A version of this article appeared June 18, 2012, on page A13 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Why I No Longer Support the Health Insurance Mandate. Mr. Williams is a former chairman and CEO of Aetna.
Notice what Williams says in the section in bold below. This is exactly what I said on my college blog in early 2010 when ObamaCare was being debated. Those who read the bill knew, those who wrote the bill set up a system that is guaranteed to blow up the private healthcare system. I am glad that Mr. Williams finally got around to actually reading what is in there.
Soon the U.S. Supreme Court will rule on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act. I am not a lawyer, or an expert on the Constitution. But as the chairman and CEO of a major health plan, I had a ringside seat to the entire health-care reform process. After much reflection, I have concluded that the federal individual mandate, which requires all Americans to purchase health insurance starting in 2014, will not be upheld.
I don’t say this lightly, as I have long been a vocal advocate of getting and keeping every American covered. As a society, we have a moral obligation to ensure everyone has access to affordable health care. We must find a way to cover those who are no longer healthy but need care.
A workable solution used by many states is a high-risk insurance pool funded by broad-based taxes. But Congress and the president chose to require health-insurance companies to guarantee issue—that is, to insure anyone at anytime.
This approach encourages people to only purchase insurance when care is needed. Insurance does not work if you only pay two months of premiums and receive hundreds of thousands of dollars of health care. This is the equivalent of getting a free ride. Under such a system, consumers would end up paying more to offset the added costs of free riders. Insurance would soon become unaffordable.
Three years ago, President Obama cut a secret deal with pharmaceutical company lobbyists to secure the industry’s support for his national health care law. Despite Obama’s promises during his campaign to run a transparent administration, the deal has been shrouded in mystery ever since. But internal emails obtained by House Republicans now provide evidence that a deal was struck and GOP investigators are promising to release more details in the coming weeks.
“What the hell?” White House Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina, who is now Obama’s campaign manager, complained to a lobbyist for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) in January 15, 2010 email. “This wasn’t part of our deal.”
This reference to “our deal” came two months before the final passage of Obamacare in an email with the subject line, “FW: TAUZIN EMAIL.” At the time, Billy Tauzin was president and CEO of PhRMA.
The email was uncovered as part of investigation into Obama’s closed-door health care negotiations launched by the House Energy and Commerce committee’s oversight panel.
“In the coming weeks the Committee intends to show what the White House agreed to do as part of its deal with the pharmaceutical industry and how the full details of this agreement were kept from both the public and the House of Representatives,” the committee’s Republican members wrote in a memo today.
On June 20, 2009, Obama released a terse 296-word statement announcing a deal between pharmaceutical companies and the Senate that didn’t mention any involvement by the White House.
“The investigation has determined that the White House, primarily through Office of Health Reform Director Nancy Ann DeParle and Messina, with involvement from Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel, was actively engaged in these negotiations while the role of Congress was limited,” the committee members wrote. “For example, three days before the June 20 statement, the head of PhRMA promised Messina, ‘we will deliver a final yes to you by morning.’ Meanwhile, Ms. DeParle all but confirmed that half of the Legislative Branch was shut out in an email to a PhRMA representative: ‘I think we should have included the House in the discussions, but maybe we never would have gotten anywhere if we had.’”
A Catholic university in Ohio said Tuesday it is being forced to end a student health insurance program over the Obama administration’s contraception mandate and costs associated with other provisions of the health care overhaul.
Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio, said it has so far excluded contraceptive services and products from its health insurance policy for students and will not participate in a plan that “requires us to violate the consistent teachings of the Catholic Church on the sacredness of human life.”
In its decision to drop coverage, the school cited the contraception mandate, but also a requirement that the maximum coverage amount be increased to $100,000 for policyholders — claiming that would have made premiums skyrocket. A university official told Fox News Radio the students’ basic $600 policy was going to double in cost in the fall and triple next year and that the school’s insurance provider said the increases were the result of the federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
HIP Programs are a Republican Party brainchild designed to help those normally uninsurable or at high risk to get affordable insurance. HIP programs provide incentives for healthy living and reward good shopping behavior that help keep costs down. As ObamaCare gets phased in many states will be forced to give up HIP programs.
A Des Moines woman who publicly thanked President Barack Obama on Tuesday for helping her obtain health insurance actually is receiving her coverage through a long-standing state program.
