More Politically INCORRECT Cartoons for Tuesday September 26, 2017
URL of the original posting site: http://dailysignal.com/2017/07/31/how-trump-could-force-congress-and-its-staff-to-live-under-obamacare/
President Donald Trump speaks during a Cabinet meeting Monday with, from left, Defense Secretary James Mattis, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, and Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao. (Photo: Mike Theiler/UPI/Newscom)
“I think he should just do it.”—@Heritage’s Robert Moffit
“This is one more instance of Congress passing an unpleasant, expensive, onerous law on citizens and then conferring a valuable benefit on itself,” Joe Morris, former general counsel for the Office of Personnel Management, told The Daily Signal.
Over the weekend, Trump tweeted that he could take away the exemption, granted by the Obama administration’s Office of Personnel Management, to prod Congress toward agreement on getting rid of Obamacare. The provision provides what critics say is tantamount to an unconstitutional waiver for members of Congress and their staff from rules mandated by the Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare. To exempt themselves, the 535 lawmakers and their more than 13,000 staffers are treated as if they were a small business employing fewer than 50 workers.
The exemption policy was created in an OPM directive under President Barack Obama, and could easily be overturned by Trump, said Morris, who worked at the agency during the Reagan administration.
Morris said that applying Obamacare rules to Congress and its staff—as the language of the 2010 law actually requires—could prompt Republican lawmakers to act on their promise to repeal and replace the law. They failed to reach 50 votes to do so in the Senate last week, when three Republicans joined Democrats to scuttle a “skinny repeal” proposal that would have set up a conference with the House.
“Congress could feel the pain of most Americans,” Morris said. “It is worth trying. If members of Congress are aggrieved and their staffs are aggrieved, they might be more likely to take action.”
Not a single Republican voted to pass Obamacare. Under a subsection of the Affordable Care Act, Democrats voted Congress out of its own employer-sponsored Federal Employees Health Benefits Program. The provision required members and House and Senate staff to enroll in the new health insurance exchanges created for other Americans under the law.
Obamacare subsidies are capped so that no one with income higher than $48,000 gets a subsidy. Members of Congress earn $174,00 annually.
On Aug. 7, 2013, the OPM—which administers the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program—determined that members of Congress and staff still could enroll in the program through the SHOP Exchange, a health insurance exchange set up to provide special insurance subsidies for small businesses in Washington, D.C., with fewer than 50 employees.
Morris co-authored a report for The Heritage Foundation, before the OPM finalized the change, that concluded the Obama administration had no statutory authority to make the rule.
In February 2015, then-Sen. David Vitter, R-La., a member of the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee, unsuccessfully sought documents pertaining to Congress and the exemption.
But documents that later surfaced reportedly showed administrators asserted Congress had a combined total of 45 employees. Congress itself has 535 members.
As of 2014, there were 4,180 Senate staffers and 9,175 House staffers, according to reports by the Congressional Research Service.
Though controversial, the move survived a legal challenge by Judicial Watch, a conservative government watchdog group that sued the District of Columbia’s small business insurance exchange on behalf of a city resident. Superior Court Judge Herbert B. Dixon Jr., however, determined the OPM’s action was legal.
“If you are talking about draining the swamp, this would be a direct assault on the swamp creatures in eliminating what is clearly an illegal insurance subsidy,” Moffit told The Daily Signal, adding:
URL of the original posting site: http://www.afa.net/the-stand/culture/2017/07/john-mccain-and-the-swamp-1-the-american-people-0/
The words that should come to every American’s lips every time they read another story about the catastrophe of ObamaCare are these: “Thank you, John McCain.”
I have never been a fan of term limits – limiting terms is what elections are for – but Sen. McCain may have just changed my mind. He’s virtually a one-man argument for strict term limits.
I predicted at the beginning of this whole farce that at the end of the day we were going to be stuck with ObamaCare with all its colossal bloat and misbegotten mandates for one simple reason: too many Republican lawmakers have virtually no conservative convictions or principles. And if they do have them, they are well-hidden and the first thing thrown overboard when the New York Times starts yammering at them.
