Thank you Kent Lamberson

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Coronavirus Outbreak Exposes China’s Monopoly on U.S. Drug, Medical Supplies
STR/AFP via Getty Images
REBECCA MANSOUR
13 Feb 20208,931
The coronavirus outbreak has exposed the United States’ dangerous dependence on China for pharmaceutical and medical supplies, including an estimated 97 percent of all antibiotics and 80 percent of the active pharmaceutical ingredients needed to produce drugs in the United States.
The economic repercussions of the coronavirus reveal the dangers of allowing one country to have a near monopoly on global manufacturing, David Dayen explains in an article at the American Prospect:
China is a source of not only finished goods, but also of input parts and raw materials. A substantial number of the materials needed for defense and electronic systems come from China, and that nation is “the single or sole supplier for a number of specialty chemicals,” according to a recent Defense Department report. Rare earth minerals, which are critical to electronics, are largely mined in China. As a result, Chinese disruptions don’t just hit Chinese manufacturing, they hit everyone’s. Automakers have already had to slow or shut down factories globally due to supply shortages.
Perhaps the biggest concern is over medical supplies. China produces and exports a large amount of pharmaceuticals to the U.S., including 97 percent of all antibiotics and 80 percent of the active ingredients used to make drugs here. Penicillin, ibuprofen, and aspirin largely come from China. Last month, the medical supply firm Cardinal Health recalled 2.9 million surgical gowns “cross contaminated” at a plant in China; the blood pressure drug valsartan also saw shortages recently, thanks to tainted active ingredients at one Chinese plant. The combination of supply chain disruptions and increased demand at hospitals if coronavirus spreads to the U.S. could prove devastating.
In a dark irony, most of the world’s face masks—now ubiquitous in China as a precaution—are made in China and Taiwan, and even for those made elsewhere, some component parts are Chinese-sourced. Shortages have led China to declare the masks a “strategic resource,” reserving them for medical workers. U.S. hospitals are “critically low” on respiratory masks, according to medical-supply middlemen. Lack of protective gear could increase vulnerability to the virus, and the one place on earth suffering from production shutdowns is the one place where most of the protective gear originates [emphasis added].
In testimony yesterday before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, Scott Gottlieb, a physician and the former Food and Drug Administration commissioner in the Trump administration, explained in detail the extent of the U.S. pharmaceutical industry’s dependence on China:
About 40 percent of generic drugs sold in the U.S. have only a single manufacturer. A significant supply chain disruption could cause shortages for some of many of these products.
Last year, manufacturing of intermediate or finished goods in China, as well as pharmaceutical source material, accounted for 95 percent of U.S. imports of ibuprofen, 91 percent of U.S. imports of hydrocortisone, 70 percent of U.S. imports of acetaminophen, 40 to 45 percent of U.S. imports of penicillin, and 40 percent of U.S. imports of heparin, according to the Commerce Department. In total, 80 percent of the U.S. supply of antibiotics are made in China.
While much of the fill finishing work (the actual formulation of finished drug capsules and tablets) is done outside China (and often in India) the starting and intermediate chemicals are often sourced in China. Moreover, the U.S. generic drug industry can no longer produce certain critical medicines such as penicillin and doxycycline without these chemical components.
According to a report from the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, China’s chemical industry, which accounts for 40 percent of global chemical industry revenue, provides a large number of ingredients for drug products. It’s these source materials — where in many cases China is the exclusive source of the chemical ingredients used for the manufacture of a drug product — that create choke points in the global supply chain for critical medicines.
Moreover, when it comes to starting material for the manufacture of pharmaceutical ingredients, a lot of this production is centered in China’s Hubei Provence, the epicenter of coronavirus. Most drug makers have a one to three-months of inventory of drug ingredients on hand. But these supplies are already being drawn down. Among big [active pharmaceutical ingredient] makers in Wuhan are Wuhan Shiji Pharmaceutical, Chemwerth, Hubei Biocause, Wuhan Calmland Pharmaceuticals. [emphasis added]
Gottlieb notes that “80 percent of the U.S. supply of antibiotics are made in China.” The sourcing of this estimate is explained in greater detail in section three of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission’s 2019 report to Congress, titled “ Growing U.S. Reliance on China’s Biotech and Pharmaceutical Products.”
The report notes that China is “the world’s largest producer of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs). The United States is heavily dependent on drugs that are either sourced from China or include APIs sourced from China.” The report further explains that although India is the world’s leading supplier of generic drugs, India gets 80 percent of its active pharmaceutical ingredients directly from China. The United States also imports 80 percent of its APIs from overseas (primarily from India and China) and “a substantial portion” of its generic drugs “either directly from China or from third countries like India that use APIs sourced from China.”
In other words, almost all pharmaceutical roads lead to China.
Furthermore, the report notes that China’s dominance of the chemical industry and global manufacturing of active pharmaceutical ingredients means that “the world is becoming increasingly dependent on China as the single source for life-saving drugs.”
“The U.S. generic drug industry can no longer produce certain critical medicines such as penicillin and doxycycline, and the APIs needed to make these antibiotics are sourced from China,” the report states.
China achieved this dominance in the pharmaceutical industry by the same methods it employed to dominate the steel industry – through anti-competitive trade practices that dumped cheap state-subsidized products on foreign markets to drive competitors out of business.
The report states:
Rosemary Gibson, senior advisor at the Hastings Center and author of China RX, noted in her testimony before the Commission that the United States is losing its ability to produce generic drugs because Chinese drug companies dumped low-price products into the global market, which in turn pushed U.S., European, and Indian producers out of the generic drug manufacturing business. According to Ms. Gibson, China is seeking to disrupt, dominate, and displace U.S. pharmaceutical and other medical companies, and in doing so limit the United States’ ability to produce its own medicines, including critical antibiotics such as penicillin and even generic aspirin. She believes the United States could see its generic drug industry made uncompetitive within five to ten years due to the Chinese government’s policies (including subsidies and export incentives) that allow Chinese pharmaceutical firms to undercut prices and drive U.S. firms out of business. [emphasis added]