CeCe Ibson was asked to share her story as an introduction to a Michelle Obama speech Tuesday in Windsor Heights. She talked about losing her health insurance when she lost her job as a lawyer two years ago. She bought private coverage for her two children, she said, but could not find it for herself.
“No one would insure me because of my pre-existing conditions. No one. Until President Obama stood up for me and millions of Americans like me across Iowa and across the country,” she said.
In fact, Ibson’s current coverage is provided by HIP Iowa, a state program for people whose health problems make them ineligible for most commercial insurance. HIP Iowa was created in 1987, during Republican Terry Branstad’s first stint as governor. Most of the program’s subsidies come from fees paid by commercial insurers.
Tucker runs the Health Insurance Tips Blog and has the issues in ObamaCare mapped out as well as anyone possibly can. This speech is invaluable education for those wishing to learn.
[Editor’s Note: Yours truly, the editor of this web site, went to Indiana insurance school and has had a state issued licence to be an agent. I have been out of the business for several years and while and I am no longer the expert that Tucker is, I can tell you with certainty that what Tucker says in this video is true and matches my own findings that I wrote about way back on my old college blog.]
When Kenneth Warden was diagnosed with terminal bladder cancer, his hospital consultant sent him home to die, ruling that at 78 he was too old to treat.
Even the palliative surgery or chemotherapy that could have eased his distressing symptoms were declared off-limits because of his age.
His distraught daughter Michele Halligan accepted the sad prognosis but was determined her father would spend his last months in comfort. So she paid for him to seen privately by a second doctor to discover what could be done to ease his symptoms.
Ken Warden
Michele’s fight began in September 2008, when her father noticed blood in his urine. His GP sent him to a consultant urologist at a hospital in the north-west of England and a large tumour was found in his bladder.
An MRI scan showed that the tumour was advanced and went through his bladder wall and muscle.
A minor operation enabled Kenneth to pass urine, but left him needing to do so every 20 minutes, day and night.
‘He was exhausted by lack of sleep,’ says Michele. ‘It was making him more ill than the tumour was. The pain was like having permanent cystitis.
‘But when I asked for Dad to be given help for this, the consultant said there was no treatment available.’
Michele, who lives in Chester and is married with two children, was not satisfied. As a former midwife, she was more confident than most about attempting her own medical research on the internet.
She read on one site that radiotherapy could shrink the tumour and give her father relief from his terrible symptoms. Further surgery on the bladder might help even more.
‘I was not looking for a cure, just a way to give my father some quality of life for the time he had remaining,’ she says.
‘We went back to the urologist and asked about radiotherapy. I also wanted to know why my father could not have an operation to relieve his urinary symptoms.
‘The doctor said that as my father was 78, these treatments would not be appropriate because he was “too old”.
‘But my father was very fit and muscular. He regularly went running and worked out at the gym. He was also a lifelong rower who held competition records. But all the consultant would say was: “You have to accept that your father is dying.”
This is what the British National Health service does to people every day. Don Berwick, who President Obama put in charge of some of Medicare program, made speeches about how wonderful the British system is.
More:
In desperation, the family found nearly £3,000 to pay for private tests and a second opinion from a consultant in Birmingham.
‘The private consultant agreed with me that Dad should be given chemotherapy to shrink the tumour prior to a radical cystectomy.’
After being told there was nothing anyone can do Kenneth Warden was sent to The Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham and is now cancer free
This operation involves removing the bladder, surrounding lymph nodes and the prostate gland. Though neither Michele nor her father had private medical insurance, the new consultant arranged for Kenneth to have the operation on the NHS at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham.
‘The treatment there was superb,’ says Michele. ‘Dad went for chemotherapy every week for nine weeks, followed by one month off. Then he went back in March 2009 and had the radical cystectomy.
‘The operation went well. We felt it would relieve so much of Dad’s anguish during the time he had left.’
But as it turned out, the chemotherapy and surgery did not just relieve his symptoms: they also banished his cancer. Now, four years after the operation, a total body scan shows Kenneth to be completely free of the disease.
Michele says: ‘He is back rowing and working out at the gym. He has enjoyed seven holidays abroad and bought himself a sports car.’
