Tag: policy

Yup, this sums it up nicely.

9:07 am

Yup, this sums it up nicely.

House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan has now accomplished the astonishing task of pushing House Republicans substantially to the left of the Senate GOP. His budget deal, announced Tuesday night, was achieved by shutting conservative Senate Republicans out of negotiations, by resorting to the old trick of spending now while claiming savings later, by ignoring a symbolically important budgetary red line, and by treating as Democratic “concessions” things to which even Democratic budgeteers already had agreed.

The chess equivalent of Ryan’s deal would be trading a castle for a mere pawn. No wonder conservatives are feeling rooked.

The absurdity of this deal is highlighted especially by the ongoing disaster of Obamacare. The Republicans have a very strong negotiating hand right now. They could have actually demanded a repeal of Obamacare in budget talks and thus pushed the Democrats into a corner for which there really is no escape. What would the Democrats do, shut the government down again so that more people could lose their health insurance?

Instead, Ryan behaved as if the Democrats have a Royal Flush and he only had a pair of twos. The stupid party strikes again!

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Trying to hide the disaster that is Obamacare.

8:56 am

Trying to hide the disaster that is Obamacare.

Most of Washington seems to have bought the White House claim that the 36 federal exchanges are finally working, and glory, glory, hallelujah. But if that’s really true, then what explains the ongoing secrecy and evasion?

On Wednesday the Health and Human Services Department continued its Victorian-era strip tease and allowed a glimpse into the Affordable Care Act’s “enrollment” for November. Out of respect for a free press, reporters ought to boycott these releases because they’re so selective that they reveal little about real enrollment.

Then there’s this:

In other nondisclosure news, the House Oversight Committee turned up letters Wednesday showing that [the Obama administration] ordered the private contractors partly responsible for the Healthcare.gov fiasco not to cooperate with congressional investigations or hand over documents.

Meanwhile, Obamacare has so far resulted in more than 4 million people having lost their health insurance, a number that includes those whom the Obama administration claim have at least selected an Obamacare plan.

As the writer above said, glory, glory, hallelujah!

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The Ryan budget deal includes a provision that limits the ability of the Senate minority to block tax increases.

10:49 pm

The stupid party: The Ryan budget deal includes a provision that limits the ability of the Senate minority to block tax increases.

The bill includes language from the Senate Democrats’ budget that voids senators’ ability to raise a budget “point of order” against replacing the sequester cuts with tax increases. The process is quite complicated, but in practice it grants Harry Reid the authority to send tax increases to the House with a bare majority, rather than the 60-vote threshold that would be required under a point of order.

In other words, another example of a Republican getting hosed in negotiations.

Though I have read several conservative reports about this deal that outline some of its positive benefits, on the whole it appears to be another defeat for the right.

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This detailed look at the budget deal suggests it isn’t as much of a surrender as first implied.

12:23 pm

This detailed look at the budget deal suggests it isn’t as much of a surrender as first implied.

I have to admit this analysis leaves me more hopeful, especially with this point:

That the Democrats would accept a deal like this is a pretty striking indication of how the Republican House has changed the conversation on the spending front since 2010. Think of it this way: In their first budget after re-taking the majority—the FY 2012 Ryan budget, passed in 2011—the House Republicans wanted discretionary spending to be $1.039 trillion in 2014 and $1.047 trillion in 2015. These budgets were of course described by the Democrats and the political press (but I repeat myself) as some reversion to humanity’s barbaric past. Yet this proposed deal with the Democrats would put discretionary spending at $1.012 trillion in 2014 and $1.014 trillion in 2015—in both cases below that first House Republican budget.

Check out the graph at the link. It does illustrate bluntly that the Republicans are beginning to force the budget curve downward, if slowly. It also suggests that should they win big majorities in both Houses of Congress next November they will be posed to finally push for some real reductions in the size of the federal government, as they will have the votes in Congress and will be doing it with the strong endorsement of the voters.

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The Republican leadership expresses contempt for any opposition to its budget deal that abandons the cuts imposed by sequestration

11:11 am

The Republican leadership expresses contempt for any opposition to its budget deal that abandons the cuts imposed by sequestration.

The Republican leadership are fools. If anything, this is the moment to push harder, to not only demand that the sequestration cuts stay in place, but to demand a repeal of Obamacare.

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After two months, Obamacare has only enrolled less than 400,000 people, even as it has caused millions to lose their health insurance policies.