Ironically, China’s success in monopolizing the U.S. drug market with these anti-competitive trade practices was reportedly cited by President Trump’s former economic adviser Gary Cohn as an argument against Trump’s efforts to fight back against China’s trade violations.
In his book Fear: Trump in the White House, Bob Woodward describes a heated discussion among Trump administration officials about the repercussions of a trade war with China. Cohn, who disagreed with the president’s decision to impose tariff’s on Beijing, reportedly invoked a Commerce Department study showing that 97 percent of all U.S. antibiotics come from China. “‘If you’re the Chinese and you want to really just destroy us, just stop sending us antibiotics,’ he said.”
Globalist critics like Cohn of Trump’s trade policies “fretted that turbulence from the Trump administration’s tariffs would have catastrophic results on the global economy,” Curtis Ellis wrote last week in an op-ed for Breitbart News. These critics were proven wrong. However, the virus itself will cause economic disruptions because it “has exposed the frailty of global supply chains and the fallacy of the management theory calling for intercontinental supply chains and just-in-time inventory management,” Ellis writes.
Or, to put it another way, the tariffs did not hurt the U.S. economy, but the current virus outbreak in China could due to the very problem that the tariffs were enacted, in part, to address. In this sense, the virus has vindicated the Trump’s administration’s tough trade stance and affirmed the necessity of moving the world’s supply chains out of China. If anything, Trump’s tariffs may have actually made the U.S. economy somewhat more resilient because they encouraged companies to begin the process of moving production out of China.
But this vindication will be of little consolation to Trump if the virus’s ripple effects hurt the economy during an election year. The political repercussions could be significant for a president who has touted the strong economy as a major selling point for his re-election.
Economists are already expecting the virus to have a major impact on China’s economy. Breitbart News’s John Carney reports that HSBC “lowered its estimate for the first quarter growth from an annualized rate of 5.8 percent to 4.1 percent” for China. “The bank’s estimate for full year growth was lowered by half a percentage point from 5.8 percent to 5.3 percent.”
As for the global economic impact, Dayen quotes Washington University in St. Louis professor Panos Kouvelis who estimates $300 to $400 billion in supply chain damage over a period of up to two years.
“That’s actually manageable as a share of the global economy,” Dayen writes. “But as new cases pop up in Singapore, an important financial hub, and as the head of the World Health Organization warns that we could be seeing only the ‘tip of the iceberg,’ those numbers could already be out of date.”
Those numbers may indeed be overly optimistic. In his testimony before the Senate yesterday, Gottlieb warned of the potential for the coronavirus epidemic to become a full pandemic–and maybe even endemic–now that it has spread to Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan. “It could take a new position as a more sinister member of the seasonal pathogens that circulate each year and infect humans,” he said, noting that “the next month is critical.”
“We must prepare for the prospect that the virus evaded our border protections and was already introduced into the U.S. in late December or early January — when it first appears to have become epidemic in China’s Hubei province. Those index cases could have seeded community spread, and eventually, outbreaks could emerge in America,” Gottlieb  stated.
Whatever the economic impacts of the coronavirus, the current dependence on an authoritarian communist regime for vital necessities is an indictment of globalist neoliberal economic policies that have endangered U.S. national security and long-term prosperity.
“[T]he economic threats to locating so much of the global supply chain in one part of the world were eminently predictable,” writes Dayen. “Neoliberal dogma about ‘comparative advantage’ and a concomitant preference for mass outsourcing put the world on a tenuous path.”
There is a growing consensus among populists on the right and left about the need to address the neoliberal trade and economic policies that gave China a monopoly on the world’s supply chains.
Gottlieb urged Congress to empower the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) “to look not only at the supply of finished products but to also identify circumstances where key components may have only a single source across an entire category of products.”
Matt Stoller, author of Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy, writes that Gottlieb is essentially asking for the FDA “to have the authority to uncover hidden monopolies.”
“The Federal Trade Commission already has this research authority, it just doesn’t use it very often,” Stoller explains. “And the United States Trade Representative has information on our dependencies on China, because when they threatened tariffs large numbers of companies came to them during a notice and comment period whining about how such dependencies would hurt their business. So we have some information about the scale of the problem. Just not enough.”
“The strongest reason to address monopolies isn’t because monopolies are unjust, but because they are dangerous,” Stoller notes. “And we may be about to find out just how dangerous they are.”
If nothing else, the coronavirus offers business and government leaders another reason to continue the process of decoupling the U.S. economy from China. And it also offers a warning for those who seek to simply relocate production to another developing country in order to exploit cheap labor and lax regulations. All of these short-term money-saving decisions come with long-term risk.
“If there’s a silver lining, it’s that this threat could inspire more diversification of supply chains,” Dayen writes. “The race to the bottom in manufacturing clearly has a cost, and countries must learn that self-preservation demands maintaining some semblance of an industrial base. The U.S.-China trade war did lead to some companies moving their work out of China, but only to cheaper countries where multinationals will likely conglomerate, to build economies of scale. We know the dangers inherent in that. Rebuilding domestic manufacturing is not just a question of jobs; it’s a question of safety.”
Rebecca Mansour is Senior Editor-at-Large for Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Tonight on SiriusXM Patriot channel 125, which broadcasts live weeknights from 9:00 p.m. to midnight Eastern (6-9:00 p.m. Pacific). Follow her on Twitter at @RAMansour.
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Healthcare Repeal FAILED 49-51  
Skinny Repeal has failed 49-51 .. what is next? We weep for America. Republican & Democrat Senators Hang your face in shame. Is it Time to "Revolt"?  7  Years of LIES
​Remember Obamacare was given to us by the DEMOCRATS ONLY.