The American public doesn’t support Obamacare, and a new survey shows that doctors have an even worse opinion. No one has a better grasp on the state of the health care system than physicians, and according to the Doctors Company survey, 60 percent of them believe that Obamacare will have a negative impact on overall patient care. This survey is consistent with the findings of another doctor survey taken in October 2010, which also showed doctors’ lack of confidence in Obamacare.
The survey was conducted to unveil physicians’ concerns about health care reform. The Doctors Company, which is the largest insurer of physician and surgeon medical liability in the nation, received more than 5,000 surveys, including all specialties and every region in the country. The results weren’t good for the President’s signature piece of legislation.
Not only do doctors believe that Obamacare will not improve the health care system, they also anticipate that it will worsen the current condition. According to the survey, nine out of 10 physicians are unwilling to recommend health care as a profession to a family member, and one primary care physician even commented, “I would not recommend becoming an M.D. to anyone.”
Obamacare doesn’t just discourage entrance into the medical profession; it encourages those who are already practicing to leave it. The survey states that “health care reform is motivating doctors to change their retirement timeline.” In fact, 43 percent of respondents said they are considering retiring within the next five years as a result of the law. A surgeon from Michigan wrote that under Obamacare, “We will be moving further away from humanity-based health care and more towards the patient as a commodity. This was not the way my father practiced—nor will I. Winding down to retire early.”
Currently, the United States is on the brink of a severe physician shortage. According to the American Association of Medical Colleges, by 2020, the nation will need an additional 91,500 doctors to meet medical demand. Dr. Donald J. Palmisano, former president of the American Medical Association, warns, “Today, we are perilously close to a true crisis as newly insured Americans enter the health care system and our population continues to age.” If current physicians leave the practice early because of the health law, the problem will be exacerbated even further.
Finally, the survey revealed concerns that the health law will compromise the doctor-patient relationship. Slightly more than half of doctors surveyed believe “that increased bureaucracy is reducing the personal interaction with patients essential for building a close relationship and understanding the nature of patient health.”
Under Obamacare, Heritage expert Robert Moffit writes, “physicians will be subject to more government regulation and oversight, and will be increasingly dependent on unreliable government reimbursement for medical services. Doctors, already under tremendous pressure, will only see their jobs become more difficult.” To reverse this trend, the U.S. needs health care reform that doctors and patients alike can eagerly support.
He had an accident while working out and injured his wrist so he want to the local hospital to make sure he was alright. It is forbidden to take pictures in the hospital and you are about to see why. The lines are the first thing you notice. It is like the BMV on steroids.
The video is HERE and his blog post about it is HERE.
Barack Obama on the Ellen DeGenerous Show in 2008:
If mandating that everyone could buy healthcare would solve the healthcare problem, than government could just mandate that everyone should buy a house to solve homelessness. It isn’t that people don’t want healthcare, they can’t afford it.
The Internal Revenue Service wants to add about 4,000 agents to hunt down tax cheats and still plans to spend $303 million building a system to oversee Obamacare even though its future looks bleak in the U.S. Supreme Court.
A new Government Accountability Office review of the IRS 2012 tax return season and the taxman’s fiscal 2013 budget request also found that the agency’s customer service rating has slipped and 5.5 million returns were delayed a week because of a computer programming glitch.
This symbol has a real impact. This is an example of the power of “iconography”. Iconograpghy is used everyday by advertisers, but its propaganda value has been used by government at least since the times of the Romans. When we think of propaganda we mostly think of spreading lies, but it be also used for communicating complex truths, albeit using exaggerated imagery. I wrote an extended piece on “iconography” HERE which is certainly worth a look.
Remember when Obama and the Democrats went on and on saying that ObamaCare would only cost $900 Billion so that it would be revenue neutral (not ad to the deficit)?
It wasn’t just this writer back in his college days who said that this number was a pipe dream. Many conservatives who ran the numbers said it would cost over $2 trillion as I reported in my college days (1, 2, 3, 4).
But it gets worse, the CBO is still underestimating the cost. Why? ObamaCare doesn’t start to spend huge money until the last phase of it’s implementation in 2014, but the new taxes are already starting to be phased in and really ramp up in 2013 just after the election. So ObamaCare is taking in money for over a year before the large expenses start incurring. If we take that into account and start the ten years in 2014, which is much more honest, the expense according to my estimates will be close to $2.3 trillion over ten years. Feel free to mark me on this readers, as I am certain others will verify this in time, as my earliest predictions about ObamaCare have been spot on so there is no reason to believe my estimate will prove to be any different (the Examiner piece below mentions the nine year issue as well).
