July, 2015, Part 2: The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Insurance Companies Get Richer, Co-Op Executives Get Richer, Americans Get Poorer

Every month for years now we have had to discuss how bad Obama Care is turning out to be under the continuing theme, “the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care.” This month is no different. As the legislation continues to march through America, driving up health care and health insurance prices as it serves as dead weight on economic growth, it cements it rightful place as the worst piece of legislation Washington has ever produced.

It never had a chance to be successful since it really never addressed the underlying root causes of our ever increasing health costs in the country:

• Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food, resulting in obscenely high obesity rates for the country.
• Our food chain is infested with overdoses of high fructose corn syrup, salt, and other unhealthy additives.
• Americans smoke too much.
• Americans do not exercise enough.
• The country is in serious need of health care tort reform.
• Barriers to insurance company competition across state lines need to come down.
• Obama Care never “followed the money” to find out who is actually profiting from the ever escalating healthcare costs in this country and how to get those factors under control.
• Obama Care never got the immense amount of fraud and abuse in current government healthcare programs, Medicare and Medicaid, under control in order to save money to efficiently fund other government health care initiatives.
• Obama Care never put serious research money towards curing the major diseases that drive high healthcare costs such as high frequency cancers and dementia type diseases.

You cannot resolve any problem unless you understand and address the underlying root causes. No difference here but with a big exception: Obama Care legislation never addressed these listed root causes and thus, has no chance of ever being successful.

For a few days, we will look at the latest disasters from Obama Care, including the gathering evidence that Obama Care policy holders are in for a big and ugly financial surprise in their 2016 costs along with some personal stories on how Obama Care is causing havoc with American families.

1) We know that the American taxpayer is making out financially as a result of Obama Care since the legislation costs more than promised to implement and will add untold hundreds of billions, if not trillions, to the national debt. We know that Obama policyholders are not making out financially since Obama Care policy costs are going to skyrocket in 2016, as we discussed yesterday. So is anyone making out financially well as a result of Obama Care?

Not surprisingly, it looks like insurance companies are making out well financially so far. Which should not come as a surprise since 1) the Federal company forced millions of Americans to become unwilling customers of those companies and 2) those companies are receiving taxpayer funded subsidies to support those new customers. 

Nick Sorrentino, writing for his Crony Capitalism website, recently wrote an article entitled, “Aetna CEO sees piles of taxpayer financed profits thanks to Obamacare” Highlights of his article include the following discussion points:

• The Aetna stock price has more than tripled since Obama Care was passed, not a bad boost to stockholder wealth.

• Sorrentino goes on to state: “A law which was not even supported by a majority of Americans but was forced through Congress on questionable procedural grounds. A law which has now financially addicted a good portion of the American people like it was designed to. Yep, good times for the health insurance companies.”
• Aetna recently stated it would make more money than originally anticipated thanks to “attractive growth” from new enrolment generated by Obama Care exchanges.

Makes you wonder why all these insurance companies are asking for mega-rate hikes if Obama Care policies are such an “attractive growth” opportunity. Something is amiss here: Obama touts Obama Care, health insurance touts Obama Care, and Americans get stuck paying more for insurance than they would have without Obama Care. Guess who has the better lobbyists in Washington: insurance companies or common American citizens?

2) One aspect of Obama Care that we have previously discussed is the concept of Obama Care health co-ops. The purpose of these co-ops was to create an insurance entity that would compete with established insurance companies in areas of the country where there was not a lot of health insurance company competition. The theory being that these co-ops would provide a competitive counter balance to established insurance companies, keeping policy costs down.

As with just about every aspect of Obama Care, many of these co-ops have been failures so far. Many are under severe financial strain and some have already shut down, leaving their policyholder customers in a lurch.

One reason they might be in financial bad shape, and now also in legal risk, is a recent analysis by the Daily Caller News Foundation which found that some of these co-ops might be breaking the law by paying their top executives too much in salary. Eighteen of the 23 co-ops paid their top executives huge salaries ranging from $263,000 to $587,000, according to 2013 IRS tax filings. The high take-home pay for the “nonprofit” executives appears to violate both federal law and Obama Care rules prohibiting “excessive executive compensation.”

At the low end of $263,000, some of these co-op executives are making more than the members of Congress, the Supreme Court Justices, and the governors of all 50 states. Some of them are making more than the President despite the law that explicitly puts caps on the co-op executive salaries. Some of these salaries are two to four times higher than the $135,000 median executive healthcare pay reported in an October 2014 nonprofit CEO compensation study published by Charity Navigator. Charity Navigator is a group that tracks philanthropic and charitable organizations.

Under the Obama Care legislation, the co-ops were required by law to conduct salary surveys to “reflect the market rate for a similar position in your area.” Despite this requirement, only half of the co-ops conducted a review, according to their IRS forms. According to Elizabeth right, health and science director of Citizens Against Government Waste: “I think it’s pretty shocking that they’re making that much money and what’s even worse is that most of these co-ops are failing.” 

Wright has pointed out that the collapse in December 2014 of the Iowa-based Co-Opportunity Health as a prime example of Obamacare co-op mismanagement. Co-Opportunity received $177 million in federal start-up loans before state regulators took it over and declared it in “hazardous” condition. David Lyons, Co-Opportunity’s president and CEO received $261,000 in compensation. Stephen Ringlee, Co-Opportunity’s CFO, received $257,000, despite having failed in several previous startups. Clifford Gold, its COO, took in $288,00.

So now we know another group that is doing well as a result of Obama Care, so well in fact they are likely breaking the law: executives in mostly failing Obama Care co-ops.

3) As we often do, let’s finish up today’s update on the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care with some real life heart aches from real Americans who are suffering from the worst piece of Washington legislation ever written, as told to the website:

www.ourhealthcarestories.com

JEFF - NEW MEXICO: I have been insuring out daughter, Melissa, for the last several years. She was in college and needed something. We insured her with Presbyterian in NM. It started out as $119 a month with a $2500 deductible. They changed all their policies around and it started costing $149 a month but low and behold the deductible dropped to $1250. That was manageable and reasonable. Along comes "obamacare" and it hit the fan. The so-called covered everything necessary now was going to be $189 a month with a SIX THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED DOLLAR DEDUCTIBLE! Who can afford that! I had to drop my daughters insurance and live in panic mode that something might happen before we could get her covered again. Then there was all those drops, exclusions, changes, delays! Who can follow all that? She now is covered by the state. Something i never wanted to happen but, you gotta do what ya gotta do and she did what she had to do.

