Ah... clean teeth! Gotta luv 'em!
(That's the good news...)
The bad news? One cavity - which I'm having taken care of tomorrow... and definitely one - perhaps two - root canals (and new crowns) in my near future.
(*SIGH*)
Oh, well...
Here's what drives me nuts: Approximately $16,000/year for "health" insurance that doesn't include... my mouth... or my eyes.
(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)
What a system, huh? And all the while I get to subsidize half the friggin' population - here legally or otherwise - so that they pay less out of pocket or even nothing of pocket.
It's bull$hit, folks.
Anyway... off to newsbiting...!!!
8 comments:
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/05/07/exclusive-rand-paul-were-going-to-take-nsa-all-the-way-to-supreme-court-and-win/
Tea Party favorite, U.S. Senator, and presidential candidate Ron Paul is celebrating the news a federal appeals court rejected President Barack Obama’s National Security Agency (NSA) data collection program on Thursday. In an exclusive interview with Breitbart News, Paul says he can’t wait for the Supreme Court to eventually rule it unconstitutional.
“We initiated a lawsuit on this over a year ago, and we are excited that the appeals court agrees with us,” Paul said.
* CONTINUING...
"Now, they’re saying it’s illegal in that Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act doesn’t authorize that — that the government has gone too far — I think that’s a good first step. We want the Supreme Court to eventually rule on whether this is Constitutional or not. Our main complaint, or one of our main arguments is, the Fourth Amendment says you have to name the person who you want to get a warrant—but not naming anyone and putting “Mr. Verizon” down and saying you can get the records of millions of people, you’re not writing a specific warrant."
* CONTINUING...
"You’re writing a generalized warrant. This is one of the things that we fought against that the British were doing to us. James Otis famously argued in court that the writs of assistance that the British were using were non-specific and didn’t use the person’s name — and so we wrote the Fourth Amendment to try to stop this kind of stuff. I guess it’s gratifying that the courts are beginning to recognize the problem. We are anticipating and eager for this to get to the Supreme Court."
On Thursday, the Second District’s U.S. Court of Appeals wrote a 97-page ruling in which it found the NSA’s data collection program illegal. This particular case was different than Paul’s class action lawsuit against it, which was filed in Washington, D.C., last year.
“A federal appeals court in New York on Thursday ruled that the once-secret National Security Agency program that is systematically collecting Americans’ phone records in bulk is illegal. The decision comes as a fight in Congress is intensifying over whether to end and replace the program, or to extend it,” the New York Times’ Charlie Savage wrote. “In a 97-page ruling, a three-judge panel for the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held that a provision of the USA Patriot Act permitting the Federal Bureau of Investigation to collect business records deemed relevant to a counterterrorism investigation cannot be legitimately interpreted to permit the systematic bulk collection of domestic calling records.”
Paul, probably the most outspoken politician against the NSA’s program, said that he’s “all for” data collection against suspected criminals and terrorists as long as the NSA follows the constitutional process of obtaining a warrant for each time they do it.
“Yeah, I’m all for it — like recently the shooting in Texas, if you’ve got probable cause and you call the judge and you put that gentleman’s name on it, by all means go get it [his records],” Paul told Breitbart News. "And if he’s called 100 people and you’re suspicious and you go back to the judge and say, ‘you know what, there is some suspicion that some of these people he called may also be terrorists,’ just keep getting warrants. The thing is, the warrants are not that difficult to get in our society. Every house that’s entered into in this country for murder suspects or rape suspects or burglars, the police stand on the corner and call a judge on their cell phones and get a warrant. But having that additional step that separates the police from the warrant helps to keep bias out of the situation and keep systemic problems from occurring regarding the gathering of records. The problem I have is we’re gathering the records of every law-abiding American instead of targeting our searches for people who are threatening us."
* THREE-PARTER... (Part 1 of 3)
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/418055/how-five-republicans-let-congress-keep-its-fraudulent-obamacare-subsidies-brendan
The rumors began trickling in about a week before the scheduled vote on April 23: Republican leadership was quietly pushing senators to pull support for subpoenaing Congress’s fraudulent application to the District of Columbia’s health exchange — the document that facilitated Congress’s “exemption” from ObamaCare by allowing lawmakers and staffers to keep their employer subsidies.
* REPUBLICAN LEADERSHIP...
