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- Weekend Newsbites: Sat. & Sun., March 29 & 30, 2014
- Barker's Newsbites: Thursday, March 27, 2014
- Barker's Newsbites: Wednesday, March 26, 2014
- Barker's Newsbites: Tuesday, March 25, 2014
- Barker's Newsbites: Monday, March 24, 2014
- Weekend Newsbites: Sat. & Sun., March 22 & 23, 2014
- Barker's Newsbites: Friday, March 21, 2014
- Barker's Newsbites: Tuesday, March 18, 2014
- Weekend Newsbites: Sat. & Sun., March 15 & 16, 2014
- Barker's Newsbites: Thursday, March 13, 2014
- Barker's Newsbites: Wednesday, March 12, 2014
- Barker's Newsbites: Monday, March 10, 2014
- New Tires...
- Barker's Newsbites: Friday, March 7, 2014
- Barker's Newsbites: Wednesday, March 5, 3024
- If You Read Nothing Else This Week... READ THIS!
- Barker's Newsbites: Tuesday, March 4, 2014
- I Have No Problem With Vladamir Putin!
- F--k You, Chris Christie!
- Weekend Newsbites: Sunday, March 2, 2014
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About Me
- William R. Barker
- Pearl River, NY High School Class of '81; Northeastern University, Boston, MA Class of '87.
11 comments:
http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2014/february/16/at-the-fed,-the-more-things-change,-the-more-they-stay-the-same.aspx
* BY THE HON. RON PAUL... FROM LAST MONTH, ACTUALLY... SORRY FOR THE DELAY IN GETTING IT POSTED!
Federal Reserve Chairman Janet Yellen [has] testified before...that interventionist Keynesian policies at the Federal Reserve are well-entrenched and far from over. Mrs. Yellen practically bent over backwards to reassure Wall Street that the Fed would continue its accommodative monetary policy well into any new economic recovery. The same monetary policy that got us into this mess will remain in place until the next crisis hits.
* REPEAT...
The same monetary policy that got us into this mess will remain in place until the next crisis hits.
Isn't it amazing that the same people who failed to see the real estate bubble developing, the same people who were so confident about economic recovery that they were talking about “green shoots” five years ago, the same people who have presided over the continued destruction of the dollar's purchasing power never suffer any repercussions for the failures they have caused?
* NOPE. NOT AMAZING. THE PEOPLE ARE SHEEPLE. DUMB. DULL. LAZY. IGNORANT. UNABLE TO LEARN. UNWILLING TO LEARN.
They treat the people of the United States as though we were pawns in a giant chess game, one in which they always win and we the people always lose. No matter how badly they fail, they always get a blank check to do more of the same.
(*SHRUG*)
* YEP.
It is about time that the power brokers in Washington paid attention to what the Austrian economists have been saying for decades. Our economic crises are caused by central bank infusions of easy money into the banking system. This easy money distorts the structure of production and results in malinvested resources, an allocation of resources into economic bubbles and away from sectors that actually serve consumers' needs. The only true solution to these burst bubbles is to allow the malinvested resources to be liquidated and put to use in other areas. Yet the Federal Reserve's solution has always been to pump more money and credit into the financial system in order to keep the boom period going, and Mrs. Yellen's proposals are no exception.
(*SIGH*)
Every time the Fed engages in this loose monetary policy, it just sows the seeds for the next crisis, making the next crash even worse. Look at charts of the federal funds rate to see how the Fed has had to lower interest rates further and longer with each successive crisis. From six percent, to three percent, to one percent, and now the Fed is at zero. Some Keynesian economists have even urged central banks to drop interest rates below zero, which would mean charging people to keep money in bank accounts.
* WHEN I WAS A KID THEY TAUGHT US "THE MAGIC OF COMPOUND INTEREST." NOW... THEY TEACH CHILDREN "SPEND, SPEND, SPEND... AND DON'T FORGET TO BORROW, BORROW, BORROW!"
Chairman Yellen understands how ludicrous negative interest rates are, and she said as much in her question and answer period last week. But that zero lower rate means the Fed has had to resort to unusual and extraordinary measures: quantitative easing. As a result, the Fed now sits on a balance sheet equivalent to nearly 25% of U.S. GDP, and is committing to continuing to purchase tens of billions more dollars of assets each month.