HOWARD - NEW HAMPSHIRE: My wife just lost her primary care provider. He left his practice because he didn't have enough time to properly treat his patients. Too much time required for all of the new paperwork.

MIKE - INDIANA:  My wife loss her original insurance and then could renew at an 100% cost increase then she lost her doctor (most likely because of Obamacare).

RICHARD - MICHIGAN:  From NBC News: Richard Helgren, a Lansing, Mich., retiree, said he was “irate” when he received a letter informing him that his wife Amy's $559 a month health plan was being changed because of the law. The plan the insurer offered raised his deductible from $0 to $2,500, and the company gave him 17 days to decide. The higher costs spooked him and his wife, who have painstakingly planned for their retirement years. "Every dollar we didn't plan for erodes our standard of living," Helgren said.

Ultimately, though Helgren opted not to shop through the ACA exchanges, he was able to apply for a good plan with a slightly lower premium through an insurance agent.

He said he never believed President Obama’s promise that people would be able to keep their current plans: "I heard him only about a thousand times," he said. "I didn't believe him when he said it though because there was just no way that was going to happen. They wrote the regulations so strictly that none of the old policies can grandfather."

Insurance companies getting rich, health co-op executives getting rich, Americans getting poorer. Sounds about right for Obama Care. More horror stories 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.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

Will The Center Hold, Part 3: More Calls For A Convention Of The States, Humping The Feds on Hemp, and More

This is our third post this past week on how the middle core of the country might be coming apart as the Washington political class becomes more and more oppressive in its policies and overreach. This is causing state governments and individual citizens to push back agaiinst the oppressive tactics of the Federal government which is hindering the states’ and individuals' rights and freedoms as laid out in the Constitution. This wide ranging pushback raises two critical questions for our nation’s future:

• What if Washington passed a law that no one obeyed?
• If this behavior became widespread, would the center of the country hold or would the Federal government as we know cease to exist?

Never in the history of our country has Washington been held in such low regard and contempt. Issues causing this friction range from gun control to overbearing and ineffective education requirements to Federal land grabs, to Obama Care resistance, etc.

The nation has stayed united through depressions, recessions, world wars, a civil war, the Nixon administration and a range of other problem eras. However, it remains to be seen where the current friction across the country will take us.

The first two parts of this series can be viewed at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2014/04/will-center-hold-april-2014-part-1.html

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2014/04/will-center-hold-april-2014-part-2.html

1) Common Core is the Federal government’s idea to institute a one size fits all educational curriculum across the country. However, early reviews on the effectiveness of such a single focused mentality for all kids in all schools are are not good. That ineffectiveness has caused a multitude of states to opt out of all or some of Common Core’s requirements, a slap in the face to the Federal government which is trying to control the education of our kids, a job that was traditionally handled at the local and state government level.

A concerned mother (by the way, this mother works as a literary consultant to urban schools so she probably knows a little about English tests besides holding a PhD in English) investigated the English class  Common Core material in some detail after her ninth grade daughter had an experience with a Common Core English test. The daughter came home and told her mother that:

• “These are such weird questions.” 
• “This test is crazy.” 
• “This is a stupid, impossible test.”

Given that teenagers can often be a little overly dramatic, the mom decided to try to answer a few of the Common Core tests for herself. She was so shocked by the material that she wrote a letter to the President to describe the many problems the material presented to ninth grade kids. The critical paragraph of her letter goes as follows:

“I have a Ph.D. in English, I’ve been in college and high school classrooms for over 20 years, and for much of that time I’ve trained and coached high school English teachers. I was shocked that the ninth grade test included an excerpt from Bleak House, a Dickens novel that is usually taught in college. I got seven out of 36 multiple choice questions wrong on the eleventh grade test. And I had no idea what to do with this essay prompt on the third grade test.”

If a highly educated, PhD holding woman cannot ace a ninth grade test in her area of specialty, who thinks that a seventh grade kid can? And if that is truly the case, what educational value did those seventh graders receive? I am not saying all tests should be easy. School should be hard and challenging, but not impossible. This is just one reason why many people are telling Washington to kiss off on Common Core, it does not work, much like just about everything else that Washington politicians touch.

Her entire letter can be viewed at:

http://www.ijreview.com/2014/04/132870-mom-writes-president-obama-letter/

2) Many states are moving forward and calling for the so-called “convention of the states,” allowed under Article V of the Constitution. This Article allows for a convention to be held to install changes to the Constitution once two thirds of the states, 34 states, pass resolutions or bills calling for a convention. Never before in my memory do I recall anything close to the states taking the initiative to push back an over reaching Federal government.

A recent article on the Capitalism Institute website reported how Alaska became the next state to call for such a convention. Highlights of the article include:

• Alaska’s Senate passed a resolution calling for a Convention of States, matching the Alaska House to make their application official. 
• Alaska joins Georgia as the only official applicants thus far, but states including Alabama, Arizona and Florida are close to making their applications official as well.
• A signature by the state’s governor is not necessary for the application to be valid, only passage through both houses of the legislature is required. 
• The Alaska resolution resolves “to call a convention of the states for the sole purpose of proposing amendments to the Constitution of the United States that impose fiscal restraints on the Federal government, limit the power and jurisdiction of the federal government, and limit the terms of office of Federal government officials.” 
• If 34 states officially apply for a convention, Congress will be compelled to call it to order. 

The article explains that the likely agenda items at an Article V convention would be strictly limited to a balanced budget amendment, a Congressional term limit amendment, and possibly an amendment prohibiting Congress from exempting themselves or other government employees from the laws they pass.

This may be the only way to attack what has become a $17 TRILLION national debt burden, return us to a much smaller but hopefully much more effective Federal government as required by the Constitution, and the implementing of term limits so that we get rid of the entrenched and useless politicians that got the country into the mess it is in now in the first place. 