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Cuban doctors tired of ‘being slaves’ sue Cuban Government
September 30, 2017
by Dr. Rich Swier
​As former Bill Clinton said, “It’s the economy stupid!” For the Cuban people it truly is the economy, stupid.
Perhaps a few of my first hand experiences during my visit to Cuba will help those who favor big government understand where “socialismo” leads.
One of the things some people, many of whom have never visited Cuba, tout is their “excellent” healthcare system. Let me explain about the Cuban single payer government healthcare system. First, every visitor to Cuba must purchase health insurance from the Cuban government. For example, the cost of my health insurance was automatically included in the price of my plane ticket. So how much does the Cuban government pay its doctors to provide universal healthcare? The salary of a doctor is $30 a month.
In 2013 Brazil hired 4,000 doctors from Cuba to “work in areas where medical services and physicians are scarce.” These Cuban doctors were to be paid approximately $30,000 a year to provide medical services to remote areas of Brazil. According to U.S. News & World Report, “Analysts say the export of medical services adds about $6 billion a year to Cuba’s economy.”
How does this work? Brazil paid the Cuban government the $30,000 annual salaries of the Cuban doctors and the Cuban government then paid the doctors $30 a month or $360 a year. This equates to an 83% profit for the Cuban government. Not surprisingly many of these Cuban doctors sought asylum in Brazil to be paid what they actually earned, $30,000.
In socialist governments the “minimum wage” inextricably becomes the prevailing wage.
Ernesto Londono in his New York Times article “Cuban Doctors Revolt: ‘You Get Tired of Being a Slave’” reports:
RIO DE JANEIRO — In a rare act of collective defiance, scores of Cuban doctors working overseas to make money for their families and their country are suing to break ranks with the Cuban government, demanding to be released from what one judge called a “form of slave labor.”
Thousands of Cuban doctors work abroad under contracts with the Cuban authorities. Countries like Brazil pay the island’s Communist government millions of dollars every month to provide the medical services, effectively making the doctors Cuba’s most valuable export.
But the doctors get a small cut of that money, and a growing number of them in Brazil have begun to rebel. In the last year, at least 150 Cuban doctors have filed lawsuits in Brazilian courts to challenge the arrangement, demanding to be treated as independent contractors who earn full salaries, not agents of the Cuban state.
“When you leave Cuba for the first time, you discover many things that you had been blind to,” said Yaili Jiménez Gutierrez, one of the doctors who filed suit. “There comes a time when you get tired of being a slave.”
Read more.
What I observed is that the Cuban people have great potential if they are unleashed and allowed to earn what they are truly worth.
As one Cuban man put it to me, “the people have no love for their work.” They have no love for their work because Cuba needs a change in direction. This change in direction will only come when there is a change of the socialist regime.
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The Executive Orders That End Obamacare - Once and For All
Wayne Allyn Root
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Posted: Jul 30, 2017 12:01 AM
 Republican Senator John McCain just singlehandedly killed the repeal of Obamacare. Now it’s time for President Trump to act. It’s time for President Trump to expose McCain and the rest of Congress for the frauds and hypocrites they are. It’s time for two Executive Orders that have the power to change everything.This is how President Trump makes "The House of Cards" collapse. This is how President Trump ends Obamacare once and for all.
Executive Order #1: President Trump should issue an immediate Executive Order forcing every member of Congress to use the same healthcare plan as the rest of us. Let Senator McCain come off his high horse and live under the rules of Obamacare. Make every member of Congress live by same rules as the rest of us.
I wonder if John McCain would have voted against the Obamacare repeal, if he had to live under the rules of Obamacare? I wonder how quick and successful his brain cancer surgery would have been, if he had to use the Obamacare plan. Or the VA system.
Would he have waited 6 months in line, like rest of us? Maybe a year. Of course, he’d probably be dead by then. That’s how the VA solved their money shortage a few years back. They put vets on waiting lists until they died. Problem solved. Why not make Senators wait on those same waiting lists?
Or would McCain have had a gigantic deductible (just like the rest of us)? Would he have had a $30,000 bill after surgery that insurance would not cover (just like the rest of us)?
Would McCain have even been allowed to have a surgery, or would a "Death Panel" advise no surgery for a 80 year old with advanced brain cancer? Let's find out.
President Trump should immediately use Executive Order to put every member of Congress in the exact same boat as rest of us. Let them pay for their own healthcare- just like the rest of us. Let’s see each member of Congress pay $2000 per month for health insurance that covers virtually nothing. That was what I was forced to pay after Obamacare passed. That’s what my insurance covered- nothing.
I don’t even have health insurance anymore. I was forced to switch to a Christian Health Sharing plan. Because $2000 per month was completely unaffordable. I’m betting Democrats would call me “rich.” And I could not pay the bill anymore, because of Obamacare. So, I left traditional insurance as of January 1st.
My predicament means no middle-class family in America that buys their own insurance can afford the bill. It’s no wonder an upscale couple jumped to their death in Manhattan on Friday. The 53-yr old husband was a chiropractor. They left behind two children. Their suicide note said they were in a financial death spiral. Thanks to Obamacare, so is every middle-class couple in America.
It’s time for Congress to feel our pain.
Executive Order #2. My gut instinct is usually on the money. I feel it in my bones. The Senators who voted against the repeal are corrupted, bribed, on the take. Senators and Congressmen are making an unimaginable fortune off of Obamacare. That’s why they are against the repeal. They don’t want to end the gravy train.
They want the system complex and expensive. They want government involved. They want taxpayer money wasted by the billions. That's how they milk the system. They all own stocks of medical companies, health insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies. I'm betting many actually own companies with government contracts that benefit from Obamacare. They put them in the names of their spouses, children, parents, siblings, childhood buddies. They own them in offshore accounts. The conflicts of interest are the size of Texas.
Obamacare is the best thing to ever happen to Senator Schumer, Senator McCain, Senator Collins, Senator Murkowski, Nevada Senator Heller. They’re all bums. They’re all thieves. They are all getting rich at our expense.
Wanna bet? 
President Trump should issue an immediate Executive Order demanding disclosure of all financial interests and ownership in healthcare related companies or stock by every member of Congress- including all family members and offshore accounts. Failure to disclose will result in a long prison term.
Then we’ll find out why they voted against repeal. They are all on the gravy train.
Issue these two Presidential Executive Orders and the “House of Cards” will collapse. The scam will be revealed.
We’ve been robbed.
P.S. Throw in a third plank. Term Limits. Limit each member of Congress to two terms. One term in office and one term in prison.
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ObamaCare Repeal Without Replacement All but Dead
Written
by  Michael Tennant
The brief glimmer of hope that ObamaCare would actually be repealed, not merely replaced with a Republican me-too version, has quickly been all but extinguished. Three GOP senators — Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, West Virginia’s Shelley Moore Capito, and Maine’s Susan Collins — have already announced their opposition to passing a bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) without replacing it.
“I do not think that it’s constructive to repeal a law that is so interwoven within our health care system without having a replacement plan in place,” Collins said in a statement. “We can’t just hope that we will pass a replacement within the next two years. Repealing without a replacement would create great uncertainty for individuals who rely on the ACA and cause further turmoil in the insurance markets.”
Monday evening, after it became clear that the Republican leadership’s ObamaCare replacement bill would go down to defeat, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) announced that the upper chamber would instead vote on “a repeal of Obamacare with a two-year delay to provide for a stable transition period.” The legislation, he said, would be based on a bill Congress sent in 2015 to President Barack Obama, who vetoed it. (Collins voted against that bill, too.)
By Tuesday afternoon, Murkowski, Capito, and Collins had all declared that they not only opposed the repeal bill but would vote against a motion to allow it to proceed to debate.
“My position on this issue is driven by its impact on West Virginians,” Capito said in a statement. “With that in mind, I cannot vote to repeal Obamacare without a replacement plan that addresses my concerns and the needs of West Virginians.”
Murkowski, in a press release, detailed the many failures of ObamaCare in Alaska, including skyrocketing health-insurance premiums and deductibles and a loss of insurance carriers. But, she added, “Repealing the ACA without a clear path forward just creates confusion and greater uncertainty.”
“I cannot vote to proceed to repeal the ACA without reform that allows people the choice they want, the affordability they need and the quality of care they deserve,” she said.
It would be easy to dismiss the senators’ concerns as simply the result of their moderate-to-liberal views; their cumulative Freedom Index scores range from 40 percent (Collins) to 48 percent (Murkowski). Yet the Congressional Budget Office forecast that ObamaCare repeal would significantly increase both the number of uninsured and the premiums on individual-market policies (mostly because of the loss of subsidies), an estimate that, if accurate, should concern anyone.
None of this is to say that ObamaCare should remain the law of the land. The ACA has, as Murkowski pointed out, contributed mightily to rising premiums, and it still leaves millions of Americans uninsured while increasing government control of healthcare. Plus, it’s unconstitutional. Repeal would certainly be welcome.
However, economist Ryan McMaken observed in a piece for the American Conservative, “repeal-only proposals do little to actually address the problem of upward spiraling healthcare costs generated by government mandates and subsidies.”
“Thanks to more than 70 years of government meddling, the American healthcare system was already broken long before Obamacare came along,” he explained. “Because of this, returning to the status quo of eight years ago would hardly be a victory for freedom and free markets.”
“If GOP politicians really wanted to do something to improve access, reduce costs, and generally improve the lives of Americans, they’d quit with the grandiose repeal schemes,” he wrote. “They’d simply focus on passing reforms that open up healthcare markets to competition, and allow consumers to circumvent the subsidized and regulated healthcare system.”
McConnell appears determined to proceed with his repeal bill nonetheless. According to CNN, he “announced Tuesday night on the Senate floor that Republicans would hold a procedural vote on the health care bill ‘early next week.’”
But will the bill pass? “Asked by CNN what would need to change given that leadership currently lacks the 50 ‘yes’ votes from senators to pass even a procedural vote, Senate GOP whip John Cornyn responded: ‘A little passage of time.’”
With strategy like this, Republicans couldn’t beat a three-year-old at tiddlywinks.
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Fact Check: It's a Lie That the GOP Healthcare Bill Abandons People With Pre-Existing Conditions
Guy Benson
Posted: May 05, 2017 2:45 PM
As we described yesterday, there are some concerning policy elements of the House-passed American Health Care Act, which the Senate would be wise to explore and rectify over the coming weeks. The bill -- and that's all it is at this point: a work in progress -- repeals and alters significant portions of the Democratic Party's failing experiment in "affordability."  But based on rhetoric from elected Democrats and the Left generally, one might assume that Obamacare was called the "Pre-existing Conditions Coverage Act" (side-stepping the whole "choice and affordability" fairy tale they peddled), and that the Republican bill obliterates those protections. The proposed law would be a "death warrant" for sick women and children, they shriek, casting Obamacare opponents as the moral equivalent of accessories to murder. This is demagogic, hyperbolic, inaccurate nonsense. To review the actual facts, even under an exceedingly unlikely scenario in which the Senate passed the House bill without making a single alteration, people with pre-existing conditions are offered several layers of protection:
Layer One: Insurers are required to sell plans to all comers, including those with pre-existing conditions. This is known as "guaranteed issue," and it's mandated in the AHCA. No exceptions, no waivers. I spoke with an informed conservative news consumer earlier who was stunned to learn that this was the case, having been subjected to 24 hours of unhinged rhetoric from the Left.