9:31 am

Fail! After two months, Obamacare has only enrolled less than 400,000 people, even as it has caused millions to lose their health insurance policies.

To get even these numbers the Obama administration is defining “enroll” as someone who went through the process of picking a plan, but hasn’t yet signed on and actually enrolled in it.

Though these low numbers are partly because of the inability of the Obamacare webpage to function, the real reason is sticker shock. Obamacare has raised the cost of health insurance so much that people simply can’t afford it.

Update: It appears that only 5 to 20% of these so-called enrollees have actually purchased Obamacare insurance.

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The IRS is now harassing the insurance broker who has helped people losing their insurance under Obamacare.

9:39 am

Working for the Democratic Party: The IRS is now harassing the insurance broker who has helped people losing their insurance under Obamacare.

The man received a visit from a Treasury Department Inspector General who demanded personal information about the cancer patient the broker was helping. When this information was refused, the official instructed the broker

to resolve the issue with the IRS immediately, and that if he did not, “you may be visited again by other IRS representatives in your home and we do reserve the right to garnish your wages and lien your assets.”

How nice. Obey the orders of the Obama administration or they will use the IRS to destroy you.

Note also that this harassment is going on right now, six months after the scandal was revealed and Obama claimed he was outraged by it and would put a stop to it. He lied. As he revealed recently in his interview on MSNBC, he sees nothing wrong with this harassment.

I just realized that my post above left out one important detail: The cancer patient had appeared on Fox to describe how he had lost his health insurance because of Obamacare. Almost immediately thereafter both he and his broker received audit notices from the IRS.

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No, you can’t keep your medicines either under Obamacare.

9:42 am

No, you can’t keep your medicines either under Obamacare.

The article is long and detailed. It seems a lot of expensive but life-saving drugs might be excluded from many plans because of cost. Worse,

The biggest problem in all of this is that consumers will have a very hard time figuring out where they stand. In many cases, the health plans being offered in the Obamacare exchanges don’t make information about their drug formularies readily available. In some cases, it doesn’t seem to be published anywhere.

The government was supposed to mandate that plans made this information easily accessible. But that never happened.

In fact, state and federal regulators must have approved the health plans without reviewing final drug formularies. Many plans are also not publishing information about their networks of doctors, or when they do; the information is unreliable (listing, for example, doctors who argue that they aren’t part of the plans).

Aren’t you glad those brave Democrats and President Obama shut the government down in October to prevent those evil Republicans from making any changes to Obamacare?

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The latest IRS power grab.

12:38 am

The latest IRS power grab.

Why is the IRS regulating political activity at all?

The answer is that many Democratic politicians and progressive activists think new rules limiting political speech by nonprofits will benefit Democrats politically. Stymied by judicial decisions restricting direct government regulation of political speech, and by a Federal Election Commission whose bipartisan makeup prevents Democratic commissioners from forcing through partisan rules on a party-line vote, these politicians and activists have decided to dragoon the IRS into doing their work.

More precise terms to describe this kind of behavior are fascists and jack-booted thugs.

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Obamacare insurance plans are routinely excluding the world’s top hospitals.

8:16 pm

Finding out what’s not in it: Obamacare insurance plans are routinely excluding the world’s top hospitals.

Amid a drive by insurers to limit costs, the majority of insurance plans being sold on the new healthcare exchanges in New York, Texas, and California, for example, will not offer patients’ access to Memorial Sloan Kettering in Manhattan or MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, two top cancer centres, or Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, one of the top research and teaching hospitals in the country.

You pay more for the plan, pay higher co-pays and deductibles, and for these higher expenses you get fewer benefits and excess to fewer good doctors. Why is anyone complaining? Aren’t we all glad the Democrats and Obama are standing firm to defend this law?

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Obamacare, where the liberal dream crashes and burns.

4:44 pm

Obamacare, where the liberal dream crashes and burns.

The botched website was an unforced catastrophe. But that’s not the real problem with Obamacare. The real problem, as dozens of thoughtful commentators have concluded, is the law itself. Obamacare is a massive policy experiment that seeks to remake one-sixth of the U.S. economy – a body that’s so fantastically complex, with so many players and so many moving parts, that nobody can possibly understand how they all interact. Tweak one part, and other parts will behave in unpredictable ways. Pull on a thread and half the sweater may unravel. Even Max Baucus, the Democratic Senate finance chairman, has warned that implementing a law so complicated could be a “train wreck.”

