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Readers! A November fund-raising drive!

 

It is unfortunately time for another November fund-raising campaign to support my work here at Behind the Black. I really dislike doing these, but 2025 is so far turning out to be a very poor year for donations and subscriptions, the worst since 2020. I very much need your support for this webpage to survive.

 

And I think I provide real value. Fifteen years ago I said SLS was garbage and should be cancelled. Almost a decade ago I said Orion was a lie and a bad idea. As early as 1998, long before almost anyone else, I predicted in my first book, Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8, that private enterprise and freedom would conquer the solar system, not government. Very early in the COVID panic and continuing throughout I noted that every policy put forth by the government (masks, social distancing, lockdowns, jab mandates) was wrong, misguided, and did more harm than good. In planetary science, while everyone else in the media still thinks Mars has no water, I have been reporting the real results from the orbiters now for more than five years, that Mars is in fact a planet largely covered with ice.

 

I could continue with numerous other examples. If you want to know what others will discover a decade hence, read what I write here at Behind the Black. And if you read my most recent book, Conscious Choice, you will find out what is going to happen in space in the next century.

 

 

This last claim might sound like hubris on my part, but I base it on my overall track record.

 

So please consider donating or subscribing to Behind the Black, either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. I could really use the support at this time. There are five ways of doing so:

 

1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.

 

2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation. Takes about a 10% cut.
 

3. A Paypal Donation or subscription, which takes about a 15% cut:

 

4. Donate by check. I get whatever you donate. Make the check payable to Robert Zimmerman and mail it to
 
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
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You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.


Obamacare causes insurance company to lose money

Finding out what’s in it: For the first time in 15 years, Blue Cross/Blue Shield of North Carolina will lose money in 2015 due to Obamacare.

Blue Cross and Blue Shield, the state’s largest health insurer, said Friday that it posted its first financial loss in 15 years as a result of insuring high numbers of older and sicker people under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The Chapel Hill organization signed up 257,704 people under the federal health care law, which requires insurers to provide coverage regardless of a customer’s health condition. New enrollees last year swelled Blue Cross’s covered membership to 3.91 million people, and boosted revenue by 25 percent to an all-time high of $8 billion.

But steep medical claims – for hip and knee replacements, heart procedures, specialty drugs and other costs – drove up medical claims from $5 billion in 2013 to $6.4 billion in 2014. Blue Cross also paid $156 million in ACA-related fees, a new cost for the company.

Federal subsidies under Obamacare are supposed to cover these loses, but then we must ask where is the bankrupt federal government going to get this money? In the end, someone is going to go bankrupt and we will all be worse off.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 

The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

8 comments

  • Cotour

    This is the calculated beginning of the end for free enterprise and market based business in the healthcare market place and is the road to single payer socialism if the un Constitutional law passed only by the Democrats is not stopped. Right on schedule, 21 months and change left to accomplish it if the Republicans who now control 2/3rds of the government do not do what MUST be done.

    And if they do not stop it we can all assume that the powers that be in the Republican party were complicit.

  • Cotour

    And just like the timely and opportune announcement about “lone wolf” Jihadi’s being discovered in America just before the vote on the DHS funding bill which just happens to include the presidents un Constitutional illegal alien executive order this media news piece is strategically let out on the catastrophic results that will occur (and the administration will guarantee it) if Obamacare is mortally wounded in coming weeks in the Supreme Court.

    http://www.politico.com/story/2015/03/supreme-court-obamacare-white-house-115631.html?hp=rc2_4

    They are playing their advantage to the hilt.

  • Jwing

    It’s all about the “crowding out” of the free market system thereby allowing monopolistic government entites to overregulate all profist out of privately owned, independently operated business leaving only “fair minded” government agencies with the politically correct democrat voting bureaucrats to rule over nationalized industries.

  • ted

    Are they really losing money or is this an accounting gimmick like GE used to avoid paying taxes.

  • Jwing

    Are they losing money??…just ask the typical family practice doctor if he can cover his/her overhead based on the medicaid reimbursment schedule.

    The big insurance companies like Blue Cross blue Shield et al are too big to fail and they have been in on this Obamacare scam as well. They willingly accept Obamacare regulations as it means more business due to mandated policy holders forced to buy their “private” healthcare insurance policies through exchanges. Obamacare guarantees these big insuance companies captive customers with no downside loss because they’re too big to fail.

  • Max

    Here Here, I agree.

  • Darwin Teague

    0bama gave the insurance companies $3 billion to cover their losses. Congress gave him no authority to do so, he just did it.

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