Heaven knows the current Washington political set has shown no ability or desire to do what has to be done, forcing states and individuals to ban together to use the only tool left to them, Article V.

3) Another recent article from the Capitalism Institute also announced that the state of Florida had also passed a binding resolution calling for a Convention of The States to reign in the Federal government. What is interesting about the convention of the states drive is:

• The effort is only about a year old.
• However, there are organized Article V teams already up and running in all 50 states.
• Seven states who are well ahead of the rest of the states and include Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Missouri, New Mexico, and South Carolina.
• These states include a broad cross section of geographic areas from Florida in the most southeastern part of the U.S. to Alaska in the most northwestern part of the U.S. to Missouri in the Midwest to Arizona to New Mexico on the southwest, i.e. Americans across the entire country are fed up with Washington.

4) We recently came across another state government push back against the Federal government that we have not previously discussed. It is against Federal law for any American to grow industrial hemp in the country. Industrial hemp, it is my understanding, while a relative of marijuana, does not contain any of the mind altering properties of marijuana. 

I am assuming that the Feds have long banned it since it looks like real marijuana. Another theory I have heard in the past is that Dupont, who makes a lot of man-made fabrics, did not want to compete with the fabrics that could be developed from hemp and thus, successfully lobbied the Federal government to ban this competitive product. That crony capitalism story can wait for another day.

Industrial hemp has a lot of different uses across the world, it would provide a nice boost to American farmers by giving them another crop option to use or to rotate through their lands. To that end, on April 16, 2014, the state government Assembly of Tennessee took the final necessary steps to send legislation to the Tennessee governor, which if signed, would nullify the Federal ban on hemp in the state.

The Tennessee Assembly Bill 2445 was sponsored by State Representative. Jeremy Faison and it would mandate that the state authorize the growing and production of industrial hemp within Tennessee, Senator Frank Niceley was the chief Senate sponsor of the legislation.

Some media reports say that since hemp production is still banned on the Federal level, the Tennessee legislation will only take effect begin cultivation once the feds change the law. However, the legislation makes no such stipulation with regards to waiting on the Federal government since the bill reads:

“The department shall issue licenses to persons who apply to the department for a license to grow industrial hemp.”

According to Mike Maharrey, communications director for the Tenth Amendment Center, one word strengthened the bill considerably: “By including the word ‘shall’ in this legislation, it has a great deal of impact. This means that rather than keeping it open-ended like other states have done, hemp farming will be able to move forward in Tennessee whether the [Federal] regulatory bureaucrats there want it to or not.”

Wow, another state telling the Federal government to back off on another Federal law. Tennessee joins three other states that are also working to ignore or nulllify Federal hemp banning laws: Colorado, Oregon and Vermont have already passed bills to authorize hemp farming, but only in Colorado has the process begun. 

That will do it for now. Push backs against the Federal government meddling in a whole range of our lives including harmless hemp growing, a doomed-to-failure national education program, term limits, out of control federal spending, and more. Again, 1) what if Washington passed a law that no one obeyed and 2) will the center hold if the previous point becomes common place? Interesting times.

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

April, 2014 Political Class Insanity, Part 1: Wasting Taxpayer Money In Every Conceivable Way

Every month since this blog began back in 2009, we have spent some time writing about the insanity, idiocy, ineptness, and wasteful spending of the American political class. Back then, we could usually cover all of the insanity in one post. 

However, over the years, it seems as if the politicians in this country have created more insanity and problems at a faster and faster rate. This has pushed the number of days each month required to cover such insanity to more and more over the years.

This month should be no exception. Even though we spent two weeks last month covering the idiocy and fiascos of Obama Care and political class corruption, there is still enough insanity this month to cover at least a week or so of posts. Today starts the process. Hopefully, at the end of this week of insanity you will feel compelled to join our effort to implement term limits at:

www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com

Because really, as you will see from the political class incompetence we will document this week, how much worse could it get with a whole new set of people sitting in elected office?

1) Many Americans like to think that we live in a capitalistic society where companies compete fairly in a free market. That is really not true. We live in a crony capitalistic society where cronies and friends of politicians use and abuse those political connections to get favored treatment at the expense of their competitors of the American taxpayer.

This point was recently driven home by a study from an organization called Open the Books. They issued a new report that went to great effort and detail to document all Federal grants, loans, direct payments, and insurance subsidies that the Federal government and political class hands out at taxpayer expense. The amount of money given to each company is relatively small in the context of the multi-TRILLION Federal budget. But when added up together, we see that the American taxpayer is paying out tens of billions of dollars to some to the largest and least needy businesses on the planet.

For example, according to the website, www.openthebooks.com:

• $21.3 billion was doled out in the form of outright income-transfer subsidies to corporate America last year. 
• On average, each Fortune 100 company received about $200 million in such handouts.
• General Electric received $380 million in taxpayer financed handouts.
• General Motors received $370 million in taxpayer funded handouts.
• Boeing received $264 million in taxpayer funded handouts.
• Archer Daniels Midland received $174 million in taxpayer funded handouts.
• United Technologies received $160 million in taxpayer funded handouts.
• The $21.3 does not include the billions of dollars in housing, bank, and auto-company bailouts in 2008 and 2009 since those payments are kept mostly invisible within the Federal government accounting system.
• It also does not include the asset purchases of the Federal Reserve, indirect subsidies such as the ethanol mandate that enriches large agribusinesses like Archer Daniels Midland, or special tax breaks for wind and solar manufacturers.
• About $8.5 billion of these financial gifts were in the form of taxpayer-subsidized loans. The big winners here were Chevron, Exxon Mobil, Ford Motor Company, and other multibillion-dollar corporations whose franchisees who somehow qualified for Small Business Administration loans despite the financial size and power of their parent companies.
• Archer Daniels Midland, the giant agricultural business, got just under $1 billion for USDA farm-program loans which does not include ethanol subsidies, a fancy name for another form of crony capitalism
• The No. 1 federal insurance program, the Export-Import Bank provides subsidizes insurance and marketing aid to such financial giants as Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase with both receiving more than $3 billion in such aid and Citigroup and Bank of America receiving more than $1.5 billion in taxpayer backstop insurance. (Remember, this doesn’t include TARP bailout money.) 
• John Deere, American Express, and even Walmart have historically reeled in taxpayer funded and backed Federal insurance support as well.
• The National Review Online article from March 27, 2014 that documented these findings pointed out that only one of the Fortune 100 companies did NOT receive taxpayer funded support and crony gifts from the American taxpayer over the time frame that Open The Books studied.