Generally, the way leftists and liberals have succeeded in gaining power is to work incrementally, in very small steps. This way, the link between their actions and the problems those actions have caused is easily hidden. They can then point to these new problems and demand another small incremental increase in their control and power in order to solve those problems, which in turn causes new problems that they can then use to justify another incremental step. And so forth.

Obamacare, however, broke this pattern. Rather than being incremental, it tried to do it all in one big massive attack. The result is that the policy is very clearly the cause of the disaster, the left can’t hide it, and their entire agenda for the past century now stands exposed as the fraud it is. The only way I can see them surviving this disaster is to try to seize power illegally, another typical leftwing technique that they use often when reality starts to go against them.

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Without permission California’s Obamacare exchange distributed the contact information of tens of thousands of people who had visited their website.

8:31 am

O joy. Without permission California’s Obamacare exchange distributed the contact information of tens of thousands of people who had visited their website.

I love this quote from the guy in charge:

Peter Lee, executive director of Covered California, acknowledged that these consumers did not ask to be contacted by the state or its certified insurance agents. But he said the outreach program still complies with privacy laws and it was reviewed by the exchange’s legal counsel. “I can imagine some people may be upset,” Lee said in an interview Friday. “But I can see a lot of people will be comforted and relieved at getting the help they need to navigate a confusing process.”

To be so cavalier about handing out people’s contact information without permission suggests that they are likely to be as cavalier about poking into people’s confidential medical information without permission.

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Seven out of ten doctors in California are refusing to participate in Obamacare.

2:02 pm

O joy: Seven out of ten doctors in California are refusing to participate in Obamacare.

It isn’t surprising the doctors are rebelling. California refuses to pay them realistic fees. The factoid, however, that is really startling from this article is this:

[The doctors] also pointing out that Covered California’s website lists many doctors as participants when they aren’t. “Some physicians have been put in the network and they were included basically without their permission,” Lisa Folberg said. She is a CMA’s vice president of medical and regulatory Policy. “They may be listed as actually participating, but not of their own volition,” said Donald Waters, executive director of the Alameda-Contra Costa Medical Association. [emphasis mine]

Par for the course. Everything about Obamacare has been fraud and deception. This just adds another layer to that dishonesty.

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One person describes the experience she and her mother had under Obamacare.

10:15 am

One person describes the experience she and her mother had under Obamacare.

Beside the fact that the doctor hardly looked at them (consumed as he was entering data on his laptop as required by the law), the mother was deemed “too old [for an MRI] and ObamaCare will not approve payment” and their prescriptions were not ready at the pharmacy at the time promised. Her conclusion:

ObamaCare is not just very expensive insurance that most of us cannot and will not afford without drastic changes in lifestyle. It delivers lousy service, uncaring and poorly paid doctors, inadequate reimbursement, longer wait times, and selective rationing.

She also notes Obamacare’s requirement that all medical records be digital results in a complete loss of privacy.

As all these computers communicate with each other through the various electronic portals, do not expect any medical privacy or cyber security of any kind. Your entire life’s history, health, meds, warts, skin lesions, bunions, surgeries, hospitalizations, Social Security numbers, income, addresses, smoking history, salt intake, soda drinking and fat-eating habits, sexual preferences, gun ownership, and biometric data are up for grabs for all to see and use. All your private medical history and information will be sent to a clearing house with or without your permission in January 2014.

Aren’t you glad the Democratic Party and Obama insisted on shutting down the government in October to prevent any changes to this law?

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Obama tells Chris Matthews what he really thinks of the IRS harassment of conservatives.

9:07 am

Obama tells Chris Matthews what he really thinks of the IRS harassment of conservatives.

[Y]ou’ve got an office in Cincinnati, in the IRS office that — I think, for bureaucratic reasons, is trying to streamline what is a difficult law to interpret about whether a nonprofit is actually a political organization deserves a tax exempt agency. And they’ve got a list, and suddenly everybody’s outraged.

I seem to remember Obama himself expressing outrage to the press soon after the scandal broke and promising an investigation. Obviously, he lied about his outrage. He also lied about the investigation, since it is now more than six months later and the so-called investigation has yet to contact any of the victims of the IRS harassment.

Gee, he seems to lie a lot, doesn’t he? I also wonder if he has any outrage over the IRS’s auditing of that cancer patient and his insurance agent soon after the patient appeared on Fox criticizing Obamacare. I suspect not.

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Here’s another report on the planetary sciences/NASA dispute this week over funding and grant scheduling.

