Tom Blumer from BizzyBlog has updated his map of the ObamaCare/PelosiCare behemoth and what it creates. Namely 111 agencies, regulators, committees, boards and offices: (click on picture to enlarge)
Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH), ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee today commented on the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) more detailed cost estimate of the manager’s amendment to the House health reform bill.
Senator Gregg stated, “The CBO estimate released last night finally sheds light on the smoke and mirrors game the majority has been playing with the cost of their health care reform proposal. Over the first 10 years, this legislation builds in gross new spending of $1.7 trillion – and most of the new spending doesn’t even start until 2014. Once that spending is fully phased in, the House Democratic bill rings up at more than $3 trillion over ten years.
“Additionally, this bill cuts critical Medicare and Medicaid funding by $628 billion, accounts for nearly $1.2 trillion in tax and fee increases and will explode the scope of government by putting the nation’s health care system in the hands of Washington bureaucrats. The $3 trillion price tag defies common sense – we simply cannot add all this new spending to the government rolls and claim to control the deficit. Read the rest of this entry »
After receiving no answer from emails requesting a town hall health care meeting, I took up Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann’s call to make a house call on our congressional representative.
Despite less than a week’s notice, up to 50,000 Americans from across the country gathered at the steps of the Capitol Building yesterday to send a message to Congress - ’kill the bill’. Pelosicare is not health care reform, it is a power grab. Read the rest of this entry »
In Washington DC there are three passions that rule this town – politics, football, and politics. Living here has given me front row seats to a pair of leadership trainwrecks in Daniel Snyder and Barack Obama. As both have been experiencingdifficult times lately, it seemed like a good time to write about the similarities I’ve noticed between the two.
First off, I moved to the DC area in 1999, the same year that Dan Snyder bought the Washington Redskins. Interestingly enough, the job that brought me here was working for Snyder’s old company, Snyder Communications. Also, I never met the man during my time working there, and from the stories I’ve heard about him that’s not a complaint.
For those of you unfamiliar, Snyder immediately became a big news item from the beginning. He was brash, energetic, and has had no problems making bold moves as owner. Whether it was interrupting summer camp by arriving in his helicopter during practices, expanding Fedex Field’s seating while raising ticket prices, and charging admission to summer camp for one season. Also, despite having no background in football, he became heavily involved in the team. Snyder held post-game meetings with his head coaches, brought in a big name personnel man from the 49ers Super Bowl Dynasty (Vinny Cerrato), has chased down and overpaid big name coaches, and has even micro managed to the point of firing several kickers over the course of a season for blown kicks. Read the rest of this entry »
“We’re trying to do too much at once,” Lieberman said. “To put this government-created insurance company on top of everything else is just asking for trouble for the taxpayers, for the premium payers and for the national debt. I don’t think we need it now.”…
Lieberman did say he’s “strongly inclined” to vote to proceed to the debate, but that he’ll ultimately vote to block a floor vote on the bill if it isn’t changed first…
“I can’t see a way in which I could vote for cloture on any bill that contained a creation of a government-operated-run insurance company,” Lieberman added. “It’s just asking for trouble – in the end, the taxpayers are going to pay and probably all people will have health insurance are going to see their premiums go up because there’s going to be cost shifting as there has been for Medicare and Medicaid.”
Since that statement came out earlier today the Reid camp…or cheerleaders….have tried to spin it so it doesn’t sound as bad as it really is. I mean how can it be bad if Joe will vote to open floor debate on Reid’s bill? Of course they are leaving out the other vote…the one that closes debate and moves the bill to a vote. Joe says he will NOT vote for that if the public option is there.
What is it with Democrats always denying who they are and what they’re peddling? Liberalism has a negative stigma attached to it in conservative America; so Democrats now prefer you call them “progressives”. The word “socialist” is the new “N” word, but it describes President Obama’s instinctual gravitations and political inclinations. Why deny it? Why hide from the description? Democrats who revel in communist/Marxist/socialist doctrine should come out of the closet and bask in the transparency of who they are. Be proud! Don’t hide! Don’t obfuscate.
Yet the reason they have an aversion to such “labels”, no matter how descriptively accurate, is because in order to sell any of their bill of goods to the American public, they have to engage in deception. Can you say “stealth socialism”?
When you get the AP doing fact checking, you have to know something’s amiss in Obama fantasyland. In the POTUS’s desperate attempt to simplify his demand for remaking America’s health care system, he reverts to the proven Alinsky techniques of finding a demon, targeting that demon and isolating it to stir up public discontent.
His latest mantras have been focused on portraying those evil health insurers in the same light as Wall Street CEO’s.
Trouble is, facts get in the way of the rhetoric.
Per AP’s Calvin Woodward today, health insurers’ profits have barely exceeded 2% in the latest annual measures. With a traditional measure of a private enterprise’s financial health and growth potential generally hovering between 25-33% profit structure, one wonders how the heck they are surviving.
The nation’s medical costs will keep spiraling upward even faster than they are now under Democratic legislation pending in the House, a report from government economic experts concluded Wednesday.
Republicans said the report is a warning sign that health care legislation is likely to fall short of President Barack Obama’s goal of “bending the cost curve” by slowing torrid rates of medical inflation.
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Unlike previous estimates that have focused mainly on the legislation’s impact on the federal deficit, the actuaries’ report looked at total costs, public and private, over the next 10 years. It found that the nation’s health care tab would increase somewhat more rapidly with the legislation than if nothing is done. The main reason: Newly insured people will seek medical care.