This documented $21.3 billion in crony capitalism/corporate handouts comes out to about $185 for each household in the country. Thus, as you are writing your check this month to pay your Federal income tax bill, remember that $185 of that payment is being used to give political and financial favors to the biggest banks, the biggest companies, and likely the biggest campaign donors to the politicians in Washington. 

It is just so unfair that we cannot claim Wells Fargo, American Express, Exxon and all the others as dependents on our tax forms since they truly are dependents, courtesy of the Washington political class.

2) But it is not just big corporations that the American political class wastes taxpayer wealth on. According to an April 1, 2014 article from the Independent Journal Review, the Federal government has recently spent taxpayer wealth on the following dubious projects:

• $3 million to create a safe street crossing for turtles.
• $137,500 for the creation of a video game called “Layoff.”
• $71,623 to study cocaine use in monkeys.
• $3 million for NASA to study Congress, giving hope that we may finally find out what color the sky is in Nancy Pelosi’s world.
• $15,551 to study drunk mice behavior.
• $544,338 to update the Justice Department’s Linkedin page.
• $17.4 million to install broadband capability to serve 30 people.
• $10,000 to develop a moose-themed musical called “Moosical.”

I dare anyone justify to me these kind of expenditures being worthy of taxpayer money. Useless, wasted spending on programs that do nothing to resolve the half dozen major issues facing the country today.

3) But the Independent Journal Review was not done with just documenting these eight wastes of taxpayer wealth. The day before exposing the above eight atrocities of waste, they identified massive wasteful spending by the National Science Foundation (NSF) in any number of areas that have absolutely minimal impact on the vast majority of Americans

Let’s start with the a Federal funded musical play. The NSF has spent nearly $700,000 of taxpayer money on a “climate change-themed theatrical production” entitled The Great Immensity. The theater company “The Civilians” applied for and won a grant in 2010 to produce the play. According to the musical’s website, The Great Immensity is “a thrilling and timely production,” presented by an “investigative theater company.”

Useless spending. The Federal government, especially one of its primary science agencies, should not be in the mode of financing the production of musical plays on an issue that is far from settled in the minds of many, many Americans, including myself.

This NSF musical funding effort was just one of several questionable expenditures that were recently scrutinized by U.S. Senator Lamar Smith of Texas. He recently interrogated the White House “science czar” John Holdren in a committee hearing about how the NSF is choosing to spend its money. Along with the musical, Smith specifically queried asked Holdren about the following questionable and idiotic NSF projects:

• A $15,000 study on the fishing practices in and around Lake Victoria in Africa. In Africa, not America, Africa. 
• $340,000 study on the examination of the “ecological consequences” of early human fires in New Zealand. In New Zealand, Not America, New Zealand. 
• $200,000 towards a three-year study of the Bronze Age. 
• Another $50,000 towards the survey of archived lawsuits from 17th century Peru. Not this century, not America. Three centuries ago in Peru. 
• $20,000 for a study on the causes of stress in Bolivia. In Bolivia, Not America, Bolivia.

Ridiculous wastes of money. If the Federal government is going to have a national science agency, and I question the need for one given the abject failure of the NSF to recently develop and deliver any kind of useful scientific breakthrough or technology despite spending tens of billions of dollars over the years, shouldn’t the projects it is funding be geared to resolving the major issues of our times?

I can think of seven areas where I would want scientific breakthroughs to happen to address the major issues facing most Americans today:

1. Find a cure for the leading cancers of today such as breast and lung cancer.
2. Find a cure and treatment approach for aging diseases such as Alzheimers and Parkinsons, diseases that will ravage our aging population.
3. Find a way to make coal a clean fuel since most of the world will be using it for decades into the future on a worldwide scale.
4. Find a way to treat addiction to break the deadly hold drug addiction has on millions of Americans.
5. Find a way to make clean energy cheaper, more efficient, and more accessible.
6. Find a way to reduce the ever escalating health care costs in this country since it is now obvious that Obama Care will not be able to resolve that issue.
7. Find a way to make existing and new energy sources cheap, plentiful and clean.

If the NSA could fund research that would solve just these seven issues, most of America would be able to pay their tab. However, the political class has allowed the NSF to waste money in New Zealand, Bolivia, Peru, and Africa on projects that are of absolutely no concern to the American public. That is insanity and that is why the NSF should either get refocused on what is important to Americans or be disbanded and their budget redistributed back to Americans.

That will do it for today, the myriad of ways our politicians have found to waste our money on their business cronies and other stupid porgrams and projects. The insanity is just getting started, much more to follow in the next few days.

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

Senate Democrats and Their Hypocrisy On Trickle Down Economics

I had wanted to do this post for a while but the constant political class insanity from our political class and the fallout from the worst piece of Washington legislation ever passed, Obama Care, has pushed this piece of political class lunacy to the back burner.

However, it is a good time to do this review of political corporate cronyism for a number of reasons. First, it is always good to see how our politicians in Washington are handing out our tax dollars to their business and union cronies, usually for a return payment to their perpetual reelection campaigns. 

Second, House and Senate politicians have been in secret negotiations over the past few months, trying to finally come up with a formal and rational Federal budget, something they have not done for the past five years. I expect to hear the President, and Reid and Pelosi start yelling really soon that they see a need for tax increases in order to have a sound budget. 

Today, we will again rebut this insanity by showing how billions and billions of dollars could be trimmed from the Federal budget spending stream by stopping the massive corporate welfare that the Federal government indulges in with our wealth. Our constant assertion that no American, rich or poor, should pay an additional penny in taxes as long as the Federal government is as wasteful, petty, and fraud infested with our tax wealth and, as we will see today, as long as they continually give out our tax wealth to their cronies in big business is still valid.

The main basis for this post is an article that was written by Tim Carney in a March Washington Examiner piece: “Trickle-down Dems would line pockets of big business.” He took a detailed look at the budget plan that Senate Democrats had put together.