When will this madness stop? Sound economic growth is based on savings and investment, deferring consumption today in order to consume more in the future. Everything the Fed is doing is exactly the opposite, engaging in short-sighted policies in an attempt to spur consumption today, which will lead to a depletion of capital, a crippling of the economy, and the impoverishment of future generations. We owe it not only to ourselves, but to our children and our grandchildren, to rein in the Federal Reserve and end once and for all its misguided and destructive monetary policy.
http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2014/march/02/hagels-defense-cuts-are-smoke-and-mirrors.aspx
* ANOTHER BY RON PAUL...
Last week Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel proposed an additional 40,000 reduction in active duty U.S. Army personnel, down to 450,000 soldiers.
As US troops are being withdrawn from the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it might make sense to reduce not only the active duty military but the entire military budget. However, from the interventionists’ reaction to Hagel’s announcement you might think President Obama announced he was shutting down the Pentagon!
Rep. Michael McCaul, Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, claimed that this slight reduction in personnel would hurt our military readiness. He blamed the exploding spending on welfare entitlements for the proposed military cuts, stating, "It's all being sacrificed ... on the altar of entitlements. This president cannot take on mandatory spending, so all we've done in the Congress - and this president - is basically cut discretionary spending."
McCaul is partly right. Welfare spending is bankrupting the country. But military spending is also welfare: it is welfare for the well-connected military-industrial complex, which enriches itself manufacturing useless boondoggles like the F-35 fighter.
* HEAR-HEAR! GOD BLESS RON PAUL! ABSOFRIGGIN'POSILUTELY!
We should never confuse legitimate defense spending – which I support – with military spending, which promotes interventionism overseas and actually undermines our national security.
(*NOD*)
Neoconservative Senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain...
* IF ONLY BOTH WOULD JUST DROP DEAD...
...were also quick to criticize Hagel’s announcement. They said the cuts were dead on arrival in the U.S. Senate. "We are going to kill it, not let it happen,” said Graham. McCain added, "We live in an ever-increasingly dangerous world and this budget is out of touch with reality.”
* INSANITY! MCCAIN AND GRAHAM ARE NOT JUST "HAWKS," THEY'RE WARMONGERS. I TRULY BELIEVE MCCAIN IS MENTALLY INCOMPETENT... THAT HE'S GONE OVER THE EDGE.
What McCain and Graham won’t admit is that much of the reason we are in an increasingly dangerous world is that the neo-cons keep inviting blowback with the interventions they are constantly pushing.
* YES!
If we minded our own business we would live in a far less dangerous world.
* NO DOUBT!
Nevertheless, although the neo-cons make a big deal about this small cut in military personnel, in reality these are not military cuts at all. These are token proposed cuts in troop levels which Congress won’t allow the administration to do anyway.
(*PURSED LIPS/SAD NOD*)
What Hagel proposes is not cuts, but instead a shift in spending away from personnel and toward new high-tech weapons which are favored by and profitable to the military-industrial complex. The F-35, for example, will continue in production according to Hagel’s plan, despite the numerous cost over-runs and design flaws. This is likely because the F-35 is built in 46 US states and nine foreign countries! That makes it particularly popular in Congress, regardless of its flaws and expense.
(*NOD*)
We do need real cuts in military spending, not just moving spending around from troops to new weapons systems. But what we really need is for the president to downsize U.S. foreign policy.
Maintaining a military presence in 140 countries while continuing to stir up trouble can lead to problems when the military is downsized. So, it's our intervention that needs downsizing.
* AMEN!
A proper foreign policy would mean a strong national defense, but a huge reduction in interventions and commitments overseas. Why are we stirring up trouble in Ukraine? In Syria? In Africa? Why are we defending South Korea and Japan when they are wealthy enough to defend themselves? A proper sized foreign policy would defend the United States instead of provoking the rest of the world.
* HEAR! HEAR!
http://news.yahoo.com/us-bolster-military-support-poland-baltic-162411959.html
The United States plans to expand military cooperation with Poland and Baltic states to show "support" for its allies after Russia's intervention in Ukraine, Pentagon chief Chuck Hagel said Wednesday.
* HAVE WE LEARNED NOTHING...??? (SADLY... A RHETORICAL QUESTION.)
http://washingtonexaminer.com/obama-charged-with-blocking-irs-probe-breaking-promises-to-help/article/2545121
A House chairman probing the IRS scandal on Wednesday said that President Obama has reneged on a promise to have his aides cooperate with the investigation...
