will add over a trillion dollars to the national debt even though Obama promised it would not add “a single dime” to the debt.
• It has stifled economic growth and job creation.
• It has increased taxes on every American, either directly or indirectly, despite Obama’s promise that it would not.
• It has forced upwards of seven million Americans to lose access to their preferred health insurance policies.
• It has caused millions of Americans to lose access to their preferred Doctors, hospitals, and current medical treatments.
• Nationally, it has increased the cost of health care premiums and deductibles as compared to before the legislation was passed.
• It has opened up millions of Americans to the real threat of identity theft since Obama Care’s data systems security protocols are woefully inadequate.
• Even those that have obtained health care insurance under Obama Care policies are finding that their choice of doctors and hospitals are extremely narrow and more narrow than before the legislation was passed, resulting in many policy holders not getting access to the premier doctors and hospitals in this country.’The legislation has made a shortage of primary care physicians even worse since it is forcing primary care physicians to either retire earlier of move on to over options.
• Ten years from now the Congressional Budget Office predicts that tens of millions of Americans will still be without health care insurance coverage, the primary reason for the legislation in the first place.
• It has burdened the failing Medicaid system with millions of more applicants without fixing the massive problems with the system, causing more and more doctors to discontinue taking Medicaid and in some cases, Obama Care patients, resulting in the cruel irony that “you finally have health insurance but you do not have health care.”
• It failed to deliver on the Obama promise that the average American family would see a $2,500 annual reduction in their health insurance costs.
• While the legislation was supposed to reduce the number of emergency room visits, it has actually increased the number of emergency room visits.
• While it was supposed to make people healthier, the legislation’s resultant high co-pay levels and high deductible levels has forced many Obama Care patients to defer medical treatment because of the higher costs.

We could go on but you get the idea. This is a disastrous piece of legislation across multiple parameters. To get more details on each of the above disasters and explore other disasters of the legislation, just enter the phrase, “the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care” in the search box above.

This is our fourth post for this month that looks at the latest Obama Care disasters and fiascoes:

1) Recall our past discussions in this blog of the Canadian health care system, a so-called single payer system. In a single-payer system, the government is in charge of all aspects of health care in the country. They handle the paperwork, oversee prices and costs, dictate treatment protocols, etc. Everywhere it has been implemented in the world has usually resulted in a failure: higher costs and lower quality.

At the beginning of the Obama Care process, some of the President's supporters wanted Obama to implement a single payer system in this country. Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa was one of the biggest supporters of such a plan.

Fortunately, Obama Care did not go all the way to a single payer system but many of its "features" have the characteristics of a single payer system:

• The Federal government dictates what features and coverage must be in Obama Care insurance policies even if some of those features and coverage are not needed and not wanted by a citizen.
• The Federal government is herding millions of people into a single payer-like system called Medicaid via Obama Care, dictating what doctors will charge for services, dictating what is covered, and basically controlling all healthcare aspects of those enrolled.
• Obama Care has increased fees, taxes, and costs as it relates to healthcare in order to pay for its dictates in both the Medicaid arena and the private insurance arena.

Thus, while we did not go whole hog into a total single payer system in this country, Obama Care and Obama took us pretty far down the single payer road. Thus, it is worthwhile to see what a single payer system does to a country's health care health even if we did not finish the journey down the single payer path.

One way to do this is to examine the state of the Canadian single payer system since it has been around for a while and its citizens' wealth levels and health care levels are comparable to ours:

• According to a recent article on the Newsmax website, a Canadian citizen has to wait about 18.2 weeks to see a specialist doctor in Canada if they need specific medical care, i.e. more than four months.
• This is the overall finding from the latest annual report from the Fraser Institute, "Waiting Your Turn." 
• It found that the median length of time Canadians wait for necessary medical treatment after being referred by a general practitioner is 18.2 weeks, up from 9.3 weeks in 1993.
• And this is the median amount of wait time, which means half of those Canadians needing specific medical help wait more than four months to see a health care specialist
• Canada "rations" healthcare through long waiting times and limited access, according to Dr. Roger Stark, a healthcare policy expert at the Washington Policy Center; he recently told The Heartland Institute: "These long waits would not be acceptable to Americans, who are rightly accustomed to timely healthcare."
• And the wait times vary significantly across the country with the new Brunswick median wait time being 37.3 weeks, (an astonishing nine months plus) to Ontario where the median wait time is 14.1 weeks, still over three months.
• Wait times also vary greatly according to what type of specialist you need to see with the median wait time for orthopedic surgery being 42.2 weeks, neurology patients median wait time is an average of 31.2 weeks, and the wait for radiation oncology is 4.2 weeks.
• Think about this last statement: if you are fighting cancer, on average you have to wait over a month to get radiation treatment, four weeks where your cancer continues to spread.
• Canadians are waiting 3.8 weeks for a CT scan, 8.7 weeks for an MRI scan, and 3.3 weeks for an ultrasound.
• Extensive wait times can have serious consequences, report co-author Bacchus Barua points out: "For example, they may force some patients to endure months of physical pain and mental anguish, they may result in lower worker productivity and [forgone] wages, they can sometimes result in a potentially treatable illness being transformed into a debilitating permanent condition, and in the worst cases, they may result in death."
• Barua goes on to claim that the extensive wait times are not due to lack of funding and resources since Canadian healthcare expenditures per person have gone up by 50%, adjusting for inflation, since 1993.
• Thus, he claims the likely underlying causes of these gross waiting times are the government monopoly on the financing and delivery of medical services and the lack of appropriate incentives for providers.
• "This is indirect rationing," said Dr. Dale Dunn, a policy adviser to The Heartland Institute. "Almost 30 years ago I started seeing doctors leaving Canada because they were disgusted with the system because it prevented them from treating patients."

