Ohio Bill to Prohibit Requiring Individuals to Purchase Health Insurance

 HEALTH CARE*, STATES  No Responses »
May 122010
 

Patriots,

We must not allow the hard work you have done in the fight against government run health care go to waste — we must continue this fight, but now it needs to be at the state level.

Our efforts must be channeled into areas where we can have a reasonable expectation of success. In the the same way we did in D.C., we now need to fill up the phones, faxes and emails in Columbus.

One of the avenues in which we can achieve this reasonable expectation of success comes from reconcentrating our efforts in supporting Senate Bill 244 sponsored by OH State Senator Shannon Jones & OH State Senator Tim Grendell. As introduced, SB 244 would prohibit requiring an individual to maintain a policy of health insurance in the State of Ohio. Continue reading »

Nothing Outside the State

 HEALTH CARE*, NEW AMERICA  No Responses »
May 122010
 

by Robert Higgs
BigGovernment.com, May 12, 2010

The health care legislation recently bulldozed through Congress is only the tip of the iceberg. With some 2,400 pages of dense legalese—with thousands of additional pages of regulations implementing the legislation still to be written—this huge statute puts government in effective control of some of life’s most intimate, personal, and important decisions: who will receive medical care, and when, where, and how it will be received.

Continue reading »

Fixing What Ain’t Broke, Hiding What Is

 ECONOMICS, HEALTH CARE*, NEW AMERICA  No Responses »
May 052010
 

By Andrew Foy, MD
American Thinker, May 5, 2010

The financial-regulatory reform bill currently under consideration in Congress highlights a recurrent theme among the left. Whenever liberals want to pass legislation intended to solve a particular problem that increases the size and scope of the federal government, they revise history and create imaginary villains which their bill is intended to combat. They never admit that it is they and their previous polices who are at fault.

The recession is a lesson in unintended consequences. In the government’s attempt to increase homeownership, it created an enormous housing bubble. The bubble inevitably burst, leading to the largest financial crisis since the Great Depression.

In 1993, President Clinton significantly broadened the Community Reinvestment Act, originally signed in 1977, which required all FDIC-insured banks to give more loans to lower-income households (or less creditworthy borrowers). This move received broad political support. As a result of these changes, homeownership and inflation soared.

Furthermore, the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac enthusiastically purchased high-risk mortgages from lenders on the secondary mortgage market. Encouraged by the knowledge that high-risk mortgages would be swallowed up by Fannie and Freddie, lenders had incentive to extend as many mortgages as possible, regardless of the creditworthiness of borrowers. Continue reading »

US Taxpayers Pay for Germany’s Socialized Medicine – and Other Terrible News

 ECONOMICS, HEALTH CARE*, NEW AMERICA  No Responses »
May 042010
 

by Uncommon Knowledge
BigGovernment.com, May 4, 2010

The debate over Arizona’s immigration law is a topic du jour in the United States, but immigration and other demographic phenomena may have already sealed a terrible fate for Europe.

Mark Steyn discusses everything from Lady Gaga to the astonishing rate of immigrant dependency on the European welfare money.

A central point of Steyn’s analysis is the issue of “cultural exhaustion” — the most recent example being the spineless South Park debacle.

The really shocking revelation is the explanation of how United States taxpayers contribute to Germany’s socialized medicine.

Malevolent Neglect

 HEALTH CARE*  No Responses »
May 012010
 

By Joe Herring
American Thinker, May 1, 2010

Much has been written about the substandard care and appalling conditions that led to the premature deaths of as many as 1,200 people at Stafford Hospital in England. As the story unfolds, it appears that the government’s insistence that this was an isolated circumstance, not indicative of the National Health Service (NHS) as a whole, is a pitiful excuse bordering on criminality.

