When we all heard his speeches during the 2008 campaign, it was something akin to the Lesley Gore’s Sunshine, Lollipops, and Rainbows. He promised more transparency and a return of civility in politics. He was everything George Bush wasn’t, which provided the hot air that led him to the presidency. Bush did run deficits and the orgy of spending and corruption scandals that plagued Republicans in 2006, that were not forgotten in 2008, allowed Democrats to control the narrative on a key Republican issue: Taxes and Spending. The “tax and spend label” that usually sinks liberal candidates, or at least makes the race a competition, faded away. Obama vowed to cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term and that was music to the ears of independent voters sick of Dubya. However, when the ballots closed that miserable day in November, Barack Obama rode that wave of “hope and change” into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue on a flawlessly executed campaign that ushered in our first black president. However, after a $800 billion dollar stimulus, a trillion dollar new entitlement program, stagnant economic growth, a volatile job market, and high unemployment, the banner of hope and change is looking more like a Kafka-esque nightmare. We’ve all transformed into beetles.
As for the so-called “stimulus,” we should thank the president. He finally and irrevocably proved that government spending doesn’t spur economic growth and, therefore, killed the cornerstone of Keynesian economics. We’ve had eleven recessions and recoveries in the past sixty years and, as Harvey Golub wrote in the Wall Street Journal yesterday:
This recovery is near the bottom of all 11. Cumulative nonfarm job growth is just 1.9% 34 months into recovery, the ninth-worst performance and well below the average job growth of 6.5%. Cumulative GDP growth is just 6.8% 11 quarters into this recovery, less than half the average (15.2%) and the worst of all 11…fiscal policy, under the control of the president and his party, increased expenditures by about $700 billion per year since 2008 and launched a spending package of about $800 billion (along with various “targeted” temporary tax reductions), all of which resulted in an increase in national debt of over $5 trillion. In other words, we borrowed $5 trillion, for which we will pay interest for who knows how long, in order to stimulate the economy now.
The libtards are beside themselves over Obamacare. They know this shit will get shot down, so they do anything and everything that they can think of to intimidate the SCOTUS. Intimidation, it’s their signature move.
The left tries to intimidate the High Court on ObamaCare.
You can tell the Supreme Court is getting closer to its historic ObamaCare ruling because the left is making one last attempt to intimidate the Justices. The latest effort includes taunting Chief Justice John Roberts that if the Court overturns any of the law, he’ll forever be defined as a partisan “activist.”
Senate Judiciary Chairman Pat Leahy recently took the extraordinary step of publicly lobbying the Chief Justice after oral argument but before its ruling. “I trust that he will be a Chief Justice for all of us and that he has a strong institutional sense of the proper role of the judicial branch,” the Democrat declared on the Senate floor. “The conservative activism of recent years has not been good for the Court.”
Obama is throwing everything he can at his reelection bid, including this farce!
Let’s trick the senior citizens of America into thinking that their Medicare Advantage is staying the same until AFTER the election then we can screw them over.
Seniors are the one’s who get out and vote, so if they’re bamboozled into thinking everything is fine they may still vote for him. The SCOAMF’s selling crappy bill of goods to seniors.
Call it President Obama’s Committee for the Re-Election of the President — a political slush fund at the Health and Human Services Department.
Only this isn’t some little fund from shadowy private sources; this is taxpayer money, redirected to help Obama win another term. A massive amount of it, too — $8.3 billion. Yes, that’s billion, with a B.
Here is how it works.
The most oppressive aspects of the ObamaCare law don’t kick in until after the 2012 election, when the president will no longer be answerable to voters. More “flexibility,” he recently explained to the Russians.
But certain voters would surely notice one highly painful part of the law before then — namely, the way it guts the popular Medicare Advantage program.
For years, 12 million seniors have relied on these policies, a more market-oriented alternative to traditional Medicare, without the aggravating gaps in coverage.