Remember, Democrats have always tried to position themselves as the protector of the common citizen and that the evil Republicans were in bed with the big, bad corporations that were abusing American citizens and workers in every way possible. As you will see, every politician, including Democrats, are very good at abusing us, as illustrated by their proposed budget back in March, an approach that I bet has not changed at all since then.

When reviewing the following corporate welfare programs the Senate Democrats were propping in that early 2013 budget proposal, keep in mind how they tried to set up the budget philosophy, in their own words: "The Senate Budget takes the position that trickle-down economics has failed as an economic policy and that true national prosperity comes from the middle out, not the top down." 

Trickle down economics has failed? That is their position in the intro to their budget. But they then go off and start giving away billions of taxpayer dollars to rich corporations in the weak, often vain, hope that this will some how trickle down the corporate ladder and create jobs. Hypocrisy at its worst.

1) The so-called Federal Export-Import Bank is supposed to support U.S. exports by lending taxpayer money or guaranteeing private loans to foreign buyers of U.S. goods. Yes, the American taxpayer, via the Federal government, gives our wealth to foreigners to buy products from U.S. companies. The Democrats wanted to keep that entity in existence in their budget proposal.

This might be a good idea except for the fact that like many years before, in 2012 Ex-Im dedicated more than 80 percent of its loan-guarantee dollars to subsidizing Boeing sales. The overwhelming majority of the program’s dollars goes to a single company. Shouldn’t the shareholders and owners of Boeing be the ones helping finance the purchase of its products, not the American taxpayer? 

The writer, Tim Carney, points out the hypocrisy quite nicely: “Democrats may argue that these Boeing subsidies -- and Boeing just got a $1.2 billion guarantee last week -- create jobs. But a party that "creates jobs" by giving taxpayer subsidies to Boeing should not complain about "trickle-down economics."

2) Another crony infested proposal by the Senate Democrats was a $20 billion "investment" in broadband -- laying fiber optics, especially in rural areas. But the New York Times published a story last February about an 11-student schoolhouse in rural Colorado, eleven students total, which received three fiber-optic Internet lines, funded by a whopping $100 million taxpayer grant to a consortium featuring IBM. That comes out to about $33 million for each line, about $9 million for each of eleven students. 

Who's really benefiting here, the students or the companies? And how many “jobs” were created with this $100 million “investment? Probably none, if only three lines were installed. Imagine how much money would be wasted if the Senate actually gave out $20 billion in the same manner.

3) Back within that early 2013 budget attempt was a call to spend money on "Investing in life science research." To prove their point and the priority for spending more on life science research (whatever that means), the Senate Democrats referenced an important sounding group called United for Medical Research (UMR). 

Who or what is UMR? UMR represents two of the biggest lobbying organizations in Washington: the Biotechnology Industry Organization and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. Sounds like those folks might have a stake in spending billions on “life science research.” 

But this is the same inane argument as the Ex-Im Bank is for Boeing: if this research is so important and so lucrative, than the businesses and companies behind the UMR should be funding the research out of their shareholder bucket of cash, not the American taxpayer. It is the shareholders who will get the eventual big payoff from the research with likely very few jobs created in the process.

4) Also cited in the Democratic budget proposal is the Alliance for a Stronger FDA, which is another group funded by BIO, PhRMA, Pfizer, Merck, Eli Lilly and Johnson & Johnson. So the big drug companies are at the teller’s window also, looking to get the American taxpayer to fund what they should be paying for from a research perspective.

5) Not mentioned in the article is the hundreds of other sweetheart deals that corporations get from Washington. Solyndra and other crony infested alternative energy companies wasted billions of dollars of taxpayer wealth with nothing in return from an alternative energy perspective. Last week, we talked how General Motors will never repay the American taxpayer the $10 billion it still owes us. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac at last count were approaching almost $200 billion worth of taxpayer bailout costs. Democrats had no problem funding these major corporations with taxpayer payer wealth.

True capitalism requires a level playing field where all the competitors live, thrive or die based on their own hard word, abilities, and innovation. Crony capitalism, as practiced by the Senate Democrats in their budget proposal and day-to-day activities, intentionally tilts the playing field to the advantage of connected companies, usually big companies, that milk the capitalism culture in Washington to their own benefit and the detriment of the American taxpayer and other, more honest competitors.

Consider some information from the political campaign tracking website, Open secrets. According to their analysis, the following companies contributed the indicated amounts of money to politicians:

• In 2012, the Boeing corporation contributed $3.4 million to election campaigns and spent $15.6 million on lobbying.
• Their level of political contributions placed them in the top 99.6% of all contributors and their lobbying expenses placed them in the top 99.7% of all companies that spent money on lobbying.
• In 2012, Johnson and Johnson contributed $1.4 million to election campaigns and spent $5.9 million on lobbying.
• Their level of political contributions placed them in the top 98.7% of all contributors and their lobbying expenses placed them in the top 98.2% of all companies that spent money on lobbying.

You get the idea. In this country today a company can spend a few million dollars on incumbent politicians’ reelection campaigns and lobbying and get billions of dollars in benefits back, courtesy of the American taxpayer. Rather than spend money on new factories or new research like they should be doing, they can now get better financial returns and results, more tax breaks, free use of taxpayer money, etc., by contributing and lobbying rather than investing.

The most insulting part of the whole Senate Democrats’ budget process was the thought that this was NOT trickle down economics. It is the exact definition of trickle down economics, give taxpayer money to preferred corporate friends and cronies and hope that some incremental jobs might get created, enough to get the incumbents reelected. 

I hate it when they think we are too stupid to recognize their lack of integrity and depth. A pathetic way to run a country. A way that leads to wasted spending, declining investment, $17 TRILLION debt loads, crony corruption, and just a slimy feeling of what Washington is all about. 

So when the Democrats emerge from the current secret budget talks, ask them how 1) how much is Boeing, General Motors, Merck, and others getting from the taxpayers this time, and 2) why should we swallow any tax increases on any common American citizen while these corporations are getting billions for spending millions. 