Remember the adverse selection “death” spiral we spoke of in posts below? The longer ObamaCare goes on the more the costs will rise exponentially as that is exactly what it is designed to do. If Democrats manage to prevent an ObamaCare repeal, they know darn well they will have to replace it with a total government take over soon or the system will blow up in a short time.
President Obama’s national health care law will cost $1.76 trillion over a decade, according to a new projectionreleased today by the Congressional Budget Office, rather than the $940 billion forecast when it was signed into law.
Democrats employed many accounting tricks when they were pushing through the national health care legislation, the most egregious of which was to delay full implementation of the law until 2014, so it would appear cheaper under the CBO’s standard ten-year budget window and, at least on paper, meet Obama’s pledge that the legislation would cost “around $900 billion over 10 years.” When the final CBO score came out before passage, critics noted that the true 10 year cost would be far higher than advertised once projections accounted for full implementation.
Today, the CBO released new projections from 2013 extending through 2022, and the results are as critics expected: the ten-year cost of the law’s core provisions to expand health insurance coverage has now ballooned to $1.76 trillion. That’s because we now have estimates for Obamacare’s first nine years of full implementation, rather than the mere six when it was signed into law. Only next year will we get a true ten-year cost estimate, if the law isn’t overturned by the Supreme Court or repealed by then. Given that in 2022, the last year available, the gross cost of the coverage expansions are $265 billion, we’re likely looking at about $2 trillion over the first decade, or more than double what Obama advertised.
UPDATE – ObamaCare to force increases in state Medicaid programs:
Again, this is something I wrote about and you can find on my old college blog in the four links above. One of the ways that the costs of ObamaCare was hidden is that some of it’s implementation is through unfunded mandates to state medicaid programs.
The CBO now projects that from 2012 through 2021 the federal government will spend $168 billion more on Medicaid than it expected last year, $97 billion less on subsidies for people to purchase insurance on government-run exchanges and $20 billion less on tax credits to small employers. That works out to a $51 billion increase in the gross cost of expanding coverage from what the CBO estimated a year ago. However, the CBO also expects the federal government to collect more revenue from penalties on individuals and employers, as well as other taxes. These revenue increases will more than offset the spending increases, according to the CBO, so it now expects the cost of Obamacare during those years to be $48 billion lower.
It’s also worth noting that we were told time and again during the health care debate that the law didn’t represent a government takeover of health care. But by 2022, according to the CBO, 3 million fewer people will have health insurance through their employer, while 17 million Americans will be added to Medicaid and 22 million will be getting coverage through government-run exchanges.
Remember Bart Stupak? He was head of the Democrats for Life Caucus in the House. President Obama promised him an executive order, in exchange for the votes of his group of congressmen, to strip public funding of abortion so ObamaCare would never use tax dollars to kill babies? Well guess how well that worked out? And Stupak’s constituents were not fooled as he sold out the values he ran on and sacrificed his political career to advance the cause of government power.
Related:
The Myth of the Pro-Life Democrat in Congress – LINK
Stupak’s “Pro-Life” Caucus Gets $4.7 Billion in Earmark Funds after Voting for Public Funding of Abortion – LINK
Despite President Obama’s empty rhetoric to the contrary, a recently finalized Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) rule makes clear that ObamaCare will use tax dollars to fund abortion.
Sadly, these facts have now come to fruition. HHS, under the direction of President Obama and Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has issued its final rule for implementing the state exchanges created by the ObamaCare law. These final rules include requirements for how abortion funding must be handled.
First off, when we consider that the President told us that his Executive Order made it clear that abortion was not a part of this law, it is reasonable to ask why the final rule references ‘abortion’ 30 times? If abortion funding was not to be a part of this law, the statute needed only a short, clear prohibition of such funding – a prohibition offered in the Pitts/Stupak Amendment, which was initially approved by the House of Representatives, and later stripped out by the President and then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Because the law does indeed contradict the President by allowing abortion funding, this final rule goes to great lengths to devise a scheme that attempts to hide that funding. The result is a complicated web of regulations that reference ‘abortion’ 30 times.
Everyone concerned about government promotion and funding of abortions should read this rule for themselves, but allow me to outline a couple of the basic components with regard to the abortion requirements.
