Duplicity, Lies and the Progressive Way

O

OMG where do I start?

Ok, let's just start at the beginning.

  The liberal ideology is based on the philosophy that the government can take care of people.

  Liberals think that the government is good at solving big problems.  

They believe that so completely that they are OK with lying to get their policies passed. 

 They truly do believe that people are too stupid to take care of themselves, the government can do it better.  Somehow, progressive liberals have been able to call this ideology "helping people."

And, they have gotten away with it.

Conservatives, on the other had, believe in personal responsibility and freedom. 

 Conservatives believe that the government isn't very good at anything. 

 The government doesn't create anything, it just takes from some and gives to others. 

 Conservatives believe that people can take care of themselves better than the government can. 

 Liberals have successfully called this ideology selfish, stupid and racist.

We all know that Obama lied all over the country to get Obamacare passed.  Now, we all know that the architect of Obamacare went all over the place calling Americans "stupid" and laughing about getting the law passed.

But, do they hang their heads in shame and realize that the jig is up?  Nope.

Obama is doubling down on his liberal progressive agenda

.  He is going to shove amnesty down our throats, make sure that we are stuck with Obamacare and kill the Keystone Pipeline.

Interestingly, he has been able to stonewall on legislation that he doesn't like for his entire presidency and successfully blame it all on George Bush or Republicans.

Legislation for the Keystone Pipeline is going to a vote on the senate floor.  The house passed legislation that would open the pipeline, but it has been sitting on Harry Reid's desk.

Why is it being brought up now?  To save Mary Landrieu's senate seat in Louisiana and for no

Read more at http://eaglerising.com/11565/duplicity-lies-liberal-way/#r06gDScIRy2gMay1.99

Is This the End Game for Liberal Racism? Obama He proposes to legalize 5 million illegal immigrants so they can compete for jobs in the formal economy -- against blacks. That's real racism.

If anyone symbolizes the American Dream, it is Condoleezza Rice. Child of a teacher and a preacher in the Jim Crow South, she rose to become Provost at Stanford, and then National Security Advisor and Secretary of State in the Bush Administration.

So when she says that “Anybody who isn't in favor of school choice, anybody who isn't in favor of educational reform, anybody who defends the status quo in the educational system, that's racist to me” she connects with a racist-sexist-homophobe bigot like me.

I'll tell you what I think about school choice. It's a start.

But Condi Rice starts you thinking. What other kinds of racism are there in America today?

Oh, but first “check your shirt,” otherwise the Mean Girls at The Atlantic might decide to ostracize you – eeuw, like, whatever – and make it all about your clothes, and not about the liberal racism that's tearing this country apart. “Check your privilege” is so yesterday.

Hey, remember the Mae West line: “Is that a comet in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?”

Obviously, the most racist thing in America today is the Racist Reverends, Sharpton, Jackson and Wright and their race hustling, shamefully backed up by Holder and Obama. This naked appeal to race descended to a new low in the Obama administration with the nationalization of the Trayvon and Ferguson killings. That's real racism.

Then there's the little question of racial disparity in the single-parent stakes. Little black children are far more likely than white children to be deprived of the basic human right of their married mother living with their married biological father. That's racism.

Then there's the murder statistics. Blacks are much more likely to get murdered by a black person that a white person. There's racism again.

Then there is unemployment. Blacks are about twice as likely to be unemployed as a white person. What does President Obama do? He proposes to legalize 5 million illegal immigrants so they can compete for jobs in the formal economy -- against blacks. That's real racism.

Derek Huneter has a piece warning blacks that Democrats are falling out of love with them because Hispanics look to become a bigger voting bloc in the future. But I wonder. The Pew Poll has numbers showing that very few Hispanics can identify a Hispanic leader. That must be worrying Democrats because you can't do proper race politics without race leaders. I suppose that's why the Democrats are promoting the Castro Brothers, Julian and Joaquin, in Texas. A telling point is that “immigration reform” is not a Hispanic grassroots movement at all but pure elite foundation astroturf.

The thing is, race politics is what Democrats do, just as Grubering is what elite liberal academics do. As the black race thing starts to lose its glamor and its traction, it's natural that Democrats would try the same thing with Hispanics; you go with what you know. There are even a few conservatives out there convinced that all the division by race is going to end up in a race war, unless we do something.

But I wonder. I've been on a mommy trip back east with Lady Marjorie recently, wandering in and out of banks and FedEx Kinko offices. The first thing that strikes you is the kaleidoscope of color in today's branded big-corporation offices and stores. The second thing that strikes you is that somebody has trained up all the minority twenty- and thirty-somethings to a customer service fare-thee-well.

If I were a licensed race baiter instead of merely an autodidact racist-sexist-homophobe I would despair at the cultural threat from corporate America. Every day in every way corporations are converting your tired and your poor into middle-class workers glad to serve the stranger, make the customer king, act friendly with everyone. No wonder lefties hate corporations; they are teaching people how to break out of liberal tribalism and join the global middle class.

There's no virtue in what the corporations are doing; it is just the logic of capitalism. You want a profit? You extend trust to everyone that can be trusted, because that is how mass production for the masses works. If you don't grab market share by figuring out how to expand your market, someone else will expand into your market.

If the pre-election period was a non-stop road show of Obama administration follies, the post-election period has descended into farce. It's a packed program of Gruber Confessions, the mean girls clique at The Atlantic Young Ladies Academy turning science class into snippy talk about clothes, and, next up, no indictment in Ferguson.

It seems that liberals are losing control of the narrative; maybe liberal racism is getting lost in all the “transnationalism... tri-coastal revolution and radical enlightenment” of the fashionable academy.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2014/11/is_this_the_end_game_for_liberal_racism.html#ixzz3JSLptWh1
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Progressive Are Already Trying to Re-Write the History of the Obama Presidency

Obama presidency is a failed presidency. He has presided over one of the slowest economic recoveries in history. His foreign policy has been a disaster. ObamaCare is a mess. And it’s hard to lay the blame off on anyone else. The president didn’t make Republicans part of any of his decisions and most of the time he ignored congressional Democrats as well.

To make matters worse, Barack Obama is the most polarizing president we have had in the past 60 years. What makes that so strange is that we were all promised something completely different.

Charles Blow, writing in The New York Times said it best:

"The president came to Washington thinking he could change Washington, make it better, unite it and the nation."

On the campaign trail he [Obama} promised to:

"… turn the page on the ugly partisanship in Washington, so we can bring Democrats and Republicans together to pass an agenda that works for the American people."

In his first inaugural address, he [Obama] said:

"On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord. On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics."

So what happened? Blow’s column is an early entry into the liberal re-writing of the history of the Obama administration. He wants to blame everything on Republicans. But that doesn’t wash. In his last two years in office, Bill Clinton and a Republican congress worked together admirably – giving us welfare reform, a capital gains tax cut and a balanced budget. There’s nothing in the Republican DNA to keep that from happening again.

So what’s the real reason for the failed presidency of Barrack Obama? I don’t know. Maybe he was never serious about bringing everyone together. Maybe he doesn’t know how. Maybe he is a talker, not a doer. (See Megan McArdle: Does Obama Even Know How to Negotiate?)

Take his signature piece of legislation: ObamaCare. As I wrote during the 2008 election, John McCain was the real radical on health reform.. McCain’s plan called for giving every single citizen the same tax subsidy for health insurance. Such a plan is more progressive than the Obama health plan. It’s not only fair, it would have involved more redistribution of income than Obama was calling for. (The legislative version of the McCain plan was the Coburn/Burr/Ryan/Nunes bill.)

So if McCain’s health plan was more liberal (in a sense) than Obama’s, bringing the two parties together should have been easy. Furthermore, prior to becoming President Obama’s economic adviser, Jason Furman endorsed a health reform that looked very much like the John McCain proposal. And Ezekiel Emanuel, the White House doctor who helped fashion ObamaCare, actually urged the president to copy the McCain approach.

Had Barack Obama endorsed John McCain’s health plan, it would have sailed through Congress with huge bi-partisan support. At a very minimum, the president could have asked John McCain and Max Baucus (the Democrat chairman of Senate Finance Committee) to chair a task force to write a reform plan. After all, no major reform of the health care system is going to succeed without buy-in from both parties.

Yet none of this was to be. Ultimately, the political advisors, led by David Axelrod, prevailed. And to satisfy partisan political motives, the president signed on to a piece of legislation that got not a single Republican vote in Congress.

Health care is not the only area where bipartisan solutions should have been easy. On foreign policy, Republicans are more inclined to support the president’s military actions abroad than Democrats. Yet here is another missed opportunity.

The failure to unite the country doesn’t end with the president’s activities in Washington. He has actively participated in efforts to create racial division throughout the land.

Democrats have been using fear and race-polarizing agitation to drive minority voters to the polls for quite some time. But as I wrote at Town Hall the other day, we have never before had a president and a First Lady who participated in spearheading the race baiting efforts.

The Obama presidency has been a huge disappointment. And that’s an understatement.

http://townhall.com/columnists/johncgoodman/2014/11/15/liberals-are-already-trying-to-rewrite-the-history-of-the-obama-presidency-n1918890/page/full

Progressivism's Last Call

The 2014 midterms were more than an average election. They were more than simply a rejection of Obama and his schemes, more than a flogging for the Democrats, more than a simple party shift like 1994. Put aside control of both Senate and House, a near sweep of governorships, and a vastly larger GOP footprint in the statehouses. This year’s midterms marked the third -- and perhaps final -- rejection of the progressive program in the past century

The chief selling point of progressivism, in its various guises -- liberalism, socialism, communism -- has always been its purported “inevitability.” Progressivism was “scientific,” “rationalist,” the sole suitable ideology to lead the fumbling masses into the bright utopian future. Only shambling Morlocks -- Christians, conservatives, Southerners, Midwesterners -- could deny this obvious truth. Sensible, intelligent people -- the better people -- could only agree.
The slow collapse of the Marxist imperial states should have demonstrated clearly that progressivism, was neither scientific, nor rational, nor inevitable. It was a system based on deprivation and misery with a definite, and very short, half-life. An ideology operating in defiance of human nature, which has its own form of rationality and operates by its own rules despite any and all attempts to systemize it.

The most obnoxious thing about all this was the way that the conservative and traditional elites bought into the leftist paradigm. With no apparent faith in their principles, their country, or their fellow citizens, they consistently bowed to the leftist argument -- either choosing to turn their coats (as the Ayottes, the Rubios, and the Ryans have done in recent years), or pile up the survivalist gear and prepare for the Apocalypse. Recent evidence of this can be found in the meme that “47% (or 49%) of the population is now living off the government.” It followed that this massive number would permanently vote for whoever the progressive candidate might be in any given election, guaranteeing a progressive dictatorship in all but name. (The largest number of these people were actually receiving government assistance in low-cost college or mortgage loans.)

This response overlooked the fact that Americans have rejected progressivism at every opportunity. Three times they have been offered the progressive utopia. Three times they have pushed it away.

The first time was, of course, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. The New Deal’s almost pure record of failure has been overshadowed by WW II, to the extent that the postwar rejection of FDR’s nanny state has been lost. It was widely argued as the war wound down that as soon as victory came, the Great Depression would sweep back in, requiring even greater government intervention. Exactly the opposite occurred -- the U.S. underwent one of the greatest economic booms in human history, one that sustained itself almost unbroken for a quarter of a century, from 1946 to 1971. The United States not only recovered, but succeeded in dragging much of the rest of a war-ravaged world along with it. This process had little to do with government. One of the great postwar domestic crises involved a nationwide housing shortage. Almost no new housing had been built during the war. No doubt there were endless government programs to address the problem. But by the time they got their offices set up, the crisis was over. The boys who endured Okinawa and the Bulge (many of them trained in construction by the Army engineers and Navy SeaBees) did not let trivial obstacles slow them down in building places to live.

The second great progressive effort was the Great Society, an attempt by Lyndon B. Johnson to arrange the United States along the model of his Texas ranch. By the 60s, virtually all of America’s institutions -- government, the academy, media -- were sold completely on rationality and inevitability. The nation would be run by committees of experts, utilizing big machines called “computers” (well out of the reach of the average prole). There would be a place for everything with everything in its place. And all done for the good of the Common Man.  

LBJ’s brand of progressivism collapsed into abject failure due to the Vietnam War, the mass public revolt that goes under the name of “the 60s,” and a complete misunderstanding as to how an economy works. Deficit spending accompanied by finagling with the currency by both Johnson and Nixon resulted in the 1970s stagflation, a lost decade culminating in the disgrace of Jimmy Carter.

Rejection of socialism was completed with the election of that throwback Ronald Reagan, who cut down the progressive monolith as much as he could in two short terms and as a result remains the most beloved and admired president of the modern era.

Which brings us to attempt three -- the “Transformation,” I guess we’ll call it. The flaw here arose from the selection of a completely uneducated and possibly ineducable candidate to carry it out. Barack Obama checked all the boxes and touched all the bases during his career without, it seems, ever learning a single thing worth knowing. The tell with this man was the fact that he utterly lacks the humility that has marked men of wisdom since Confucius and Socrates. According to Obama, he was “a better speechwriter than his speechwriters,” a better economist, better banker, better planner, and so on down the line to poodle groomer, than anyone living. Obama committed the greatest crime against intelligence: he didn’t know what he didn’t know.
Paradoxically, this grotesque flaw served the country well. In his abject blindness, Obama raged ahead with “transformation” with no hesitation or sense of caution. People who actually knew things would have been more careful. Not Obama, who truly believed that he could operate the way the generalissimos did in his adopted country of Indonesia -- give his orders, flick the fly whisk, and move on. He knew nothing of history or the economic record -- or even that there was such a thing as a record. He had no Plan B’s or fallbacks in case anything went wrong -- what could possibly be the point? He was Obama -- what could go wrong?

As a result, progressivism received its first fully public test. The disastrous effects of the New Deal (such as the Second Crash that occurred in 1937 and which has been carefully excised from the history textbooks) were hidden by WW II. The Great Society was masked by the Vietnam War and the upheavals of the 60s. (Not to mention the cover later offered by Richard “we’re all Keynesians now” Nixon). Few 1980 voters saw the connection between the current doldrums and events that had occurred back in 1965.

But the Barackian Transformation unfolded on the public stage, under the full spotlight, overseen by one of the purest narcissists ever to practice politics on the North American continent. Every move was telegraphed, every effort underlined, every last syllable amplified, every gesture outlined in neon. And every last inch of it has collapsed.

As of 2014, 95 million people have left the workforce (most of them women). This constitutes a lost generation, embittered and yearning for better days. ObamaCare has not collapsed only because it has not yet been put into effect. (IPAB -- or whatever it’s called this week -- the death panel, remains unestablished, with no one named to it. Obama’s bureaucrats don’t dare to ramp it up). The national debt and deficit, already at levels beyond human comprehension, have been multiplied furiously over the past few years, to a point where they can never be repaid and will require other forms of action. (Forget “laying the debt on our grandchildren” -- it is to laugh, as they say in one of them foreign countries. Believe me, that debt will be inflated or devalued to zero long before it reaches the grandkids. We’re going to pay for every last nickel -- I kid you not.) Obama even figured out a way to assure that the financial industry would make no effort to support a recovery by treating them to a trillion and a half dollar handout, none of which was loaned out or put to work in industry, but safely invested, thus decoupling the stock market from the economy as a whole.

The disastrous nature of the “Transformation,” in economic terms alone, is beyond rational calculation. Which does not mean that its effects are invisible. A man out of work for six years may not grasp the process in detail, but he does know that he’s broke.

By 2014, the end result of progressivism, in the basic, bread and butter economic sense, was clear to all but the willfully blind. While the administration has made a number of attempts to distract attention through increasing racial animosities and the “War on Women,” none of this has worked. For the first time in a century, the trajectory of progressivism was clear and unmistakable. The progressive ideal has been stripped naked in the public square, its illusions ripped into tatters, its rhetoric flensed of meaning, its promises rendered null -- and all this inflicted by its own supporters and acolytes. The American people beheld, and recoiled at what they beheld. Last week it came up for the vote. The voters rejected it in toto.

The dream is over. The progressive spell is broken. The long witch’s dance of the left is ending through sheer exhaustion. The edifice of left-wing power has been rent in twain by the rock of the American republic.

This does not mean that leftism is dead and gone. Or that Obama will disappear in a blue flash. Or that we will wake up tomorrow to find the shadows receded to sit in peace beneath our vines and fig trees. No… plenty of battles lie ahead. The infection is deeply entrenched and will have to be cut out piece by piece. There will be retreats and mistakes and betrayals. We may see yet another attenuated adolescent in the White House, preaching the same dead slogans and demanding the same demented actions. There will still be leftists clogging the landscape as the 22^nd century dawns.

But the nightmare will not come to pass. The dream of the Founders will not be curtailed, the Republic will not be strangled. Because in 2014, the American people said, “No.”

Obama was the high tide mark for the progressive movement of the United States. They had a clear shot, and they blew it. They have failed in a way that they will not understand for years to come. Americans simply cannot be bought off.

What conservatives must do is rub it in -- underline it, hammer it, let no opportunity pass shout the death of progressivism. The GOP will attempt to soothe their “friends across the aisle.” The Northeast Corridor conservatives, our intellectuals in their blue blazers and bow ties, will wring their hands about how “unseemly” triumphalism is. Forget them. In the end, it was and will be the people of this country who set the agenda.
There’s a reason why three strikes means “out” in baseball -- the classic American game. Three is a magic number, the number of the Trinity, the number of good luck, but also the number of the last gasp of the drowning man, the sniper’s guaranteed kill on a lit match. Three is the number of hope for the decent, the innocent, and the good, of finality for the wicked, the useless, and the corrupt.