The only path back to sanity on health care is through the free market. ObamaCare needs to be repealed root and branch because it is an exercise in government-run, government-controlled health care, which is just a form of fascism. Literally. Fascism is, by definition, a system in which you are allowed to own your own business but the government tells you how to run it. We went to war in 1941 to stop that kind of foolishness from turning Europe into the dark continent.
The only proper role for government in health insurance is to enforce the sanctity of the contract. A health insurance policy is a contract between the insurer and the insured. If an insurer fails to fulfill his end of the contract by providing the services promised in the contract, the insurer can and should be sued in the interests of justice, and civil government should hold them strictly accountable. But that’s it. In fact, enforcing contracts should be the only role of government anywhere in a free economy.
If ObamaCare were to be repealed tomorrow, as it should be, and wasn’t replaced by anything, virtually overnight health insurance companies, because they want to stay in business and make money, would be competing with each other in a mad dash to offer a veritable cornucopia of health plans. You can make bank that these plans would include low-premium, high-deductible, catastrophic policies which would provide inexpensive and entirely affordable protection for ordinary Americans against the cost of major medical events. The Cruz amendment would have created this kind of market, but alas it was strangled in the cradle by Republicans and dumped in the Swamp.
Under a free-market plan, employers could make these plans available to their employees at a fraction of the current cost of health insurance. The employers would then be able to take what they save in premiums and contribute it to health savings accounts owned by their employees, which would rapidly enable their employees to accumulate enough to satisfy the deductible and to take care of ordinary medical expenses along the way.
The competition across state lines would be fierce, as insurance companies, without the promise of gargantuan, taxpayer-funded bailouts, would compete with each other for your insurance dollar. Health insurance companies would have to step up their game to earn business, rather than counting on the heavy hand of government to drive business into their nets by ordering every citizen to buy their product.
Perhaps showing his true colors, before the final vote was called McCain literally walked across the aisle and engaged in a hug-fest with Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein and a gaggle of Democrats. In fact, McCain told his best buddies on the left that he wanted to stick a fork in the whole repeal effort: “Let’s get this over with,” he told them, before walking theatrically to the well of the Senate and delivering a dramatic thumbs-down, a gesture worthy of any Roman emperor in the Coliseum.
Democrat Senator Chris Coons of Delaware said, “I was trying not to jump up and down and smile.” Video showed Sen. Schumer exuberantly pumping his fist in celebration, just what we hoped to see when we gave Republicans the House, the Senate, and the Oval Office.
Roy is a right-leaning economist and thinker but he recently decided to dig into the CBO projections because he noticed something startling about the projections of every GOP healthcare plan – they all showed expectations of more than 20 million people “losing” their healthcare. It didn’t matter how conservative or how moderate the plan, no matter what the GOP suggested, the CBO kept saying that more than 20 million people would lose their healthcare. Roy wondered how this was possible give the wildly different plans being suggested by various legislators. So, Roy dug into the numbers and realized almost immediately that the CBO was playing a corrupt and very misleading game with their projections:
In the national debate over the GOP health reform proposals, one data point has stood out above all others: the estimate, from the Congressional Budget Office, that more than 20 million people would “lose” coverage as a result. And there’s been an odd consistency to the CBO’s projections. Do you want to repeal every word of Obamacare and replace it with nothing? The CBO says 22 million fewer people would have health insurance. Do you prefer replacing Obamacare with a system of flat tax credits, in which you get the same amount of assistance regardless of your financial need? The CBO says 23 million fewer people would have health insurance. Do you prefer replacing Obamacare with means-tested tax credits, like the Senate bill does, in which the majority of the assistance is directed to those near or below the poverty line? The CBO says 22 million fewer people would have health insurance. 22 million, 23 million, 22 million — these numbers are remarkably similar even though the three policies I describe above are significantly different. Why is that?