Keep the following image in mind while you wait for the answers to these questions, courtesy of Tim Carney:

There's a colorful description for this sort of policy: feeding the horse to feed the birds. If you want to feed birds, you could set out birdseed in a bird feeder. Or you could throw some hay to the horses, and let the birds feast on what comes out the other end.

Here's a more polite term for the Democrats' economic approach: "trickle down."

BS is BS no matter what you call it. Or in Mr. Carney's example, we have horses rather than bulls so HS is HS no matter what you call it.

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

November, 2013 The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care, Guest Speaker 1: A Summary of The Many Obama Care Disasters

We have spent the past nine posts researching, reporting on, and commenting on the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. Americans losing access to their favorite doctors, Americans losing access to their preferred insurance policies and carriers, Americans needlessly being made the targets of identify thieves via faulty IT security, a $600 million website that does not work, politicians cutting favorable deals for themselves, deals not available to the rest of America, Americans losing their jobs or having their work hours cut, economic growth being stymied, and dozens of other disasters. All caused by the worst piece of legislation ever written by the most inept set of Washington politicians ever.

The first post in this latest set of Obama Care disasters can be accessed at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2013/11/november-2013-unfolding-obama-care.html

In the next two days, we will step aside and let a few experts and others take their best shot at describing why this is such a horrid piece of legislation. Today’s writing comes from a Mr. Rick McKee writing for the Augusta Chronicle. He does an excellent job of summarizing the draconian and fatal consequences of the legislation, starting with the failure of the Obama Care Federal government website to the role that big business played in writing this horrid piece of legislation to the lose of freedom and choice in our medical decisions to the glaring conclusion that most Americans already know but may not want to believe: Government is not negatively affected by failure. In fact, there is a reward for failure in government. And make no mistake about it, Obama Care is government failure at its pinnacle.

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Healthcare.gov Is Obamacare’s Best Feature

Rick McKee, The Augusta Chronicle

The public face of the Obamacare deathcare disaster right now is the government website that administers program sign-ups, Healthcare.gov.

If the government’s goal in establishing Healthcare.gov, as President Barack Obama has claimed, is to allow people to view available insurance plans and sign up for them through the website, then Healthcare.gov is a colossal failure. It’s the type of failure that, had it occurred in the private sector, would have resulted in the immediate firing of the company’s chief executive officer, the head of the department overseeing the project, the project’s director and most, if not all, of the people who contributed to the project in any supervisory way — and that is only if the company was able to survive the disastrous debut.

But government is not negatively affected by failure. In fact, there is a reward for failure in government. As Representative Steny Hoyer reminded Tuesday when asked how Congress could help improve the system, “We can give them a little money.” Never mind the hundreds of millions of dollars already dumped into the boondoggle.

And so it was for the crony firm tasked with developing the website, CGI Federal. The Canadian information technology firm entered the U.S. government contracting business after buying several American IT firms beginning in 2004. It was in the right place at the right time and got the contract despite a checkered past on similar projects; one of them, a Canadian healthcare registry for diabetes sufferers, performed so badly and CGI missed so many deadlines that the $46.2 million project was scrapped.

So apparently, government contractors aren’t affected by failure either, at least as long as they play the corporatist game and line the pockets of the Washington, D.C., criminal elected class, which CGI did to the tune of at least $800,000, according to Opensecrets.org.

And neither are government bureaucrats affected by failure. See Sebilius, Kathleen; Lerner, Lois; Holder, Eric; Boswell, Eric J.; Maxwell, Raymond; Clinton, Hillary; Napolitano, Janet, etc.

Insurance executives are warning that the Healthcare.gov website will lead to theft of private information and other forms of identity theft. And if fixes aren’t made properly, those trying to sign up can expect to see their bank accounts debited multiple times and they may still not be signed up for health insurance.

The user experience has been disastrous. ProPublica has been monitoring user feedback at Healthcare.gov/feedback and is finding that the site is misidentifying people, compromising their identities (or claiming their identities are compromised), requiring them to fill out the same information numerous times, blocking their access to their own accounts and costing insurance agents countless hours and dollars in lost time and clients.

But as bad as the Healthcare.gov rollout has been (and even Democrats are now admitting it has been a failure), Obamacare itself is actually much, much worse:

• It restricts medical choices in myriad ways. Treatment options and payment schedules will be set by a group of unelected bureaucrats under the thumbs of Big Pharma, the medical industrial complex and Big Insurance. Holistic and naturopathic treatments are not part of the protocol. Doctors are leaving over the regulations and reduced payment schedules. Many more are being dropped by the crony insurance companies. (See below.) Most doctor examinations are being replaced by examinations by nurse practitioners. 
• Although its official name is the Affordable Healthcare Act, Obamacare is anything but affordable. The low-premium Bronze Plan has impossible-to-afford deductibles. The high-premium Gold Plan is unaffordable to most. According to a breakdown of premiums for each county done by The Market Ticker® the average unsubsidized premium for a 27-year-old will be $3,200 per year. For the average 50-year-old, individual premiums are about $5,434 per year. For a couple with children, the annual premium would be about $7,774. But smokers’ premiums are about twice that because of surcharges. 
• As is typical of government redistribution schemes, this one picks winners and losers. Losers are most Americans who will be paying a lot more for less care and fewer choices. The workers and the healthy will be subsidizing the poor, the nonworking and sickest. The text of the Obamacare calls for government “subsidies” up to 400 percent of the poverty line (about $94,000 for a family of four). But lawsuits are in the works that will deny subsidies to those 34 States that opted not to set up exchanges. Few, if any, will choose to pay the prices for unsubsidized premiums. According to government Consumer Price Index numbers, health insurance spending is .656 percent of the family budget. Under Obamacare, a family would have to make to $1.185 million annually for a premium of $7,774 to be .656 percent of their budget. 
• If the government pays for treatments, it can set treatment options. Already, the Food and Drug Administration is a fascist system that approves drug treatments will little or no independent research and it not only exempts Big Pharma from paying damages to people harmed by their drugs, it often uses taxpayer dollars to pay damages when courts mandate them. Once the government gets into the business of approving and mandating treatments, medical freedom is lost. 
• Many Obamacare supporters outside the Beltway believe that Obamacare is a better system than the previous government-regulated crony system because they disapproved of private businesses making decisions about which treatments they would pay for and how much they’d pay. But Obamacare is a fascist system written by insurance companies, Big Pharma and medical-industrial lobby to their benefit, not to the patients’ benefit. 
• Further evidence that Obamacare was written by the insurance companies can be seen in their rising stock prices since Obamacare’s passage. Obamacare is a boon to insurance companies who expect to see in increase in the number of customers and premium payments guaranteed by the Federal government. 
• Obamacare is hastening the collapse of U.S. economic system. America is currently selling U.S. bonds to itself in order to pay its bills and running up trillions of dollars in “debts” that will never be paid by anything of substance. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the cost of Obamacare at $2 trillion, but the law will increase the number of insured by only 40 million people at a cost of $50,000 each. 
• Obamacare is turning America into a part-time workforce. Hundreds of thousands of full-time jobs have been reduced to part time so businesses can avoid Obamacare mandates. 
• Obamacare’s premium structure penalizes married couples. It gives benefits more generously to unmarried couples who cohabit than it does to married couples. Cohabiting couples are 170 percent more likely to split up than married couples. Children from broken families are 82 percent more likely to live in poverty and are more likely to engage in high-risk behaviors like sexual activity and substance abuse and are more likely to exhibit anti-social behavior. 