The left has had its three tries -- we will see that they don’t get a fourth.
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2014/11/progressivisms_last_call.html

Welcome to the Modern Progressive Art of Debate--A Political Storm in an Outhouse/

One of the most regrettable—and perhaps wholly inevitable elements of today’s life in the West is the wretched mission of liberals to eradicate any trace of intellectual disagreement with their convictions. In every conceivable arena, any non-conformist theories against progressive shibboleths—such as the current war over global warming—receive the most disrespectful and wholesale trashing.

The emotional tenor is sheer disgust and fury, while those in intellectual opposition are held in the same esteem as a brain-dead fetal piglet. This politicized environment utterly discards courtesy or politeness in its fury against dissent.

What is the source of this action? What is its most apparent goal? The goal is to silence all opposition, because the movement has an inability to engage in debate or dialogue. The source codex is Marxist cant and its political movements which have leached into every area of human endeavor, morphing into a thousand bastard children of failure.

The ultimate source of this opposition to traditional religion, classical liberalism (ie what today is termed Conservatism), and common sense, can be traced to ancient Gnosticism, according to Eric Voegelin. Cyril O’Regan, in Gnostic Apocalypse: Jacob Boehme’s Haunted Narrative, refers to this as the Gnostic Return to modernity.

The following essay traces this story and also gives examples of the hateful rhetoric of leftist demagogues who often don’t even understand their own beliefs, yet still ladle personal attacks upon all who disagree with their ideas.

I. Political Storm in an Outhouse

A. Disagreeing is Evil

It is a simple fact of modern society that leftists and progressives cannot accept any level of disagreement with their theories. In fact, they positively boil with anger that anyone claiming to be educated or a member of society in-good-standing would dare take issue with their conclusions. This is strange because it borders on the kind of fanaticism which demands one be treated as a deity. This cannot lead to any kind of psychiatric diagnosis which portends long-term good mental health.

The upshot of this problem creates a potent societal dilemma on several levels, which could literally destroy the Republic. A lesser issue is our level of political discourse has degenerated to such a low standard that dialogue has been replaced by personal insult. This then leads to a larger problem. If dissent of any kind is no longer tolerated, and those who disagree are immediately demonized and removed from any influence, how on earth will false ideas ever be rectified?

Further, why on earth would any group of people, who clearly profess a politically oriented movement, such as socialists and other neo-liberals, claim a God’s-eye level of knowledge and wisdom? And what exactly is it that liberals believe, anyway? For the most part, liberals accept socialism as a default summary of their beliefs.

B. Hume’s Is/Ought Fallacy

One startling element of neo-liberalism is the claim that the world actually runs by how it should run, not by any other measure. This is an inversion of a famous dilemma—theis/ought discussion of David Hume, “Hume’s Guillotine.” Here, the Scots philosopher stated it was a mistake to claim the world should be a certain way was because it was that way, already. So, for example—it is a mistake to claim that slavery is good because people of the past accepted it.

This point is then inverted by claiming that because a person or group believes a thing should be a certain way, it already is that way. As Hume pointed out, it’s also mistaken to claim that there is a moral component to how things work. For example, arguing the Minimum Wage should be raised because it morally benefits society and the economy, does not prove the measure is essentially cost-free, or that it will have no ill effects on employment.

C. Literary Examples

1. Spirit Level Deception

Several examples will reveal how this ought/is fallacy has played out recently. A book claiming the wealthy do not really benefit from their (illicit) riches was published by Kate Pickett, titled The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. While an impressively progressive idea, the book was quickly debunked as wishful thinking, in another book by Christopher Snowdon, titled The Spirit Level Delusion: Fact-checking the Left’s New Theory of Everything. Snowdon’s book revealed that Spirit Level suffered from bad data, confirmation bias, and wishful thinking. Simply another leftist finding socialism’s anti-reality dogma reflected in her view of the world.

2. Piketty’s Grand Hoax

Another book again confirming socialist dogma was later skewered by analysts pouring over the data. Frenchman Thomas Piketty, who wrote Capital in the Twenty-First Century, claims Marx was right, calling for wealth re-distribution. Socialist Robert B. Reich described it as, “An extraordinary sweep of history backed by remarkably detailed data and analysis… Piketty’s economic analysis and historical proofs are breathtaking.” Undoubtedly, the world’s Marxists were delighted when he demanded a global wealth tax. Despite all of Piketty’s data, the Financial Times scrutinized his work and found it deeply flawed, in an article titled, Piketty findings undercut by errors. Forbes also reviewed the work and stated,

In Capital, Piketty presents a painstakingly researched case for doing what progressives ranging from Paul Krugman to Barack Obama want to do anyway, which is to raise taxes and expand the power and reach of government. Unfortunately for liberals, Piketty gets almost everything wrong, starting with the numbers.

II. Example of Rude “Debates” by Public Liberals

A. Science

Cosmology: Lawrence M. Krauss, “Religion will disappear in a Generation”

Cosmologist and theoretical physicist Lawrence M. Krauss does not merely disagree with religious folks, but claims that religion itself is such a hoax, that without public support it will disappear in a generation:

What we need to do is present comparative religion as a bunch of interesting historical anecdotes and show the silly reasons why they each did what they did. Instead of shying away from it, we have to explicitly educate people to confront their own misconceptions. People say, ‘Well, religion has been around since the dawn of man. You’ll never change that’ ...This issue of gay marriage, it is going to go away, because if you’re a child, a 13-year-old, they can’t understand what the issue is. It’s gone. One generation is all it takes.

Krauss, who appears to lack working knowledge of religious beliefs, is one of the most vociferous critics of religion, and identifies as an anti-theist, much like Richard Dawkins. Yet, while he states religion is not needed for morality or ethics, he claims it is not clear to him that incest is wrong. Such a statement simply affirms that his source of moral authority is deeply defective. Further, while Krauss asserts “truth” is a necessary presupposition for science, others scientists disagree. Moreover, the amount of falsified data some scientists use to promote their own agendas, such as found with Global Warming, is shocking, and disproves Krauss’ truth claim.

B. Global Warming

Those who deny Anthropogenic “man-made” Global Warming (AGW) are “Deniers.” Rep. Peter DeFazio calls the “deniers” “blathering idiots” on the US House floor. He was incensed anyone would claim the Artic Vortex disproves Global Warming. Even Obama joined in the insults against Deniers, in a 2014 commencement speech,

Today’s Congress, though, is full of folks who stubbornly and automatically reject the scientific evidence about climate change. They’ll tell you it’s a hoax, or a fad. “Let me translate: What that means is, ‘I accept that manmade climate change is real, but if I admit it, I’ll be run out of town by a radical fringe that thinks climate science is a liberal plot.’

In another article, the obvious connection between denying AGW and a lack of intellect and education is outlined by George Monbiot, who writes,

...drawing on a sample size of several thousand, correcting for both education and socioeconomic status, the new study looks embarrassingly robust. Importantly, it shows that prejudice tends not to arise directly from low intelligence, but from the conservative ideologies to which people of low intelligence are drawn. Conservative ideology is the “critical pathway” from low intelligence to racism. Those with low cognitive abilities are attracted to “right-wing ideologies that promote coherence and order” and “emphasize the maintenance of the status quo…The Republican party, with its “prevailing anti-intellectualism and hostility to science” is appealing to what he calls the “low-information voter” or the “misinformation voter.

Given that temperatures have not been elevated for the last few decades, and promised catastrophes have never materialized, it is hard to imagine what evidence would ever be considered by this cabal of insulters as evidence against their beliefs.

C. Economics: Ferguson Deflates Krugman

  The intemperate and rude nature of modern liberal criticism is well presented by the story of how the stunningly arrogant NY Times columnist Paul Krugman was humbled by historian Nial Ferguson, as detailed in Krugtron the Invincible, Part 1. (and Krugtron the Invincible, Part 2, Krugtron the Invincible, Part 3) It is speculated the thrashing was so complete that Krugman actually lost his Ivy League teaching position because of it, in Is Paul Krugman Leaving Princeton In Quiet Disgrace?
Ferguson, a Harvard professor and Hoover Institute writer decided to go after Krugman when the Times writer personally attacked him, as he has repeatedly done to many other academics and writers. Ferguson writes,

You may ask: Why have I taken the trouble to do this? I have three motives. The first is to illuminate the way the world really works, as opposed to the way Krugman and his beloved New Keynesian macroeconomic models say it works. The second is to assert the importance of humility and civility in public as well as academic discourse. And the third, frankly, is to teach him the meaning of the old Scottish regimental motto: nemo me impune lacessit (‘No one attacks me with impunity’).

Finally—and most important—even if Krugman had been “right about everything,” there would still be no justification for the numerous crude and often personal attacks he has made on those who disagree with him. Words like “cockroach,” “delusional,” “derp,” “dope,” “fool,” “knave,” “mendacious idiot,” and “zombie” have no place in civilized debate. I consider myself lucky that he has called me only a “poseur,” a “whiner,” “inane”—and, last week, a “troll.”

This example of Krugman, who the liberal writer Michael Tomasky claims has gone “from being a center-left scholar to being a liberal polemicist,” is just one of tens of thousands of professional liberals who regularly rain down opprobrium on non-liberals. Further, as seen above, it is typical for liberals to be not just nasty, but utterly clueless about what they are debating. But how would this be possible?

III. Gnostic Return—Self Infatuation as Religious Enlightenment

A. Gnostic History

So how does Gnosticism fit in with today’s liberal elites? According to the New Advent encyclopedia, the Gnostics had a pre-Christian Oriental origin. The root of Gnosis means “knowledge,” and the sect taught salvation was the result of knowledge, not faith. Gnosticism represents the incursion of Eastern religious ideas, and was introduced into Christianity. According to Eric Voegelin, in The New Science of Politics, Gnosticism reemerged in the modern era with disastrous results.

Voegelin explains how the roots of modern liberalism grew from a Catholic heresy extolled by Joachim of Flora, a 12^th century rogue Italian monk. Joachim’s writings became the outline for all future leftist thought, such as Marx’s works. Jacob Boehmewas instrumental in injecting the Gnostic ideas into 17^th century Christianity.

B. Six Stages of Gnosticism & the Divine Revelation

One of the hallmarks of gnostic thought is it is typically discussed in an unclear style. According to O’Regan, six claims can be deduced from its authors, such as Jacob Boehme, a shoemaker and self-styled mystic. Following are the 6 stages of Gnostic belief, as outlined in Boehme:

1. The classic Christian divine manifestation morphs into divine self-revelation.
2. The “divine light” is refracted into humans by God.
3. The Fall of humans into sin, engineered by Satan, causes the temporal world to be created.
4. Humans destroyed the mirrored divine image by repeating Lucifer’s obsessive demand for freedom.
5. Christ appears as a 2^nd Adam, a work of rebirth.
6. History is a work of salvation, from creation to Apocalypse. Finally, mankind will re-enter the original divine paradise that Satan helped destroy.

So here we see, if modern liberals are influenced by Gnosticism, they tend to automatically believe their instincts or feelings will guide them towards all truth. Further, they will also tend to inject these feelings with religious fervor. This then explains the fury and shock liberals display when contradicted.

Conclusion

It is certain that modern liberalism has been wholly subsumed under the influence of Gnosticism. This explains the disconnected policy and rhetoric, as well as the fiery self-righteous denunciation against opponents. This movement also influenced the Fascist and Nazi camps, as well as the Russian and Chinese communists. Certainly, only delusional thinking can explain the wildly violent and wholly destructive actions of these evil men. Likewise, we must understand that liberalism must be strenuously checked, or it will go off track, leaving all kinds of misery and destruction in its wake.

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/67421?utm_source=CFP+Mailout&utm_campaign=e39c396313-Call_to_Champions&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_d8f503f036-e39c396313-297703129

Rebjiii/Lisa New Busted Village Idiot

For some back round Rebjiii/Lisa   is a liberal troll on News Busted You Channel and for the last five plus years i and two other have been battling is troll,  love to C&P the same stuff as listed below is just a a little of what is brain dead troll say week in and week out, also this troll have had many fake channel and one of them  it used the name Lisa Chiimento as fake channel back in 2012. so for them on i state call it Lisa and it stuck with it now. L.M.A.O up date to follow

 https://plus.google.com/108958106446743602740/posts

1.  Rebjiii/Lisa
Nothing is more pathetic than conservatives like Sean Hannity & Rush Limbaugh who pretend to know what is going on behind the scenes at the White House, the Pentagon & the State Department.?

2. Rebjiii/Lisa
The percentage of Americans with health insurance coverage is ta an all time record high right now thanks to the Affordable Care Act - which should be applauded - not repealed or defunded.

 

Those of you who know me, know that making rebjiii look like the mindless turd he is, is something I enjoy.  It's easy, but time consuming.  To save time, I will be putting everything here, one link, tada, he's stupid.

 The percentage of Americans with health insurance coverage is ta an all time record high right now thanks to the Affordable Care Act - which should be applauded - not repealed or defunded.

The Biggest Failure of Obamacare: Increasing the Number of Uninsured

The biggest failure of Obamacare isn't the website.

Some people have been surprised by the failure of the Obamacare web site and more broadly of the federal exchanges generally.

But those of us who have followed this legislation closely weren’t surprised at all. In fact, a year ago I wrote on John Goodman’s blog – “The Republicans may have lost this election, but a year from now millions of people may be begging to be freed from the scourge of ObamaCare’s exchanges.”

I’m not psychic. My conclusion was based on the dismal experience of everything the federal government had already tried and failed to do to implement the law and on the excellent reporting of Robert Pear at the New York Times. He had written months earlier that, while the state exchanges were doing their work in public, the federal effort was entirely behind closed door.  The Feds even refused to divulge what was in a “request for proposals” they had released to advertising agencies to help hype up interest in the exchanges.

Doing your work in secret may shield you from the criticism of political opponents, but it also prevents you from getting constructive suggestions from neutral outsiders. And that has been the primary problem with this whole exercise from the beginning. The idea was poorly conceived, the law was poorly written, and it is being poorly implemented, all because they didn’t want to hear from critics. The effort was so fragile that the slightest hint of trouble would have brought it crashing down. But it is far better to crash a poor concept on paper before it becomes law than to pass it and watch it wreck the lives of real people.

Now, not everything about this law has failed. Some things, like covering adult children on their parents’ policies to age 26, paying 100% for preventive services, and eliminating annual and lifetime caps on benefits, have been implemented smoothly. But these are all things that are within the scope of the normal regulatory process – the regulators tell the insurance companies what to do, and the insurance companies do it.  Both regulators and insurers have been doing this for decades.

These may or may not be good ideas, but they are easy to implement. In fact, all these provisions would have required only about five pages of legislation.

The problem comes in the other 2,695 pages of legislation. Why so many pages? Because they were creating entirely new functions for the federal government and all the agencies needed to operate them. And this is where the failures have come. The list is extraordinary –

• 1. The CLASS Act. This feeble attempt to create federal long-term care insurance was thrown overboard by the administration itself after it became apparent it would be impossible to do.
  2. 
     
  3. The 1099 provision. This requirement that businesses issue a 1099 to any vendor from whom they purchased $600 of goods and services in a year was repealed after business owners explained what an impossible burden it would impose.
  4. 
     
  5. Federal high risk pools. This program seemed to be well-funded, but they enrolled very few people at much higher cost than projected. They quickly ran out of money.
  6. 
     
  7. Retiree health subsidies. Large corporations and unions were more than happy to accept free money to do what they were doing anyway (provide health benefits to retirees), but all the money ran out in about a third of the time expected.
  8. 
     
  9. CO-OPs. As an alternative to the “public option,” Congress appropriated billions of dollars to create consumer-run, nonprofit insurance companies in each state and even created a whole new section of the Internal Revenue Code for them. It was never explained why mutual insurance companies were not adequate to the job. A few have been created but Congress put so many restrictions on them that even those few are unlikely to make it past the first year.
  10. 
      
  11. Small employer tax credits. The complexity and confusion of these credits deterred all but a handful of companies from applying.
  12. 
      
  13. Medical Loss Ratios. The MLR requirements have had the very predictable effect of discouraging innovation and cost containment. The requirements actually encourage higher premiums — the higher the premiums, the more money insurance companies have for administration and profits. Plus, they discourage fraud prevention efforts.
  14. 
      
  15. Medicaid expansions. The Supreme Court made these expansions voluntary for the states and only about half have done it. But it was an odd idea from the start. One-third of all the uninsured were already eligible for Medicaid but hadn’t bothered to enroll, and a large portion of the people now enrolling seem to be people who were already covered in the private market.
  16. 
      
  17. Limits on FSA funding. It is cruelly ironic, but the families most disadvantaged by the new $2,500 limit on FSA funding are those with special needs children.
  18. 
      
  19. Limits on the Medical Expense Deduction. Beginning in 2013, a taxpayer is able to deduct only those medical expenses that exceed 10% of income, up from the current 7.5%. Once again it is the sickest families that will be hurt.
  20. 
      
  21. Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs). These were intended to introduce an entirely new form of health care delivery to reduce costs and improve quality in the Medicare program, and eventually throughout the health care system. But they have been plagued with problems, including that nearly a third of the original participants have already dropped out. CMS is refusing to release information on how the rest are doing, suggesting it isn’t going well.
  22. 
      
  23. Health IT. The HITECH bill was enacted separately from ObamaCare, and many billions have been spent on it, but reports from the field indicate the top-down efforts result in lower quality and less efficiency as physicians spend more time wrestling with computers than taking care of patients.
  
  Essentially, everything the federal government itself has been responsible for doing has failed. None of this should have been a surprise. Any honest reading of available research would have shown the futility of these efforts. For example the United Kingdom was way ahead of us in trying to upgrade its health information technology. It spent $12 billion on the project before concluding it was an abysmal failure and shut it down completely. An effort very similar to ACOs was tried from 2005-2010 in the form of the Physician Group Practice demonstration project. It, too failed. Medical loss ratio limits have been tried without success in several states.
  
  But, like the old Gene Autry song, the true believers in the Obama administration didn’t want to hear a discouraging word, so they locked themselves away and even refused to let the public know what they were doing.
  