First, beginning on page 453, this rule describes and reaffirms the “segregation of funds for abortion services” as required under ObamaCare. Essentially, insurance plans may include abortion services in a plan subsidized by federal taxpayer dollars. To justify this inclusion, the plan will collect a $1 “surcharge” from all policy holders. Of course this surcharge will be collected as part of a larger premium payment, and not as a part of a separate collection. Additionally, plans are entirely free to advertise the total cost of these plans without mentioning that $1 of the premium is specifically intended to subsidize the abortion coverage. Further, the surcharge is only to be disclosed when the policyholder first enrolls.
In short, the $1 surcharge does not even attempt to resemble an actual offset of the abortion coverage cost, is virtually undetectable by the policy holder, and serves the singular purpose of providing a flimsy defense for inserting the federal government into the business of providing coverage for elective abortions.
Additionally, on pages 364-365, the final rule makes it entirely plausible that States that have passed laws prohibiting abortion coverage will be forced to provide that coverage anyway. This would occur through the multi-state plans administered by the Federal Government. The final rule simply says that rules governing these plans will be issued at a later date, so it’s entirely feasible (I’d say likely) that these plans will be permitted to cover abortion, even when one of the States within the multi-State area prohibits it.
Of course, this very writer was predicting this from mid 2009 and onward (2) as ObamaCare is phased in more and more people and businesses are seeing the results. So much for Obama’s promise that ObamaCare would save you $2,500 a year.
NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Compliance with health care reform is already driving up costs for some employers’ group health plans, and a majority of employers expect price increases to be passed on to employees, according to a health care reform survey released today by the Willis Human Capital Practice, a unit of Willis Group Holdings (nyse:WSH), the global insurance broker.
“The survey suggests employers realize that costs of providing medical benefits will increase and that they will likely have to pass those costs on to their employees.”
This is what will hurt you most:
Employers expect that similar employers will pass increased costs on to employees: More than half of the responding employers felt that other, similar employers would pass more of the cost for dependent coverage on to their employees. One-third of respondents thought other, similar employers would reduce coverage to the lowest-cost package to avoid the “pay-or-play” penalty, and a majority of employers also thought that wellness programs would be expanded in scope. Finally, nearly two-thirds of the employers expected that employee contributions would be increased.
You read that correctly, the result will be increased costs to you AND reduced coverage.
Sandra Fluke demanded in her testimony to Congress that Catholic Universities, Hospitals and other institutions give her $3,000 worth of birth control because she goes to school at Georgetown (Catholic) University which is enough to buy so many condoms that she could have sex three times a day, every day she is in school. Fluke also wants Catholic institutions to pay for so called “morning after” abortion pills (See our previous Sandra Fluke coverage HERE).
It gets better.
Fluke, according to transcripts, also expects Catholic institutions, insurance companies, government, small businesses etc to pay for sex changes.
Sandra Fluke, Gender Reassignment, and Health Insurance
Sandra Fluke is being sold by the left as something she’s not. Namely a random co-ed from Georgetown law who found herself mixed up in the latest front of the culture war who was simply looking to make sure needy women had access to birth control. That, of course, is not the case.
However, as I discovered today, birth control is not all that Ms. Fluke believes private health insurance must cover. She also, apparently, believes that it is discrimination deserving of legal action if “gender reassignment” surgeries are not covered by employer provided health insurance. She makes these views clear in an article she co-edited with Karen Hu in the Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law.
The title of the article, which can be purchased in full here, is Employment Discrimination Against LGBTQ Persons and was published in the Journal’s 2011 Annual Review. I have posted a transcript of the section I will be quoting from here. In a subsection of the article entitled “Employment Discrimination in Provision of Employment Benefits” starting on page 635 of the review Sandra Fluke and her co-editor describe two forms of discrimination in benefits they believe LGBTQ individuals face in the work place:
“Discrimination typically takes two forms: first, direct discrimination limiting access to benefits specifically needed by LGBTQ persons, and secondly, the unavailability of family-related benefits to LGBTQ families.”
Their “prime example” of the first form of discrimination? Not covering sex change operations:
“A prime example of direct discrimination is denying insurance coverage for medical needs of transgender persons physically transitioning to the other gender.”