11:08 pm

Here’s another report on the planetary sciences/NASA dispute this week over funding and grant scheduling.

From this report it appears that the complaints by the planetary science community might have been a bit overstated. It doesn’t appear that NASA is cutting the planetary sciences grant program in any significant way.

I suspect that the reason the planetary scientists are so touchy is because they do not trust the Obama administration, based on its previous efforts to eliminate the planetary program entirely. (It is also possible that they are right.)

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A new poll shows Democrats as out-of-touch extremists.

9:50 am

A new poll shows Democrats as out-of-touch extremists. Hat tip to Doug Ross.

The public overwhelmingly believes the country is headed in the wrong direction, that current economic policies aren’t working, that President Obama is doing a bad job, that government should be smaller and that ObamaCare should be repealed. But not Democrats.

On issue after issue, in fact, Democrats are the outliers by wide margins, according to an analysis of the December IBD/TIPP survey. They are, by and large, Pollyanna-ish about the economy, they can see no evil when it comes to Obama or ObamaCare, and they are extremists when it comes to the size and role of the federal government.

This close-mindedness is increasingly disturbing. How can we fix our problems if one significant portion of the population refuses to consider that they might be wrong?

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Let the space price war begin.

9:20 am

Let the space price war begin.

Two money quotes:

This latest launch is bad news for Russia, Europe, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin. SES paid $55 million to SpaceX for the launch; rivals typically charge $100 million to $200 million. SpaceX has a backlog of about $4 billion worth of launches, many for commercial customers that it can now begin to serve.

and this:

We’ll really get a sense of SpaceX’s abilities over the next year. The company plans to launch rockets at a much more ferocious clip, to refine their reusability and to prepare for sending humans to the International Space Station. You can also expect to see SpaceX tormented by politicians with ties to existing launch contractors and military suppliers. May we live in interesting times.

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A new poll suggests that the young are finally abandoning Obama and the Democratic Party.

9:17 am

A new poll suggests that the young are finally abandoning Obama and the Democratic Party.

They aren’t rushing to the Republicans very much either, but this detail is significant:

According to the poll, 57 percent of millennials disapprove of Obamacare, with 40 percent saying it will worsen their quality of care and a majority believing it will drive up costs. Only 18 percent say Obamacare will improve their care. Among 18-to-29-year-olds currently without health insurance, less than one-third say they’re likely to enroll in the Obamacare exchanges.

In other words, they are finally beginning to pay attention, and have discovered that their blind faith in Democrats was a big mistake. They might not like Republicans, but if Republicans offer to kill Obamacare the young will likely favor Republicans in the coming elections.

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In a 376-5 bi-partisan vote, the House has approved a one year extension to the liability exemption of the 2004 Space Amendments Act.

9:27 am

In a 376-5 bi-partisan vote, the House has approved a one year extension to the liability exemption of the 2004 Space Amendments Act.

Though this is helpful, it still leaves intact the regulations imposed by that 2004 law, all of which make difficult the future of space tourism. That this extension was passed in conjunction with an effort by Congress to overhaul the law is encouraging.

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According to one online hacker/security expert, no security was ever built into the Obamacare website.

8:04 pm

O joy: According to one online hacker/security expert, no security was ever built into the Obamacare website.

The issue is not so much that the website is a dangerous place to enter personal information (bad as that is) but that no one should be surprised by any of this. Allowing the equivalent of the Motor Vehicle Administration to run the whole health insurance industry was guaranteed to produce these problems, as conservatives repeatedly noted in 2010.

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A Canadian disabled woman was denied entry to the United States after a customs agent cited her supposedly private medical details.

9:20 am

Does this make you feel safer? A Canadian disabled woman was denied entry to the United States after a customs agent cited her supposedly private medical details.

“I was turned away, I was told, because I had a hospitalization in the summer of 2012 for clinical depression,’’ said Richardson, who is a paraplegic and set up her cruise in collaboration with a March of Dimes group of about 12 others. The Weston woman was told by the U.S. agent she would have to get “medical clearance’’ and be examined by one of only three doctors in Toronto whose assessments are accepted by Homeland Security. She was given their names and told a call to her psychiatrist “would not suffice.’’

At the time, Richardson said, she was so shocked and devastated by what was going on, she wasn’t thinking about how U.S. authorities could access her supposedly private medical information.

If Homeland Security can get access to a Canadian woman’s confidential medical records, how easy do you think it is for them to get access to your Obamacare records?

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