Or, to sum up, as I’ve told you numerous times, Obamacare is a deathcare trap of graft and corruption that advances medical tyranny and hastens the collapse of the U.S. economy… and that’s not even the worst of it. 

***********************************

He about says it all in a myriad of different ways: Failure.

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

November, 2013 The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care, Part 9: When Your Friends Say You Screwed Up, You Really Screwed Up and More

This our ninth custom and final post this month on the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. These posts addressed the research and analyses we have been doing to unmask what is the worst piece of legislation ever written by Washington’s political class. We are stopping now because:

• It is too depressing writing about what this law is doing to the country and its citizens. 
• We are now circling back on the same disasters that are happening to different people but the effects are the same. 
• We are going to step aside over the next few days and let industry experts express their opinion, opinions that are no different to the conclusions that we have arrived at. 

The first post in this depressing series can be accessed at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2013/11/november-2013-unfolding-obama-care.html

To finish up as much as possible today with our research, the facts and fiascos will be presented as crisply as possible to get everything in. I am sure we will revisit the disasters next month as they seem to be growing exponentially.

1) The Independent Journal Review recently reported on some personal experiences from Obama Care, reporting that puts a human face on the hardships the law is creating:

• Edie Littlefield Sundby of San Diego lost her “world-class” insurance while in the middle of battling stage 4 bladder cancer. Obama Care will not cover her current cancer treatment team and she has no idea how she will access treatment through Covered California, the Obama Care health exchange in her state. 
• Carla Albers of Colorado entire family will now be dropped from the insurance plan they were very happy with for over 7 years. 
• Jim Stadler of North Carolina is self-employed and was very satisfied with his family’s coverage to the tune of about $400/month. His insurance notified him the new stringent demands from Obama Care are forcing them to drop Jim’s plan. They did offer him another one that covered no more than his current insurance but will cost him almost $900/month. 

Similar scenarios are happening in millions of American households across the country. There are no reports of millions of American households rejoicing over their new Obama Care insurance.

2) Consider the viewpoint of Daniel R. Dawkins, senior vice president of the National Association of Community Health Centers. His organization includes 9,000 medical clinics across the country. In an interview in the New York Time earlier this year he correctly pointed out another major fiasco of Obama care: “We serve the very population that will gain coverage—low-income, working class uninsured people. But insurers have shown little interest in including us in their provider networks.”

We have talked about this a number of times before: the operation was a success but the patient died, i.e. Obama Care was successful in getting people insurance but they could never find the right doctor or hospital to accept that insurance. Pitiful.

3) According to a recent report, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that Obama Care will also cause millions of Americans will lose their employer provided health insurance coverage beyond the millions of Americans who are losing their health insurance coverage in the individual insurance policy holder market. The CBO analyses show that at least 30 million more Americans might find themselves uninsured as a result of Obama Care. 

Put this latest dire estimate in the perspective of the President who declared at least two dozen different times that if you like your current insurance policy, you can keep it. This is turning into the biggest political lie in the history of the country, especially when tens of millions of Americans will not be able to keep their current policies.

4) There have been many accusations, probably true, that this legislation was done behind closed doors with business cronies in the drug and insurance companies. These companies wanted to ensure that the government sanctioned medical care in the most favorable ways for their companies’ financial well being by forcing every American to buy overpriced and over priced health care insurance. 

These companies had the government do what they could not do: legally force Americans to buy products they did not necessarily want, making ordinary Americans criminals for not obeying Obama Care. This is crony capitalism at its worse.

But was this actually what happened? We will never know but consider what has happened over the past few years to two large health insurance companies, United HealthCare and Aetna: 

• In the past five years, the S&P stock index has risen about 70% and the Dow stock index has risen just under 100%. 
• However, in that same timeframe, the stock price of United HealthCare has risen almost threefold, going from about $25 a share in 2008 to about $71 today. 
• Aetna’s stock price has risen about two and a half fold, going from about $25 has share in 2008 to about $64 today. 
• Thus, the stock price shares of two large health insurance companies, companies that expected Obama Care to deliver millions of young low cost, highly profitable customers to them have far out gained the rest of the stock market over the past five years. 

Now, this could have all been a coincidence. It could be that these two companies just happened to be better business people, better marketers, etc. than the rest of corporate America. Or, it could be that they are better lobbyists, better at working the political class in Washington. 

Consider the following political financial information from the Open Secrets website:

• In 2012, Aetna spent millions of dollars on lobbyists and contributions to political candidates. 
• Their political candidate spending levels ranked them ahead of 99.4% of other political contributors to political campaigns and ahead of 97.1% of the companies that used lobbyists in 2012. 
• In 2012, United HealthCare also spent billions of dollars on lobbyists and contributions to political candidates. 
• Their political candidate spending ranked them ahead of 99.6% of other political contributors to political campaigns and ahead of 96.5% of the companies that used lobbyists in 2012. 