(*GNASHING MY TEETH*)
The application said Congress employed just 45 people. Names were faked; one employee was listed as “First Last,” another simply as “Congress.”
To Small Business Committee chairman David Vitter, who has fought for years against the ObamaCare exemption, it was clear that someone in Congress had falsified the document in order to make lawmakers and their staff eligible for taxpayer subsidies provided under the exchange for small-business employees. But until Vitter got a green light from the Small Business Committee to subpoena the unredacted application from the District of Columbia health exchange, it would be impossible to determine who in Congress gave it a stamp of approval.
When Vitter asked Republicans on his committee to approve the subpoena, however, he was unexpectedly stonewalled.
With nine Democrats on the committee lined up against the proposal, the chairman needed the support of all ten Republicans to issue the subpoena. But, though it seems an issue tailor-made for the tea-party star and Republican presidential candidate, Senator Rand Paul (R., Ky.) refused to lend his support.
* WHY...???
And when the Louisiana senator (Vitter) set a public vote for April 23, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his allies got involved. “For whatever reason, leadership decided they wanted that vote to be 5-5, all Republicans, to give Senator Paul cover,” one high-ranking committee staffer tells National Review. “So they worked at a member level to change the votes of otherwise supportive senators.”
* FOLKS... I'M MAKING THIS A NEWSBITE. THAT SAID... I DON'T TRUST NATIONAL REVIEW. THIS COULD BE A HIT PIECE AGAINST PAUL ON BEHALF OF THE RINOs. (JUST SAYIN'...)
Four Republicans — senators Mike Enzi, James Risch, Kelly Ayotte, and Deb Fischer — had promised to support Vitter, but that would soon change. “The amount of blood that McConnell and Paul spilled to prevent [the subpoena] from happening makes me wonder [if] maybe that isn’t all that there is to it,” the high-ranking staffer says.
* WHAT BLOOD? AND WHO IS THIS SENATE STAFFER AND WHO DOES HE WORK FOR?
Senate staffers, according to a top committee aide...
* AND WHO IS THIS TOP COMMITTEE AIDE...
...reported seeing Missouri senator Roy Blunt make calls to at least two Republican committee members, lobbying them, at McConnell’s behest, to vote no on subpoenaing the exchange. By the time the committee was called to quorum, Enzi, Risch, Ayotte, and Fisher voted no.
* THEIR VOTES - PARTICULARLY IF CHANGED AS NRO ALLEGES - NEED TO BE EXPLAINED.
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONTINUING... (Part 2 of 3)
To many observers, it was curious that any Republican would move to put the brakes on an investigation into ObamaCare fraud, and particularly curious that they would pull back in an instance where the federal government was actually defrauding itself, one that so clearly illustrates ObamaCare's flaws by exposing the bureaucratic jujitsu and outright dishonesty required of federal employees themselves to navigate the law.
(*NOD*)
Conservative health-care experts can’t understand the reasoning behind the GOP senators’ opposition.
* HAVE THEY ASKED THEM...???
They see politics and self-interest at play, and they allege that Republican leaders are as invested as their Democratic counterparts in maintaining their subsidies, fraudulently obtained, while avoiding scrutiny from an overwhelmingly disapproving American public.
* BUT WHY WOULD PAUL VOTE "NO" IF ALL IS AS NRO SAYS IT IS? (AND AGAIN... DID NRO ATTEMPT TO QUESTION PAUL... OR ENZI, RISCH, AYOTTE, AND FISHER ON THEIR VOTES?)
“We deserve to know who signed that application, because they are robbing taxpayers,” says Michael Cannon, director of health-policy studies at the libertarian CATO Institute.
* I AGREE!
The staffers who signed the fraudulent application, he says, “know who was directing them to do this. And so we have to follow the trail of breadcrumbs. This is the next breadcrumb, and whoever is farther up the trail wants to stop Vitter right here.”
* BUT WHY WOULD PAUL WANT TO DO THIS? (I WANT TO HEAR FROM PAUL!)