  But the biggest failure of all is still a few months away. This is the essence of the law – that it will reduce the numbers of uninsured. It will not. It is far more likely to raise the numbers of people without insurance coverage. Why? Three reasons –

1. The Medicaid expansion will have at best a modest effect on covering new people. As we said above one-third of the uninsured are already eligible for Medicaid but not enrolled. In many cases, they have been on the program before and haven’t bothered re-enrolling. They simply don’t find value in it. They are more likely to see a doctor by going to the hospital ER, and they know if anything big happens they will be instantly signed up. Having a Medicaid card in their wallets just to please some bureaucrat is no enticement.

Now, it is likely that the Medicaid roles will grow, but this will be from people who were already covered by their employers. Medicaid is free while employers expect a premium contribution. It makes sense to switch, but it doesn’t add any uninsured people.

The individual market is gone. This means some 15 million newly uninsured people. Some of them will get coverage on the exchanges, but not many. The exchanges offer benefits that are too rich – things like pediatric dental care that few private insurance plans cover – and all those “enhanced” benefits cost money. Yes, some will be offered some subsidies, but in most cases people will still pay more than they have been used to, and the enrollment process is a nightmare.

Employers will drop coverage in droves. That has been happening slowly for years, but Obamacare will accelerate it dramatically. In 2011 the McKinsey Company did a large survey of the employers and found 30% said they would definitely or probably drop their coverage. This was blithely dismissed by administration supporters, but McKinsey is a rock solid company with no interest in political spin. This means perhaps 50 million people will no longer have coverage on the job. They will find –

• 1. No more automatic enrollment going along with the job. People will have to take the initiative to find out about the Exchange.
  2. 
     
  3. No more pure community rating of the employee share of premiums. The Exchange will vary premiums every year based on a person’s age.
  4. 
     
  5. No more paycheck deductions of the employee share of premiums. People will have to make some kind of payment arrangement for their share of the premium.
  6. 
     
  7. No more convenient and friendly HR Department people to answer questions. People will have to seek out an “Exchange navigator” to get their questions answered
  8. 
     
  9. More importantly, they will find no more employer contribution to the cost of their coverage.
  
  Very few people have significant medical expenses in the course of a year. The cost of insurance coverage far outweighs the cost of their medical expense – especially if they are paying the entire premium themselves.
  
  So there might be 20% – 30% of the total, maybe even 50% who find that insurance is a good deal through the Exchanges, but that leaves 25 million people who are newly uninsured.
  
  Taken together, the numbers of uninsured Americans may double after Obamacare is fully implemented. How’s that for a kick in the head?
  
  Now, you may be wondering about all those pitiful, helpless people you have heard about who have been denied coverage for all these years. Won’t they be lining up around the corner to finally get insurance coverage? Yes, very likely they will be.  But keep in mind that the only people subject to such a denial are new applicants for individual coverage. This is a very small segment of the population. People getting employer based coverage are free of any such concern, as are people on Medicare or Medicaid. AHIP (the insurance company trade association) reports that in 2008, there were only 1,763,000 people who applied for individual coverage, and only 223,000 were denied. Many of these people were allowed to enroll in a state high-risk pool, so were not uninsured when this law was passed. That’s a pretty tiny number of people compared to the many millions who are about to become uninsured.
  
  Finally, there is the issue of the mandate itself. Won’t those people who refuse to enroll be severely punished? No. There is no effective enforcement mechanism. Many commentators have remarked on how low the tax penalty is, but even that penalty is easily avoided. The only tool the IRS has for collecting the penalty is seizing a taxpayer’s tax refund. It may not garnish wages, it may not place a lien on property, it may not bring the taxpayer to court. It is easy enough to avoid a refund, by adjusting withholding at the beginning of the year. That has the added effect of giving the taxpayer more money in his paycheck during the course of the year and depriving the federal government of an interest-free loan from the taxpayer.
  
  So the biggest failure of all will take place in the next six to nine months: We will discover the numbers of uninsured has doubled just in time for the 2014 elections.

LATEST GALLUP POLL: Democrats Who Say Obamacare Hurt Them MORE THAN DOUBLES!

Well, Mr. President. Looks like even your loyal sheeple are disappointed in your great “Obamacare” scam, and the polls are reflecting it.

 Breitbart reports that a record number of Democrats are report a HUGE disappointment level in Obamacare, or the ‘Affordable Healthcare Act’. The latest poll indicates that in may, only 6% said that Obamacare hurt them – now, its a whopping 21%.

A Gallup poll released Wednesday finds that the number of Democrats who say Obamacare has hurt them more than doubled in the last five months.

In May, just 6% of Democrats said Obamacare hurt them. Now, 15% of Democrats polled said Obamacare hurt them.

Equally troubling for Democrats, the poll found that only 27% of Democrats say Obamacare has helped them, a slight 4% increase since May. Overall, more than one in five Democrats (21%) said in the long run Obamacare will “make things worse.”

Nationally, Americans remain sour on Obamacare. When Gallup asked, “In the long run, how do you think the healthcare law will affect the healthcare situation in the U.S.?” 46% of Americans said Obamacare would “make things worse” versus 36% who said it would “make things better.”

Gallup concluded: “Americans’ views toward the law overall and its effect on the U.S. healthcare situation in the long run continue to be more negative than positive.”

This number can only be expected to go up. The healthcare system as it currently is simply is a nightmare. men are carrying maternity coverage, premiums are at an all time high, and many Americans lost their regular doctors. This is an issue of poor leadership and decision making. May God save America.

Obamacare Enrollment is “Shrinking”… It Could Be Doomed

August 14, 2014


When Obamacare was first pitched to the American people, it promised the world, but since it’s implementation it has failed to deliver.
Liberals touted this supposed deeply needed healthcare reform bill as the cure-all for all what ails the current system, as politicians made all kinds of promises, but gave no details on how the legislation would work. You had to pass the bill to find out, sort of like buying a box of Cracker Jacks to get the prize.
As Obamacare rolled out, the system was plagued with technical problems, thousands lost their insurance coverage, and those that managed to jump over the other two hurdles soon discovered their medical expenses actually increased.


Millions of Americans have finally woken up to the truth about Obamacare, and have since joined the fight to bring about its demise. Fortunately, it looks like the end of this awful socialist experiment could actually be in sight.



According to Investors.Com, Obamacare enrollment is rapidly shrinking, and it looks to continue the downward spiral through the end of 2014.


Statistics show that America’s third largest insurer had 720,000 people sign up for insurance in May, but by the end of June only had 600,000 actual paying clients.
Insurance giant, Aetna, predicted they will see that number drop even lower to just over 500,000 by year’s end.


Companies across the industry are seeing similar results, which raises the question of whether or not enough new members will sign up to offset attrition rates, but the evidence isn’t too promising.


Good. If insurance companies continue to lose money and not make a profit, they will surely revolt against Obamacare, and having strong opposition against this travesty is always welcomed.


Everyone knows that in reality, Obamacare wasn’t about improving health care, as much as it was about gaining more control over the governed, without needing their consent.
Having control over health care gives the government incredible power to squash those who resist it’s agenda, not to mention the taxes and fines levied at business owners would damage an already fragile economy.


Obamacare needs to be repealed and then tossed into the garbage, and these declining numbers show that the American people affirm this belief.

Nearly 90% of Obamacare Enrollees Originally HAD Insurance 

 January 29, 2014



 
Barack Obama and the liberals have always cited the millions of uninsured as the main reason for federalized healthcare. They made us believe that Obamacare would be the ultimate solution for the impoverished and unemployed.


In his State of the Union address Tuesday night, Obama again touted the success of his champion legislation. In the face of the program’s failure on so many levels – from website inadequacies to implementation disasters – liberals still try to pretend that Obamacare is a success.


Even those of us opposed to Obamacare could feel good knowing that the people who really needed insurance would be getting it. The success of the entire program relied on the stipulation that if you already had insurance, you could keep it, with the majority of the enrollees being citizens who previously had no insurance. However, it should now come as no surprise to us all that there is apparently another critical flaw in the legislation’s execution.


Early signals suggest the majority of the 2.2 million people who sought to enroll in private insurance through new marketplaces through Dec. 28 were previously covered elsewhere, raising questions about how swiftly this part of the health overhaul will be able to make a significant dent in the number of uninsured.


Insurers, brokers and consultants estimate at least two-thirds of those consumers previously bought their own coverage or were enrolled in employer-backed plans.


The data, based on surveys of enrollees, are preliminary. But insurers say the tally of newly insured consumers is falling short of their expectations, a worrying trend for an industry looking to the law to expand the ranks of its customers.


About 48 million Americans were uninsured in 2012. The health law is expected to cut 25 million from that total by expanding state-run Medicaid programs and the pool of privately insured people who buy through state marketplaces, also called exchanges.


Only 11% of consumers who bought new coverage under the law were previously uninsured, according to a McKinsey & Co. survey of consumers thought to be eligible for the health-law marketplaces. The result is based on a sampling of 4,563 consumers performed between November and January, of whom 389 had enrolled in new insurance.


This report makes us all ask the question: Is Obamacare actually helping the people it set out to insure? And if it isn’t, then what’s the point of the legislation at all? We as Americans must do all that we can to spread the word of Obamacare’s ineffectiveness and inadequacy.

Hurdles for ObamaCare in 2nd sign-up season


Potential complications await consumers as President Barack Obama's health care law approaches its second open enrollment season, just two months away.

Don't expect a repeat of last year's website meltdown, but the new sign-up period could expose underlying problems with the law itself that are less easily fixed than a computer system.

Getting those who signed up this year enrolled again for 2015 won't be as easy as it might seem. And the law's interaction between insurance and taxes looks like a sure-fire formula for confusion.

For example:

-- For the roughly 8 million people who signed up this year, the administration has set up automatic renewal. But consumers who go that route may regret it. They risk sticker shock by missing out on lower-premium options. And they could get stuck with an outdated and possibly incorrect government subsidy. Automatic renewal should be a last resort, consumer advocates say.

--An additional 5 million people or so will be signing up for the first time on HealthCare.gov and state exchange websites. But the Nov. 15-Feb. 15 open enrollment season will be half as long the 2013-2014 sign-up period, and it overlaps with the holiday season.

-- Of those enrolled this year, the overwhelming majority received tax credits to help pay their premiums. Because those subsidies are tied to income, those 6.7 million consumers will have to file new forms with their 2014 tax returns to prove they got the right amount. Too much subsidy and their tax refunds will be reduced. Too little, and the government owes them.

--Tens of millions of people who remained uninsured this year face tax penalties for the first time, unless they can secure an exemption.


"It's the second open enrollment, but the first renewal and the first tax season where the requirements of the Affordable Care Act are in place," said Judy Solomon, vice president for health policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which advocates for low-income people, and supports the law.

"The fact that it is all going to be occurring within an overlapping and relatively short time frame ... means that there will be many issues," she added.



At Foundation Communities, an Austin, Texas, nonprofit serving low-income people, Elizabeth Colvin says more volunteers will be needed this year to help new customers as well as those re-enrolling. Last time, her organization's health insurance campaign lined up 100 volunteers. She figures she will need a minimum of 50 more.

"We have less than half the time than last year, and it's over the holidays," she said. "We have a concern about trying to get more people through the system without shortchanging education, so that consumers know how to use the insurance they're enrolling in,"

Some congressional supporters of the law are worried about more political fallout, particularly because of the law's convoluted connections with the tax system.

"It seems to me there ought to be some way to better educate folks on what they may face in this process," Rep. Mike Thompson, D-Calif., told Internal Revenue Service Commissioner John Koskinen at a hearing last week.

Thompson wasn't impressed when Koskinen said the IRS has put information on its website and is using social media to get out the word.


Rep. Bill Pascrell, D-N.J., said in an interview that he disagrees with making people pay back part of their premium subsidy. That would happen if someone made more money during the year and failed to report it to HealthCare.gov.

"Why should individuals be punished if they got a bump in salary?" said Pascrell. "To me, this was not the ACA I voted on."

Last year the federal website that serves most states crashed the day it went live, and it took the better part of two months to get things working reasonably well. This year, the Obama administration is promising a better consumer experience, but officials have released few details. It's unclear how well system tests are going.

"This coming year will be one of visible and continued improvement, but not perfection," said Andy Slavitt, a tech executive brought in by the Department of Health and Human Services to oversee the operation.


Insurers say they continue to worry about connections not fully straightened out between their computer systems and the government's.


They also are concerned about retaining customers. One quirk troubling the industry is that policyholders who want to update their subsidies and stay in the same plan will have to type in a 14-character plan identifier when they re-enroll online. That's longer than a phone number or a Social Security number, and customers may not know where to find it.

Administration spokesman Aaron Albright says consumers will have several ways to do that. The number will be mailed to them by their insurer as part of their renewal notice, they can get it from a HealthCare.gov call center or they can select the same plan while browsing other options online.

Alex Stevens, a dishwasher at an Austin pizzeria, got covered this year and said he's planning to re-enroll. A skateboarding enthusiast in his late 20s, Stevens broke a leg skating with friends this summer. It was a bad break and he had major surgery the next day.  But his insurance paid most of the $55,000 bill, and he only owed $750.

"My mom said she was glad that I have insurance," said Stevens.

As the share of Americans remaining uninsured declines, it's clear the health care law has filled a need for millions of people like Stevens, who work but don't have coverage on the job.

That demand was strong enough to overcome a dysfunctional website the first year of the coverage expansion. The second year will show whether the full program is workable for the people it was intended to serve, or if major retooling will be needed.

Nothing is more pathetic than conservatives like Sean Hannity & Rush Limbaugh who pretend to know what is going on behind the scenes at the White House, the Pentagon & the State Department.

11 Signs You Might Be an Intellectual Elitist

With the war in Israel and recent ISIS massacres, my social media accounts have been overwhelmed with elitist moral relativism. These days, it seems like in popular culture you can only be considered “intelligent” if you are willing to throw out every traditional value and speak totally contrary to common sense.


The intellectual elitist seeks to be be contrarian in the face of valid arguments, no matter what the argument may be. The intellectual elitist values words and emotions over deeds. The intellectual elitist (IE) believes their words equal a kind of superior benevolence to the poor and disenfranchised.


Between the traditional media and the monopoly of liberalism in academia, it seems the intellectual elitists have become bolder than ever.


You may be one of them. To help you decide, I’ve compiled a list of 11 signs you might be an IE.


You may be an intellectual elitist:


1. If you believe Christian aggression 1,000 years ago during the Crusades is a valid reason for modern Muslim aggression and beheadings.


I was recently involved in a Facebook discussion about the difference in philosophies between the two religions, and was somewhat flabbergasted to run across this statement: “While some [Muslims] in certain parts of the world are violent, Christians, at least the American ones, are verbally just as violent but unwilling to recognize how they injure people with their words.” Seriously, these were actual words that someone actually formed in their actual mind and then actually typed them on their actual computer. Actually. I suggested we ask journalist James Foley’s parents which type of “violence” they would have preferred their son to suffer. I’m still waiting on an answer.


2. If you bemoan the rise of the military industrial complex and NSA spying on citizens, while at the same time voting for politicians who favor maximum government intervention in our day to day life.


IEs don’t ever seem to recognize that government is government, period. The military is government. The NSA is government. Want less government? Stop voting for more government!


3. If you consistently rage against the evils of coal and oil, then drive your electric car home and plug it into a socket powered by a plant that runs on…coal and oil.


We call this cognitive dissonance. But hey, if you can feel good without actually making a difference of any kind – you’re definitely an IE.


4. If you think illegal immigrant children from all over the world should be educated in our public education system at the cost of the taxpayer, but think a black woman who lies about her street address to get her son into a better public school in the suburbs is a criminal.


I recently reported  on the case of a black woman in Connecticut who is now serving time for “stealing” up to $15,000 in educational services, all because she used her babysitter’s suburban address to help her son escape from the failing inner city public school he had been condemned to. IEs abhor school choice. A mother desperate to escape inner city public schools is a criminal for switching districts, but an illegal immigrant from halfway across the world is entitled to a public education.


5. If you think a ban on aborting babies after the 8th month is unjust but insist on banning plastic bags, e-cigarettes, black cars (something that has been attempted multiple times in California), crosses in public, Bibles in school, fireworks, transfats, sugar, fast food restaurants…you get the drift.


6. If you think making people pay for their own birth control constitutes a “war on women,” but female genital mutilation is a “cultural marker.”


Another very common case of moral relativism. Hobby Lobby wants employees to pay for just 4 out of 20 types of birth control and they are the biggest fascists of the 21st century. Meanwhile, it’s radio silence on barbaric practices against women on other continents because we shouldn’t be imposing our American cultural norms on them…or something.

7. Similarly, if you don’t want the government in your vagina but want the government to pay for what goes in your vagina.


8. If you regularly use the terms “cisgender” or “heteronormative.”


Oh, you don’t know what “cisgender” means? Wikipedia defines it thus: Cisgender and cissexual (often abbreviated to simply cis) describe related types of gender identity where individuals’ experiences of their own gender match the sex they were assigned at birth.


….which brings us to:


9. If you use a whole bunch of words to define something that has been simply defined since the beginning of time by all cultures everywhere at all times…forever. Boy, girl, man, woman – see…easy peezy and everyone knows what you’re talking about. IEs always need to complicate the simple and simplify the complicated.


10. If you believe requiring an ID to vote is racist but it is not racist to require an ID to: buy a gun, cash a check, buy alcohol, buy cigarettes, attend a townhall meeting with your representative, enter the White House, go to a club, get on an airplane, drive a car, buy a car, insure a car, fill a prescription, buy cold medicine, open a bank account, register for school, get a library card…again, you get the drift.


11. If you are so far removed from the horrors of slavery and the ’60s civil rights movement that you equate “microagression” with being ripped apart by dogs and fire hoses because you drank out of the wrong water fountain or sat in the wrong seat on a bus.


Are you worried you may be an Intellectual Elitist? Some steps you can take toward recovery – head straight out and buy a six-pack of Budweiser, drink it while watching an “Archie Bunker” marathon.