Layer Two: Anyone with a pre-existing condition and who lives in a state that does not seek an optional waiver from the AHCA's (and Obamacare's) "community rating" regulation cannot be charged more than other people for a new plan when they seek to purchase one -- which, as established above, insurers are also required to sell them.

Layer Three: Anyone who is insured and remains continuously insured cannot be dropped from their plan due to a pre-existing condition, and cannot be charged more after developing one. So if you've been covered, then you change jobs or want to switch plans, carriers must sell you the plan of your choice at the same price point as everyone else. Regardless of your health status. This is true of people in non-waiver and waiver states alike.

Layer Four: If you are uninsured and have a pre-existing condition and live in a state that pursued (and obtained after jumping through hoops) a "community rating" waiver, your state is required to give you access to a "high risk pool" fund to help you pay for higher premiums. The AHCA earmarks nearly $130 billion for these sorts of patient stability funds over ten years.It is simply a lie to say that the AHCA guts protections for people with pre-existing conditions. One can argue that perhaps $130 billion (not $8 billion, as some are dishonestly pretending) might at some point prove insufficient to covering the people described in layer four, but I think any such assessment is at best hypothetical and premature.  Either way, it's a very different critique than the scare-mongering going around right now.  Also, I'll repeat: The number of "uninsurable" Americans with pre-existing conditions within the individual market represents a tiny sliver of the overall population.  Helping these people was one of the few credibly-popular selling points and actual achievements of Obamacare.  But the existing law's track record on this front helps illustrate how limited the scope of that particular problem is:

Obamacare created a "bridge" program that allowed previously-uninsurable consumers with pre-existing conditions to get coverage in between the law's 2010 passage and full implementation a few years later. At its peak, it attracted less than 115,000 takers. Those people matter, and they were helped. But that statistic helps contextualize the problem, especially compared to Obamacare's overriding flaw: Unaffordability, leading to lack of participation, leading to unsustainable risk pools, leading to insurers pulling out and hiking premiums, leading to unaffordability, leading to further lack of participation, etc.  As for the moral bullying about the AHCA supposedly leading to thousands of deaths (with these pronouncements coming from the very same people who lied incessantly and made spectacularly wrong predictions about Obamacare, by the way), consider this data-based evidence:
Public-health data from the Centers for Disease Control confirm what one might expect from a health-care reform that expanded Medicaid coverage for adults: no improvement. In fact, things have gotten worse. Age-adjusted death rates in the U.S. have consistently declined for decades, but in 2015 — unlike in 19 of the previous 20 years — they increased. For the first time since 1993, life expectancy fell. Had mortality continued to decline during ACA implementation in 2014 and 2015 at the same rate as during the 2000–13 period, 80,000 fewer Americans would have died in 2015 alone. Of course, correlation between ACA implementation and increased mortality does not prove causation. Researchers hypothesize that increases in obesity, diabetes, and substance abuse may be responsible. But thanks to the roughly half of states that refused the ACA’s Medicaid expansion, a good control group exists. Surely the states that expanded Medicaid should at least perform better in this environment of rising mortality? Nope. Mortality in 2015 rose more than 50 percent faster in the 26 states (and Washington, D.C.) that expanded Medicaid during 2014 than in the 24 states that did not.If conservatives wanted to turn liberals' demagoguery against them, they could cite these numbers to claim that Obamacare is killing tens of thousands of people -- especially in Medicaid expansion states -- and that Democrats have blood on their hands. Murderers! Let's not match their repugnant hackery. But we should make them aware of evidence that could build that deeply uncharitable and specious narrative. And speaking of Medicaid, I've seen a lot of hyperventilating about "deep cuts" to the program, which was already suffering poor health outcomes and restricted access before Obamacare's huge expansion of it. The AHCA does eventually transition to a major reform of the dysfunctional program, but it does so via a gradual tapering and eventual halt of Medicaid's expansion several years from now, with existing recipients (including new additions under the continued expansion) grandfathered in. May I repeat: There are flaws in the bill that need to be addressed. But the fact-challenged, emotional, manipulate meltdown on the Left is designed to scare people, not inform them. And it has the side effect of distracting from the spiraling betrayals of Obamacare, a program the Left put in place last time they were in charge. I'll leave you with this strong editorial from the Wall Street Journal:

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TWO MORE INSURANCE COMPANIES DROP OUT OF FAILING OBAMACARE EXCHANGES
April 5, 2017 by Aaron Bandler
Two more insurance companies have announced that they will leave Obamacare’s failing exchanges.
On Monday, The New York Times reported that Wellmark Blue Cross and Blue Shield announced their intention to leave Iowa’s Obamacare exchange next year because they lost $90 million in three years due to most of their enrollees having “expensive medical conditions.”
“Finding solutions to stabilize this market is in the best interest of all Iowans, including providers of health care and insurance carriers,” Wellmark Chairman and CEO John Forsyth said in a statement. “No one really benefits from rising costs. While there are many potential solutions, the timing and relative impact of those solutions is currently unclear. This makes it difficult to establish plans for 2018.”
Wellmark’s departure from Iowa’s Obamacare exchange will affect 21,400 people, but 1.64 million will still be able to receive insurance from Wellmark outside of the Obamacare exchanges.
Only two insurers remain in the Iowa exchange – Aetna and Medica – and it’s uncertain if both will choose to participate in the exchange next year. Medica is still mulling over its options while Aetna “has largely exited the market and declined to comment on its plans,” according to The New York Times.
Wellmark isn’t the only insurer to recently leave a failing Obamacare exchange.
On Friday, it was reported that Anthem Inc. is poised to leave most of the Obamacare exchanges, as they had lost $374 million last year. This is a significant development because, as Guy Benson pointed out at Townhall:
Thanks to Obamacare’s slow-motion implosion, just one single provider remains as a “choice” for consumers who live in roughly one-third of all US counties. In many of those places, Anthem has been that last holdout insurer, which is now reportedly about to end in 2018. Millions of Americans could be left with zero marketplace options, as the planned withdrawal of the last remaining US healthcare giant from most areas marks the latest sign that Obamacare is an unworkable actuarial nightmare.
Anthem and Wellmark will join Humana, Aetna and UnitedHealth as insurers who have fled Obamacare exchanges, reaffirming that the Obamacare death spiral is real and will only worsen from here.
Follow Aaron Bandler on Twitter.
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Thank you Kent Lamberson