A congressional staffer kindly leaked the CBO’s scoring process to Roy, and what he learned was that nearly 75% of the difference in coverage between Obamacare and any of the GOP bills has to do with the repeal of the “individual mandate.” Yes, 3/4 of the difference is just because the GOP would stop forcing people to buy healthcare, and the people would CHOOSE to stop getting healthcare insurance.
It gets worse, almost all of the rest of the difference between the GOP’s suggested bills and Obamacare only exist because the CBO is using faulty numbers.
Based on those estimates, of the 22 million fewer people who will have health insurance in 2026 under the Senate bill, 16 million will voluntarily drop out of the market because they will no longer face a financial penalty for doing so: 73 percent of the total. As you can see in the above chart, two factors—repealing Obamacare’s individual mandate and the CBO’s outdated March 2016 baseline—explain nearly all of the CBO-scored coverage difference between GOP bills and Obamacare.
Below is the chart that Roy is talking about:
The GOP keeps suggesting new plans with hopes that the CBO will give them a better score, but as Roy’s explanation proves, there is no plan that the GOP could propose that would give them a fair scoring. The CBO score has been the primary reason that GOP moderates have given to explain why they continue to fight against repeal, but again, Roy’s breakdown proves that their excuse is spurious. The moderates have to choose, will they continue to be cowed by the fake numbers from the CBO? Will they continue to break the very promises they made to get elected? Or will they finally stand up and do what they promised – repeal Obamacare?
In a follow up piece over at Forbes, Roy suggests a simple solution for the GOP to prove that the CBO’s projections are all washed up:
There’s a simple way for Republicans to highlight the CBO’s mandate mania: have CBO score one version of the bill with an individual mandate, and one version without. It’ll make as plain as day what those of us who follow this stuff see up close: that the mandate is the secret sauce driving the CBO’s faulty coverage predictions.
By the way, the media continues to report that repeal is unpopular, but you shouldn’t believe that nonsense. The most recent CNN poll proved that talking point was a lie and revealed that most Americans want Obamacare repealed.
The GOP has some work to do, and they better get started now.
Get even more in depth coverage on the CBO’s lies from Guy Benson at Townhall.
URL of the original posting site: http://comicallyincorrect.com/2017/07/21/one-for-the-road/#s6BC1KEykydd6RrG.99
URL of the original posting site: http://clashdaily.com/2017/06/lmao-mad-max-goes-full-maxine-says-700-billion-lose-insurance-coverage/
The Democrats have always had a tenuous grasp of reality, but since Trump’s election, they’ve come unhinged.It’s time Maxine step aside and join Gary “And what is Aleppo?” Johnson on the political sidelines.
You probably thought Virgina Governor Terry McAuliffe’s stupid claim that ’93 Million Americans are killed by guns every day’ would be pretty tough to beat.
We give you… Mad Max.
“Take, for example, the state of Kentucky. Almost one-third of those people in that state are covered by Medicaid, and so they’re talking about eliminating 700 billion,” she said, looking off camera, seemingly seeking confirmation, “in, uh, Trumpcare bill.”
She concluded, “And so that’s no way that they can say that they’ll do more coverage than Obamacare, and so I don’t really know what they’re talking about.”
The Congressional Budget Office claims 22 million people — not 700 billion — will lose health care coverage if Obamacare is repealed, CNBC reports. –Read More
She began her thought talking about people. The kindest thing we could say about her gaffe is that she may have jumped from talking about people to talking about dollars. Even SHE looked lost in the middle of that thought.
But to play by the same rules as she plays with Republicans, we would NOT look for the most generous explanation, but the most cynical. And in this case, the most cynical is that the old bat has completely lost it, and not only doesn’t know how many people live in Kentucky — Or America — but the entire world.
After all — the Left made Romney’s HR notes, or ‘binders full of women’ into some kind of a ‘sexist slur’. So letting her comment stand like someone who doesn’t know how many people live on the whole frickin PLANET is fair game, right?
The LA Times has been as friendly as possible to the Obama administration, but they can’t ignore this. Today they broke the story that another massive lie around Obamacare has been told to the Congress and the American people. As you know “If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan” was ranked as the biggest lie of the year by the Washington Post. Well here comes an early contender for this years award.