Rep. Dave Camp also revealed that federal agents conducting an investigation into the Internal Revenue Service's bid to punish Tea Party and conservative critics of the president have yet to talk to a single target of the scandal.
(*SNORT*)
Camp, whose committee is one of several looking into the 2010-2013 scandal, put the blame for the drawn out investigations on Capitol Hill at the president’s feet. “I don’t fully understand why it’s taken them so long given that the president promised,” Camp said at a media roundtable hosted by the Christian Science Monitor. “He promised that he would have quick action and we still don’t have the documents from an agency that is in this administration."
His committee has been frustrated with the administration's failure to cough up emails from Lois Lerner, who ran the IRS department that blocked Tea Party groups from winning the typically quick approval of tax exempt status. (Lerner was on Capitol Hill Wednesday where she refused to testify before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.) “I still don’t have all of her emails. I still don’t have all of the documents that I’ve requested. The administration promised a quick action, and I’m still waiting for her emails,” said Camp, a Michigan Republican. “I need all of those, before I can conclude.”
By refusing to make good on his promise, Camp said that Obama and his administration is to blame for dragging out the investigations. Had Lerner not refused to testify to his committee earlier, Camp said “we probably would be at the bottom of what this is all about.”
He also expressed disgust that the Tea Party victims of the scandal, many of whom have been identified and even testified before his panel, are being ignored by the administration’s probe.
“As far as I know, I don’t know that Justice has spoken to any of the victims. I have not got information that they have even contacted the witnesses that came before the Ways and Means Committee,” said Camp.
While the scandal has taken a back seat to other issues, Camp said that his probe has uncovered several new elements to be included in a final report.
“We found that the targeting was more widespread than they had admitted. We found that it wasn’t just agents in Cincinnati that were rogue agents, this actually originated in Washington, D.C.,” he said. “I don’t think a lot of the public knows that,” he added.
* FOLKS... AGAIN... UNDERSTAND... THIS ISN'T ABOUT IDEOLOGY - IT'S ABOUT MONEY AND PARTISAN POLITICS - IT WAS ABOUT WINNING THE 2012 NATIONAL ELECTION!
* FOLKS... THIS WASN'T ABOUT IDEAS... IT WAS ABOUT STOPPING ANTI-OBAMA/ANTI-DEMOCRAT FUNDRAISING! (YES... THEY'D GLADLY STAMP OUT THE IDEAS OF THE RIGHT THEMSELVES... BUT THE GOAL WASN'T CENSORSHIP PER SE... THE GOAL WAS TO STOP FUNDRAISING.)
* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/code-chaos_783576.html#
Ever considered suicide by jellyfish?
Have you ended up in the hospital after being injured during the forced landing of your spacecraft? Or been hurt when you were sucked into the engine of an airplane or when your horse-drawn carriage collided with a trolley?
Should any of these unfortunate injuries befall you after October 1, 2014, your doctor, courtesy of the federal government, will have a code to record it.
On that date, the United States is scheduled to implement a new system for recording injuries, medical diagnoses, and inpatient procedures called ICD-10 — the 10th version of the International Classification of Diseases propagated by the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland.
(These exotic injuries, codeess for so many years, will henceforth be known, respectively, as T63622A Toxic effect of contact with other jellyfish, intentional self-harm, initial encounter, V9542XA Forced landing of spacecraft injuring occupant, initial encounter, V9733XA Sucked into jet engine, initial encounter, and V80731A Occupant of animal-drawn vehicle injured in collision with streetcar, initial encounter.)
The coming changes are vast. The number of codes will explode — from 17,000 under the current system to 155,000 under the new one...
* AND AS WE ALL KNOW, FOLKS, THE CURRENT SYSTEM IS TOTALLY F--KED UP!
“ICD-10 is the foundation for health care reform,” said Jeff Hinson, a CMS regional administrator, in a conference call about ICD-10 for providers in Colorado.
(*HEADACHE*)
It will affect almost every part of the U.S. health care system — providers and payers, physicians and researchers, hospitals and clinics, the government and the private sector. That system — already stressed with doctor shortages, electronic medical records mandates, and the broader chaos of ObamaCare — is nowhere near ready.
(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)
And that has lots of people worried.
* I'LL BET!