Rebjiii, "Conservatives like Ted Cruz & Rand Paul are not afraid the Affordable Care Act will fail - they are afraid it will succeed at giving millions of previously uninsured Americans the option to purchase affordable health insurance coverage.  Fox News still has not found even one legitimate ACA - that's because there are none to find."

Estimated Cost of ‘Obamacare’ Is Now $2.6 Trillion — Nearly $1.7 Trillion More Than Obama Promised

According to the latest estimates, President Obama’s health care law, also known as “Obamacare,” will cost around $2.6 trillion over the next 10 years, nearly $1.7 trillion more than Obama’s initial promise of $900 billion.

The Senate Budget Committee — the Republican side — released the following chart today depicting the rising costs of Obamacare. Notice that the cost estimates have increased with each and every estimate:

 “President Obama promised a joint session of Congress in 2009 to spend $900 billion over ten years on his health care law: ‘Now, add it all up, and the plan that I’m proposing will cost around $900 billion over 10 years.’ Adding up all the different spending provisions in the health care law, however, (including closing the Medicare ‘donut hole,’ implementation costs, and other spending) total gross spending over the FY 2010–19 period is about $1.4 trillion, based on CBO estimates,” the Senate Budget Committee Republican staff explains.

“And most of the major spending provisions in the law do not even take effect until 2014. Congressional Democrats delayed these provisions in order to show only six years of spending under the plan in the original 10-year budget window (from FY2010-19) used by CBO at the time the law was enacted. Therefore, the original estimate concealed the fact that most of the law’s spending only doesn’t even begin until four years into the 10-year window. A Senate Budget Committee analysis (based on CBO estimates and growth rates) finds that that total spending under the law will amount to at least $2.6 trillion over a true 10-year period (from FY2014–23)—not $900 billion, as President Obama originally promised.”

According to The Weekly Standard, the chart was published today to coincide with the House vote to repeal Obamacare. House Republicans with the help of five Democrats voted in favor of repeal the law 244-185.

As the chart explains, “Estimates of the gross outlays under the President’s health care law in nominal dollars using CBO estimates of major coverage provisions, as well as Senate Budget Committee Republican projections based on CBO estimates of the remaining costs.”

ObamaCare's outrageous deductibles are making life miserable for many Americans

Just last week the Associated Press released a survey finding that 25 percent of Americans are "not confident" that they'll be able to afford medical care in the event of a major health problem. The results underscore one of the central problems with ObamaCare, that is the high deductibles that often come with health plans on the Exchanges.


The New York Times came out with a story ahead of the weekend telling the stories of a few different Americans who are still struggling to pay for healthcare because of ObamaCare's outrageous deductibles.


Patricia Wanderlich, a Chicago-area resident, experienced a life-threatening brain hemorrhage three years ago and has an aneurysm. Her health plan, however, comes with a hefty $6,000 deductible. Rather than pay for a much-needed yearly brain scan to monitor her condition, Wanderlich is going without. "To spend thousands of dollars just making sure it hasn’t grown?" she told The Times. "I don’t have that money.”


Dr. Rebecca Lowe, who suffers from degenerative arthritis among other conditions, also has a $6,000 deductible that she has to meet before her health plan, for which she pays $422 per month, kicks in. But, thanks to ObamaCare's limited provider networks, she's been forced to seek medical care out of network to visit doctors more than 100 miles away. Though Lowe spent more than $6,000 on medical care for the year, none of it counts toward her deductible because she's gone out of network.


Though ObamaCare supporters like to focus on the subsidies that artificially lower premiums by passing the costs onto taxpayers, ObamaCare's higher deductibles are making it difficult for many Americans to afford the healthcare they need, or pricing them out of seeking care, entirely.

Unable to Meet the Deductible or the Doctor

Patricia Wanderlich got insurance through the Affordable Care Act this year, and with good reason: She suffered a brain hemorrhage in 2011, spending weeks in a hospital intensive care unit, and has a second, smaller aneurysm that needs monitoring.





But her new plan has a $6,000 annual deductible, meaning that Ms. Wanderlich, who works part time at a landscaping company outside Chicago, has to pay for most of her medical services up to that amount. She is skipping this year’s brain scan and hoping for the best.





“To spend thousands of dollars just making sure it hasn’t grown?” said Ms. Wanderlich, 61. “I don’t have that money.”





About 7.3 million Americans are enrolled in private coverage through the Affordable Care Act marketplaces, and more than 80 percent qualified for federal subsidies to help with the cost of their monthly premiums. But many are still on the hook for deductibles that can top $5,000 for individuals and $10,000 for families — the trade-off, insurers say, for keeping premiums for the marketplace plans relatively low. The result is that some people — no firm data exists on how many — say they hesitate to use their new insurance because of the high out-of-pocket costs.





Insurers must cover certain preventive services, like immunizations, cholesterol checks and screening for breast and colon cancer, at no cost to the consumer if the provider is in their network. But for other services and items, like prescription drugs, marketplace customers often have to meet their deductible before insurance starts to help.





While high-deductible plans cover most of the costs of severe illnesses and lengthy hospital stays, protecting against catastrophic debt, those plans may compel people to forgo routine care that could prevent bigger, longer-term health issues, according to experts and  research.





“They will cause some people to not get care they should get,” Katherine Hempstead, who directs research on health insurance coverage at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, said of high-deductible marketplace plans. “Unfortunately, the people who are attracted to the lower premiums tend to be the ones who are going to have the most trouble coming up with all the cost-sharing if in fact they want to use their health insurance.”



  

Deductibles for the most popular health plans sold through the new marketplaces are higher than those commonly found in employer-sponsored health plans, according to Margaret A. Nowak, the research director of Breakaway Policy Strategies, a health care consulting company. A survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that the average deductible for individual coverage in employer-sponsored plans was $1,217 this year.





In comparison, the average deductible for a bronze plan on the exchange — the least expensive coverage — was $5,081 for an individual and $10,386 for a family, according to HealthPocket, a consulting firm. Silver plans, which were the most popular option this year, had average deductibles of $2,907 for an individual and $6,078 for a family.





Jon R. Gabel, a health economist at NORC, a research organization affiliated with the University of Chicago, said that employer-sponsored plans had lower deductibles, in part, because they provided more generous coverage than the most popular exchange plans. The typical employer-sponsored health plan would qualify as a gold-level policy under the standards of the Affordable Care Act, Mr. Gabel said.





The website for the federal insurance marketplace serving 36 states, HealthCare.gov, strongly encourages consumers to focus on premiums: When consumers search for a plan online, the results are ranked by premium price, with plans offering the lowest premiums listed first.





But insurance plans with lower premiums generally have higher deductibles. Gina Brown, 37, of Nashville, was paying about $155 a month for a Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee plan, after taking account of her subsidy. But her deductible was $4,000, she said, and so she avoided going to the doctor even when she got an ear infection over the summer.





“I attempted to treat it with over-the-counter and homeopathic meds,” she said. “Eventually it went away.”





Ms. Brown recently got a job with health benefits, so she canceled the marketplace plan. Her new insurance has a deductible of $1,000, but primary care visits and prescriptions are not subject to the deductible.





“Now that I know I can go and safely just pay a co-pay,” she said, “it makes me feel better.”





Mark Yuschak, 57, of Jackson, N.J., said he had a silver plan with an annual deductible of $3,000. He discovered its limits in March.





“My wife had an incident, a digestive disorder, and we had to go to the emergency room of a hospital in Freehold, N.J.,” Mr. Yuschak said. “We presented our insurance card and filled out all the forms. They told us, ‘You don’t have a co-payment, you’re free to go.’ ”





Later, though, they received a bill “that could choke a horse,” Mr. Yuschak said — for more than $1,000. “Our insurance wouldn’t cover any of it because we had not met our deductible.”





Carol Payne, a respiratory therapist in Gilbert, Ariz., signed up through HealthCare.gov for a Blue Cross Blue Shield plan with a $6,000 deductible. She pays $91 toward her monthly premium and gets a subsidy of $353 to cover the rest.





The plans she could have chosen with lower deductibles were from insurers that “were not as reputable,” Ms. Payne said. She has used the insurance for preventive care and an emergency room visit after a car accident.





“I’m just doing what I can to keep myself healthy,” she added. “I mean, $6,000 — do they think I’ve just got that under my mattress?”





People with low incomes may qualify for subsidies that reduce their deductibles, co-payments and other out-of-pocket costs. The assistance is available to people with incomes from 100 percent to 250 percent of the poverty level (from $23,550 to $58,875 for a family of four), but only if they choose a silver plan.





Consumers also benefit from a provision of the Affordable Care Act that limits out-of-pocket costs, which include deductibles. The limit this year is $6,350 for an individual and $12,700 for a family plan. But in general, the limits apply only to care provided by doctors and hospitals in a plan’s network and do not cap charges for out-of-network care.





Dr. Rebecca Love, of Moab, Utah, is well on her way to passing that limit. Dr. Love, 63, who has degenerative arthritis and a host of other health problems, pays $422 a month in premiums for a plan that has a deductible of $6,000. But she has already paid more than $6,000 in medical costs this year that did not count toward her deductible because the doctors and hospitals — more than 100 miles away in Grand Junction, Colo. — were not in her network.





To see certain specialists in her network, Dr. Love said, she would have had to travel to Salt Lake City, which is much farther away and requires driving through a treacherous mountain pass.





“Medical care costs too much and health insurance as it stands doesn’t address this,” she said. “What have we become?”





Ms. Wanderlich, who had suffered the brain hemorrhage, was even avoiding preventive care until last month, when she had to get a prescription renewed and her doctor’s office required her to be seen first. Grudgingly, she went for an annual physical exam on Sept. 12. She was relieved to learn that she owed only $30 for the visit; the provider billed her insurer more than $1,200.





When the next open enrollment period begins on Nov. 15, Ms. Wanderlich said, she will probably switch to a plan with a narrower network of doctors and a smaller deductible. It will probably mean losing her specialists, she said, but at this point she is resigned.




“A $6,000 deductible — that’s just staggering,” she said. “I never thought I’d say this, but how many minutes until I get Medicare?”

LATEST GALLUP POLL: Democrats Who Say Obamacare Hurt Them MORE THAN DOUBLES!

Well, Mr. President. Looks like even your loyal sheeple are disappointed in your great “Obamacare” scam, and the polls are reflecting it.
 Breitbart reports that a record number of Democrats are report a HUGE disappointment level in Obamacare, or the ‘Affordable Healthcare Act’. The latest poll indicates that in may, only 6% said that Obamacare hurt them – now, its a whopping 21%.


A Gallup poll released Wednesday finds that the number of Democrats who say Obamacare has hurt them more than doubled in the last five months.


In May, just 6% of Democrats said Obamacare hurt them. Now, 15% of Democrats polled said Obamacare hurt them.


Equally troubling for Democrats, the poll found that only 27% of Democrats say Obamacare has helped them, a slight 4% increase since May. Overall, more than one in five Democrats (21%) said in the long run Obamacare will “make things worse.”


Nationally, Americans remain sour on Obamacare. When Gallup asked, “In the long run, how do you think the healthcare law will affect the healthcare situation in the U.S.?” 46% of Americans said Obamacare would “make things worse” versus 36% who said it would “make things better.”


Gallup concluded: “Americans’ views toward the law overall and its effect on the U.S. healthcare situation in the long run continue to be more negative than positive.”


This number can only be expected to go up. The healthcare system as it currently is simply is a nightmare. men are carrying maternity coverage, premiums are at an all time high, and many Americans lost their regular doctors. This is an issue of poor leadership and decision making. May God save America.

When You Go to the Emergency Room in California, You’ll Have Obamacare to Thank for New Problems

Doctors in California are speaking out about the stark difference between the Obama administration’s promises about how the Affordable Care Act would reduce the number of uninsured Americans using emergency rooms and improve their access to primary healthcare and reality.

What they’re finding is that it’s having exactly the opposite effect.

The Washington Free Beacon reports:

According to Dr. Jay Kaplin of the American College of Emergency Physicians, almost half of emergency physicians are reporting that their emergency department visits have risen since Obamacare went into effect.
*
One emergency center in Fresno, California, at Community Regional Medical Center, is currently taking in 300-400 patients a day.

In fact, the average wait time for an emergency room visit in the state has skyrocketed to five hours.

In the same article, Robert Subers, a California doctor, told a local TV station that he’s had to turn away some of the new patients- because he just can’t afford it. The payments from Obamacare are so low, Subers says, “we’d go bankrupt doing it.”

Another day, another promise broken to the American people by this administration.

The Biggest Failure of Obamacare: Increasing the Number of Uninsured

The biggest failure of Obamacare isn't the website.

Some people have been surprised by the failure of the Obamacare web site and more broadly of the federal exchanges generally.

But those of us who have followed this legislation closely weren’t surprised at all. In fact, a year ago I wrote on John Goodman’s blog – “The Republicans may have lost this election, but a year from now millions of people may be begging to be freed from the scourge of ObamaCare’s exchanges.”

I’m not psychic. My conclusion was based on the dismal experience of everything the federal government had already tried and failed to do to implement the law and on the excellent reporting of Robert Pear at the New York Times. He had written months earlier that, while the state exchanges were doing their work in public, the federal effort was entirely behind closed door.  The Feds even refused to divulge what was in a “request for proposals” they had released to advertising agencies to help hype up interest in the exchanges.

Doing your work in secret may shield you from the criticism of political opponents, but it also prevents you from getting constructive suggestions from neutral outsiders. And that has been the primary problem with this whole exercise from the beginning. The idea was poorly conceived, the law was poorly written, and it is being poorly implemented, all because they didn’t want to hear from critics. The effort was so fragile that the slightest hint of trouble would have brought it crashing down. But it is far better to crash a poor concept on paper before it becomes law than to pass it and watch it wreck the lives of real people.

Now, not everything about this law has failed. Some things, like covering adult children on their parents’ policies to age 26, paying 100% for preventive services, and eliminating annual and lifetime caps on benefits, have been implemented smoothly. But these are all things that are within the scope of the normal regulatory process – the regulators tell the insurance companies what to do, and the insurance companies do it.  Both regulators and insurers have been doing this for decades.

These may or may not be good ideas, but they are easy to implement. In fact, all these provisions would have required only about five pages of legislation.

The problem comes in the other 2,695 pages of legislation. Why so many pages? Because they were creating entirely new functions for the federal government and all the agencies needed to operate them. And this is where the failures have come. The list is extraordinary –

• 1. The CLASS Act. This feeble attempt to create federal long-term care insurance was thrown overboard by the administration itself after it became apparent it would be impossible to do.
  2. 
     
  3. The 1099 provision. This requirement that businesses issue a 1099 to any vendor from whom they purchased $600 of goods and services in a year was repealed after business owners explained what an impossible burden it would impose.
  4. 
     
  5. Federal high risk pools. This program seemed to be well-funded, but they enrolled very few people at much higher cost than projected. They quickly ran out of money.
  6. 
     
  7. Retiree health subsidies. Large corporations and unions were more than happy to accept free money to do what they were doing anyway (provide health benefits to retirees), but all the money ran out in about a third of the time expected.
  8. 
     
  9. CO-OPs. As an alternative to the “public option,” Congress appropriated billions of dollars to create consumer-run, nonprofit insurance companies in each state and even created a whole new section of the Internal Revenue Code for them. It was never explained why mutual insurance companies were not adequate to the job. A few have been created but Congress put so many restrictions on them that even those few are unlikely to make it past the first year.
  10. 
      
  11. Small employer tax credits. The complexity and confusion of these credits deterred all but a handful of companies from applying.
  12. 
      
  13. Medical Loss Ratios. The MLR requirements have had the very predictable effect of discouraging innovation and cost containment. The requirements actually encourage higher premiums — the higher the premiums, the more money insurance companies have for administration and profits. Plus, they discourage fraud prevention efforts.
  14. 
      
  15. Medicaid expansions. The Supreme Court made these expansions voluntary for the states and only about half have done it. But it was an odd idea from the start. One-third of all the uninsured were already eligible for Medicaid but hadn’t bothered to enroll, and a large portion of the people now enrolling seem to be people who were already covered in the private market.
  16. 
      
  17. Limits on FSA funding. It is cruelly ironic, but the families most disadvantaged by the new $2,500 limit on FSA funding are those with special needs children.
  18. 
      
  19. Limits on the Medical Expense Deduction. Beginning in 2013, a taxpayer is able to deduct only those medical expenses that exceed 10% of income, up from the current 7.5%. Once again it is the sickest families that will be hurt.
  20. 
      
  21. Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs). These were intended to introduce an entirely new form of health care delivery to reduce costs and improve quality in the Medicare program, and eventually throughout the health care system. But they have been plagued with problems, including that nearly a third of the original participants have already dropped out. CMS is refusing to release information on how the rest are doing, suggesting it isn’t going well.
  22. 
      
  23. Health IT. The HITECH bill was enacted separately from ObamaCare, and many billions have been spent on it, but reports from the field indicate the top-down efforts result in lower quality and less efficiency as physicians spend more time wrestling with computers than taking care of patients.
  
  Essentially, everything the federal government itself has been responsible for doing has failed. None of this should have been a surprise. Any honest reading of available research would have shown the futility of these efforts. For example the United Kingdom was way ahead of us in trying to upgrade its health information technology. It spent $12 billion on the project before concluding it was an abysmal failure and shut it down completely. An effort very similar to ACOs was tried from 2005-2010 in the form of the Physician Group Practice demonstration project. It, too failed. Medical loss ratio limits have been tried without success in several states.
  
  But, like the old Gene Autry song, the true believers in the Obama administration didn’t want to hear a discouraging word, so they locked themselves away and even refused to let the public know what they were doing.
  