The story of the ill-fated subpoena can be traced back to the debate over the Affordable Care Act, when Senator Chuck Grassley (R., Ia.) insisted that lawmakers and congressional staff join a health-care exchange set up under the bill. For government employees, that meant giving up government-subsidized health-care contributions of between $5,000 and $10,000 per person. The White House scrambled to find a way to allow congressional employees to keep those subsidies. In Washington, D.C., only the small-business exchange allowed them to do so. After secret meetings with House Speaker John Boehner in 2013, President Obama instructed the Office of Personnel Management to allow Congress to file for classification as a small business, despite the fact that the law defines a small business as having no more than 50 employees and the House and Senate together employ tens of thousands.
* WELL WE KNOW BOEHNER IS A PIECE OF $HIT...
When Vitter’s staffers tracked down the application and discovered obvious signs of fraud, Vitter requested approval to subpoena an unredacted copy of the application. The value of that document, says Cannon, is that it would reveal the name of the person who filed it. “Now you’ve got someone to call to testify,” he says, predicting that testimony would precipitate a congressional vote on whether to end the congressional exemption altogether.
(*NOD*)
“I think it makes sense to find out what happened,” says Yuval Levin, the editor of National Affairs, a noted conservative health-care voice and a National Review contributor. “It would be pretty interesting to see whose name is on the forms,” he says. “It has to go beyond mid-level staffers.”
* AGREED...
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* OPPS... MAKE THAT FOUR-PARTER... (Part 3 of 4)
But some congressional Republicans, it seems, are also resistant to getting to the bottom of the mystery — or, at the very least, they are content to let sleeping dogs lie. Committee rules for a subpoena require either the consent of the ranking member or a majority of the group’s 19 senators. Because Democrats quickly made their opposition clear, Vitter needed the approval of all ten Republicans. Nine of them quickly consented via e-mail; one senator was strangely unresponsive. Senior committee aides say that Rand Paul’s staff didn’t immediately reply to an e-mail requesting the senator’s consent and, when they did, they refused to provide it. When Vitter attempted to set up a member-to-member meeting, his overtures were ignored or put off.
* SAYS...??? (SAYS WHO? WHO - ON THE RECORD - SAYS THIS?)
* FOLKS... VITTER CAN'T BE TRUSTED. THAT I KNOW!
Paul’s policy staff refused to take a meeting. When Vitter tried to confront Paul on the Senate floor, they say, the Kentucky senator skirted the issue.
* I'M READING LOTS OF CHARGES... SIMPLY "CHARGES..."
It wasn’t until after the vote that Paul shared his reasoning. “Senator Paul opposes allowing Congress to exempt themselves from any legislation,” an aide told the Conservative Review. “To that end, yesterday, he reintroduced his proposed constitutional amendment to prohibit Congress from passing any law that exempts themselves. Senator Paul prefers this option over a partisan cross-examination of Congressional staff.”
* SO... THIS IS POLITICAL STRATEGY? IF SO... I DON'T LIKE IT.
But a constitutional amendment is a longshot that would take years, and it hardly precluded an investigation of congressional corruption here and now.
* ABSOLUTELY! (YOU'LL GET NO ARGUMENT FROM ME!)
“That’s absurd,” says Robert Moffitt, the director of the Center for Health Policy Studies at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “You don’t need a constitutional amendment to get a subpoena . . . I don’t know where he’s coming from.” “The answers he has given do not make sense,” Cannon says of Paul. “And when someone with his principles does something that is so obviously against his principles, and does not give an adequate explanation, you begin to think that politics is afoot. It would have to be someone very powerful that made him a powerful pitch — or threat — to keep him from doing this.”
* FAIR ENOUGH... (ALL I WANT IS THE TRUTH...)
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONCLUDING... (Part 4 of 4)
Paul’s press secretary tells National Review that the senator “examines every opportunity to [oppose ObamaCare] individually, and does not base his vote on requests made by other senators, including the majority leader.” Asked whether McConnell pushed Paul or any other senator on the subpoena, a spokesman for McConnell says the majority leader “didn’t make any announcements when that committee voted.”
* AGAIN... AS WITH BOEHNER... WE ALL KNOW MCCONNELL SUCKS.
Risch said in the April 23 committee meeting that legal wrangling with the D.C. exchange could take time away from the committee’s small-business work. Enzi said he saw little wrong with the application as is. “Each of us has our own budget, each of us has our own staff,” he said. “I don’t know about everybody else, but I’m way under 50 [employees]. So my staff qualifies as a small business.” Enzi was one of the original sponsors of Vitter’s 2013 amendment to end the congressional ObamaCare exemption, but his press secretary tells National Review he felt the probe “could inadvertently target staff who simply completed paperwork as part of their job.” He insists that Enzi “made up his own mind.” Risch, Ayotte, and Fischer declined to comment.