Health care professionals use ICD codes to talk to one another. The codes record diagnoses and services provided, and third-party payers — government, insurance companies — use the codes to determine reimbursements and to deter fraud. Coding errors can mean unpaid claims or costly audits — or both.
Virtually everyone agrees that the transition will mean decreased productivity and lost revenue, at least for a time.
(*CLAP...CLAP...CLAP*)
Some experts, dismissed as alarmists by ICD-10 enthusiasts, are predicting widespread chaos in a sector of the economy that can little afford it.
* WE... ARE... SO... F--KED...
Nobody really knows just what to expect. And remarkably, despite the embarrassing failures of HealthCare.gov, until recently the federal government had no plans to conduct end-to-end testing of the system before the launch this fall.
(*BANGING MY HEAD AGAINST THE WALL*)
In a letter to CMS administrator Marilyn Tavenner on February 18, 2014, four Republican senators pressed for comprehensive testing. The senators — Tom Coburn, Rand Paul, John Barrasso, and John Boozman — are all physicians and expressed deep concern that CMS is planning only one week of “front-end” testing.
After receiving the letter, CMS hastily announced that it will offer limited end-to-end testing to “a small group of providers” at some point in “summer 2014” and promised that “details about the end-to-end testing process will be disseminated at a later date.” That’s hardly reassuring. One health care consultant, a longtime ICD-10 proponent, put it this way: “This is probably going to be the most painful year we’ve seen in the history of U.S. health care.”
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) are in the middle of a major public awareness campaign on ICD-10. ... Despite this urgency, public affairs officials from HHS, CMS, and the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) at the Centers for Disease Control all declined repeated requests for interviews.
The introduction of a system with exponentially more codes, and far more complicated codes, will inevitably mean many more coding errors. The default position of payers, whether government or the private sector, will be to deny all claims that are not coded correctly. In many cases, providers will be left with a lose-lose choice: forgo payment altogether or dedicate valuable time and resources to appealing the denied claims. Hospitals, large physician practices, and other big institutions can absorb some of the losses and have the workforce at their disposal to challenge the denials. Small practices do not.
* FOLKS... THIS IS INSANITY PILED UPON INSANITY!
“Most practices in the United States are small businesses,” says Senator Coburn, an obstetrician and family practice doctor from Muskogee, Oklahoma. “This could ruin them.”
An ICD-10 preparation plan from the Health Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) advises practices to have a minimum of six months revenue in reserve to help avoid that possibility.
(*SNORT*)
* SERIOUSLY...? THIS IS THEIR ANSWER... THEIR ADVICE?
A 2008 study on the costs of implementing ICD-10 from the health care IT firm Nachimson Advisors warned that “significant changes in reimbursement patterns will disrupt provider cash flow for a considerable period of time.” The study projected that the total cost of the ICD-10 implementation would be $83,290 for a small practice (3 physicians and 2 administrative staffers)... and $2.7 million for a large practice (100 providers, 10 full-time coding staffers, and 54 medical records staffers).
Coburn believes the new system will require doctors to spend more time coding. “You’re just not going to trust a nurse to do that,” he says. “If they put in the wrong code, they’re going to hammer you. The penalties are getting more severe. If you fail a recovery audit, they don’t just take your money, they penalize you on top of that.”
* GREAT! WONDERFUL! JUST... IMAGINE...
(*STILL SHAKING MY HEAD*)
Coburn’s concerns go beyond the likelihood of a rough transition to ICD-10 to the long-term effect the changes could have on the doctor-patient relationship. The specificity of the codes will require doctors to spend more of their time on documentation.
(*CLAP...CLAP...CLAP*)
“Let’s say it takes you an extra two minutes per patient to do the coding yourself,” he says. “It doesn’t sound like much. But if you see 30 or 40 patients a day, that’s at least an extra hour you’re spending on this stuff.
(*NOD*)
That minute or two that you’re not spending talking with the patient might be the minute when you learn something critical to your diagnosis or treatment plan.”
Coburn's prescription: “Delay it forever. The health care system can’t take another cost, especially right now.”
CMS administrator Jeff Hinson, in his conference call with Colorado providers, offered a stern warning about the October 1, 2014, compliance date. “You need to know that the deadline is firm,” he said. “The deadline is firm.”
(*SIGH*)
Despite desperate pleas from virtually every corner of the health care industry, the federal government has offered no details for comprehensive end-to-end testing of the new coding system before it goes live in seven months.