  But the biggest failure of all is still a few months away. This is the essence of the law – that it will reduce the numbers of uninsured. It will not. It is far more likely to raise the numbers of people without insurance coverage. Why? Three reasons –

1. The Medicaid expansion will have at best a modest effect on covering new people. As we said above one-third of the uninsured are already eligible for Medicaid but not enrolled. In many cases, they have been on the program before and haven’t bothered re-enrolling. They simply don’t find value in it. They are more likely to see a doctor by going to the hospital ER, and they know if anything big happens they will be instantly signed up. Having a Medicaid card in their wallets just to please some bureaucrat is no enticement.

Now, it is likely that the Medicaid roles will grow, but this will be from people who were already covered by their employers. Medicaid is free while employers expect a premium contribution. It makes sense to switch, but it doesn’t add any uninsured people.

The individual market is gone. This means some 15 million newly uninsured people. Some of them will get coverage on the exchanges, but not many. The exchanges offer benefits that are too rich – things like pediatric dental care that few private insurance plans cover – and all those “enhanced” benefits cost money. Yes, some will be offered some subsidies, but in most cases people will still pay more than they have been used to, and the enrollment process is a nightmare.

Employers will drop coverage in droves. That has been happening slowly for years, but Obamacare will accelerate it dramatically. In 2011 the McKinsey Company did a large survey of the employers and found 30% said they would definitely or probably drop their coverage. This was blithely dismissed by administration supporters, but McKinsey is a rock solid company with no interest in political spin. This means perhaps 50 million people will no longer have coverage on the job. They will find –

• 1. No more automatic enrollment going along with the job. People will have to take the initiative to find out about the Exchange.
  2. No more pure community rating of the employee share of premiums. The Exchange will vary premiums every year based on a person’s age.
  3. No more paycheck deductions of the employee share of premiums. People will have to make some kind of payment arrangement for their share of the premium.
  4. No more convenient and friendly HR Department people to answer questions. People will have to seek out an “Exchange navigator” to get their questions answered.
  5. More importantly, they will find no more employer contribution to the cost of their coverage.
  
  Very few people have significant medical expenses in the course of a year. The cost of insurance coverage far outweighs the cost of their medical expense – especially if they are paying the entire premium themselves.
  
  So there might be 20% – 30% of the total, maybe even 50% who find that insurance is a good deal through the Exchanges, but that leaves 25 million people who are newly uninsured.
  
  Taken together, the numbers of uninsured Americans may double after Obamacare is fully implemented. How’s that for a kick in the head?
  
  Now, you may be wondering about all those pitiful, helpless people you have heard about who have been denied coverage for all these years. Won’t they be lining up around the corner to finally get insurance coverage? Yes, very likely they will be.  But keep in mind that the only people subject to such a denial are new applicants for individual coverage. This is a very small segment of the population. People getting employer based coverage are free of any such concern, as are people on Medicare or Medicaid. AHIP (the insurance company trade association) reports that in 2008, there were only 1,763,000 people who applied for individual coverage, and only 223,000 were denied. Many of these people were allowed to enroll in a state high-risk pool, so were not uninsured when this law was passed. That’s a pretty tiny number of people compared to the many millions who are about to become uninsured.
  
  Finally, there is the issue of the mandate itself. Won’t those people who refuse to enroll be severely punished? No. There is no effective enforcement mechanism. Many commentators have remarked on how low the tax penalty is, but even that penalty is easily avoided. The only tool the IRS has for collecting the penalty is seizing a taxpayer’s tax refund. It may not garnish wages, it may not place a lien on property, it may not bring the taxpayer to court. It is easy enough to avoid a refund, by adjusting withholding at the beginning of the year. That has the added effect of giving the taxpayer more money in his paycheck during the course of the year and depriving the federal government of an interest-free loan from the taxpayer.
  
  So the biggest failure of all will take place in the next six to nine months: We will discover the numbers of uninsured has doubled just in time for the 2014 elections.

Obamacare causing insurance premiums to soar

A new study targeting a diversity of demographic groups has revealed a massive spike in across-the-board insurance premiums since the implementations of the Affordable Care Act – especially for those who previously enjoyed lower rates because they posed a lower risk burden to insurers.


The study, done by the price-shopping health insurance website HealthPocket and shared with select media outlets in advance of publication, focused on health coverage for both sexes among three distinct age groups – 23 year-olds, 30 year-olds and 63 year-olds – and found that the least damaging price spike still amounted to a whopping 22.7 percent increase (for 63 year-old men) and 37.5 percent increase (for 63 year-old women).


From there, it gets much worse. According to PR Newswire, the youngest group in the study is taking it on the chin:


Premiums in the pre-reform and Obamacare individual health insurance markets were examined for nonsmoking men and women ages 23, 30, and 63 to determine if premiums were affected differently based on age and sex. HealthPocket found that the average health insurance premium increased by double digits for each group examined though some groups saw a much steeper increase than others.


Using government data for on-exchange and off-exchange individually purchased health plans in the two largest metropolitan regions in each state, HealthPocket calculated the average 2013 and 2014 premiums across all plans for each selected demographic profile. The largest increase was observed for young men age 23. The average premium across all plans increased 78% for 23 year-old men in the 2014 Obamacare market as compared to the 2013 pre-reform market. In comparison, 23 year-old women saw their average premium increase by nearly 45%. For 30 year-olds, the average premium increased 73% for men and 35% for women. For 63 year-olds who are not yet Medicare-eligible, women had a higher increase to average premiums than men. The Obamacare market’s average premium for 63 year-old women was 37.5% higher than the pre-reform market while the increase for 63 year-old men was 22.7%.


Of course, it’s feast or famine with Obamacare: you can either afford to pay more, or you can afford to get covered for free, or at a substantially subsidized rate. This study obviously covers those who have had the misfortune of earning their way into the full-price category.


“The study doesn’t include the federal premium subsidies offered to those earning between 100 and 400 percent of the federal poverty limit,” The Washington Times  noted in an analysis of the report Wednesday.


In related news, a survey released this week showed that, as of May 2014, fully one-fourth of all active physicians in the U.S. have declined to participate in insurance plans offered under Obamacare. “That number of 214,524, estimated by American Action Forum, is through May 2014,” reported CNS News Tuesday, “but appears to be growing due to plans that force doctors to take on burdensome costs.”

Survey shows ObamaCare sending premiums rising at fastest clip in decades

A recent survey of 148 insurance brokers shows that ObamaCare is sending premiums rising at the fastest clip in decades.

"For the last, about, five years they've been doing this survey, so this was the largest percentage increase in any quarter since they've been doing (it)," said Scott Gottlieb of the American Enterprise Institute.

"But at 12 percent, 11 percent increase on average across all the states -- that puts it at the upper end of any increase we've seen for decades."

That is the national average in a survey done by Morgan Stanley. But in some states, it found rates are soaring.

"There are specific states with exorbitant increases," Gottlieb said. "Delaware had 100 percent increase, Florida had a 37 percent increase, Pennsylvania 28 percent increase, California had a 53 percent increase in their premiums."

Rates vary widely, often depending on the state and how highly regulated it was to begin with. Analysts, however, say the main reasons for the higher costs are not medical inflation, but rather the requirements of ObamaCare itself.

"There are certain regulations and certain requirements that had to be in there. And because of that it's driven up the costs of these benefits," said John DiVito of the Flexible Benefit Service Corporation, which represents hundreds of agents.Rate hikes include ten essential health benefits along with more than 20,000 pages or regulations.

The reported hikes are for the first policies issued under ObamaCare in 2014.

The Congressional Budget Office or CBO issued a report Monday saying the average premium for the silver plan this year will be $3,800, or just over $300 a month, rising to $4,400 in 2016, 15 percent below its earlier estimates in 2009.

Those early, higher estimates make costs now look better – but that does not include deductibles of as much as $5,000.

But the estimates are comforting to the White House.

White House spokesman Jay Carney says, "It shows that marketplace health care costs have gone down because premium estimates have gone down."

The CBO also projects future premium increases over the next decade.

Insurance companies will soon have to set rates for 2015, and analysts fear reported higher costs now will mean increases next year, as well.

"They're going to see an announcement that next year's premium's going to be 25 percent or maybe 50 percent higher than what they're now paying," says John Goodman of the National Center for Policy Analysis.

John Divito of Flexible Benefit Service Corporation said, "we're reading studies where the rates could be 10 to 30, 40 percent higher. Again, it all depends geographically where these rates are being looked at but definitely an increase in rates."

Scott Gottlieb, a medical doctor as well as an analyst, added, "We've seen insurance premiums go up quite a bit over the period in which ObamaCare started to get implemented."

Insurance executives say the same thing. Marc Bertolini, CEO of Aetna, recently told an earning conference that he anticipates 2014 spikes of 20 to 50 percent, going as high as 100 percent in some markets.

Obamacare will double my monthly premium (according to Kaiser)

byTirge CapsFollow

My wife and I just got our updates from Kaiser telling us what our 2014 rates will be. Her monthly has been $168 this year, mine $150. We have a high deductible. We are generally healthy people who don't go to the doctor often. I barely ever go. The insurance is in case of a major catastrophe.

Well, now, because of Obamacare, my wife's rate is gong to $302 per month and mine is jumping to $284.

I am canceling insurance for us and I am not paying any fucking penalty. What the hell kind of reform is this?

Oh, ok, if we qualify, we can get some government assistance. Great. So now I have to jump through another hoop to just chisel some of this off. And we don't qualify, anyway, so what's the point?

I never felt too good about how this was passed and what it entailed, but I figured if it saved Americans money, I could go along with it.

I don't know what to think now. This appears, in my experience, to not be a reform for the people.

What am I missing?

I realize I will probably get screamed at for posting this, but I can't imagine I am the only Californian who just received a rate increase from Kaiser based on these new laws.

UPDATE: Updated the title per some requests. I appreciate all the helpful comments. I am   now on baby duty but will go through these later for more information. I can't keep up with all the comments right now.

I really do appreciate the helpful comments. Peace all. Peace out.

Obamacare Raising Premiums, Hurting Middle, Lower Class

Andrew Herndon knew it was coming.
Herndon, a Charlotte, N.C. resident who has a health and life insurance license but works in sales, fully expected that his health insurance premiums would rise after the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The only question was by how much.

He recently learned in a letter that monthly premiums for his individual market plan, which also covers his wife and two kids, will increase to $810 next year, a $547 or 280 percent increase from his current plan, after the ACA’s health insurance exchanges begin offering coverage.

“I can’t pay $800 a month for insurance,” he said in an interview with the Washington Free Beacon.
“Basically the government is making me choose between paying for my mortgage and buying food and paying for insurance,” he said. “[My wife and I] are both in our 50’s. We have two children. We’re not going to have more children. We don’t need maternity. We don’t see the doctor that much. We don’t use medication.”

“There’s no way we can pay that and live.”

Herndon is not the only American facing higher premiums because of the ACA, commonly known as Obamacare. Premiums for plans in the exchanges will climb in 45 states compared to plans offered in the individual market before Obamacare’s implementation, according to a study released Wednesday by the Heritage Foundation. States like Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Kansas, and Vermont will see triple-digit percentage increases.

For example, premiums in Arkansas will soar by more than 170 percent to $285 per month for adults aged 27. Rates will also increase by 79 percent for adults aged 50 and 25 percent for a family of four.
Drew Gonshorowski, policy analyst at Heritage and author of the report, said at a Heritage event Wednesday that the surge in premiums can be attributed to a myriad of regulations, mandates, and taxes under Obamacare. Those include taxes on health insurers, benefit mandates, coverage of those with pre-existing conditions (also known as guaranteed issue) and community rating. Community rating requires that insurers charge no more than three times as much to their costliest plan holders, typically older, sicker people, than to their less-costly ones.

Obamacare mandates that everyone not already covered by a plan or a federal program must either enroll in the exchanges or pay a tax. Many young adults would save hundreds by not enrolling and paying the penalty, even with the availability of federal tax credits.

That poses a problem for the underlying logic of the exchanges, which are designed to share costs and lessen the burden on older, sicker patients, Gonshorowski said. If young people do not enroll, premiums will spike as older and costlier people fill the insurance pools—inducing fewer and fewer people to enroll and premiums to further escalate.

Health care experts call this “adverse selection” or a “death spiral.”

The prospect of skyrocketing health care costs appears to contradict President Barack Obama’s claim in 2008 that his administration would lower premiums “by up to $2,500 for a typical family per year.”
Additionally, experts say Obamacare will exacerbate trends in health care consolidation and access to services that will hit middle-income and poor Americans the hardest.

James Mills, assistant general counsel for the Oklahoma Insurance Department, said at the Heritage event that about one in five Oklahomans lack health insurance. He said Obamacare will affect the state’s entire insurance industry, increasing premiums by 58 percent for those aged 27 and 22 percent for those aged 50. The law will still leave 31 million people uninsured across the nation by 2023, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s latest projections.

Most importantly, increased coverage under Obamacare will put a strain on Oklahoma’s health care providers, particularly in rural areas, Mills said. Oklahoma, which Mills described as “not a particularly rich state,” ranks 49th in the nation for resident access to primary care physicians and has about 80 primary care doctors per every 100,000 residents, he said. Many medical students in the state do not come back to rural areas after their residencies, he added.

“There’s a very drastic need for primary care physicians who want to work in rural areas where the reimbursements may be low,” he said.

Rural areas nationwide lack about 20,000 primary care doctors, but only about 16,500 medical doctors graduate annually, according to the American Association of Medical Colleges.

Mills said that of the five insurers offering plans in Oklahoma’s exchange, two are Health Management Organizations (HMOs) that will not serve rural areas in the state due to new network requirements.
He added that a lot of hospitals in rural Oklahoma “are on the brink.” Uncompensated care costs also might actually rise at hospitals, even though more people are insured, if they purchase plans in the exchange with low premiums but higher out-of-pocket costs they cannot afford.

Meanwhile, insurers have told other providers in Oklahoma that they will see an increase in volume size and revenues as a result of the shrinking networks. That might not be much of a consolation to them, Mills said.

“There’s a limit to how many people they can see,” he said. “Either they can’t see people or the quality of care will go down.”

The Free Beacon reported last month that Obamacare has accelerated layoffs and the elimination of services at hospitals across the country, partially due to annual Medicare reimbursement cuts. Those reductions could eventually lead to a quarter of all hospitals rejecting Medicare patients and the rationing of care.

Larry Patterson, president of the glass company Glass Doctor in Dallas, Texas, offered the perspective of a business owner at the Heritage event. Even though his company has provided health insurance options to its employees since 2003, he said premium increases of about 200 percent since 2010 will prompt him to no longer contribute to employees’ plans. He said he is also considering dropping coverage for his 30 employees entirely and pushing them onto the exchanges.

“These are real people. These guys work hard,” he said. “They’re going to have to spend an hour or more a week in their wages for something that is too expensive that they don’t need.”

“They’re not going to pick it up,” he said. “Why are they going to pay more than $1000 a year to have a $3000 deductible?”

Herndon, the salesman from Charlotte, said he might forego insurance next year and pay the tax.
“For the middle class that are doing all the work in this country, this is going to kill us if we end up paying it,” he said.

“It’s making a choice between food, clothes, paying the mortgage, and health care. And that’s not an easy decision.”

Obamacare premiums to skyrocket

Health industry officials say ObamaCare-related premiums will double in some parts of the country, countering claims recently made by the administration.

The expected rate hikes will be announced in the coming months amid an intense election year, when control of the Senate is up for grabs. The sticker shock would likely bolster the GOP’s prospects in November and hamper ObamaCare insurance enrollment efforts in 2015.

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The industry complaints come less than a week after Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius sought to downplay concerns about rising premiums in the healthcare sector. She told lawmakers rates would increase in 2015 but grow more slowly than in the past.

“The increases are far less significant than what they were prior to the Affordable Care Act,” the secretary said in testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee.

Her comment baffled insurance officials, who said it runs counter to the industry’s consensus about next year.

“It’s pretty shortsighted because I think everybody knows that the way the exchange has rolled out … is going to lead to higher costs,” said one senior insurance executive who requested anonymity.

The insurance official, who hails from a populous swing state, said his company expects to triple its rates next year on the ObamaCare exchange.

The hikes are expected to vary substantially by region, state and carrier.

Areas of the country with older, sicker or smaller populations are likely to be hit hardest, while others might not see substantial increases at all.

Several major companies have been bullish on the healthcare law as a growth opportunity. With investors, especially, the firms downplay the consequences of more older, sicker enrollees in the risk pool.

Much will depend on how firms are coping with the healthcare law’s raft of new fees and regulatory restrictions, according to another industry official.

Some insurers initially underpriced their policies to begin with, expecting to raise rates in the second year.

Others, especially in larger states, will continue to hold rates low in order to remain competitive.

After this story was published, the administration pointed to some independent analyses that have cast doubt on whether the current mix of enrollees will lead to premium hikes.

ObamaCare also includes several programs designed to ease the transition and stave off premium increases. Reinsurance, for example, will send payments to insurers to help shoulder the cost of covering sick patients.

But insurance officials are quick to emphasize that any spikes would be a consequence of delays and changes in ObamaCare’s rollout.
They point out that the administration, after a massive public outcry, eased their policies to allow people to keep their old health plans. That kept some healthy people in place, instead of making them jump into the new exchanges.

Federal health officials have also limited the amount of money the government can spend to help insurers cover the cost of new, sick patients.

Perhaps most important, insurers have been disappointed that young people only make up about one-quarter of the enrollees in plans through the insurance exchanges, according to public figures that were released earlier this year. That ratio might change in the weeks ahead because the administration anticipates many more people in their 20s and 30s will sign up close to the March 31 enrollment deadline. Many insurers, however, don’t share that optimism.

These factors will have the unintended consequence of raising rates, sources said.

“We’re exasperated,” said the senior insurance official. “All of these major delays on very significant portions of the law are going to change what it’s going to cost.”

“My gut tells me that, for some people, these increases will be significant,” said Bill Hoagland, a former executive at Cigna and current senior vice president at the Bipartisan Policy Center.

Hoagland said Sebelius was seeking to “soften up the American public” to the likelihood that premiums will rise, despite promises to the contrary.