* DOESN'T SOUND GOOD...
(*SIGH*)
A spokesman for South Carolina senator Tim Scott, who voted for the subpoena, says that nobody lobbied him one way or the other, while a spokesman for Florida senator Marco Rubio, who also voted in favor of the measure, declined to comment.
* RUBIO'S "DECLINE TO COMMENT" LEADS ME TO BELIEVE THE RINO LEADERSHIP WAS BEHIND THIS.
Health-care experts dismiss Enzi’s claim that each member’s office is its own small business, and not just because the health exchange application was filed for Congress as a whole. “These congressional offices that think they’re small businesses, are they LLCs?” Cannon asks. “Are they S-Corps? Are they shareholder-owned? Are they privately held? What is the ownership structure of this small business that you’re running, senator? It’s just utterly ridiculous.”
* ABSOLUTELY!
“They’re transparently absurd,” says Moffitt of Senate Republicans claiming small-business status. “Who made the determination that Congress is a small business and is therefore eligible for subsidies that do not legally exist? How did that happen?” No one quite knows what’s behind leadership’s apparent push to kill the subpoena. The move baffled some committee staffers. “The amount of blood that McConnell and Paul spilled to prevent [the subpoena] from happening makes me wonder [if] maybe that isn’t all that there is to it,” the high-ranking staffer says. “Maybe other people signed it . . . They’re clearly afraid of something bigger than a person’s name getting out there.”
* THIS NEEDS TO BE INVESTIGATED - BOTH BY "OUR" CONSERVATIVES AND BY THE MSM (EVEN IF THEY'RE ONLY DOING IT TO EMBARRASS THE GOP).
Others, however, think the motives behind GOP leadership’s apparent obfuscation are clear. “If there’s one thing that absolutely drives Americans fundamentally crazy, it’s the idea that Congress can set one set of rules for themselves and another for everybody else,” says Moffitt. “That’s political poison, and that’s why they have been so desperate to avoid the issue.”
“The most powerful interest group in Washington D.C. is not the Chamber or the unions or anyone else,” Cannon says. “It is members of Congress and their staffs. And when it comes to their benefits, they are all members of the same party.”
* THREE-PARTER... (Part 1 of 3)
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/05/04/emergency-room-visits-rise-under-affordable-care-act/26625571/
Three-quarters of emergency physicians say they've seen ER patient visits surge since ObamaCare took effect — just the opposite of what many Americans expected would happen.
* BECAUSE OBAMA AND THE DEMS TOLD US... ASSURED US... THAT THE OPPOSITE WOULD HAPPEN... THAT ONCE OBAMACARE WAS PASSED THERE'D BE FEW ER VISITS!
* WHY DO I HAVE TO POINT THIS OUT? WHY DOES USA FEEL THE NEED TO MUDDY THE WATERS BY PHRASING IT THE WAY THEY DID?
A poll released today by the American College of Emergency Physicians shows that 28% of 2,099 doctors surveyed nationally saw large increases in volume, while 47% saw slight increases. By contrast, fewer than half of doctors reported any increases last year in the early days of the Affordable Care Act.
* INCREASES ARE INCREASES! (WE WERE PROMISED DECREASES...!!! BY OBAMA...!!! BY PELOSI AND REID...!!!)
Such hikes run counter to one of the goals of the health care overhaul, which is to reduce pressure on emergency rooms by getting more people insured through Medicaid or subsidized private coverage and providing better access to primary care.
* AGAIN... WHAT IS THIS "GOALS" CRAPOLA...??? WHY PROVIDE COVER FOR OBAMA AND THE DEMS? FEW EXPENSIVE ER VISITS WAS A KEY SELLING POINT EMPLOYED BY THE DEMOCRATS - ALONG WITH "IF YOU LIKE YOUR DOCTOR YOU CAN KEEP YOUR DOCTOR" - ALONG WITH THE PROMISE OF AN AVERAGE $2,500 REDUCTION IN HEALTH INSURANCE PREMIUMS. (REMEMBER...?!?!)
* LIES... ALL LIES...
