Tag: healthcare

Not good: The Labor Department announced today that the U.S. economy only added 69 thousand jobs in May, the fewest in a year.

10:39 am

Not good: The Labor Department announced today that the U.S. economy only added 69,000 jobs in May, the fewest in a year.

The unemployment rate went up slightly as well, Labor also adjusted downward the number of jobs created in the past two months to terribly comparable numbers.

While no president is ever entirely responsible for the state of the economy, Barack Obama’s policies have certainly done significant harm. High regulation, Obamacare, and a clear hostility to private enterprise in all fields except space exploration has helped produce what appears to be the longest period with a floundering economy in my lifetime.

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According to one professor, the government should require people to exercise in order to control their weight.

1:37 pm

Modern intellectualism: At a Harvard conference, a scientist has proposed that the government should require people to exercise in order to control their weight.

At a “Harvard Thinks Big” confab earlier this year, evolutionary biologist Daniel Lieberman offered his own bright idea for tackling the nation’s obesity epidemic. Merely medicating it won’t do, he said, and education is well-meaning but ineffective. His answer? “Coercion. … We should start telling corporations what to do.” But not just corporations. He also advocated – “to hearty applause,” the Harvard Gazette noted – “requiring people to exercise.” [emphasis mine]

I emphasis the applause to illustrate that this tyrannical attitude is not unusual in academic circles. The modern elite community is very arrogant, and believes it has the right to tell everyone else what to do.

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Forty-three Catholic institutions today filed suit over the Obamacare mandate requiring them to pay for contraceptives.

9:12 am

We’ve only just begun: Forty-three Catholic institutions today filed suit over the Obamacare mandate requiring them to pay for contraceptives.

As stated in the complaint filed by the University of Notre Dame:

This lawsuit is about one of America’s most cherished freedoms: the freedom to practice one’s religion without government interference. It is not about whether people have a right to abortion-inducing drugs, sterilization, and contraception. Those services are, and will continue to be, freely available in the United States, and nothing prevents the Government itself from making them more widely available. But the right to such services does not authorize the Government to force the University of Notre Dame (“Notre Dame”) to violate its own conscience by making it provide, pay for, and/or facilitate those services to others, contrary to its sincerely held religious beliefs.

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Muslims are exempt from Obamacare’s insurance mandate.

8:30 am

Finding out what’s in it: Muslims are exempt from Obamacare’s insurance mandate.

ObamaCare uses the Social Security language of the Internal Revenue Code to determine who is eligible for “religious conscience” objection to the insurance mandate. Specifically, the law provides exemptions for adherents of “recognized religious sects” that are “conscientiously opposed” to accepting benefits from any insurance, public or private.

As a consequence of this provision, Muslims may claim a religious exemption that is denied Christians and Jews. Since Islam believes insurance is haraam (forbidden) and likens insurance to gambling, the religion is excluded from requirements, mandates, or penalties set forth in the bill. Others who fall into this category are the Amish, American Indians, and Christian Scientists. Although the U.S. Constitution grants all Americans equal protection of the law, some Americans are more equal than others.

Not only must this catastrophe of a law be repealed, we voters have got to remove as many as possible of the incompetent elected officials who wrote and voted for it.

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“a train wreck for the Obama administration.”

9:59 am

“A train wreck for the Obama administration.”

Trying to determine what the Supreme Court will rule on any issue by analyzing the questions they ask beforehand has generally been a poor predictor of their final decision. Sadly, we really won’t know what the Supreme Court will do until they do it.

Moreover, from my perspective it would be far better for Congress to repeal the law rather than have the court rule it unconstitutional. In the former it will be done by legislative action, backed by the voters. In the latter it would be the decision of nine unelected individuals, essentially expressing their personal opinions. In a true democracy the former is definitely preferred.

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The four best legal arguments against Obamacare.

5:10 pm

The four best legal arguments against Obamacare.

The fourth is probably the most devastating to Obamacare. No contract can be enforced if you are forced to sign it.

American contract law rests on the principle of mutual assent. If I hold a gun to your head and force you to sign a contract, no court of law will honor that document since I coerced you into signing it. Mutual assent must be present in order for a contract to be valid and binding.

Once again, we are skirting around that forgotten word called freedom. Obamacare has nothing to do with freedom. It requires participation, something that is fundamentally hostile to this country’s culture and law.

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The reckoning

8:57 pm

The reckoning.

Today, it’s the Catholic Church whose free-exercise powers are under assault from this cascade of diktats sanctioned by — indeed required by — Obamacare. Tomorrow it will be the turn of other institutions of civil society that dare stand between unfettered state and atomized citizen.