Steadily increasing costs for steadily decreasing quality. Even though Obama Care is not a single payer system, the negativity of a single payer systems sounds an awful like the unfolding disasters of Obama Care.

The Newsmax article concludes with this interesting news tidbit from New York: The New York State Assembly's Health Committee held a hearing in January on Committee Chairman Richard Gottfried's bill to adopt single-payer healthcare in the state of New York. Reminds me of an old saying: you cannot fix stupid.

2) There have been a lot of lies and deceptions that have come out of the President's mouth and other supporters of Obama Care over the past few years:

• The President promised that if you liked your current insurance policy you could keep it: false/lie
• The President promised if you liked your current doctors and hospitals, you could keep them: false/lie
• The President promised that not one single dime would be added to the national debt as a result of Obama Care: false/lie
• The President promised that the average American family would see about a $2,500 annual decrease in their health insurance costs: false/lie
• The President promised that signing up for Obama Care online in the Obama Care health exchanges would be simple, quick, and easy - false/lie

I am sure I am missing other lies and deceptions but you get the idea. It is very difficult to believe anything this President says relative to Obama Care given his trail of deceptions. 

And let's add another lie to this list, as documented recently by the Heritage Foundation. Obama had promised, both the country and anti-abortion Congressional Democrats, that not a single dollar of Obama Care would be used to cover the cost of abortions. This promise was critical to getting the necessary House votes he needed from pro-choice Democrats for the approval of the Obama Care legislation. Specifically, the President promised that "no Federal dollars will be used to fund abortions."

But as expected, this has turned into just another lie. According to pro choice groups, the non-green states below are states where Federal dollars and Obama Care insurance policies may be being used to fund abortions, a direct contradiction of what Obama promised.

How important was this issue to the passage of the legislation. According to Charles Donovan of the Charlotte Lozier Institute: “Federal funding for elective abortion was the most salient issue as the fate of the Affordable Care Act was hanging in early 2010, right up to the day of its passage.”  But a late 2014 report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) confirmed what many pro-life people had worried about - more than 1,000 Obama Care plans covered abortion while remaining eligible for Federal tax subsidies.

Even worse, the GAO analysis found that insurance companies were failing to collect from policyholders a required separate payment for abortion coverage, what critics call a “hidden” or “secret” fee. Requiring Obama Care policy holders to make two separate payments each month, one of them exclusively for abortion coverage, was the government’s attempt to prevent tax dollars, as Obama promised, from directly funding abortion.

According to the Heritage article, despite the GAO's findings and recommendations to fix what Obama promised would never happen, those fixes were not put in place for the second round of Obama Care policy signups that began in late 2014. In the absence of information or proof to the contrary, it must be assumed that Federal dollars are continuing being used to help fund Obama Care policies that support and fund abortion procedures. Thus, a critical deception was used to enact the law despite Presidential promises to the contrary.

3) One last point today, an example that shows what should have been done to reduce the high healthcare costs in this country. The following chart shows the dramtic and positive decline in breast cancer death rates over the past several decades:




Thus, the breast cancer death rate has dropped by about a third in the past two decades as a the result of better treatment, greater awareness and more women getting mammograms. The American Cancer Society says this translates into more than 200,000 deaths averted.

Imagine if Obama had focused on these types of success stories six years ago rather than a Rube Goldberg government insurance bureaucracy called Obama Care. Imagine if he had diverted those billions of dollars spent on a failed data systems process, enlargement of several existing government bureaucracies, etc. and had put that wealth into finding cures for colon cancer, prostate cancer, dementia, Parkinsons, heart disease. 

If we could reduce the death rates and incidences of these afflictions by one third or more, imagine how costs for health care in this country would plummet, making insurance that much cheaper without the idiocy of subsidies. If Obama had led the country to a healthy living and medical research vision, he could have been epic, much like Kennedy was epic when he led the country with a grand vision to use our resources to put a man on the moon  by the end of the decade.