Republicans frequently highlight President Obama’s promise on the campaign trail to enact a healthcare law that would “cut the cost of a typical family’s premium by up to $2,500 a year.”

“They’re going to have to backpedal on that,” said Hoagland, who called Sebelius’s comment a “pre-emptive strike.”

“This was her way of getting out in front of it,” he added.

HHS didn’t comment for this article.

Insurers will begin the process this spring by filing their rate proposals with state officials.

Insurance commissioners will then release the rates sometime this summer, usually when they’re approved. Insurers could also leak their rates earlier as a political statement.

In some states, commissioners have the authority to deny certain rate increases, which could help prevent the most drastic hikes.

Either way, there will be a slew of bad headlines for the Obama administration just months before the election.

“It’s pretty bad timing,” said one insurance official.

Other health experts say predictions about premiums are premature.

David Cutler, who has been called an architect of Obama-Care, said, “Health premiums increase every year, so the odds are very good that they will increase next year as well.  None of that is news.  The question is whether it will be a lot or a little.  That depends in part on how big the insurers think the exchanges will be.”

Jon Gruber, who also helped design the Affordable Care Act, said, “The bottom line is that we just don’t know. Premiums were rising 7 to 10 percent a year before the law. So the question is whether we will see a continuation of that sort of single digit increase, as Sebelius said, or whether it will be larger.”

The White House and its allies have launched a full-court press to encourage healthy millennials to purchase coverage on the marketplaces.

HHS announced this week that sign-ups have exceeded 5 million, a marked increase since March 1.

White House press secretary Jay Carney on Tuesday claimed the administration has picked up the pace considerably, saying months ago reporters would have laughed if he “had said there would be 5 million enrollees by March 18.”

It remains unclear how many of those enrollees lost their insurance last year because of the law’s mandates. Critics have also raised questions about how the administration is counting people who signed up for insurance plans.

Political operatives will be watching premium increases this summer, most notably in states where there are contested Senate races.

In Iowa, which hosts the first presidential caucus in the nation and has a competitive Senate race this year, rates were expected to rise 100 percent on the exchange and by double digits on the larger, employer-based market, according to a February 2013 article in the Business Record.

Obamacare Insurer WellPoint Sees Double-Digit Rate Rise

Two months before health insurers must submit rate proposals for 2015 to government regulators, WellPoint Inc. (WLP) fired a surprising shot across their bow by predicting it may ask for “double-digit plus” increases.

Kathleen Sebelius, the U.S. Health and Human Services secretary, said March 13 that while premiums for health plans sold on the Obamacare insurance exchanges would rise next year, the increases would be “far less significant than they were before the passage of the Affordable Care Act.”

Individuals who bought their own insurance in 2010 paid 13 percent more than in 2009, a Kaiser Family Foundation survey found. The exchanges, which opened in October, serve those who buy their own individual or family insurance and aren’t covered by employer or government health plans. WellPoint’s statement on next year’s rates, the first by an insurer, startled some analysts while others said the company may be hedging bets as the Obama administration continually changes the rules on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

“The double-digit increase surprised me,” said Stephen Zaharuk, a New York-based analyst at Moody’s Investors Service, in a telephone interview. “If everything’s working according to plan, then the increases should be where the medical trend is, which should not be double-digit.”

The medical trend refers to the total cost of health care, including price inflation and patient utilization of services. It has grown about 5 percent to 6 percent in the last two years, and may increase to 8 percent or 9 percent this year, Zaharuk said.

‘Costs Down’

Joanne Peters, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services, declined to say if WellPoint’s prediction was in line with government expectations. “Since the Affordable Care Act became law, health-care costs have been slowing and premiums are increasing by the lowest rates in years,” Peters wrote in an e-mail.

WellPoint is the biggest commercial insurer in the Obamacare exchanges with 500,000 members through January. The company fell 1.3 percent to close at $99.69 in New York and has increased 55 percent over the past 12 months.

On March 21, the Indianapolis-based insurer raised its 2014 earnings forecast after saying it had expanded its customer base through Obamacare.

“We’re very optimistic as to where we are” on the exchanges, Ken Goulet, executive vice president for WellPoint’s commercial and specialty business, said at the company’s investor day meeting after the forecast was announced. The average age of those enrolled “came in right where we expected it to be.”

‘Double-Digit Plus’

Still, the 2015 rates will rise because of an expected reduction in government payments to insurers, he said. The payments, known as reinsurance, are intended to help ease insurance companies’ transition into the public exchanges.

“On a year-over-year basis on our exchanges, and it will vary by carrier, but all of them will probably be in double-digit plus,” Goulet said.

WellPoint’s prediction is “on the higher side” but the insurer is “playing it safe,” Ana Gupte, a New York-based analyst at Leerink Swann & Co., said in a phone interview. “They don’t know what the risk pool looks like yet, and until they get some experience, they’re going to be more cautious.”

Insurers may also be responding to the administration’s recent extension of the deadline to renew old health plans that don’t comply with Obamacare requirements, and a new requirement that insurers broaden their provider networks.

Rules ‘Changing’

“The rules of the road keep changing,” said Dan Mendelson, chief executive officer of Washington-based consulting firm Avalere Health. “These companies have to hedge their bets.”

Aetna Inc. (AET) spokeswoman Cynthia Michener declined to comment on her company’s 2015 rates.

“It’s too early to say,” she said today in an e-mail. The Hartford, Connecticut-based insurer is selling plans in 17 states.

Cathryn Donaldson, spokeswoman for Louisville, Kentucky-based Humana Inc. (HUM), which is participating in 14 states, also declined to comment. The insurers will submit preliminary rate proposals to regulators at the end of May.

The Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare, requires insurers to justify any rate increases of more than 10 percent, but federal regulators can’t restrict the amount that premiums rise.

Enrollment Guess

So far, insurers can only guess at the health of the people enrolled in their plans through the ages of those signing up. If enrollees are older and sicker than expected this year, that will help drive up premiums, according to Clare Krusing, spokeswoman for America’s Health Insurance Plans, the industry’s Washington lobby group.

“There’s broad recognition that you need to have participation from the young and healthy to balance out the old and less healthy, otherwise premiums will rise for everyone,” Krusing said in a telephone interview.

The group is concerned that the low tax penalty for people who don’t sign up -- which starts at $95, less than most individuals would pay for a monthly premium -- decreases the incentive for young, healthy people to enroll, she said.

“Our experience is similar to Massachusetts, which had a successful risk pool,” Peters, of HHS, said about the mix of people who signed up for exchange plans.

Increasing premiums next year may further worsen the mix of those enrolling up on the exchanges next year, said Moody’s Zaharuk.

Staying Away

“Already you hear that people aren’t signing up because it’s too expensive,” he said. “If, next year, there’s a double-digit increase, there’s going to be more people who say they can’t afford it anymore, who are the ones who need it least. The sicker population tends to stay with you.”

Even so, the system is not likely to go into a “death spiral” as critics of Obamacare have suggested, Mendelson said.

“There’s a subsidy, which will take the sting off for the lower-income population,” he said. “And even if your monthly premium goes from $400 to $450, if you need the product and want the product, you’re likely to keep buying the product.”

Doctors have started turning away Obamacare recipients over low payments

As physician reimbursement rates continue to plummet, many doctors around the country are no longer taking Obamacare patients.

In a new report at NPR, one Connecticut doctor explains that Obamacare plans, many of which use private insurance plans, are paying lower fees to doctors than Medicaid, a sum close to $80.00.

“I cannot accept a plan [in which] potentially commercial-type reimbursement rates were now going to be reimbursed at Medicare rates… You have to maintain a certain mix in private practice between the low reimbursers and the high reimbursers to be able to keep the lights on,” Dr. Doug Gerard told NPR.

“I don’t think most physicians know what they’re being reimbursed. Only when they start seeing some of those rates come through will they realize how low the rates are they agreed to.”

Suddenly, Obamacare is more unpopular than ever

This month's Kaiser Family Foundation poll finds that people more than ever feel otherwise.



Even after survey after survey has recently shown a major drop in the nation's uninsured rate, Obamacare just had its worst month in a key health-care poll.
Kaiser Family Foundation, which has done arguably the best and most consistent polling on the health-care law in the past four-plus years, found that public opinion on the law sank to a record low in July. More people than ever (53 percent) last month said they viewed the law unfavorably, an increase of 8 percentage points since June — one of the biggest opinion swings ever.



As the foundation notes, more people seemingly made up their minds about the law last month. The rate of those without an opinion on the Affordable Care Act dropped from 16 percent in June to 11 percent in July.


Historically, public opinion on the ACA hasn't changed much since it was enacted, despite some notable monthly swings. Kaiser pollsters said it's not clear what drove the change in opinion this month.


"Normally, when negatives go up, you can tie it to an event," said foundation chief executive Drew Altman in an interview. Events like a broken enrollment Web site, or people losing their health plans.


That doesn't seem to be case here, though. The poll was conducted before a federal appeals courts split on the legality subsidies in the 36 states with federal exchanges, and before House Republicans formally advanced plans to sue President Obama over his failure to enforce the law's employer coverage mandate. Yet, the poll was conducted after a string of surveys showing that the nation's uninsured rate has dropped significantly since Obamacare's coverage expansion took effect this year.
Kaiser's pollsters point out that most people still hear negative things about the law. People who said they discussed the law were about five times more likely to report that they heard mostly bad things about it, while people who said they encountered political ads about the law (53 percent) said those ads were mostly against it (19 percent versus 7 percent).


But that's pretty much always been the case, so it doesn't seem to explain the sudden spike in unfavorability. Altman said he couldn't really explain this month's finding.
"I think we're going to have to wait and see what this looks like in future months," Altman said. "It may be a blip."


Still, about six in 10 people said they’d prefer to keep the law and improve it. That includes a strong majority of Democrats (86 percent), most independents (58 percent) and almost a third of Republicans.

Doctors Nationwide Are Beginning to Reject Obamacare Patients

Obamacare is a scam, and relies completely upon everybody buying into the scam, in all aspects of the healthcare industry.


But some doctors and top hospitals are rebelling against Obamacare.  Doctors are rejecting Obamacare patients, and some are even blatantly saying that they “will not comply” with the law.


Even some hospitals are refusing to accept patients enrolled in Obamacare, choosing instead to serve only those with private insurance.



According to the Daily Caller, the amount that Obamacare plans pay reimbursements to doctors is so low, that many doctors are finding they can’t afford to take on more Obamacare patients.


Obamacare enrollees are already facing limited choices when it comes to doctors and hospitals that are covered by the limited choice of plans on the exchange, and those choices are only going to become more limited.


Obamacare plans pay reimbursements at a lower rate than purely private insurance plans, just slightly higher than Medicare or Medicaid reimbursement rates, which is roughly $80 versus $100 for a simple quick office visit.


“I cannot accept a plan [in which] potentially commercial-type reimbursement rates were now going to be reimbursed at Medicare rates,” Dr. Gerard, a Connecticut internist, told NPR.  ”You have to maintain a certain mix in private practice between the low reimbursers and the high reimbursers to be able to keep the lights on.”


“I don’t think most physicians know what they’re being reimbursed,” Gerard said. “Only when they start seeing some of those rates come through will they realize how low the rates are they agreed to.”


There is a big fear, which of course was warned about, but completely ignored, that the difference in rates will create a tiered system of top quality care for those that can afford it, and lower quality care for those stuck on Obamacare plans.


Private practice doctors will be especially hard hit by this developing two tier system, as their salaries depend upon reimbursement rates.  If the Obamacare plans don’t pay as much as private plans, why would any doctor or hospital willingly accept them, knowing they aren’t going to get paid the market rate?


As this trend continues, as Obamacare continues to rollout, and more people discover what a horrible joke it is, more doctors are going to begin defying the law and the mandates.  When Americans discover that they can’t find a doctor or hospital that will accept them on Obamacare, they will rebel against the law too.

Obamacare Incentivizes Doctors To Deny Treatment To Patients Covered Under ACA

It’s begun: doctors turning away patients covered under the Affordable Care Act because the physicians aren’t being reimbursed at a rate that allows them to “keep the lights on.”


It’s a twofold problem, because doctors need patients in order to stay in business, and patients need doctors because, well, they’re either sick or trying to manage their health to reduce their chances of getting sicker.


But more and more doctors are beginning to decline patients covered under Obamacare plans because the reimbursement rates are too low to make accepting their insurance an economically viable option. Meanwhile, many patients under ACA plans are funneled into coverage networks that offer limited healthcare choices in order for insurers on the network to keep their costs manageable.


NPR recently interviewed Connecticut doctor Doug Gerard for a story on Obamacare — from a physician’s point of view. Gerard said it makes no sense to admit Obamacare patients whose coverage pays out at a rate that’s roughly 80 percent of what he receives from private insurers that cover patients who aren’t participating in an Obamacare exchange.



On a recent afternoon at his office in Hartford, Conn., Dr. Doug Gerard examines a patient complaining of joint pain. Gerard, an internist, checks her out, asks her a few questions about her symptoms and then orders a few tests before sending her on her way.


For a typical quick visit like this, Gerard could get reimbursed $100 or more from a private insurer. For the same visit, Medicare pays less — about $80. And now, with the new private plans under the Affordable Care Act, Gerard says he would get something in between, but closer to the lower Medicare rates.


That’s not something he’s willing to accept.


“I cannot accept a plan [in which] potentially commercial-type reimbursement rates were now going to be reimbursed at Medicare rates,” Gerard says. “You have to maintain a certain mix in private practice between the low reimbursers and the high reimbursers to be able to keep the lights on.”


Three insurers offered plans on Connecticut’s ACA marketplace in 2014, and Gerard is only accepting one. He won’t say which, but he will say it pays the highest rate to doctors.


“I don’t think most physicians know what they’re being reimbursed. Only when they start seeing some of those rates come through will they realize how low the rates are they agreed to.”


Smaller private practices have much more difficulty maintaining that “certain mix” of patients at different coverage levels in order to run a business that’s both ethical and profitable. But even hospitals, which have historically accepted more types of coverage from broad patient demographics, are beginning to struggle with the small returns on Obamacare plans.


“[H]ospitals — especially top-tier ones that treat the most difficult diseases — are also increasingly rejecting the low reimbursement rates,” The Daily Caller observed Monday. “The nation’s best cancer treatment centers are often covered by very few exchange plans in their states; if Obamacare customers end up with a difficult-to-treat cancer, they’re likely to face a lower quality of care right off the bat.”


Over time, this trend could lead to a form of quality-of-care segregation in which certain types of health care providers who accept Obamacare patients dole out faster, cheaper and poorer services than providers who limit their acceptance of Obamacare-backed plans.


“If reimbursement rates to doctors stay low in Obamacare plans, more doctors could reject those plans. And that could mean that people will get access to insurance, but they may not get access to a lot of doctors,” NPR reported.


“I think it could lead potentially to this kind of distinction that there are these different tiers of quality of care,” Kevin Counihan, manager of Connecticut’s AccessHealthCT insurance exchange, told the network.

Poll: 1/3 of Americans Say They’ve Already Been Harmed by Obamacare

March 8, 2014



 
Obamacare is destroying the American economy.  When fully implemented, it will cause employers to cut jobs and hours, and will cause million more to lose their health insurance plans that they were told they could keep and be forced onto the government-created exchanges.


We’ve already gotten a taste of what’s to come in recent months.  Doctors and hospitals are rebelling against the law by refusing to accept Obamacare patients.  The Whole Foods CEO said that Obamacare was fascism and would cause his businesses to be forced to cut hours.  Millions have already lost their insurance in this unmitigated mess, despite what Harry Reid would like to think.


It’s obvious that this law wasn’t designed to help people.  In fact, over 90% of the Obamacare enrollees already had insurance, so it’s not like the law is helping the uninsured.  As Allen West, Charles Krauthammer, Wayne Root, and Ben Carson have already pointed out, this law was designed to bring big government socialism to America.

      
According to a new poll, one-third of Americans have already been harmed by Obamacare… and it’s not even in full force yet.


Fox Nation writes:


One-in-three U.S. voters now says his or her health insurance coverage has changed as a result of Obamacare, and the same number say the new national health care law had a negative personal impact on them.


Forty percent (40%) of Likely U.S. Voters have at least a somewhat favorable opinion of the health care law, while 56% regard it unfavorably, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. This includes 16% who view the law Very Favorably and 41% who have a Very Unfavorable opinion of it. (To see survey question wording, click here.)


Favorable opinions of the law are down from 45% two weeks ago and are the lowest measured since late December. Unfavorables hit an all-time high of 58% in mid-November. Favorables fell to a record low of 36% in that same survey.


It’s time to repeal this monstrosity before it kills the economy.  Whether they realize it or not, Obamacare is already affecting all Americans in one way or another.  That is, except for those in Congress and the White House who can exempt themselves from the law they wrote because they know it’ll negatively affect their healthcare.  Whether it’s increased premiums, lost insurance, lost jobs, or lost wages, we’re all feeling the brunt of Obamacare, and it’ll only get worse unless we stop it.

How Obamacare Distorts the Labor Market

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, American Action Forum president, tells Fox Business that although most employers offered health plans before Obamacare, the law’s mandates and coverage requirements have pushed up employers’ costs. Those costs have to be paid—either from reduced employee wages or less investment in the company.


One such distortion is that under the health care law, full-time work, which was once defined as has 40 hours-per-week, has been redefined as 30 hours-per-week. This has created a perverse incentive for employers to hire more part-time workers.


However, the health care law also distorts the supply of labor. In January the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) pointed out that “given the new taxes and other incentives [workers] will face and the financial benefits some will receive” it expects a “net reduction in the supply of labor."


In a paper for the Mercatus Center University of Chicago economic professor Casey Mulligan examined these labor supply distortions. Here are some of his key findings:

•The ACA’s employment taxes create strong incentives to work less. The health subsidies’ structure will put millions in a position in which working part time (29 hours or fewer, as defined by the ACA) will yield more disposable income than working their normal full-time schedule.