The nation’s health care tab, now at about $2.5 trillion annually, is projected to approach $4.7 trillion in 2019 without the legislation. Read the rest of this entry »
In 2007, Sebelius said she was for a single payer system “eventually.” Mind you, this is the same person who will be establishing the “level playing field” between the government plan and private coverage.
What a great bit of double talk from the director of HHS. How can the citizens of the US trust her to appropriately run the proposed health care scheme? Yes, it is looking more likely that it will take a conservative to clean up this mess in 2012.
Maneuvering to boost prospects for sweeping health care legislation, Senate Democrats hope first to win quick approval for a bill that grants doctors a $247 billion increase in Medicare fees over a decade but raises federal deficits in the process, officials said Wednesday.
By creating a two-bill approach, Democrats intend to claim the more comprehensive health care measure meets President Barack Obama’s conditions — that it will neither add to deficits nor exceed $900 billion in costs over 10 years.
If approved and signed into law, the legislation would avert a 21 percent reduction in Medicare fees paid to doctors that is scheduled to take effect in January as well as additional cuts in future years. Read the rest of this entry »
The former CBO director, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, warns today on the effect ObamaCare will have on our economy and health care. These facts should be painfully obvious to those with even one iota of common sense. This bill will lead to a huge middle class tax increase:
Remember when health-care reform was supposed to make life better for the middle class? That dream began to unravel this past summer when Congress proposed a bill that failed to include any competition-based reforms that would actually bend the curve of health-care costs. It fell apart completely when Democrats began papering over the gaping holes their plan would rip in the federal budget.
As it now stands, the plan proposed by Democrats and the Obama administration would not only fail to reduce the cost burden on middle-class families, it would make that burden significantly worse.
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The bill creates a new health entitlement program that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates will grow over the longer term at a rate of 8% annually, which is much faster than the growth rate of the economy or tax revenues. This is the same growth rate as the House bill that Sen. Kent Conrad (D., N.D.) deep-sixed by asking the CBO to tell the truth about its impact on health-care costs.
To avoid the fate of the House bill and achieve a veneer of fiscal sensibility, the Senate did three things: It omitted inconvenient truths, it promised that future Congresses will make tough choices to slow entitlement spending, and it dropped the hammer on the middle class. Read the rest of this entry »
“Today we reached a critical milestone in our efforts to reform our health care system, the president said this afternoon,” speaking from the White House Rose Garden.
Although the bill drew an “aye” vote from one Republican senator, President Obama touted the bill as a proposal having both “Democratic and Republican support.”
“After the consideration of hundreds of amendments, it includes ideas from both Democrats and Republicans, which is why it enjoys the support of people from both parties,” he said.
The president thanked in particular the senator who cast the lone Republican vote, Sen. Olympia Snowe from Maine.
Democrat….er, “Republican” Senator Snowe caving to the Democrats is not surprising. Just look at her scorecard at Club For Growth:
No…not surprising in the least and I suppose the ignorant claim that her defection is proof that the bill is bipartisan should not surprise us either coming from this administration. Read the rest of this entry »
America’s Health Insurance Plans commissioned a study from PriceWaterhouseCoopers recently on the Baucus health bill and it shows many things that we all expected and feared would happen. The cost of insurance will go waaaaay up….by about 18% on average ON TOP of the expected inflation.
Key Findings
Health reform could have a significant impact on the cost of private health insurance coverage.
There are four provisions included in the Senate Finance Committee proposal that could increase private health insurance premiums above the levels projected under current law:
A new tax on high-cost health care plans,
Insurance market reforms coupled with a weak coverage requirement,
Cost-shifting as a result of cuts to Medicare
and New taxes on several health care sectors.
The overall impact of these provisions will be to increase the cost of private insurance coverage for individuals, families, and businesses above what these costs would be in the absence of reform.
On average, the cost of private health insurance coverage will increase:
26 percent between 2009 and 2013 under the current system and by 40 percent during this same period if these four provisions are implemented.
50 percent between 2009 and 2016 under the current system and by 73 percent during this same period if these four provisions are implemented.
79 percent between 2009 and 2019 under the current system and by 111 percent during this same period if these four provisions are implemented.
America’s Health Insurance Plans asked PricewaterhouseCoopers to check out the impact of four components in the Baucus bill: Read the rest of this entry »
“Right now, doctors, a lot of times, are forced to make decisions based on the fee payment schedule that’s out there. So if you come in and you’ve got a bad sore throat, or your child has a bad sore throat, or has repeated sore throats, the doctor may look at the reimbursement system and say to himself, ‘You know what? I make a lot more money if I take this kid’s tonsils out.’ Now, that may be the right thing to do, but I’d rather have that doctor making those decisions just based on whether you really need your kid’s tonsils out or whether it might make more sense just to change, maybe they have allergies, maybe they have something else that would make a difference.”
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“All I’m saying is let’s take an example of something like diabetes, one of, a disease that’s skyrocketing, partly because of obesity, partly because it’s not treated as effectively as it could be. Right now, if we paid a family, if a family care physician works with his or her patients to help them lose weight, modify diet, monitors whether they’re taking their medications in a timely fashion, they might get reimbursed a pittance. But if that same diabetic ends up getting their foot amputated, that’s $30,000, $40,000, $50,000, immediately the surgeon is reimbursed. Well, why not make sure that we’re also reimbursing the care that prevents the amputation, right? That will save us money.”
But still the AMA and the insurance industry backed his disastrous socialism.