But alas, the Obama administration has been anything but epic. We have wasted six years chasing an insurance answer for a public health and medical research issue. A one third decrease in the big diseases of our times would have been historic. Instead, Obama Care has become hysterical.

But it is not hysterical for the Americans we will focus on tomorrow, the last Obama Care update for this month. The people you will meet tomorrow have had their lives, their families, and their healthcare turned upside down in a truly negative way via Obama Care. And that is the sad human side of Obama Care.

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.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

Barack Obama - Using Executive Orders To Endanger The Biggest Progressive Victories Of The Last 50 Years

Before we get into the latest unConstitutional action and lawlessness of Barack Obama, let me set the stage. I am over sixty years old, I have never voted for a Republican for President in my life, and up until 2010, I had never voted for a Republican for national office. Thus, I am not a Republican, I am not a conservative, and I am not a right winger.

But I am an American. I do believe in the tenets and spirit of the Constitution. I do believe in the rule of law. And that is why on any number of levels, I find the recent Obama executive action relative to illegal immigrants repugnant, lawless, unConstitutional, and extremely dangerous to freedom. 

The most obvious danger from his unilateral action is that it is a direct violation of Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution: "Congress shall have the power to....establish a uniform rule of naturalization." This could not be any clearer. This power and responsibility within our republic lies with Congress when it comes to immigration and naturalization laws. Not the President, not the executive branch, Congress. Clear cut and concise. Thus, even if the President goes through with this clearly illegal action, it will no doubt be thrown out be the courts based solely on this explicit provision within the Constitution.

Now, the President will likely say he had to act via executive action because Congress did not act. And he may be right, maybe Congress did not act. But that does not allow the President to do what he wants, to ignore whatever current laws say no matter how distasteful that reality is to himself and immigration supporters. 

The Rolling Stones once sang that "you can't always get what you want," and that is the case here. Mr. President, you cannot always get what you want, so get over it. If this issue is so important to you, you should have done it legally six years ago when you and your party controlled both the White House and Congress. 

If you had acted then, you could have gotten what you wanted in a Constitutional manner that would have been able to withstand any court challenge. Your inability to plan or prioritize is all on you and you missed your window.

But your reckless and illegal actions on immigration carry a much bigger, yet more subtle risk, and danger to our country. In two years you will be gone, out of office. If the Republicans continue to politically out maneuver and out perform Democrats in 2016, like they did in the recent 2014 midterm elections, there is a very good chance that the country will get a Republican President in 2016.

And what if that President is just as disrespectful of the Constitution and rule of law as you are, acting on his or her whims rather than established legislative history and foundations? We might see Roe Vs. Wade get ignored and abortion made an illegal act again, based on the whim of a Republican President. 

We might see gays ousted from our military forces again, based on the whim of a Republican President. 

We might see existing gun control laws treated merely as suggestions and not law, based on the whim of a Republican President. 

We might see the Civil Rights Act or Voting Rights Act nullified, based on the whim of a Republican President.

You get the idea. Acting on a whim outside of the constructs of the Constitution justify others acting on their whims also. If Obama gets away with this illegal action, it opens the door for further illegal action, actions that may be contrary to what non-Republicans find important. And wouldn't that be the ultimate irony of the Obama administration: opening the door to undo fifty years of liberal, progressive, and Democratic victories and advances?

This is much bigger than a spat between a President and Congress. Obama is making himself bigger than the country, its laws, and the Constitution. If he gets away with it, there is nothing to stop future Presidents from having similar temper tantrums and going into emperor mode, ignoring existing laws and the will of the people. At that point, voting, freedom, representative government, and liberty become quaint and historical concepts that have been destroyed in this country.

Is there a need for comprehensive, compassionate, and doable immigration reform?Absolutely. Should both Congress and the President start acting like adults, get together, and bring such a plan to fruition? Absolutely. Will this happen? Not once the President has again fallen short of his leadership duties and role and has poisoned the waters of compromise and unity by ignoring the Constitution and current laws of the land.

And if you believe in a woman's right to an abortion, if you believe in gay rights, if you want at least existing gun control laws to remain in effect, if you believe in the right to vote and in civil rights for all, I strongly suggest you contact the White House and your Congressional representatives and pressure both parties to do immigration reform the right way. 

Otherwise, the next time a President goes rogue and acts like an emperor it might be an issue that you are passionate about, an issue your fought hard to favorably resolve, and an issue your thought was a done deal, only to have it blown up on the whim of a President. At that point it is too late to protect what is important to you and your principles. Don't let the following historical perspective repeat itself in this country (Pastor Martin Niemoller, 1892 - 1984):


"In Germany, they came first for the Communists. And I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.
And then they came for the trade unionists. And I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.
And then they came for the Jews. And I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for me and by that time there was no one left to speak up."

Speak up now before whims and egos of shallow men drive this country, bypassing the rule of law and the Constitution.

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.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w