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10535 Pages of ObamaCare condensed! 
Nice summary by a Purdue engineer. 
 Here are the 10,535 pages of ObamaCare condensed to 4 sentences...
 As humorous as this sounds.....every last word of it is absolutely TRUE!

 1. In order to insure the uninsured, we first have to un-insure the insured.

 2. Next, we require the newly uninsured to be re-insured.

 3. To re-insure the newly uninsured, they are required to pay extra charges to be re-insured.

 4. The extra charges are required so that the original insured, who became uninsured, and then became re-insured, can pay enough extra so that the original uninsured can be insured, which will be free of charge to them.

 This, ladies and gentlemen, is called "redistribution of wealth" ... or, by its more common name, SOCIALISM. 
 :(    :(    :(    :(    :(   SAD 4 SURE
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Thank You Kent Lamberson

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WE ALL NEED TO CHANGE HOW WE LIVE OUR LIVES TO FIGHT THIS GENERATION OF PANDEMICS
Published on: Sunday, 01 March, 2020
Culture and practice can change without putting Big Brother in chargeMy article for The Telegraph:
In the 19th century Ignaz Semmelweis was vilified and ostracised when he tried to make doctors wash their hands after doing autopsies on women who had died from childbirth fever before going straight upstairs to deliver more babies. We have come a long way since then in public health, but we can go much further still.
The Covid-19 coronavirus must change the way we behave – whether it kills millions or not. The vulnerability to pandemic-panic of world stock markets, the tourism industry, international sport and global trade, even before there is an actual pandemic, tells us that global society, for all its medical know-how, is vulnerable.
Pandemics are frankly more likely to kill millions or disrupt the world economy than climate change. But if we learn the lesson that we must be more authoritarian, we’ll have got it wrong. Culture and practice can change without putting Big Brother in charge.
Covid-19 may yet peter out, but it looks unlikely after what has happened in Italy and Iran. It seems to be killing mainly old people and its mortality and infectivity may eventually be no higher than flu, but that is cold comfort.
Flu kills thousands a year, yet we treat respiratory infections fatalistically as an inevitable risk, the way our ancestors thought of consumption or smallpox. It should not be like this: we can do much more to stop these viruses spreading.

China has apparently got Covid-19 under control with brutal measures: drones shouting at people in the street; violent arrests; and a total ban on travel.
This has gained admirers among the instinctively bossy. “China’s uncompromising and rigorous use of non-pharmaceutical measures to contain transmission of the Covid-19 virus in multiple settings provides vital lessons for the global response,” said the World Health Organisation this week.
There has long been a streak of China envy among those on the statist Left who yearn for authoritarian measures to bring in population control and renewable energy, bypassing inconveniences of democracy.
But autocracy has its drawbacks too. Lack of challenge from civil society allows live, wild animals to be sold in markets in China, providing a way for new viruses to jump into the human species. Besides, violent enforcement of public health would not survive legal and political challenge here and might prove counterproductive.
It should not be necessary anyway. Society is already reacting: conferences and rugby matches are being cancelled and people are self-isolating voluntarily. For those who refuse to go along (a doctor friend mentioned a patient who ignored advice not to board a connecting flight after falling ill on a flight from China), shame will be a powerful weapon.
I hope that what emerges from this episode is a cultural shift to change our habits so as to defeat not just future lethal diseases, but also ones as harmless as the common cold. It’s outrageous that we treat viruses as acts of God to be borne with patience, and mock as wimps those who stay at home.
It’s mad that we send our children to nurseries with runny noses where they amplify infections. It’s idiotic that many persist in believing you only get a cold because you’re “run down”, as if Louis Pasteur had never lived and the germ theory of disease was still up for discussion. It’s silly that people with colds go to parties and not only shake hands with but – increasingly, if they are under 30 – kiss strangers on first meeting.
A few weeks ago I had a bad cold so I delayed a trip to London, then refused to shake hands with anybody for 10 days. It was hard. People kept saying things like “Oh, I don’t get colds, I take vitamins”, or “I’ve had it already”, when there are 200 kinds of virus that cause the common cold and immunity is often temporary anyway.
Wearing a face mask when you have a cold or flu should become the norm as it is in Japan.
Let’s use this epidemic, however bad it gets, to change our habits not just temporarily but for good.
With 7.7  billion people on the planet, we are a very tempting target for new viruses and although we have interrupted many of the ways that they would like to spread, and are good at making vaccines, we are still subject to lots of respiratory infections that can occasionally kill us and will always inconvenience us.
We don’t need Big Brother to force cultural change on us; better that we do it voluntarily.
To stay updated, follow me on Twitter @mattwridley and Facebook, or subscribe to my new newsletter!

Nightmare: 33-Year-Old Left Barren After Socialized Medicine in Canada ‘Treated’ Her
​Nightmare: 33-Year-Old Left Barren After Socialized Medicine in Canada ‘Treated’ Her
Volume 10%
 
BY BEN MARQUIS 
PUBLISHED APRIL 30, 2019 AT 7:42PM

A growing number of elected Democrats, particularly several top-tier 2020 presidential candidates, have openly proposed the United States move to a form of socialized medicine, a single-payer, government-run “Medicare for All” scheme that would utterly destroy our nation’s private medical institutions and health insurance providers.
The ideological left like to proclaim that a government-run health care system would be the height of compassion and the most admirable way for Americans to help take care of each other. However, a recent story from our Canadian neighbors, who have been saddled with a single-payer, centralized health care system, reveals the absolute nightmare and potentially deadly evil that socialized medicine truly is.
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported on the tragic case of a relatively young woman from Nova Scotia named Inez Rudderham. Rudderham has discovered she is now barren due to the incredibly delayed radiation treatment she received for a cancerous tumor. Her cancer went undiagnosed for about two years, despite her efforts to get her declining health checked out by doctors.

In what can only be described as a powerful, heartbreaking and emotional video posted to Facebook, Rudderham challenged the premier of Nova Scotia, Stephen McNeil, to tell her directly to her face in a one-on-one meeting that there is no real health care crisis in the province, as she asserted that she herself has become “the face” of a very real health care crisis.