* THIS... IS... OBAMA...!!!
Coburn, along with the other Republican physicians in the Senate, is trying to force CMS to perform comprehensive testing or to delay the start date. “Given the size and scope of the potential transition to ICD-10, the brevity and limited scope of this test is worrisome,” they wrote in their letter to Tavenner.
http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/ED-AR921_1budge_G_20140304184203.jpg
...shows the arc of tax revenues and spending during the Obama Presidency, and you can see they are both up.
* B*O*T*H U*P!
The feds spent $2.98 trillion in 2008 and Mr. Obama is proposing to spend $1 trillion more than that in fiscal 2015.
The Pelosi-Obama stimulus blew out the bank in 2009-2011, the GOP House imposed a modicum of restraint in the next two years, but Mr. Obama is going back to the Pelosi future from here on out. His budget would increase outlays by nearly $450 billion from fiscal 2013...
(*SIGH*)
Spending in 2015 would hit 21.4% of GDP, up from 20.8% in 2013.
(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)
Outlays would rise by another $1 trillion by 2020, much of it fueled by the exploding costs of ObamaCare, and would reach an astonishing $6 trillion by 2024. If Democrats do take the House and Senate, you can bet spending will rise even faster.
Mr. Obama's budget nonetheless says that the deficit will fall to $564 billion in 2015, or 3.1% of GDP.
How would that happen?
* READ ON...
Well, because tax revenues are booming. Revenues hit $2.77 trillion in 2013 — a new federal record — and the Obama budget foresees them growing another 20%, to $3.33 trillion in fiscal 2015. Receipts will hit 18.3% of GDP in 2015, well above the 40-year average of 17.4%, and they'll keep rising to 19.9% a decade from now.
(But Mr. Obama says the government is starved for revenue...)
The President's budget proposes to spread all this cash around to various voter groups and Democratic constituencies. Mr. Obama would fund public preschool for every four year old and create a new fund to underwrite paid family leave in the states. There's more for job training programs that haven't shown they can train workers for jobs, and more for shovel-ready road projects that may or may not be shovel-ready. And don't forget a new $1 billion fund for efforts to combat climate change, which means more payola for green crony capitalists.
The big spending loser is the military, which will impress Vladimir Putin, though not in a good way. The proposed 2015 $623 billion defense budget is 3.4% of GDP and would be cut by nearly $39 billion more in 2016 to 3% and 2.3% by 2023. The last time the U.S. spent that small a share of the economy on defense was 1.7% in 1940. Readers who attended schools that still taught American history may recall that was not a good year for global stability.
By contrast, Mr. Obama's budget leaves entitlement program spending on cruise control.
(He has dropped from the budget last year's modest proposal to make the calculation for cost-of-living increases in Social Security more accurate — a bow to the protests by liberal Democrats.)
Inequality and class warfare will be big Democratic themes this election year, so Mr. Obama has obliged with more tax increases on business to finance more tax credits for workers. Millions of Americans already pay no income taxes, and Mr. Obama would take more of them off the rolls by expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) to 13.5 million childless Americans — at a cost of $60 billion over 10 years.
(These credits are "refundable," which means you get a check even if you have no net tax liability.)
This EITC expansion deserves longer treatment, not least because the Treasury Inspector General reports that the current program loses at least $11 billion a year to improper payments. But as a policy matter the earned credit was designed to be a substitute for the minimum wage that wouldn't price workers out of the job market. Instead, Mr. Obama wants to expand the EITC and...
* AND...
...raise the minimum wage.
Mr. Obama's budget doesn't make even a token outreach to the GOP, and in that regard it is at least honest.
With Democrats at risk of losing the Senate, Mr. Obama views a revival of tax and spend as his party's best 2014 campaign pitch. Americans will have to decide if they like what about half of them will be paying for.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dana-milbank-president-obama-releases-a-budget-without-vision/2014/03/04/a217a01e-a3e5-11e3-84d4-e59b1709222c_story.html
* HERE'S LIBERAL COLUMNIST DANA MILBANK WRITING IN THE WASHINGTON POST...
By universal agreement, Obama’s budget is dead on arrival on Capitol Hill — and the White House wasn’t really pretending otherwise. Instead of offering a proposal that would be the basis for negotiations with lawmakers, White House officials drafted a document that would do Democrats no harm in the 2014 elections.