The Republicans have been accusing the Obama administration of building into Obamacare an insurance plan for the insurance companies. A bailout if the insurance companies lost money under Obamacare. Their claim was that in the law was something called the temporary risk corridor program. Under that Republicans said the administration had allowed themselves a way to take tax dollars and bailout an insurance company that lost money. But the administration and the Democrats have denied that. Apparently the administration and the Democrats had been telling the truth…and didn’t like it.
The LA Times reports that late last week hundreds of pages of new regulations were added to Obamacare. Their reporters went through it and found a few key paragraphs. The change in regulations essentially provides insurers with another backup: If they keep rate increases modest over the next couple of years but lose money, the administration will tap federal funds as needed to cover shortfalls. This could be hundreds of billions of dollars!
This is a classic bait and switch. The middle class will feel like they’re getting a break on insurance premiums. As long as they don’t look at the governments check book, they’ll believe the Affordable Health Care Law is working. It only unravels if they realize they are paying double for their insurance, because the increase is being charged to their account in the form of more debt.
The Republicans are expected to go nuts over this, and the Democrats will point at the scene they are making and say ‘look how fanatical those people are’. I would warn Republicans against making a big deal out of this. In the medical field it’s called bedside manner. You’re about to inform the patient (America) that it has a potentially fatal disease (debt). They are going to get a 2nd opinion from the Democrats that will contradict your diagnosis. If you come off as raving lunatics, the patient will believe the diagnosis of the other doctor who is telling them they’re fine. Conservatives don’t have the luxury of showing anger anymore. They have been rightly angry over a number of scandals, but it turns the middle off. It’s vital that the middle hears and comprehends what your message is.
This won’t be classified as a scandal by the media, so we shouldn’t either.
I don’t believe Obamacare will be the law of the land for long. Sometime around 2017 it will either move to socialized medicine or as the Democrats have branded it “single payer”, or it will turn into some free market based system which probably includes some government subsidies and Health Savings Accounts. There is a lot depending on the way this argument is settled and it’s important that the patients understand what their decision means for their health.
Published: 21 hours ago
Dr. Benjamin Carson, the retired neurosurgeon whom many are urging to run for president in 2016, gave a remarkable interview to WND columnist and radio talker Bob Just recently, who was filling in as guest-host on the top-rated “Sean Hannity Show.”
Just interviewed Carson during the second hour of the Dec. 27 program. (During the third hour, Just interviewed WND Managing Editor David Kupelian and historian Ron Rychlak about the influential new book, “Disinformation.”)
With more than 500 affiliates nationwide, Hannity’s radio show, second only to that of Rush Limbaugh, is heard by roughly 13.5 million loyal listeners each week.
Carson, who retired recently as director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital, became a household name for “speaking truth to power” when he delivered the keynote speech at the National Prayer Breakfast last February and, with President Obama sitting a few feet away, proceeded to brilliantly critique the Obama administration’s deficit spending, health-care takeover and more.
In October, Carson told The Hill, “[Running for president] is not something I have any desire to do whatsoever,” adding “but I certainly listen.”
He continued, “If the circumstances were to evolve in such a way that that seemed to be what God was calling me to do, I would certainly do it. And I would never turn my back on my fellow citizens, if there was a hue and cry for such.”
But on the Hannity show, Just turned aside from all the usual political questions Carson is asked, to get the famed surgeon and possible presidential contender to talk about the person who put him on the path to success – his desperately poor mother.
“She was one of 24 children and got married when she was 13 in a desperate attempt to escape the horrible environment in rural Tennessee,” said Carson. “And she and my father moved to Detroit. He was a factory worker and then she discovered some years later he was a bigamist. So there she was by herself again, trying to raise two young sons in the inner city.”
However, as Carson explained, his mother had one saving grace:
“But the interesting thing about her was, she was never a victim. She never felt sorry for herself, she never made excuses, and that was a good thing.