“I am a 33-year-old mother. I went undiagnosed with anal cancer for two years because I did not have access to a family doctor. And when I went to the ERs, I was brushed off,” Rudderham explained.
She revealed that doctors finally caught her cancer — once it had reached Stage Three. “Three ERs I went to, before someone would listen to me,” she said.

“Thirty rounds — 30 rounds! — of radiation to my pelvis, which has left me barren and infertile. At 33, I am in menopause, because when my tumor was a polyp I did not have access to a family doctor, and the ERs wouldn’t help me,” she continued, wiping away tears.
She further revealed that she had finally been granted an appointment with mental health services to discuss and receive help coping with her situation. Unfortunately, that appointment for the desperately needed mental health assistance — which she had been trying to arrange since January — wasn’t scheduled to take place until the middle of July.

“So once again, I dare you to look me in the face, and tell this — this is the face of the health care crisis in Nova Scotia. I cannot receive help for trauma that I experienced because of this failed system. Until July,” Rudderham said.
“What about my daughter? What about my 4-year-old daughter, who doesn’t have me there — fully — because I need help and I’m not receiving it,” she added. “This is the face. This is the face of the health care crisis in Nova Scotia, and I dare you to tell me otherwise.”
The CBC reported that, according to the president of Doctors Nova Scotia, Rudderham’s account of her treatment — or more accurately, lack thereof — was an increasingly all-too-common refrain that had been heard from countless patients in the province, as well as across the entire nation of Canada.

“Lack of a family physician, having to access emergency department services for health care — knowing full well that those emergency departments aren’t equipped to be diagnosing cancer like this, and are also stretched thin themselves,” Tim Holland explained. He suggested that cutting back bureaucratic red tape, hiring and retaining more doctors and nurses, and improving working conditions were all part of a “multi-factorial” approach that was necessary to address and fix the problems with the nation’s health care system.
As for province Premier McNeil, he told reporters that he had tasked the Health Department to seek out and learn more from Rudderham about her particular issues, but declined to commit to a face-to-face meeting with her. The province’s Health Minister, Randy Delorey, also said that his people would reach out to Rudderham, but declined to agree that the health care system had reached a “crisis” state.

Contrary to the rosy picture painted by leftists who tout a single-payer health care system, this is in fact the grim reality of socialized medicine, a system that limits access and provides no alternativesor second opinions, leaving those patients trapped within the system to suffer and even ultimately die with no hope whatsoever.
There is nothing compassionate or caring at all when it comes to socialized medicine. Every Democrat who openly promotes such an evil and dangerous system should be compelled to watch this video or meet with other individuals who have suffered similarly to Rudderham, if only to hear for themselves the sort of dystopian nightmare they seem intent on foisting upon the American people.
We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.
Ben Marquis
Contributor, Commentary
Summary More Info Recent Posts Contact
Ben Marquis is a writer who identifies as a constitutional conservative/libertarian. His focus is on protecting the First and Second Amendments. He has covered current events and politics for Conservative Tribune since 2014.

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It’s official: Medicare trust fund will run out of money in 8 years
Simon Black
 
June 7, 2018
Santiago, Chile
Two days ago the respective Boards of Trustees for Medicare and Social Security released their annual reports for 2018.
As usual, the numbers are pretty gruesome… and the reports plainly stated what we’ve been talking about for years: the trust funds for both Social Security and Medicare are going to run out of money.
Soon.
In the case of Medicare, the Trustees project that its largest trust fund will be fully depleted in 2026, just eight years away. In the context of retirement, that’s right around the corner.
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For Social Security, the Trustee report stated that the program will spend more money on benefits in 2018 than it will generate in income and tax revenue.
So this year will be the first time Social Security has run a deficit since 1982.
But it gets worse. Because according to the Trustees’ projections, the program will continue running larger and larger deficits until it too becomes fully depleted in 2034.
After that, recipients can expect at least a 25% cut in the benefits that they were promised and worked their entire lives to receive.
Again, these numbers come directly from the Trustees of Social Security and Medicare (which includes the US Treasury Secretary).
The reports were so dire that mainstream publications picked them up almost immediately.
Curiously, though, a number of newspapers tried to play down the bad news, dismissively telling their readers that Social Security and Medicare are just fine, and that those sobering projections don’t matter.
These are common refrains. They’ll state, for example, that there’s nothing to worry about because the government will step in and bail out the programs.
Is that so? Well, who is going to bail out the government?
According to the Treasury Department’s annual financial report, Uncle Sam is already insolvent to the tune of $20.4 trillion.
And those numbers are only getting worse too. Treasury’s own projections show annual budget deficits in excess of $1 trillion starting in 2020.
Simply put, a short-term fix of Social Security and Medicare would cost trillions of dollars. And that would just be a down payment on the long-term costs of fixing the programs.
The federal government simply doesn’t have that kind of money. Not even close.
So the expectation that some politician is going to come riding in on a white horse with checkbook in hand is ludicrous.
A second commonly held myth is that these Social Security and Medicare projections are irrelevant because they “have a history of being wrong.”
That’s completely untrue.
35 years ago, the Social Security annual report from 1983 projected that the program’s cost would exceed its income and tax revenue in… 2020.
The current report states that this is going to happen in 2018.
That’s only a two year difference from what they projected over three decades ago. So they pretty much nailed it.
More importantly, though, we’re not even talking about long-range projections, which typically look 50-75 years into the future. We’re talking about EIGHT years from now.
But even if you take a longer-term view, the data is still grim.
Social Security and Medicare provide benefits to people based primarily on tax revenue generated by those who are currently in the work force.
Essentially the programs require a certain number of workers paying into the system for every single retiree drawing benefits. They call this the worker-to-retiree ratio.
In order for this delicate balance to work, population growth has to remain fairly stable. Major swings in population growth throw everything out of whack.
The critical problem is that both fertility rates and population growth (which takes into consideration immigration and mortality) have been declining.
The US fertility rate has been on a general downward trend since 1990, and in steep decline since 2007.
And overall population growth rates for the past several years have been the lowest in more than five decades.
This contrasts with the years immediately following World War II, in which there was an explosion in population growth.
Those are the folks who are currently receiving Social Security and Medicare benefits.
But due to the declines in population growth, there are no longer enough workers paying into the system (even with unemployment at multi-decade lows) to support the programs’ current recipients.
The end result is what we’re talking about today: Social Security and Medicare can’t generate enough revenue to support their costs and will thus soon deplete their cash reserves.
The government is trying to put a brave face on this, telling us that the alarming drop in the national fertility rate is only temporary, even though it’s been falling steadily for three decades.
But they insist it will reverse soon.
Frankly, it doesn’t seem sensible to plan one’s retirement based the ability of these bureaucrats to accurately predict how much sex people are going to be having in the coming years.
Instead, let’s look at the big picture: Social Security and Medicare are both perennially mismanaged with a history of gridlock and inaction.
And the people who are responsible for overseeing these trust funds have clearly stated that the programs will run out of money and be unable to pay the benefits that have been promised.
What sane person would possibly put all of his/her retirement eggs in that basket?
There are clearly better ways.
One approach is to establish more robust retirement plans (like a solo 401(k) or self-directed IRA) and start maximizing your contributions.
These types of structures allow you to direct your capital to potentially more lucrative investments that go beyond mainstream stocks and bonds. Plus, in many respects, they can be cheaper to maintain.
This is important, because if you can squeeze out an extra 1% per year between cost savings and better investment returns, it can add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional retirement savings when compounded over several decades.
Regardless of what happens (or doesn’t happen) with Social Security in the future, it’s hard to imagine you’ll be worse off for doing this.
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Drudge nails it: John McCain is face of ‘corruption’