Rarely has one law so exemplified the worst of the Leviathan state — grotesque cost, questionable constitutionality and arbitrary bureaucratic coerciveness. Little wonder the president barely mentioned it in his latest State of the Union address. He wants to be reelected. He’d rather talk about other things.

Remember, the power of the state is not always wielded by those you agree with. From the right or the left, fear that power, because it will come after you both when it finally has the ability to do so.

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A business in Missouri has become the first secular and private company to bring a lawsuit challenging the Obama administration’s contraception mandate.

8:42 am

Bring it on! A business in Missouri has become the first secular and private company to bring a lawsuit challenging the Obama administration’s contraception mandate.

Most of the discussion about the Obama administration’s mandate has revolved around whether specific religious organizations, such as the Catholic Church, should be exempted from it. To me, that misses the point. In a free society, anyone who objects to this mandate on the basis of personal belief should have the freedom to ignore it. Or to put it another way, the government has no right to order free citizens to buy contraceptives for others.

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The three big network nightly news shows all failed to mention the Congressional Budget Office report that says the cost of Obamacare will be twice what was predicted, and that millions will lose their healthplans because of it.

12:00 pm

News you can’t use: All three network nightly news shows last night failed to mention the Congressional Budget Office report that says the cost of Obamacare will be twice what was predicted, and that millions will lose their health plans because of it.

This is a good example of why I’ve said for years that if you depend on television for your news, you are not only uninformed, you are misinformed.

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ObamaCare: If Possible, The News Is Getting Worse

10:28 pm

“Obamacare: If possible, the news Is getting worse.”

Here’s a new little tidbit:

When the House of Representatives votes next week on repealing Obamacare’s unaccountable, unelected IPAB board, at least some Democrats are likely to support repeal. The IPAB repeal bill, sponsored by Rep. Phil Roe (R-TN), received bi-partisan support as it made its way through House committees, showing that Democrats are equally worried about the power of the board to usurp the job of the people’s elected representatives.

Maybe these idiotic Democrats should have read the bill before they passed it. That they obviously didn’t is further proof that they should be fired.

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New numbers released today from the Congressional Budget Office estimate that the cost of Obamacare over the next decade will be $1.76 trillion, not $940 billion as predicted by the Democrats who passed it.

3:20 pm

Finding out what’s in it: New numbers released today from the Congressional Budget Office estimate that the cost of Obamacare over the next decade will be $1.76 trillion, not $940 billion as predicted by the Democrats who passed it.

The only word I can think of that aptly describes the people who pushed this law on us is incompetence. That any rational person would consider voting for these people again boggles the mind.

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The U.S. Conference of Catholic bishops is issuing a flyer to be distributed at Masses over the March 3-4 weekend that asks their congregation to voice their opposition to the Obama administration’s contraceptive mandate.

4:20 pm

We’ve only just begun: The U.S. Conference of Catholic bishops is issuing a flyer to be distributed at Masses over the March 3-4 weekend that asks congregations to voice their opposition to the Obama administration’s contraceptive mandate.

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Because of Obamacare, child-only health plans have been discontinued nationwide.

10:25 pm

Repeal it: Because of Obamacare, insurance companies nationwide have stopped offering child-only health plans.

Jared Wolfe, executive director of the Texas Association of Health Plans, said it is not because insurers do not want to cover children. The federal health care overhaul [Obamacare], and in particular the pre-existing condition language, has been interpreted to mean that insurers must write a policy for any child who applies, Mr. Wolfe said. That effectively ensures that only sick children will apply for benefits, he said — an unworkable financial scenario for insurance companies.

This happened in New York state back in the 1990s. The state legislature decided to help everyone by mandating that no insurance company could deny insurance to anyone, no matter how sick they were. The result: there was no point buying insurance until you were sick, which meant there was no way the insurance companies could make any profit at all. Instantly the insurance field shrunk, with many companies (including my own) abandoning the state.

But then, who cares? We live in amazing times, when a President can simply order — on his personal authority and without any basis in law — that insurance companies must provide free contraceptives, without anyone having to pay for their manufacture. Who knew what things were possible before Obama was President?

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Senate Democrats reject religious exemption in Obamacare.

2:08 pm

Telling us who they really are: The Democrats in the Senate today rejected any religious exemption to anyone who does not wish to pay for someone else’s contraceptives or abortion drugs.

Personally, I have no problem with anyone who wants to use contraceptives or abortion drugs. What I and all free-thinking individuals have a problem with is the idea of the government forcing someone to pay for this, against their religious beliefs.

I guarantee that if this Obamacare requirement does not fall, people will end up choosing jail to honor their personal conscience.

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