But as part of its hundreds of billions in Medicare cuts, the Obama one-size-fits-all plan slashes reimbursement rates for Medicare Advantage starting next year — herding many seniors back into the government-run program.
President Obama’s landmark health-care initiative, long touted as a means to control costs, will actually add more than $340 billion to the nation’s budget woes over the next decade, according to a new study by a Republican member of the board that oversees Medicare financing.
The study is set to be released Tuesday by Charles Blahous, a conservative policy analyst whom Obama approved in 2010 as the GOP trustee for Medicare and Social Security. His analysis challenges the conventional wisdom that the health-care law, which calls for an expensive expansion of coverage for the uninsured beginning in 2014, will nonetheless reduce deficits by raising taxes and cutting payments to Medicare providers.
The 2010 law does generate both savings and revenue. But much of that money will flow into the Medicare hospitalization trust fund — and, under law, the money must be used to pay years of additional benefits to those who are already insured. That means those savings would not be available to pay for expanding coverage for the uninsured.
“Does the health-care act worsen the deficit? The answer, I think, is clearly that it does,” Blahous, a senior research fellow at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, said in an interview. “If one asserts that this law extends the solvency of Medicare, then one is affirming that this law adds to the deficit. Because the expansion of the Medicare trust fund and the creation of the new subsidies together create more spending than existed under prior law.”
I’ve harped on AARP before and suggested alternatives to them.AMAC is a good choice for an alternative. I’m not 50 yet, but close enough to pay attention.
My wife just turned 50, so she recently experienced that least favorite American rite of passage: the arrival of the dreaded solicitation letter from AARP.
I’m pleased to say that she took advantage of this opportunity to do precisely as I have done for the past eight years: she immediately and with malice aforethought dropped the solicitation in the trash.
Not that she was offended by the reminder of her advanced age; rather, because she holds AARP in contempt.
So do I.
Two quick questions, dear reader: 1) Do you belong to AARP? 2) Which AARP do you belong to?
If you’re confused by the second question your confusion is, in AARP’s eyes, a marketing triumph.
You are likely thinking, “Which AARP? Why, I belong to the American Association of Retired Persons. I belong to that AARP.”
Surprise. There is no such thing as the American Association of Retired Persons. The non-profit organization that was founded in 1956 to help older folks was renamed some years ago. It’s now called AARP and it exists as three separate organizations. (Actually four, but for our purposes let’s ignore the international branch. This is confusing enough.)
President Obama’s national health care law will cost $1.76 trillion over a decade, according to a new projection released 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.
And once again, the asshole in the White House wants to put the problems of America on the backs of the military. Specifically, on the backs of the active military, retirees and their families.
They’ve already sacrificed for this nation, now that they are done with that, the government can screw them over.
We’re not a commodity anymore. Just a liability.
Thanks for your service asshole, now get on Obamacare and like it.
Trashing Tricare
Obama to cut healthcare benefits for active duty and retired US military
The Obama administration’s proposed defense budget calls for military families and retirees to pay sharply more for their healthcare, while leaving unionized civilian defense workers’ benefits untouched. The proposal is causing a major rift within the Pentagon, according to U.S. officials. Several congressional aides suggested the move is designed to increase the enrollment in Obamacare’s state-run insurance exchanges.
The disparity in treatment between civilian and uniformed personnel is causing a backlash within the military that could undermine recruitment and retention.
The proposed increases in health care payments by service members, which must be approved by Congress, are part of the Pentagon’s $487 billion cut in spending. It seeks to save $1.8 billion from the Tricare medical system in the fiscal 2013 budget, and $12.9 billion by 2017.
Many in Congress are opposing the proposed changes, which would require the passage of new legislation before being put in place.
“We shouldn’t ask our military to pay our bills when we aren’t willing to impose a similar hardship on the rest of the population,” Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and a Republican from California, said in a statement to the Washington Free Beacon. “We can’t keep asking those who have given so much to give that much more.”
Administration officials told Congress that one goal of the increased fees is to force military retirees to reduce their involvement in Tricare and eventually opt out of the program in favor of alternatives established by the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare.