By Cheryl K. Chumley - The Washington Times - Monday, July 31, 2017
Matt Drudge of Drudge Report fame didn’t take kindly to Sen. John McCain’s recent thumbs-down vote on Obamacare repeal.
In a tweet that quickly amassed 5,500 or so likes, and near 2,800 retweets, Drudge simply wrote: “Corruption has so many faces …”
The message was atop a photo of a McCain campaign photo that included the senator’s face and this text: “John McCain: Leading the fight to stop Obamacare.”
Right. A picture says 1,000 words.
But in this case, one suffices. And Drudge nailed it: Corruption.
McCain, pure and simple, screwed Republicans, conservatives and President Donald Trump on Obamacare repeal. And he did it simply because he could.

He did it because, post-brain cancer diagnosis, he has nothing to lose. His political career is nearing its end, he’s made his money, he’s secured his family’s financial future.
He did it, bluntly, because he hates Trump more than he loves the American people.
And for a supposed war hero, that’s quite a statement to send.
Drudge’s tweet drew a photo from McCain’s 2016 re-election campaign. And McCain can say what he wants as his reasons for turning down the repeal bill — and he has indeed come out and said the “skinny repeal fell short of our promise to repeal and replace.”
But fact is: His legacy now is as a traitor to the conservative cause. Or, as Drudge likes to call it: “Corruption.”

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Democrat Bernie Sanders is known for being a radical left-winger.

Washington Post Shocks Dems As They Demand The Liberal Lie Stop
Posted by Luis Orozco | Jun 21, 2017 

Sanders offered some crazy proposals during the primaries.
While The Washington Post has been one of the most prominent newspapers in the U.S. history, its inclination to the left has been so obvious in the last decade that is common to see many articles endorsing delusional politics. The latest example is the single-payer healthcare, which many experts claim would be a disastrous system.
Although the media has pushed a lot in favor of it, the Sunday Editorial in the Post finally admitted that this healthcare plan is not feasible in the United States. Of course, we’re talking about an unexpected situation where a liberal media decides to destroy their narrative and give way to facts.
The Post explained that while there could be a lot of benefits with this healthcare system, it would come at a colossal price that Americans can’t manage. The newspaper said that when Bernie Sanders proposed the “Medicare for all” health system in his campaign, the nonpartisan Urban Institute revealed that it would increase government spending by $32 trillion over a decade.

Democrat Bernie Sanders is known for being a radical left-winger.
The Institute explained that this terrible idea would require a dramatic tax increase. Sanders’ didn’t bother to mention anything that during the campaign. It might have hurt his popularity.
The Post admitted that the Urban Institute’s numbers were correct. The American government currently spends more per citizen to cover just a slice of the population than other government spends to cover all of theirs.
Basically, expanding the government’s involvement in this issue wouldn’t be enough to reach a beneficial healthcare plan. Especially when the cost associated with single-payer would be extremely unpopular.

The Post said that in order to fulfill the single-payer dream of coverage for all and big savings, every single player in the medical industry –including doctors- would have to get paid less. At the same time, patients would be forced to accept different standards of comfort and access. The Post explained that most Americans won’t accept these tradeoffs.
The Washing Post has endorsed some delusional politics from Democrats.
The liberal newspaper finished its editorial by saying that health care eventually needs to include cost restraint and universal coverage, and that government involvement could achieve that goal. Regarding this assertion, the Post explained there are several options that the government could take, including determining which treatments should be covered, lowering drug costs, or even changing how care is delivered.
Basically, while The Washington Post clearly believes that a single-payer healthcare system is a good idea, they finally recognized it wouldn’t work in America. Sadly, the Post has endorsed the idea of universal coverage to the detriment of citizens.

Since Donald Trump got elected as the new president, The Washington Post has increased its bias to the point where this media outlet has been brutally criticized by many analysts and even some of its readers.
Barack Obama got cheered and applauded at the Washington Post in a 2009 visit.
As reported by Fox News back in May, the newspaper experienced one of its most shameful moments when the newsroom exploded in a festive atmosphere after publishing a story about Trump discussing classified information with Russian officials. Soon after the Post published this story, National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster defended Trump’s conversations and explained that it was legal and “wholly appropriate,” in terms of homeland security.
McMaster was also highly critical during a tense White House briefing about the leaks fueling media reports. He said that Trump was not even aware of the source of the data he apparently shared with the Russians officials.