This so called “prime example” of discrimination is expounded on in a subsection titled “Gender Reassignment Medical Services” starting on page 636:
“Transgender persons wishing to undergo the gender reassignment process frequently face heterosexist employer health insurance policies that label the surgery as cosmetic or medically unnecessary and therefore uncovered.”
To be clear, the argument here is that employers are engaging in discrimination against their employees who want them to pay for their sex changes because their “heterosexist” health insurance policies don’t believe sex changes are medically necessary.
We have heard it time and time again, “RomneyCare was a choice for Massachusetts as an experiment, but doing it nationally is a bad idea, likely won’t work, and is unconstitutional”. This is what Mitt Romney has been saying since the Iowa debates (LINK), but the video taped evidence shows that Romney was supporting a national insurance mandate up to at least 2009.
In the videos Mitt Romney says that his plan helps keeps costs down, but the record shows that the RomneyCare policy team was not really interested in keeping costs down, and as the record shows the cost of healthcare in Massachusetts has far exceeded the rest of the country (and YOU are helping to pay for it). Even if RomneyCare or such a plan could help keep costs down in theory; the simple truth is that getting control of healthcare (a sixth of our economy) is too much of a temptation for politicians to regulate favors, kickbacks, ideological experiments etc into the system. Government cannot be trusted with that much power as we have seen with socialized health care around the world and are already seeing in ObamaCare.
Mitt Romney not being honest about this is nothing new to our readers as we reported:
Romney: Requiring people to have health insurance is “conservative” – LINK …
….on January 9th, but these videos bring a new attention to this important story.
“Well that’s what we did in Massachusetts and that is we put together an exchange, the president is copying that idea. I’m glad to hear that. We let people buy their own private insurance. Most people can afford to buy that insurance once you have an exchange that allows them to do that in a cost effective basis. And then for those that are low income you help them buy their own private insurance. But you don’t set up a government insurance plan because it’s going to end up costing billions of dollars in subsidy. It’s the wrong way to go.”
Related:
New York Magazine: How Romney Advocated Obamacare and Lied About It – LINK
Newsmax: RomneyCare and ObamaCare Are Identical – LINK
MIT Economist: ObamaCare is RomneyCare with three more zeros – LINK
Romney Supporter Florida AG Pam Bondi Says Mitt Wants RomneyCare In Every State – LINK
You paid the high cost of RomneyCare in Massachusetts – LINK
UPDATE – Sandra Fluke: Catholic Institutions Should Pay for My Sex Change – LINK
Sandra Fluke says that as a law student she is poor that a Catholic University or an insurance company should be forced to give her birth control for free.
Sandra Fluke says that she uses $3,000 a year worth of birth control; CNS News and others ran the numbers and concluded that she would have to have sex 3 TIMES A DAY every day to use $3,000 worth.
So our friend Rush has a little fun with that statistic and makes jokes a parodies. One of the jokes was that if she wants to have that much sex and wants others to pay for it, are we not in essence paying her to have sex? If so she should post videos.
Rick Santorum, obviously forgetting that anyone who enters the political arena is fair game for jokes from just about everyone (I bet Jay Leno had a ball with this), condemned Rush for making the joke, which obviously had a very serious point behind it, which Rick also wimped out on commenting on.
Of course contraception is free at many health clinics and state run institutions, and that includes birth control; so this has nothing to do with who is going to pay for her insatiable sex habits, rather it is about going after the First Amendment’s protections of freedom of religion and conscience. It is also an effort to close Catholic hospitals and clinics so that government can take one step closer at taking over the health care system (which Kathleen Sibelius just all but admitted that this is the administration goal). It is also important to keep in mind that the Obama Administration is trying to force Catholic institutions not just to provide free contraception, but also to provide free so called “morning after” abortion pills.
Sandra Fluke presented herself as just another average Catholic law student, but in reality she is the president of the radical pro-abortion group “Law Students for Reproductive Justice” (2). Fluke is absurd and should be called out on it.
…to start a non-profit health insurance company, but the group is has no experience in the insurance industry. What the group does have experience in is far left radical activism. Saul Alinsky was a 1960’s revolutionary communist activist.
More Obama pals get your money.