•The reduction in weekly employment due to these ACA disincentives is estimated to be about 3 percent, or about 4 million fewer full-time-equivalent workers. This is the aggregate result of the law’s employment disincentives, and is nearly double the impact most recently estimated by the Congressional Budget Office.

•Nearly half of American workers will be affected by at least one of the ACA’s employment taxes—and this does not account for the indirect effect on others as the labor market adjusts.


The end result is fewer workers in the labor market, adding additional costs on employers by forcing them to restructure their workforces and business processes.


Obamacare’s demand and supply distortions leave us with a weaker economy. Employees’ and employers’ “adjustments to the new incentives will make our economy less productive and stifle wage growth, even among workers who have no direct contact with the law's penalties and subsidies,” Mulligan writes in the Wall Street Journal [subscription required].


On how to move forward on effective health care reform, on October 22, the U.S. Chamber and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce will host the third annual Health Care Summit to explore how the private sector can lead on delivery system reform that also controls costs.

Rebjiii, "I truly pity self loathing conservative women like Jodi Miller and Michelle Malkin who believe they deserve to be treated like 2nd class citizens.  Jodi Miller & Michelle Malkin are a disgrace to their gender."

A Short History of Democrats, Republicans, and Racism

The following are a few basic historical facts that every American should know.

Fact: The Republican Party was founded primarily to oppose slavery, and Republicans eventually abolished slavery. The Democratic Party fought them and tried to maintain and expand slavery.

Why is this indisputable fact so rarely mentioned? PBS documentaries about slavery and the Civil War barely mention it, for example. One can certainly argue that the parties have changed dramatically in 150 years, but that does not change the historical fact that it was the Democrats who supported slavery and the Republicans who opposed it. And that indisputable fact should not be airbrushed out for fear that it will tarnish the modern Democratic Party.

Had the positions of the parties been the opposite, and the Democrats had fought the Republicans to end slavery, the historical party roles would no doubt be repeated incessantly in these documentaries. Funny how that works.

Fact: During the Civil War era, the "Radical Republicans" were given that name because they wanted to not only end slavery but also to endow the freed slaves with full citizenship, equality, and rights.

Yes, that was indeed a radical idea at the time!

Fact: Lincoln's Vice President, Andrew Johnson, was a strongly pro-Union (but also pro-slavery) Democrat who had been chosen as a compromise running mate to attract Democrats. After Lincoln was assassinated, Johnson thwarted
Republican efforts in Congress to recognize the civil rights of the freed slaves, and Southern Democrats continued to thwart any such efforts for nearly a century.

Fact: The Ku Klux Klan was originally and primarily an arm of the Southern Democratic Party, and its mission was to terrorize freed slaves and Republicans who sympathized with them.

Why is this fact conveniently omitted in so many popular histories and depictions of the KKK, including PBS documentaries? Had the KKK been founded by Republicans, that fact would no doubt be repeated constantly on those shows.

Fact: In the 1950s, President Eisenhower, a Republican, integrated the US military and promoted civil rights for minorities. Eisenhower pushed through the Civil Rights Act of 1957. One of Eisenhower's primary political opponents on civil rights prior to 1957 was none other than Lyndon Johnson, then the Democratic Senate Majority Leader. LBJ had voted the straight segregationist line until he changed his position and supported the 1957 Act.

Fact: The historic Civil Rights Act of 1964 was supported by a higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats in both houses of Congress. In the House, 80 percent of the Republicans and 63 percent of the Democrats voted in favor. In the Senate, 82 percent of the Republicans and 69 percent of the Democrats voted for it.

Fact: Contrary to popular misconception, the parties never "switched" on racism.

Following the epic civil rights struggles of the 1960s, the South began a major demographic shift from Democratic to Republican dominance. Many believe that this shift was motivated mainly by racism. While it is certainly true that many Southern racists abandoned the Democratic Party over its new support for racial equality and integration, the notion that they would flock to the Republican Party -- which was a century ahead of the Democrats on those issues -- makes no sense whatsoever.

Yet virtually every liberal, when pressed on the matter, will inevitably claim that the parties "switched," and most racist Democrats became Republicans! In their minds, this historical ju jitsu maneuver apparently transfers all the past sins of the Democrats (slavery, the KKK, Jim Crow laws, etc.) onto the Republicans and all the past virtues of the Republicans (e.g., ending slavery) onto the Democrats! That's quite a feat!

It is true that Barry Goldwater's opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 probably attracted some racist Democrats to the Republican Party. However, Goldwater was not a racist -- at least not an overt racist like so many Southern Democrats of the time, such as George Wallace and Bull Connor. He publicly professed racial equality, and his opposition to the 1964 Act was based on principled grounds of states rights. In any case, his libertarian views were out of step with the mainstream of the Republican Party, and he lost the 1964 Presidential election to LBJ in a landslide.

But Goldwater's opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act provided liberals an opening to tar the Republican Party as racist, and they have tenaciously repeated that label so often over the years that it is now the conventional wisdom among liberals. But it is really nothing more than an unsubstantiated myth -- a convenient political lie. If the Republican Party was any more racist than the Democratic Party even in 1964, why did a higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats in both houses of Congress vote for the 1964 Civil Rights Act? The idea that Goldwater's vote on the 1964 Civil Rights Act trumps a century of history of the Republican Party is ridiculous, to say the least.

Every political party has its racists, but the notion that Republicans are more racist than Democrats or any other party is based on nothing more than a constant drumbeat of unsubstantiated innuendo and assertions by Leftists, constantly echoed by the liberal media. It is a classic example of a Big Lie that becomes "true" simply by virtue of being repeated so many times.

A more likely explanation for the long-term shift from Democratic to Republican dominance in the South was the perception, fair or not, that the Democratic Party had rejected traditional Christian religious values and embraced radical secularism. That includes its hardline support for abortion, its rejection of prayer in public schools, its promotion of the gay agenda, and many other issues.

In the 1960s the Democratic Party essentially changed its strategy for dealing with African Americans. Thanks largely to earlier Republican initiatives on civil rights, blatant racial oppression was no longer a viable political option. Whereas before that time Southern Democrats had overtly and proudly segregated and terrorized blacks, the national Democratic Party decided instead to be more subtle and get them as dependent on government as possible. As LBJ so elegantly put it (in a famous moment of candor that was recorded for posterity), "I'll have those niggers voting Democratic for the next 200 years." At the same time, the Democrats started a persistent campaign of lies and innuendo, falsely equating any opposition to their welfare state with racism.

From a purely cynical political perspective, the Democratic strategy of black dependence has been extremely effective. LBJ knew exactly what he was doing. African Americans routinely vote well over 90 percent Democratic for fear that Republicans will cut their government benefits and welfare programs. And what is the result? Before LBJ's Great Society welfare programs, the black illegitimacy rate was as low as 23 percent, but now it has more than tripled to 72 percent.

Most major American city governments have been run by liberal Democrats for decades, and most of those cities have large black sections that are essentially dysfunctional anarchies. Cities like Detroit are overrun by gangs and drug dealers, with burned out homes on every block in some areas. The land values are so low due to crime, blight, and lack of economic opportunity that condemned homes are not even worth rebuilding. Who wants to build a home in an urban war zone? Yet they keep electing liberal Democrats -- and blaming "racist" Republicans for their problems!

Washington DC is another city that has been dominated by liberal Democrats for decades. It spends more per capita on students than almost any other city in the world, yet it has some of the worst academic achievement anywhere and is a drug-infested hellhole. Barack Obama would not dream of sending his own precious daughters to the DC public schools, of course -- but he assures us that those schools are good enough for everyone else. In fact, Obama was instrumental in killing a popular and effective school voucher program in DC, effectively killing hopes for many poor black families trapped in those dysfunctional public schools. His allegiance to the teachers unions apparently trumps his concern for poor black families.

A strong argument could also be made that Democratic support for perpetual affirmative action is racist. It is, after all, the antithesis of Martin Luther King's vision of a color-blind society. Not only is it "reverse racism," but it is based on the premise that African Americans are incapable of competing in the free market on a level playing field. In other words, it is based on the notion of white supremacy, albeit "benevolent" white supremacy rather than the openly hostile white supremacy of the pre-1960s Democratic Party.

The next time someone claims that Republicans are racist and Democrats are not, don't fall for it

It would appear, liberals are better versed in treating individuals as second class citizens.

The Democratic Party's War On Women

While his poll numbers have plummeted and a midterm election nears, President Obama is dusting off the old women’s issues playbook of his party and is basing his speeches on its anachronistic rhetoric. They are attempting to once again portray themselves as the only political party that serves women. They are doing this by attacking Republicans as the party that wants to abolish birth control and tolerate lower incomes for women.


The plain fact is, the rhetoric of birth control and income equality are relics of the 1960s and 1970s and are not directly relevant to the issues of adult women living under the Obama economy. It is the changes in their lives that have occurred since Obama took office that are on their minds. 

           

When it comes to an examination of the behavior of Democrats toward women, however, what they have actually done, and what Obama has done, is far more damaging and revealing of their war on women. While Democrats might predict that women will suffer if Republicans are elected, it is easy to cite those things that are already happening to women under Obama’s rule that are hurting them. 


The issues of reproductive freedom have their roots in Feminist activism of the 1960s. The driving concept of that movement was that men controlled the family, dominated women, and extended that domination to the workplace. Consequently they earned more money and held more wealth. If women had reproductive choice, feminists asserted, then they would no longer be bound by the old-fashioned chains of pregnancy and motherhood.


These issues, of birth control and same sex marriage, are topics of sex and marriage that are the concerns of single women, not adult women who are concerned with the needs of their homes and families. These are the focus of discussions on the college campuses and bars of America and not the kitchen tables. In short, with regard to women’s issues, the Democratic Party needs to grow up and address the concerns of adult women. Now that they are married with kids they are beyond talking to their girlfriends about sex and dating.


Obama’s record with American women is abysmal, perhaps the worst in U.S. history.


Under Obama’s policies and administrative agenda the adult woman’s life has become far more difficult. The price of gasoline has stayed near four dollars a gallon for the longest time in U.S. history. And while President G.W. Bush proved that a simple presidential announcement that drilling will open up on Federal land will lower the price of gasoline, Obama uses every administrative trick, such as delaying the Keystone pipeline and ignoring the issuance of new permits to drill on Federal land, to stifle oil production. And recent EPA rules to limit carbon emissions on power plants will only increase the price of electricity for all families. EPA lawyers support Democrats.


In 2007, the year before Barack Obama started to run for president, more women were in the labor force.  At that time there were 70,988,000 women age 16 and over in the labor force. Now there are only 72,741,000 but their population has increased by 8.26 million.  Before Obama took office 56.6% of eligible women were working, now it’s dropped to 53.5%. Women, whether single or married, have lost jobs and are now worse off than they were before Obama took office.


Some of this was due to the mortgage market crash of 2008 but as I have shown this also was caused by the Democratic Party initiative to pursue social justice in the housing industry.


And while fewer women are working, their property taxes have skyrocketed in this time period and their incomes have declined. Under Obama’s policies the top 1% have seized 95% of the wealth grown in the U.S. while he was in the White House.  American women are without jobs and those who work are earning less while Obama has taken care to ensure that wealth is being redistributed to those in the top 1%.


Republicans have a unique opportunity to turn the women’s issues campaign focus around and feature TV ads with American moms talking about the price of gasoline has really hurt their weekly budget, and how they don’t know how much her health care will cost next year, and if they can afford it at all. For the first time in their lives, American mothers are genuinely fearful that they may lose their health care, and have to pay cash for doctor visits at a time when their property taxes and other expenses have dramatically increased. These actions are directly caused by President Obama and his party’s sneaky passage of the Affordable Care Act.  An Act passed without public Congressional Hearings or the approval of the American people.


And since 2009 90% of all Americans have lost net worth.  These are financial facts which affect all adult women all around the country, not just a tiny percentage who seek a same-sex marriage.


The average American woman may say, okay, if two women in love want to get married, then I suppose that’s acceptable, but my real concern is who my family doctor will be next year. And President Obama not only has no answer for that, he has created that question for the first time in the lives of American mothers.


And while Democrats have accused Republicans of interfering with the birth control rights of women, the single motherhood rate of Hispanic teenage women has skyrocketed to rival that of black teenagers. This does not bode well for the futures of Hispanics in the U.S. who are also suffering, under Democratic rule, a high school dropout rate twice that of blacks.


The groups that Democrats claim to help the most, blacks and Hispanics, seem to have the greatest issues with reproductive freedom. While polls show that American women do not support the Affordable Care, their concerns fall on deaf Democratic ears.


The Democratic Party rose to power and expanded its electoral base in the 1960s by representing the legitimate concerns of minorities and women. Now that feminism has become an institution, it has fallen into the traditional pitfalls of maintaining their prestigious jobs, perks, and control and lost touch with the concerns of American women.


They may still face a glass ceiling but many women are now more concerned about the holes in the floor which cause them to drop out of the middle class and earn less money and have less options in the work place.


While Democrats love to make reproductive choice a campaign issue, the major reason for this may be that if they focused on how American women are suffering due to Democratic policies on housing, employment, education, and health care they would lose the vote of every female voter.



While his poll numbers have plummeted and a midterm election nears, President Obama is dusting off the old women’s issues playbook of his party and is basing his speeches on its anachronistic rhetoric. They are attempting to once again portray themselves as the only political party that serves women. They are doing this by attacking Republicans as the party that wants to abolish birth control and tolerate lower incomes for women.


The plain fact is, the rhetoric of birth control and income equality are relics of the 1960s and 1970s and are not directly relevant to the issues of adult women living under the Obama economy. It is the changes in their lives that have occurred since Obama took office that are on their minds.


When it comes to an examination of the behavior of Democrats toward women, however, what they have actually done, and what Obama has done, is far more damaging and revealing of their war on women. While Democrats might predict that women will suffer if Republicans are elected, it is easy to cite those things that are already happening to women under Obama’s rule that are hurting them.


The issues of reproductive freedom have their roots in Feminist activism of the 1960s. The driving concept of that movement was that men controlled the family, dominated women, and extended that domination to the workplace. Consequently they earned more money and held more wealth. If women had reproductive choice, feminists asserted, then they would no longer be bound by the old-fashioned chains of pregnancy and motherhood.




These issues, of birth control and same sex marriage, are topics of sex and marriage that are the concerns of single women, not adult women who are concerned with the needs of their homes and families. These are the focus of discussions on the college campuses and bars of America and not the kitchen tables. In short, with regard to women’s issues, the Democratic Party needs to grow up and address the concerns of adult women. Now that they are married with kids they are beyond talking to their girlfriends about sex and dating.


Obama’s record with American women is abysmal, perhaps the worst in U.S. history.


Under Obama’s policies and administrative agenda the adult woman’s life has become far more difficult. The price of gasoline has stayed near four dollars a gallon for the longest time in U.S. history. And while President G.W. Bush proved that a simple presidential announcement that drilling will open up on Federal land will lower the price of gasoline, Obama uses every administrative trick, such as delaying the Keystone pipeline and ignoring the issuance of new permits to drill on Federal land, to stifle oil production. And recent EPA rules to limit carbon emissions on power plants will only increase the price of electricity for all families. EPA lawyers support Democrats.


In 2007, the year before Barack Obama started to run for president, more women were in the labor force.  At that time there were 70,988,000 women age 16 and over in the labor force. Now there are only 72,741,000 but their population has increased by 8.26 million.  Before Obama took office 56.6% of eligible women were working, now it’s dropped to 53.5%. Women, whether single or married, have lost jobs and are now worse off than they were before Obama took office.


Some of this was due to the mortgage market crash of 2008 but as I have shown this also was caused by the Democratic Party initiative to pursue social justice in the housing industry.


And while fewer women are working, their property taxes have skyrocketed in this time period and their incomes have declined. Under Obama’s policies the top 1% have seized 95% of the wealth grown in the U.S. while he was in the White House.  American women are without jobs and those who work are earning less while Obama has taken care to ensure that wealth is being redistributed to those in the top 1%.


Republicans have a unique opportunity to turn the women’s issues campaign focus around and feature TV ads with American moms talking about the price of gasoline has really hurt their weekly budget, and how they don’t know how much her health care will cost next year, and if they can afford it at all. For the first time in their lives, American mothers are genuinely fearful that they may lose their health care, and have to pay cash for doctor visits at a time when their property taxes and other expenses have dramatically increased. These actions are directly caused by President Obama and his party’s sneaky passage of the Affordable Care Act.  An Act passed without public Congressional Hearings or the approval of the American people.


And since 2009 90% of all Americans have lost net worth.  These are financial facts which affect all adult women all around the country, not just a tiny percentage who seek a same-sex marriage.


The average American woman may say, okay, if two women in love want to get married, then I suppose that’s acceptable, but my real concern is who my family doctor will be next year. And President Obama not only has no answer for that, he has created that question for the first time in the lives of American mothers.


And while Democrats have accused Republicans of interfering with the birth control rights of women, the single motherhood rate of Hispanic teenage women has skyrocketed to rival that of black teenagers. This does not bode well for the futures of Hispanics in the U.S. who are also suffering, under Democratic rule, a high school dropout rate twice that of blacks.


The groups that Democrats claim to help the most, blacks and Hispanics, seem to have the greatest issues with reproductive freedom. While polls show that American women do not support the Affordable Care, their concerns fall on deaf Democratic ears.


The Democratic Party rose to power and expanded its electoral base in the 1960s by representing the legitimate concerns of minorities and women. Now that feminism has become an institution, it has fallen into the traditional pitfalls of maintaining their prestigious jobs, perks, and control and lost touch with the concerns of American women.


They may still face a glass ceiling but many women are now more concerned about the holes in the floor which cause them to drop out of the middle class and earn less money and have less options in the work place.