* YOU FOLKS DO UNDERSTAND THAT WE PAY THIS COCKSUCKER (OBAMA - NOT MILBANK) TO OFFER SEROUS PROPOSALS FOR GOVERNING... RIGHT?
* YOU FOLKS DO UNDERSTAND THAT THIS BEHAVIOR HURTS THE COUNTRY... RIGHT?
* FINALLY... YOU FOLKS DO UNDERSTAND THAT... (*DRUM ROLL*)... OBAMA COULDN'T GIVE A RAT'S ASS... RIGHT?
Gone was the proposal from a previous Obama budget to restrain the growth of Social Security costs.
Missing was any major proposal to fix the huge long-term deficits in Medicare.
Obama’s budget confirmed his irrelevance by retreating from any serious attempt at reforming entitlement programs. Those programs are swelling and will grow exponentially in coming years, crowding out everything else government does, including defense spending and social programs.
* AGAIN... DANA MILBANK... LIBERAL COLUMNIST... WASHINGTON POST...
(*SIGH*)
http://nypost.com/2014/03/04/how-obamacare-slaps-the-sick/
The plans offer “free” mammograms, “free” colonoscopies and “free” contraceptives — meaning you don’t have a co-pay. But if you have cancer, MS or Parkinson’s, you’re in trouble: Most ObamaCare plans skimp on specialists and life-saving drugs.
* OOPS...
Dr. Jeffrey English, a Georgia neurologist who treats patients with advanced MS, worries that such patients forced into exchange plans will deteriorate rapidly. Some plans don’t cover six out of the 10 drugs that can treat MS, including the ones most effective at staving off irreversible paralysis.
“ObamaCare is a throwback to the old HMO model of the 1990s, which promised a broad package of coverage for primary-care benefits like vaccines and routine doctor visits. But to pay for these benefits, the ObamaCare plans skimp on other things, principally the number of doctors you’ll have access to and also the number of costlier branded drugs,” explains Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a practicing physician and fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
It’s like a car with leather seats and Bose speakers, but a lousy engine.
Another aspect of this approach: Most exchange plans exclude the academic medical centers that cancer patients look to when their local hospital runs out of answers.
Dr. Katherine Albrecht developed stage 3c breast cancer (which had spread to her lymph nodes) in 2011. Doctors at her local hospital in Nashua, NH, told her to get her affairs in order. But her Anthem PPO health insurance allowed her to go to Dana Farber Cancer Center in Boston, where she was successfully treated, and afterward to Cornell Breast Cancer Center.
Her Anthem policy was canceled late last year, because it didn’t meet ObamaCare mandates such as maternity coverage.
(*PURSED LIPS*)
Yet ObamaCare-compliant policies in New Hampshire won’t cover care at 10 of the 26 hospitals in the state, and none outside the state — so if she’d been on ObamaCare when she got cancer, she couldn’t have gone to Boston for care. Albrecht says, “Under ObamaCare, I’d be dead.”
* ARE... YOU... PEOPLE... READING... THIS...?!?!
Recently, the president urged Organizing for Action volunteers to enroll as many people as possible in ObamaCare before the March 31 deadline, calling it “God’s work.” Really? Maybe helping the uninsured is God’s work. But not convincing people with health problems to move into plans that won’t provide the care they need to stay alive. In the private sector, that would be fraud. It takes politics to a new low.
In February 2013, the Obama administration whacked people with pre-existing conditions even harder by suspending the cap on out-of-pocket expenses under an ObamaCare policy, which was originally set to kick in Jan. 1 at $6,350 for an individual. Theodore M. Thompson, a vice president of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, said “The promise of out-of-pocket limits was one of the main reasons we supported health-care reform.”
* ARE... YOU... PEOPLE... READING... THIS...?!?!
Without the cap, an MS patient on Copaxone, which costs $6,000 a month, will have to spend about $1,500 to $2,000 every month for the co-pay on that one drug alone. That’s unaffordable for many.
* ARE... YOU... PEOPLE... READING... THIS...?!?!
Before the Affordable Care Act, nine out of every 10 Americans with pre-existing conditions had coverage. They got it through an employer-provided plan, Medicare or Medicaid without discrimination. Only the individual-policy market let insurers charge sick people more or turn them away — and even in that market most got covered. Nationwide, only 2 million to 4 million people with health problems couldn’t get coverage. That’s about 1% of the population — a small, fixable problem.