“The problem was, she didn’t accept excuses from us either (laughter), and that was a problem for us! So we had to learn pretty early on, just forget about making excuses cause it’s just not gonna work. …
“More importantly, we were both poor students, and she was observant, and she noticed in the homes that she cleaned – these were wealthy people – that they didn’t sit around watching TV all day. They did a lot of reading, studying and figuring things out. So she determined that that’s the life we were going to have.
“We were extremely unhappy … but it didn’t matter, we had to do it.
“Interestingly enough, after a while, as I began to read those books, particularly about people of accomplishment, I began to notice something. And that is that the person who has the most to do with what happens to you in life is you. Nobody else gets to determine that except you. And that was an incredible revelation for me and for my brother both. And we realized our terrible situation did not have to continue. We had the power to change it.”
But wait, asked Just: “She had a tough childhood. … How did she overcome that? Where did she find her authority to love you and discipline you the way she did, as a struggling single mom?”
Said Carson: “She found it in God. She became a believer, and a very strong believer …”
And that’s just the beginning. To find out more about how Dr. Ben Carson got started on the path to a remarkable life, listen to Bob Just’s entire interview here:
Carson, winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom and founder of the Carson Scholar’s Fund, is the author of five bestselling books, including “Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story,” “Take the Risk: Learning to Identify, Choose and Live With Acceptable Risk,” and his latest, “America the Beautiful: Rediscovering What Made the Nation Great.”
Bob Just, in addition to being a veteran radio talker and WND columnist is founder and president of several organizations, including Concerned Fathers Against Crime, Concerned Mothers Alliance for Children, and Concerned Youth. He worked with Sean Hannity on the research and development of Hannity’s New York Times bestselling book, “Deliver us from Evil.” His television appearances include Fox News’ “Hannity,” ABC’s “Politically Incorrect,” “Hannity & Colmes,” “Fox & Friends” and “The Coral Ridge Hour.”
’I don’t want to offend anyone’
At the National Prayer Breakfast last February, broadcast live on C-SPAN2, Carson said at the outset that he didn’t want to “offend” anyone. Yet his words nonetheless made at least one distinguished guest in attendance – President Barack Obama – squirm in his seat.
For instance, taking on class-warfare economics by advocating for a 10 percent flat tax, Carson said a person who earns $10 billion should pay $1 billion in tax, while one earning $10 will pay $1 in tax.
“Some people say, ‘Well, that’s not fair because it doesn’t hurt the guy who made $10 billion as much as the guy who made 10,’” Carson said. “[But] where does it say you have to hurt the guy? He just put a billion dollars in the pot!
“We don’t need to hurt him,” Carson continued. “It’s that kind of thinking that has resulted in 602 banks in the Cayman Islands. That money needs to be back here, building our infrastructure and creating jobs.”
Carson further took aim at the swelling national debt, increasing bureaucracy and political correctness, which he called “dangerous” because it “muzzles” people and “keeps people from discussing important issues while the fabric of their society is being changed.”
But it was Carson’s proposal for health-care reform – an approach completely antithetical to the president’s massive and disastrous health-care overhaul program – that likely rankled Obama the most.
“Here’s my solution,” Dr. Carson said of America’s health-care woes. “When a person is born, give him a birth certificate, an electronic medical record and a health savings account [or HSA] to which money can be contributed – pretax – from the time you’re born ’til the time you die. When you die, you can pass it on to your family members, so that when you’re 85 years old and you got six diseases, you’re not trying to spend up everything. You’re happy to pass it on, and there’s nobody talking about death panels.
“And also, for the people who were indigent who don’t have any money,” Carson continued, “we can make contributions to their HSA each month, because we already have this huge pot of money. Instead of sending it to some bureaucracy, let’s put it in their HSAs. Now they have some control over their own health care.”
“Dr. Carson said the one thing that Obama and the Democrats do not want to hear,” Rush Limbaugh later commented. “In this case, we have an ideal replacement for Obamacare that is much better, that promotes the health-care industry, that promotes cost savings, that promotes competition and it gets everybody covered.”
Video of Dr. Carson’s entire National Prayer Breakfast speech can be seen below:
You must be logged in to post a comment.