They can’t balance a budget. They slash the military’s budget. They go after the retirees to pay for the things that they were promised would be there after they did their 20 years, or better. It’s bad enough that they want to hike fees, but to do it by as much as 78% is criminal.
The Veterans did what was asked, now the government reneges on the deal. Typical.
Pentagon officials will continue pressing in 2013 for significantly higher Tricare fees for military retirees, including older retirees covered by Tricare for Life, as well as higher drug co-pays for all Tricare beneficiaries.
The Defense Department’s proposed 2013 budget calls for annual enrollment fees for retirees in Tricare Prime to rise next year by 30 percent to 78 percent, from the current $460 or $520 for families to between $600 and $820, depending on military retirement income.
“Working-age retirees” — those younger than 65 — also would pay annual enrollment fees for Tricare Standard and Extra: $70 for an individual and $140 for a family. These would be the first enrollment fees for Standard and Extra in Tricare history.
Deductibles for Standard and Extra also would rise by $10 for individuals and $20 for families.
More overreaching by government. This time it’s the FDA. Now, they want to regulate your body. It’s a drug after all. When will the madness stop? The government wants to control everything in our lives, including our own bodies. You’d think that liberal assholes would be all up in arms over this overt power grab by “the man.” That sound you hear is crickets coming from the left on this.
In another outrageous power-grab, FDA says your own stem cells are drugs—and stem cell therapy is interstate commerce because it affects the bottom line of FDA-approved drugs in other states!
We wish this were a joke, but it’s the US Food and Drug Administration’s latest claim in its battle with a Colorado clinic over its Regenexx-SD™ procedure, a non-surgical treatment for people suffering from moderate to severe joint or bone pain using adult stem cells.
The FDA asserts in a court document that it has the right to regulate the Centeno-Schultz Clinic for two reasons:
Stem cells are drugs and therefore fall within their jurisdiction. (The clinic argues that stem cell therapy is the practice of medicine and is therefore not within the FDA’s jurisdiction!)
The clinic is engaging in interstate commerce and is therefore subject to FDA regulation because any part of the machine or procedure that originates outside Colorado becomes interstate commerce once it enters the state. Moreover, interstate commerce is substantially affected because individuals traveling to Colorado to have the Regenexx procedure would “depress the market for out-of-state drugs that are approved by FDA.”
We discussed the very ambiguous issue of interstate commerce last September—it’s an argument the FDA frequently uses when the basis for their claim is otherwise lacking. As we noted then, the FDA holds that an “interstate commerce” test must be applied to all steps in a product’s manufacture, packaging, and distribution. This means that if any ingredient or tool used in the procedure in question was purchased out of state, the FDA would in its view have jurisdiction, just as they would if the final product had traveled across state lines.
This time the FDA just nakedly says in court documents that the agency wants to protect the market for FDA-approved drugs. No more beating around the bush—their agenda is right out in the open! This appears to be a novel interpretation of the Food Drug and Cosmetic Act (FD&C), as evidenced by the government’s failure to cite any judicial precedent for their argument.
I’ve bitched about AARP for years. Their a bunch of sorry assed liberal asshats that are out to steal as much money from the American elderly as they possibly can.
Their lobbying efforts are all focused on the liberal agenda of Obamacare because it removes the Medicare Advantage plan which plays into the hands of AARP.
They supported this scheme of Obama and the Democretins because if it stands, seniors will be forced to go back and buy the supplemental insurance from AARP.
Greg Hengler at Townhall puts together this stylized, noir-detective look at the “mystery” of AARP’s political support for ObamaCare. Call it The Mystery of the Senior Swindle if you will, or How To Make A Billion Dollars Without Really Trying. All you need to do is get Congress to create a market for you by swinging a lobbying hammer around Washington DC, and let the Democrats do your dirty work for you:
This site may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material available in my efforts to advance understanding of political, human rights, economic, democracy, and social justice issues, etc. I believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research, educational, or satirical purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