As an example, the Open Secret website page for United Healthcare can be reviewed at:

http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/summary.php?cycle=2012&id=D000000348

Yes, these two example companies might just be better business people. But I bet the extremely high amounts of money they spent on political campaign contributions and lobbying did actually get them access to the closed door deal making that ended up being the atrocity that is Obama Care. It also ended up paying off handsomely from the perspective of outsized gains in their respective stock prices.

Crony capitalism at its worse.

5) Consider the recent words of Democratic Congressman Kurt Schrader: “So I think the president saying you could stay with it and not being honest that a lot of these policies were going to get cancelled was grossly misleading to the American public and is causing added stress and added strife as we go through a really difficult time with health care.”

Yes, it is not only Republicans, Tea Party members, and Americans that are calling the President’s promises a lie, at least one member of his own party is jumping onto that reality bandwagon.

6) Consider another Obama Care lie or deception or subtlety that is coming to light, as exposed by a November 5, 2013 article in Forbes magazine:

The Affordable Care Act does indeed specify, in Section 1201, that “a health insurance issuer offering group or individual health insurance coverage may not impose any preexisting condition exclusion with respect to such plan or coverage.” In other words, a health plan cannot deny enrollment, or the plan’s benefits, to someone based on that person’s preexisting.

However, that is not the same as saying that a plan has to include coverage for any particular preexisting condition, and it certainly does not mean a plan has to include coverage for ongoing treatment that a patient started before obtain coverage in an exchange plan on January 1, 2014.

Key to understanding this distinction is that having “health coverage” is not the same as actually obtaining “health care.” The insurance plan has to take anyone who wants to enroll, regardless of their health status or health history – but they don’t have to provide the same treatments, the same doctors, or the same medications that a patient has been receiving.

Another version of “the operation was successful but the patient died.” Under Obma Care you cannot be denied health insurance coverage for a pre-existing condition but that does not mean you will get proper and adequate treatment for a pre-existing condition. Another massive deception of the American people.

7) Circling back to the identify theft threat from the Obama Care’s website, consider the first the three paragraphs from a CNN wire story from late October, more than three weeks after the website went live:

The Obamacare website has more than annoying bugs. A cybersecurity expert has found a way to hack into users' accounts.

Until the Department of Health fixed the security hole last week, anyone could easily reset your Healthcare.gov password without your knowledge and potentially hijack your account.

The glitch was discovered last week by Ben Simo, a software tester in Arizona. Simo found that gaining access to people's accounts was frighteningly simple.

Bad security still existing after the disastrous introduction of the system. Truly an identity thief’s paradise.

8) One last set of bad news about Obama Care. Not from Republicans, not from conservatives, not from racists but from President Obama’s traditional supporters and fans:

Senator Mark Pryor (D-AR) on his plan to delay the individual mandate:

Affordable health care was never meant to be — if you’ve got insurance, now you’re going to have to buy insurance that’s more costly and not as good. That has to be fixed.

David Axelrod, a former White House adviser and strategist on Obama’s reelection campaign, said on MSNBC’s “The Last Word”:

They need to be forthcoming with the public and report on a regular basis as to the progress that’s being made … This has been shrouded in a little bit of mystery. I don’t quite understand why that is … I also would be very, very tough on the people who are responsible to get those fixes done quickly … I’d be, as I’m sure they are, kicking a bunch of folks in the butt every day to make sure that what need to be done is being done.

Joe Scarborough, co-host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” said:

These people want to run our health care system, and they want to be the grand organizers of what’s most important to most Americans over the age of 35 or 40. And yet they’re not telling us what’s going wrong with our system that they want to run?

Ezra Klein, blogger and columnist for The Washington Post, said the website’s problems aren’t simply glitches:

One of the Obama administration’s jobs, separate from all of the political stuff we talk about here, is to simply run things like this well, to run their signature legislative initiative well. … On that, so far, this has been a big failure.

Clay Johnson, who worked for Obama’s digital team in 2008, said:

HealthCare.gov got this way not because of incompetence or sloppiness of an individual vendor, but because of a deeply engrained and malignant cancer that’s eating away at the federal government’s ability to provide effective online services.

Sam Stein, political reporter for the Huffington Post, appearing on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” said:

No one beta tested the site, which is almost criminal, when you think about it. The president was caught off-guard, which is really unfortunate and also really kind of messed up.

Arthur Delaney, a Huffington Post reporter, hoped the problems with HealthCare.gov were a joke:

It’s no joke.

Mike Barnicle, an MSNBC contributor, said:

They’re lying about it now. … They’re not depriving us of information, they are outright lying…about the numbers of who have enrolled, the numbers who have made the process complete, the numbers of people who have actually signed up, a couple others things. The larger point is they keep using the word, ‘unacceptable.’ This is not unacceptable, this is outrageous.

Mark Halperin, TIME’s editor-at-large and senior political analyst, said:

The secrecy is unacceptable. It begins with not saying how many people have enrolled. I don’t understand why they can’t release that figure on a rolling basis. But in addition, you search in vain for answers to lots of questions. Tom Costello, lots of other reporters have asked them every day for basic information. When governments are in crisis, they withhold information, and sometimes they don’t tell the truth.

When your friends are this critical, you really, really screwed up.

That is all for now regarding Obama Care, from us. Over the next few days, we will be sharing the views of industry experts who agree with us that this is the worst piece of legislation ever written and enacted by the most inept Washington political class of all time.

And this entire disaster is occurring because the writers of this legislation had no obvious problem solving skills that would have enabled them to identify the root causes of our high health care costs in this country. Unless you can identify and address the true root causes of a problem, you have no chance of resolving that problem. 

Obama Care did not address the root causes of our cost problem, e.g. Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food, Americans are obese, Americans smoke too much, Americans do not exercise enough, Americans are aging which brings aging diseases to the forefront of medical costs, there is a need for serious tort reform in the medical industries, etc. Instead, we got an unworkable Rube Goldberg-like insurance scam that does not address the root causes of high health care costs, it just rearranges money in the country to get inferior, more expensive insurance into the market. Not going to work, it is not working and we are all suffering as a result.

Later this week we will look at other ways the political class is screwing with our lives and our freedoms and our wealth, a welcome change from discussing 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.robertringer.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w