But ObamaCare doesn’t fix the problem, it makes it far worse. As millions lose on-the-job coverage this year or next and get pushed into ObamaCare, those with pre-existing illnesses will have the same difficulty getting care as the patients in the TV ads.
It’s no lie.
* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/372566/obamacare-illegals-michelle-malkin
You knew it was coming.
I knew it was coming.
When government expands entitlements, illegal aliens always end up with a piece of the pie.
ObamaCare promoters relented to GOP pressure to include an illegal-alien ban on eligibility and vowed endlessly that no benefits would go to the “undocumented.” But denial isn’t just a river in Egypt. It’s the Obama way.
In Oregon this week, officials confessed that nearly 4,000 illegal immigrants had been “accidentally” steered from the state’s low-income Medicaid program and instead were enrolled in ObamaCare in violation of the law.
Oopsie.
The Oregonian newspaper’s Nick Budnick reported that the health bureaucrats “discovered the problem several weeks ago and are correcting it.” Get in line. The beleaguered Cover Oregon health insurance exchange has been riddled with ongoing problems, errors, and glitches since last October that have yet to be fixed. Take note: This wasn’t a one-time computer meltdown. Because Oregon’s health insurance exchange website has been offline and its software architects under investigation for possible fraud, the Oregon ObamaCare drones have been processing each and every application manually. That means nearly 4,000 illegal-alien applications with “inaccurate” data "somehow" passed through government hands and "somehow" ended up getting routed through as new enrollees with ObamaCare-approved full-service health care.
(*SMIRK*)
Does anyone believe the same incompetent boobs who enrolled them will be able to track down the nearly 4,000 illegal-alien beneficiaries, “correct” the “errors,” and ensure that it doesn’t happen again?
(*GUFFAW*)
What a slap in the face to the millions of law-abiding Americans who have lost their health-care coverage and work hours thanks to Democratic-sponsored federal health-care regulatory burdens and mandate costs.
One Oregon Obamacare manager defended the unlawful illegal-alien enrollment by explaining: “We were just getting people into the services.”
And there’s the rub.
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)
The imperative of these government social engineers is to herd as many “clients” into taxpayer-subsidized programs as possible. Just last week, Obama’s Homeland Security secretary Jeh Johnson publicized an open letter to families with illegal-alien relatives promising that no one would be deported for seeking ObamaCare services.
“No one in America who is eligible should be afraid to apply for health coverage because they have a family with mixed status,” Johnson assured. And in another sign of how the White House is still planning for mass illegal-alien amnesty, Johnson also made clear: “Enrolling in health coverage . . . will not prevent your loved ones who are undocumented from getting a green card in the future or who do not yet have a green card at risk.”
As always, California Democrats are at the forefront of busting open ObamaCare for the illegal-alien population. Earlier this month, Democratic state senator Ricardo Lara introduced a bill to extend health benefits and a special online marketplace to 1 million illegals under an Obamacare-style program subsidized by state taxpayer dollars.
In case you forgot, President Obama had already paved the path for illegal-alien ObamaCare when he signed the massive expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP) in 2009. As I’ve reported previously, the law loosened eligibility requirements for legal immigrants and their children by watering down document and evidentiary standards — making it easy for individuals to use fake Social Security cards to apply for benefits with little to no chance of getting caught. In addition, Obama’s S-CHIP expansion revoked Medicaid-application time limits that were part of the 1996 welfare-reform law.
Open-borders activists saw those provisions as first steps toward universal health coverage for illegals. They see America as the medical welcome mat to the world. Over the past year, they’ve ratcheted up public protests demanding free organ transplants for illegal-alien patients. In Chicago last fall, they marched on a hospital with caskets and posters demanding scarce organs. One illegal alien blasted authorities for putting “paper over our lives.” In California, illegal-alien transplant patients count on federal incompetence and lax enforcement to abet them, because if they notify the state that DHS “is aware of their presence and does not plan to deport them,” they are eligible for full-blown Medi-Cal coverage, according to the state.
(*HEADACHE*)
Now, ObamaCare peddlers from Oregon to New York and all points in between are rushing to sign up new “customers” in advance of the March 31 open-enrollment deadline. How many more thousands of illegal aliens will be roped into the system? Remember: In the lexicon of the Left, “accidental” is just another word for inevitable entitlement creep.
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