The British Health Department recently commissioned a series of independent inquiries into the quality and safety of care in the NHS. Completed and presented to the department in the summer of 2009, the reports were withheld from the public until a London-based think-tank forced their release. The bombshell reports put the lie to the government’s claim that the deadly scandals of Mid-Staffordshire and numerous other hospitals were aberrations in an otherwise splendid system.

Obsession with targets and not care, flawed systems of self assessment, a culture of blame and fear and most of all patients at the bottom of the pile of priorities. Together these reports paint a damning picture. Their findings should’ve been released at the time. You can’t just bury bad news. Continue reading »

Obamacare Is Poised to Crash and Burn

 ECONOMICS, HEALTH CARE*  No Responses »
Apr 302010
 

Congress needs to replace this rust bucket with a viable aircraft.

Deroy Murdock
National Review Online, April 30, 2010

Just five weeks after the president of the United States signed Obamacare into law, it already resembles an overweight airplane lumbering down the tarmac, poised to crash and burn soon after takeoff. Obamacare’s excess cargo of broken promises threatens such a catastrophe.

“The plan I’m announcing tonight,” Pres. Barack Obama promised a joint session of Congress last September 9, “will slow the growth of health-care costs for our families, our businesses, and our government.”

Not so fast, warns Medicare’s Office of the Actuary. In a devastating, independent, 38-page analysis released on April 22, chief actuary Richard Foster forecast, “The growth rate reductions from productivity adjustments are unlikely to be sustainable on a permanent annual basis. . . . We show a negligible financial impact over the next 10 years for the other provisions intended to help control future health care cost growth.” Continue reading »

Down the Health Care Wormhole

 HEALTH CARE*, NEW AMERICA  No Responses »
Apr 202010
 

How ObamaPelosiCare will saddle future generations with a public policy disaster

Terry Michael
Reason Magazine, April 19, 2010

If we can put a man on the moon, we can re-write the basic laws of supply and demand and get more quality health care, dispensed by fewer providers per patient, at lower prices for all Americans. Sure we can. Just like we ended poverty with the Great Society, and like we’ll impose liberal democracy on the corrupt oligarchy ruling a collection of tribes known as Afghanistan.

Landing humans on the lunar surface looks like an easily do-able dream when set beside many of the ideologically and anecdotally driven social, economic, and foreign policy nightmares cooked up by public officials in the last half-century of big government. That truth is explored in the appropriately titled book, If We Can Put a Man on the Moon…: Getting Big Things Done in Government (though, it should be noted, the book doesn’t advocate getting big things done by big government). Continue reading »

Obama’s goal? Socialism at all costs

 HEALTH CARE*, NEW AMERICA, PRESIDENT  No Responses »
Apr 122010
 

Chad Groening
OneNewsNow, April 12, 2010

A scholar and bestselling author says it will be very difficult to reverse the socialist policies of Barack Obama, even if Republicans take over control of Congress next year.

Dr. Jerome Corsi is author of the 2008 New York Times bestseller The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality (Threshold Editions, August 2008), which was recently released in paperback. He says since taking office, Obama has taken the American government in an ideologically left direction, as he warned about in the book.

Corsi says the president is determined to transform the United States into a European-style social welfare state. But he believes Obama’s agenda has proven to be enormously unpopular and will cost the Democrats dearly in the upcoming midterm elections.

“Democrats could well lose control of the House of Representatives [and] control could be challenged in the Senate,” he says. “And Republican governors could be put into place where’s there’s Democrats now, holding the statehouses for the 2012 election.

“[But] I don’t think Barack Obama cares. Barack Obama’s intent is to get socialism fully in place.”

Even with a Republican-controlled Congress, Corsi believes it would be tough to undo all the damage. “I’m not sure what it will take to reverse the United States back into a market economy after we’re got this much entitlement programs,” notes the author. “The social welfare state here is beginning to look like the social welfare state in Greece — and they’re very difficult to reverse.”

As he puts it, when that happens “people riot in the streets if you try to take away their benefits — even when the government can’t pay for it.”

OneNewsNow

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