Like many of the “green jobs” projects that the Obama Administration has given huge loans to, this is yet another big taxpayer investment that will likely never be paid back and is instead taxpayer dollars used for Democrats political activism. Many “green jobs” government loan recipients went out of business soon after receiving the loans, but the CEO’s of the companies were large political contributors who paid themselves large salaries and bonuses before ceasing operations.
A Saul Alinsky-tied group has been awarded a $56 million federal loan to start up a nonprofit health insurance company — one of several organizations across the country this week tapped to launch a new network of insurers under the sponsorship of the federal health care overhaul.
The Wisconsin group, Common Ground Healthcare Cooperative, was awarded the funding on Tuesday. According to the Department of Health and Human Services, the group is expected to provide coverage statewide within five years after starting on a smaller scale in early 2014.
But Americans for Limited Government President Bill Wilson questioned the group’s credentials — given its affiliation and lack of experience in the insurance field.
“The indisputable fact is that Common Ground was an outgrowth of the Alinsky operation in Chicago,” Wilson said. “We’re not giving money to a group with experience in health care issues or in setting up exchanges. … We’re handing the money to people who have been trained by arguably the single most expert individual on community organizing in the last 100 years.”
Common Ground, a Milwaukee group that dates back to 2004, is an affiliate of the Alinsky-founded Industrial Areas Foundation.
Well well well, who didn’t see this coming? The readers of my former college blog knew all about it as we explained how ObamaCare is designed to increase costs and insurance to such a point that the only “solution” would be a total government take over. Even Nancy Pelosi said that the bill was designed to make them “cry out for a public option”.
[I have nine pages of posts and links devoted to this subject on my old college blog starting HERE. To verify that we got it right and called it early just start on this link and proceed forward. Figuring out that ObamaCare was designed to do exactly this, and recognizing that the behavior incentivized by the program creates an economic death spiral – technically called an adverse selection spiral – which is designed to burden the system with such costs and regulation that it will collapse, was not difficult. It did not take an MIT Economist to see what so was obvious in the structure of ObamaCare and quite frankly this editor rejects the idea that Prof. Gruber just figured this out in some grand revelation recently. Anyone with some decent economics training could see this coming a mile away; yes it has always been that obvious – Editor.]
Medical insurance premiums in the United States are on the rise, the chief architect of President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul has told The Daily Caller.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Jonathan Gruber, who also devised former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s statewide health care reforms, is backtracking on an analysis he provided the White House in support of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, informing officials in three states that the price of insurance premiums will dramatically increase under the reforms.
In an email to The Daily Caller, Gruber framed this new reality in terms of the same human self-interest that some conservatives had warned in 2010 would ultimately rule the marketplace.
“The market was so discriminatory,” Gruber told TheDC, “that only the healthy bought non-group insurance and the sick just stayed [uninsured].”
“It is true that even after tax credits some individuals are ‘losers,’” he conceded, “in that they pay more than before [Obama’s] reform.”
Gruber, whom the Obama administration hired to provide an independent analysis of reforms, was widely criticized for failing to disclose the conflict of interest created by $392,600 in no-bid contracts the Department of Health and Human Services awarded him while he was advising the president’s policy advisers.
UPDATE – CNBC’s Jim Cramer: CEO’s scared to hire because of ObamaCare. Moving more operations overseas
“This is what President Obama would call a “teachable moment”. The teachable moment here is when we elect a president who brings this progressive philosophy to bear to government, they decide how our rights are to be granted and given and organized. And if they clash with our first amendment right of religious freedom or something else then we know who wins in that exchange. This is much much bigger than about contraception or something like that, this is about religious freedom, first amendment rights, and how this progressive philosophy of fungible rights or a living, breathing constitution really clashes and collides with these core rights that we built our society and country around,”.
Anyone who has ever used a Catholic hospital or school and enjoyed those services should not vote for another Democrat. The Democratic Party from Obama on down has declared war on these services.
By the way, we conservatives warned that this could happen under ObamaCare as it was phased in. The elite media and the Democrats said we were crazy liars. Well, now here we are.
Of course here is the rub. Mitt Romney after promising it wouldn’t happen, ended up having RomneyCare mandate that Catholic Hospitals had to give day after abortion pills under some circumstances.
Oh and you Catholics who dare to act surprised by this; your church leadership has been pushing statism (far left Democrats) for decades. Now you have it. Learn from this and do the country a favor and make it a lesson you remember.
“If you are not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” – Malcolm X
Political Arena 