While Democrats love to make reproductive choice a campaign issue, the major reason for this may be that if they focused on how American women are suffering due to Democratic policies on housing, employment, education, and health care they would lose the vote of every female voter.

MILLER: Weiner, Spitzer, Filner sex scandals - So which party has a war on women?

Democrat leaders refuse to condemn within their own ranks


Democrats launched the “war on women,” but they didn’t first sweep their side of the battlefield for land mines. Anthony Weiner, Eliot Spitzer and San Diego Mayor Bob Filner have dominated the headlines for their atrocious disrespect and sexual harassment of women. Yet the Democratic leadership is hiding in a foxhole.


The Weiner mess keeps getting more repulsive. The Democratic New York City mayor wannabe admits to sending photos of his genitalia and having phone sex with other women as recently as last year. It seems running for public office hasn’t quashed his compulsion. In an interview in The New York Daily News this week, the former congressman refused to answer definitively that he had stopped cheating on his wife, Huma Abedin, with his sexual emails and texts to young women.


On Tuesday, Mr. Weiner’s communications director, Barbara Morgan, called a female former campaign intern a slew of profane words, most of which can’t be printed in a family newspaper. Ms. Morgan was reacting to Olivia Nuzzi writing in The Daily News about her negative experiences during a monthlong internship, such as Mr. Weiner repeatedly calling female interns “Monica.” Ms. Morgan told Talking Points Memo that the college student “sucked” at her job and was a “slutbag.” That term quickly trended worldwide on Twitter.


Ms. Morgan used a variation of a pejorative word that last year triggered the Democrats’ grand idea to accuse the Republican Party of waging a “war on women.” Sandra Fluke was a Georgetown University Law School student who testified on Capitol Hill that Obamacare should force the Catholic school to pay for contraception. Georgetown, from which I also graduated as an undergrad, does not include health insurance coverage for birth control as it conflicts with its Catholic doctrine.


Radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh said that Ms. Fluke was a “slut” and “wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex.” Seizing on the comments, the Democrats launched an election-year campaign to link Republicans with the conservative radio host in order to get more female votes. Never mind that the comments were repudiated by GOP leaders and had nothing to do with policymaking.


Now, Democrats are faced with one elected official, Mr. Filner, who admitted to sexually harassing his employees at City Hall, which is illegal. They have Eliot Spitzer, the former New York governor who admitted to using prostitutes and was caught trafficking one woman across state lines, running for New York City comptroller. Then there is Mr. Weiner, the pervert who can’t stop cheating on his wife, no matter what the consequences.


How has the party leadership reacted? Have they tried to defend women victimized by these predators? Have they spoken out that men who treat women like dirt should not be in public office? No. They hid out in their bunkers.


On Monday, a reporter asked White House deputy press secretary Josh Earnest at the the daily briefing, “The president, as the leader of the Democratic Party, does he have an opinion of whether or not Anthony Weiner should stay or go as far as the race is concerned there?” Mr. Earnest replied, “Not one that I’ve heard.”


Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has not made a peep about the sex scandals. Reporters have repeatedly asked the senior senator from New York, Democrat Charles E. Schumer, about the Weiner scandal, but he refuses to answer.


Also, Democratic National Committee Chairman Debbie Wasserman-Shultz has not called on either Mr. Weiner or Mr. Spitzer to get out of their races. The most powerful female in the Democratic Party ignored for months the eight women who came forward with shocking stories of the sexual predator, Mr. Filner.


Finally, after the mayor said he would not step down but instead go to two weeks of so-called sex rehab, Ms. Wasserman-Shultz put out a written statement that he should resign. California’s two female Democratic senators — Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer — also called on the groping San Diego mayor to go to therapy and not come back.


House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is the only exception to the Democrats’ tacit approval of mistreatment of women within their own ranks. Seemingly keeping to the social mores of her Baltimore Catholic school upbringing, Mrs. Pelosi is the only national elected official to say that Mr. Weiner should drop out of the mayor’s race.


Referring to both the former New York congressman and Mr. Filner, the California Democrat said last week, “The conduct of some of these people that we’re talking about here is reprehensible. It is so disrespectful of women. And what’s really stunning about it is they don’t even realize it. You know, they don’t have a clue.”


There is no war against women, but there are men in public office who think women are nothing but their sexual playthings. Democrats like to think of themselves as the party that battles for women’s rights, but apparently, their own officials are in a demilitarized zone. The president and all the leaders of the party should denounce the behavior of Mr. Spitzer, Mr. Weiner and Mr. Filner and demand they permanently leave public office.

She Just Nailed the Democrats’ Double Standard in the ‘War on Women’

Speak ill of a woman, and you’ll likely be labeled a misogynist — if you’re a Republican, at least.


The same standard seems not to apply to Democrats, and pointing that fact out could earn hoots and hollers from those around you.


“You want to talk about [the] ‘war on women,’ why don’t we talk about the war that Democrats waged this week against the woman who heads the DNC?” asked GOP strategist Ana Navarro on ABC’s “This Week” on September 21st.


The response from the Democrats on the panel: loud groans.


Navarro was referencing the Politico article that laid out Democrats’ complaints with Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, and as her fellow panelists derided her, Navarro fought through to drive the point home.


“If a Republican had gone out and talked about how somebody wanted to spend all this money on clothes and say all the gossipy things they said about Debbie Wasserman-Schultz — with the White House’s fingerprints all over it — you all would be screaming bloody murder,” Navarro said.

Networks Barely Notice White House 'War on Women’s Pay'

Obama has been a champion of equal pay for women, at least according to his administration and the network news media.


The broadcast networks boosted his image on the subject throughout his presidency, from the first bill he signed into law in 2009 to a September 2014 speech mentioning “equal pay.” ABC said Obama waged an “assault” on the pay gap with an executive order over salary disclosures, while CBS said he “boosts equal pay for women.”


The networks credited Obama with signing the Lilly Ledbetter Act, which would allow women more time to sue employers for unfair compensation. Stories repeated his “new attack line” against Republicans over equal pay and praised other legislative efforts including his support for the Paycheck Fairness Act. Yet, the networks virtually ignored the hypocrisy when the White House was taken to task for its own gender wage gap.


Between Obama’s inauguration in January 2009 and early October 2014, ABC, CBS and NBC news programs aired 22 stories that mentioned equal pay or pay gap and the Obama administration in some way. Roughly 95 percent (21 of 22 stories) said nothing about a gender wage gap within the White House itself.


Even liberals and the media knew the entire pay gap construct was a charade, because the method of determining the gap the media and the left cite was an overly simplistic comparison of all women in all jobs to all men in all jobs. But Obama, the media, and many others continued to claim that women make only 77 or 78 cents to a man’s dollar.


Measuring by the same standard Obama has used to claim women are being discriminated against, there is also gender wage gap in the Obama White House. Annual staff salaries showed an 88 cents to $1 difference between women and men, American Enterprise Institute determined. AEI published its findings in multiple posts in September 2013 and December 2013. CNN.com later reported those findings. The Daily Mail (UK) spoke up even sooner with its own calculation in April 2012 that there was an $11,000 difference between the median female and male salaries at the White House.


The hypocrisy on Obama’s part barely registered with the networks which only mentioned it in one story.


As Obama and Liberals Campaigned on ‘War on Women,’ Networks Ignored Pay Disparity for White House Women


Just a campaign season ago liberals blasted conservatives with so-called “war on women” rhetoric, and a few, like Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., were still using it this election cycle. One line of argument that the left used repeatedly was the issue of “equal pay.” Obama brought up gender pay gaps many times throughout his presidency often earning him network praise.


In 2012, Obama campaigned saying he wanted women to make “equal pay for equal work.” That year he also revived the “war on women” theme in attack ads against Mitt Romney’s pro-life stance, according to Politico.


CBS “This Morning” said nothing about the disparity between pay for men and women in the White House on June 23, 2014, when it reported on the White House Summit on Working Families where “issues like equal pay” were “on the agenda.” The story included an interview between Obama and CBS co-anchor Norah O’Donnell.


Obama told her, “[A]cross the board in the aggregate, women are making 77 cents for every dollar that a man’s making. Discrimination’s still taking place and so part of what we want to do is to lift up the possibilities of changes in federal policy, but we don’t want to restrict it to just federal laws.”


In that broadcast, O’Donnell failed to follow up by asking if the president knew there was a pay gap among his staff or what he intended to do about it.


NBC “Nightly News” brought on Maria Shriver to present her own report on the economic status of women. Shriver had also been invited to the White House to present her findings about the  between men and women. Unsurprisingly, on the Jan. 14, 2014, “Nightly News” she quoted Obama and praised him saying he “has pledged to fix the problem” Shriver called a “persistent wage gap.” Her story also cited the oft-repeated, but misleading statistic that women make 77 cents to every dollar a man makes.


Only the April 8, 2014, “World News with Diane Sawyer” mentioned criticism of the White House pay gap, burying it at the very end of its segment.


“The White House hopes highlighting the issue of fair pay will help Democrats at the polls in November. Though the Paycheck Fairness Act is set to be considered by the Senate soon, it is unlikely to get through the GOP-led House. The right calling it, quote ‘A bizarre obsession’ and pointing out that women in Obama’s own White House make 88 cents to men’s dollar. So Diane, both sides using this politically,” ABC correspondent Mara Schiavocampo said.


That same night CBS “Evening News” teased a story saying “the president boosts equal pay for women” but said nothing in its story about the Obama pay gap.


In contrast, both The New York Times and The Washington Post repeatedly exposed the White House pay gap. The gap “remains entrenched at White House,” the Post wrote on July 1, 2014. The next day the Post exposed the administration’s struggle to “explain how it is they can complain about the gender pay gap and then have one of their own.”


The Times pointed out on April 7, 2014, that Obama’s “Own Payroll Draws Scrutiny” and suggested gender issues including “pay equity” could be “critical” in midterm elections. That story repeated Carney’s claim that the White House gender gap of 88 cents to a dollar was “misleading” “because it aggregates the salaries of White House staff members at all levels, including the lowest levels, where women outnumber men.”


The Times then cited a Republican spokesman criticism and explained that the “77-cent statistic that Mr. Obama has often cited was misleading for the same reason.”


The Equal Pay Charade


Equal pay was easily the most misleading lefty argument in its farcical “war on women” claims. What many liberals, including Obama, didn’t want to admit was that the statistic they paraded out to incite feminine outrage was a useless measurement.


Comparing what all full-time females with what all full-time males make failed to take into consideration differences like the fact that men and women don’t all choose the same fields of employment, get the same levels of education, have the same amount of work experience or even work the same number of hours in a full-time work week. When many of those things were accounted for the gap narrowed significantly.


In fact, it was such an absurd comparison that one far-left writer at Slate.com, Hanna Rosin, actually called it a “lie” and said it was time to stop repeating the 77 cents on the dollar nonsense.


“Barack Obama said it during his last campaign. Women’s groups say it ever April 9, which is Equal Pay Day,” Rosin wrote. “I’ve heard the line enough times that I feel the need to set the record straight: It’s not true.”


The problem, in her opinion, was that the statistic “gives the impression that a man and a woman standing next to each other doing the same job for the same number of hours get paid different salaries. That’s not at all the case.”


She said a closer to “apples-to-apples” comparison by two economists that was designed to account for education, experience, occupation and industry narrowed the gap to 91 cents. Rosin noted “women congregate in different professions than men do, and the largely male professions tend to be higher-paying.”


Obama and the media often portrayed any gender “pay gap” as the result of overt discrimination -- which is already illegal -- rather than the result of making different personal choices. No two individuals are the same as one other. The network news media often helped bolster claims of discrimination by repeating the statistics without explaining how misleading they really were.


Comedian Sarah Silverman cried discrimination in a recent, raunchy, promotional video complaining about the issue of equal pay and joked that she was going to get a sex change operation in order to make the same money as a man. But even without a sex change, she had a net worth of $10 million, according to Celebrity Net Worth. That’s more than three times the net worth of comedian John Oliver who just got his own fake new show on HBO.


Pay discrimination is already illegal, and has been since President John F. Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act of 1963. Yet, year after year, election after election the left trotted out this statistic to argue for more government.


Obama’s administration wanted to have it both ways and the broadcast networks have mostly failed to take him to task for it, even when print media outlets did. The administration repeated the misleading statistic time and again, but insisted “women who do the same work as men” at the White House do get paid the same.


CNN.com reported in April 2014, that as Obama was on another equal pay kick, his press secretary Jay Carney was caught off guard by a reporter asking about White House pay disparity.


“What I can tell you is that we have, as an institution here, have aggressively addressed this challenge, and obviously, though, at the 88 cents that you cite, that is not a hundred, but it is better than the national average," Carney said.


He continued, "And when it comes to the bottom line that women who do the same work as men have to be paid the same, there is no question that that is happening here at the White House at every level."


Methodology: MRC Business examined all news segments on NBC, CBS and ABC mentioning “equal pay” or “pay gap” between Jan. 20, 2009, and Oct. 10, 2014, to see which ones mentioned the president, the White House or the Obama administration. The the stories were analyzed to see if they mentioned pay differences among male and female White House staff.

Liberal Agenda in Two Words: Victim Mentality

I’ve come to the conclusion that there is a simple explanation for the agenda of the Left. While some of the liberal ideas started with a noble groundwork such as equality for all, etc., the Left has been hijacked by a force called “Victim Mentality“.





Education





We have a failing system in the U.S. While Republicans want to raise standards, require responsibility and motivate, the Liberals want to lower standards, point fingers and accept mediocrity. When children do poorly on a standardized test, the kids are the victims of a racist test. When a student-athlete graduates high school with a 4th grade reading level, blame the coaching staff and “sports institution”, not the athletic victim. When the dropout rate begins to soar, don’t question the truants or their parents, they’re just victims too.





Business





 We see this phenomenon as well in the business world. With terms like “big business”, “big oil”, “big tobacco”, “big auto”, we’re able to conjure up a David vs. Goliath scenario… with the poor working class Americans as the little guy, the victim. We treat smokers like they’re victims of an unknown danger… a danger unknown to those who have lived under a rock for the last half century, maybe. Big evil fast food chains are killing victims with their fatty foods… but it’s not the responsibility of the individual to limit their intake of grease, fries and junk, is it? The irony was, as is in real life, that David, the small guy, was the victor. Likewise, we as a mass, control those industries, they don’t control us. Think I’m wrong? Gather 1/2 the fast food restaurant customers in the country, just half, and boycott the purchase of fast food for a year and see what happens. Ask any big business who’s stepped in the path of Jesse Jackson just who the victim is.





Another irony is that most of these liberals who complain about “big business” enjoy the fruits of these evil empires. They drive cars, buy houses or rent apartments, eat at restaurants, talk on telephones, watch televisions, etc� with the products of “big business”. If these people had to go out and build these items themselves, most wouldn’t be able to. The advantages to big business are the economies of scale and we enjoy them everyday in having choices of products from all over the world, lower costs, or simple logistics (our inability to make a phone call, if we had to build the phone and construct the lines to all of our friends and family ourselves).





Social Programs





We don’t require that those receiving aid who are capable of working, actually do something. We just require they show need and blame their situation on others. We don’t look to the best way to get them on their feet, we look for the easiest way to distribute a check. Afterall, the liberals contend, it’s not the fault of most of these people, they’re just victims… of society, of bad luck, of big business… whatever. Sure, there are a few truly needy folks, but those are better left served by the local community, not one-size-fits-all national programs.





Criminal Justice System





One of the most prevalent areas of victim mentality is the criminal justice system. Long gone are the days where criminals are actually held responsible. Liberals now have created a system that blames society for a serial killer, blames playground bullies for a rapist, blames minimum wage for someone going postal and blames the dead for putting themselves in the path of a killer. Instead of punishing, taking responsibility and deterring criminals, liberals excuse, reason and explain away their behavior. “You just need to understand his mind” or “look at his childhood” become the rallying cries. It’s ridiculous. Take the old case of Rodney King. The guy was (and continues to be) a habitual criminal, on drugs, running from and trying to attack the cops. After a few minutes of forceful restraint, he’s immediately cast into heroism, given a multimillion dollar settlement and is viewed as the victim, not the lowlife criminal thug that he is. When the cops are acquitted of wrongdoing in the case, thousands take to the streets to riot, loot (from small businesses, many going under as a result) and destroy billions of dollars of city infrastructure… but who’s accountable? That’s right… the racist criminal justice system.





Taxes





 How about the tax cuts? Instead of the focus being on the true victims of an unfair progressive tax system, the focus, instead, was on the ‘victims‘ like our children and grandchildren “who will have to fund this tax cut later”, or the “poor” who are so oppressed by the “rich” that they deserve lower tax rates and higher tax rebates. Create victims and you can get their votes.





Foreign Policy





 Finally, let’s look at America’s standing on the world stage. We have the liberals calling our war in Iraq “illegal and unjust”… making Saddam out to be the victim. We destroy the Taliban, an evil regime in Afghanistan, and it’s “you’ve just blown the country back to the stone ages”… untrue, but still, the Taliban were just victims of our “empire building”. We capture al Qaeda members and hold them for questioning and the Left screams abuse, cruel and unusual, and barbaric treatment…. just more victims. Our interests are bombed all over the world, and yet somehow, it’s the bombers who were justified because they’re victims of our foreign policy. Terrorists kill 3,000 of our own, tear down several skyscrapers, destroy 4 airplanes and slow our economy… but they’re the victims because we don’t do more for their cause.





All in all, it’s just simply become the liberals� political strategy. If you can create enough victims in the world, you can swoop in as “defender of their cause” and gain their votes. It has been a brilliant strategy in the political arena, because representatives do just that, “represent”. The Liberals have held a monopoly on victimization for quite some time and they’ve become arrogant about it, which is costing them dearly now. You see, they’ve carved up so many victim groups that the interests among each group conflicts with the needs of another and the Liberals are finding their “hero” resources running thin trying to support so many vast wants and needs. They’ve fractured society into so many fragments, it’s impossible for them to swoop in and save the day when their actions help one group, but hurt another.

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