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONTINUING... (Part 2 of 3)
A major reason that hasn't happened is there simply aren't enough primary care physicians to handle all the newly insured patients, says ACEP President Mike Gerardi, an emergency physician in New Jersey.
* PEOPLE LIKE ME WERE SAYING THIS AT THE TIME!
"They don't have anywhere to go but the emergency room," he says. "This is what we predicted. We know people come because they have to."
Experts cite many root causes. In addition to the nation's long-standing shortage of primary care doctors — projected by the federal government to exceed 20,000 doctors by 2020 — some physicians won't accept Medicaid because of its low reimbursement rates. That leaves many patients who can't find a primary care doctor to turn to the ER — 56% of doctors in the ACEP poll reported increases in Medicaid patients.
Emergency room usage is bound to increase if there's a shortage of primary care doctors who accept Medicaid patients and "no financial penalty or economic incentive" to move people away from ERs, says Avik Roy, a health care policy expert with the free market Manhattan Institute.
"It goes to the false promise of the ACA," Roy says, that Medicaid recipients are "given a card that says they have health insurance, but they can't have access to physicians."
* AND OBAMA AND THE DEMS KNEW THIS AT THE TIME! THEY PLAYED US! AND THE MEDIA HELPED THEM GET ONE OVER ON US!
Complicating matters, low-income patients face many obstacles to care. They often can't take time off from work when most primary care offices are open, while ERs operate around the clock and by law must at least stabilize patients. Waits for appointments at primary care offices can stretch for weeks, while ERs must see patients almost immediately.
"Nobody wants to turn anyone away," says Maggie Gill, CEO of Memorial University Medical Center in Savannah, Ga. "But there's no business in this country that provides resource-intensive anything and can't even ask if you're going to be able to pay."
* SOFT FASCISM. (SERIOUSLY... HOW ELSE WOULD YOU DESCRIBE IT?) IT'S A DIRECT "TAKING." TOTALLY UNCONSTITUTIONAL. IT WOULD BE ONE THING IF THE FEDS PAID THE BILLS OF THOSE THEY REQUIRED ERs TO TREAT, BUT THEY DON'T. SOFT F*A*S*C*I*S*M.
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONCLUDING... (Part 3 of 3)
Some people who have been uninsured for years don't have regular doctors and are accustomed to using ERs, even though they are much more expensive. A 2013 report from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation says going to an ER when a primary care visit would suffice costs $580 more for each visit.
* THAT'S A SEPARATE ISSUE, BUT... SINCE THEY BROUGHT IT UP... WHY SHOULD A MERE VISIT COST $580?
Damian Alagia, chief physician executive for KentuckyOne Health, says he's seen the trend play out in his large hospital system. There are more than a half-million people in the state newly insured through ObamaCare. Many who put off care in the past now seek it in the place they know — the ER. "We're seeing an uptick pretty much across the system in our ERs," he says, calling the rise "significant" in both urban and rural hospitals.
* I SAY TAKE 'EM TO THE NEAREST FEDERAL BUILDING... OR CONGRESSMAN'S OFFICE... OR SENATOR'S OFFICE.
(*SMIRK*)
Gerardi acknowledges that some people come to the ER for problems that would be better handled in a primary or urgent care office. But he says the ER is the right place for patients with vague but potentially life-threatening symptoms, such as chest pain, which could be anything from a heart attack to indigestion.
ER volumes are likely to keep climbing, and hospitals are working to adapt. Alagia says his ERs have care management professionals who connect patients with primary care physicians if they don't already have them. Gill says her Georgia hospital has a "whole staff in the emergency room dedicated to recidivism," who follow up with patients to see whether they've found a primary care doctor, are taking their medications or need help with transportation to get to doctors.
* BABYSITTERS. WE'RE PAYING FOR BABYSITTERS.
Still, seven in 10 doctors say their emergency departments aren't ready for continuing, and potentially significant, increases in volume. Although the numbers should level off as people get care to keep their illnesses under control, Alagia says, "the patient demand will outstrip the supply of physicians for a while."
* THIS WAS OBAMA'S PLAN; BREAK THE SYSTEM SO HE OR THE NEXT DEMOCRAT PRESIDENT WOULD HAVE AN EXCUSE TO DEMAND FULL SOCIALIZATION - SINGLE PAYER - AND THUS TOTALLY SCREW ALL OF US.
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