While this moment clearly showed the media’s bias, a fact check from Drudge Report’s proprietor Matt Drudge revealed that The Washington Post lost its decency a while ago.
On his Twitter account, Drudge said that the Post’s newsroom staff cheered and applauded when Barack Obama visited them back in 2009. Drudge stated that the Post was playing “bloodsport” then, and Obama was just another player on the same team.
Also, he included a link to a Politico story from that year, which contained a press pool report about Obama’s visit to the Washington Post. In this piece, Politico described Obama arriving at the nondescript Soviet-style building that houses the Post at 15th and L Street. There were around 100 people –it is believed they were reporters- awaiting him to show their happiness over his winning of the election.
Given the Post’s love for the Democratic party, the fact that they recognized the stupidity of a single-payer healthcare system is definitely breaking news.
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The real scoop on Obamacare replacement options
   The House of Representatives needed two attempts to pass an Obamacare replacement bill. The Senate is now adding big changes to the House bill. Maybe it will draft its own Senate version of healthcare replacement and then fight it out with the House. How long will that take?
   The Democrats want to keep the Obama Affordable Care Act as law, and say they want to work with the Republicans to improve it and make it sustainable. Who would believe them? California—the most liberal state in the Union--has just passed a new health care bill calling for a single-payer system similar to the federal Medicare program. Two other “blue” states are in the process of doing the same.
   Healthcare in America is an unmanageable mess that only some hard-nosed decisions can correct. Nearly all those who have Obamacare policies and who think that guarantees them reliable health insurance coverage are deluding themselves. If left untouched, Obama’s Affordable Care Act will disappear altogether in little more than a year, and people will be forced to pay through the nose for their health care or die miserable deaths.
   A single-payer, Medicare-like system, at first glance, appears to be a possible answer. After all, Medicare has worked so far for seniors, but its soaring costs and inefficiencies threaten to kill it off in the next 10 to 15 years. Medicare exists through tax contributions from recipients that can no longer cover health benefits distributions from year to year. But to implement a Medicare-like system for everyone in a state the size of California would require a tax input of more than $400 billion annually. That’s twice the amount the state collects in taxes to pay for all it's necessities. This enormous extra contribution of tax money would be impossible to collect from all the tax sources currently available to the state. So a single-payer state system is dead right from the start. And if single-payer is dead for one state, it’s “deader than dead” for the entire nation.
   What can we do to replace the crap that now passes for healthcare coverage in America? Here are some suggestions that undoubtedly are going to piss some people off. But compromises have to be made, and not everybody is going to get what they want. The best we can hope for is to cover the broad essentials of reasonable health coverage:
Don’t throw out the “good” in a fruitless search for the “perfect.” There’s nothing perfect anywhere in life, and so there will never be a perfect healthcare bill. Those “numb nuts” in the Republican Party who won’t support any new bill that includes any vestige of the old Obamacare are exactly that: numb nuts. And besides that, most of these dumb asses are only interested in insuring that their constituents know they made a real, personal contribution to how the new replacement bill is worded.  They want to hold out on passing any bill that doesn’t make them look like heroes. We the people didn’t send these schmucks to Washington to strut around like rock stars.
Pre-existing conditions must be covered. Regardless of whether you think the nation can’t afford to provide health insurance for sick people, we’re going to have to…and there’s really no reason why we can’t. Also, no state should have the right to opt out of this coverage.
   Before Obamacare, the health insurance industry reported that approximately 85 percent of all persons who apply for health insurance are approved to receive it. If true, this means, even today, we’re talking about a very small portion of the U.S. population that would be denied coverage by insurance companies because of pre-existing health problems.
   Under Obamacare, many of these unhealthy individuals were able to obtain insurance because they were underwritten by the inflated prices charged to young and otherwise healthy persons who were forced to pay for a slew of ridiculous coverage items, such as pregnancy services for men and prostate treatments for women. Even with all these absurd coverages included in the typical Obama policy premiums, insurance companies have found they can’t make a profit under Obamacare. And so, that’s why Obamacare is disappearing so fast —abandoning everyone, rich or poor, healthy or sick.
The poor need government subsidies to pay for healthcare insurance. If you haven’t got the money for healthcare, somebody has to help out. Charities can’t do it all. That means government must step in. And there are many ways for government to provide assistance:
The application of earned income tax credits.  The poor, at certain income levels, are rewarded with earned income tax credits from the federal government. This is supposed to help them feed their families. But too often the money is tossed away on things that are in no way essential to family survival. Why not make this hand-out from the government, or at least part of it, distributable only as a direct payment for health insurance premiums. In many cases, this would be the only good use this money would be put toward. Figures for 2015 show that more than 26 million low-income households received earned income tax credits ranging from $3,400 to$ 6,200 for the year.
The elimination of useless, duplicate government benefits programs. President Trump's fiscal 2018 budget proposal would completely eliminate 66 federal programs, for a savings of $26.7 billion.  If these programs were gone tomorrow, the vast majority of Americans would never have known they existed.
   By freeing up nearly $27 billion, this money could be applied to healthcare insurance subsidies that could cover as many as 3 million low-income families.
Modest cuts to the federal SNAP (food stamp) program.  The Trump 2018 budget also intends to cut the food stamp program by as much as 25 percent. Some in Congress scream that such a big cut would throw millions of families off the food stamp program. But a more modest trimming, say 10 percent, wouldn’t knock anyone off the program. It would just reduce monthly allotments by a few dollars. For example the average national monthly food stamp allotment for a family of four persons is about $512. Cutting this back 10 percent would remove about $51 from their monthly food allotment, which could mean that families would have to rearrange their meals to include a few less-expensive ingredients.
   According to SNAP, food budget allotments are designed to restrict the use of this money to “made from scratch” meals; prepared foods and other upscale convenience items are not allowed. So a budget cut of only 10 percent would not be impossible to absorb in an intelligent “made-from-scratch” menu program.  
   The 2016 federal food-stamp budget provided over $70 billion in allotments to cover about 45 million persons. A cut of 10 percent in the 2018 budget could possibly divert $7 billion to subsidize healthcare premiums for nearly another one million poor American families. 
Big reductions in Medicare and Medicaid Fraud. Fake claims made against these two giant programs are so varied and unexplored that government estimates put the annual volume of this fraud at anywhere between $60-billion and $90-billion. Yet it’s reasonable to believe that as much as half of this loss of taxpayer funds can be eliminated.
   Although there are many kinds of Medicare/Medicaid fraud, most of it is concerned with overcharges by medical practitioners and hospitals, the lack of regulation of drug prices charged by pharmacies and price-gouging by suppliers of medical aids and devices to consumers.
   Nearly everyone has a story about how some supplier of health services or products has gouged a purchaser, a health insurer or the government. I have several that come to mind that are indicative of the kind of overcharging that, repeated millions of times, jacks up healthcare costs by tens of billions every year.
Pharmacy drug prices must be controlled.  Growing more devastating today is the wide range of overpricing that pharmacies are allowed to do by law. Currently, there is no control on pharmacy drug pricing. Recently my wife refilled a prescription for ninety Doxycycline 40 Mg. tablets. We have drug prescription insurance, and so the cost to her for these tablets was only $9.17. However, the pharmacy she used—a huge national chain—charged our prescription insurance plan $1,926.25 for the prescription. Now, Doxycycline isn’t a new wonder drug. It’s been around since 1967. According to information gathered on the Internet, this pharmacy would have charged my wife $112 for that refill if she had paid cash for it.
   So why does this pharmacy chain get away with charging our insurance company almost $2,000 for a prescription that would only have cost my wife a little over $100 had she paid cash? The answer is simple. This pharmacy can engage in such a gargantuan overcharge because the government (the law) allows them to.  And whenever the cost of a drug prescription is passed on to the government, the same price gouging usually occurs. Is our government protecting our need for reasonable, affordable, life-saving drugs or is it knuckling under to vicious price-gouging because the retail pharmacy and pharmaceutical industries have the power to make or break politicians? The answer is obvious.
Prices medical suppliers charge directly to the government must be questioned.   Another example of Medicare fraud that comes to mind, concerns information received from a friend, a senior citizen, who relies on a Cpap machine to aid in breathing while asleep. He remarked that a supplier of Cpap parts charged the government more than $200 to replace a worn plastic hose and nose-piece for his machine. The replacement expense to the supplier couldn’t have been more than about $15, at most. But since the supplier billed the government directly there was no one with first-hand knowledge of the transaction to challenge the price charged to the government. Also, no one within the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services seems interested in closely examining these bills. No supplier of medical devices to the public should ever be able to defraud the government so easily. Yet it happens every day to the tune of billions of dollars each year.
   Cutting this kind of Medicare fraud isn’t difficult. Even Obama, in his usual half-assed way of doing things, was able to take a $7 billion chunk out of it in 2014. Unfortunately, he let his fraud reduction project disappear the next year. But with some additional investigative manpower on board at Medicare, total fraud could be reduced by perhaps $30-billion or more annually. I would suggest that the Trump administration push for hiring perhaps a 1,000 additional investigators to make this happen. The cost of these additional personnel (under $100 million) would be more than offset by the billions they recover in fraud reduction.
   It could reasonably be assumed that a reduction of $30 billion in this fraud could provide the funds to extend health care insurance subsidies to an additional five million U.S. families each year.
Reduce the number of illegal aliens living on taxpayer money. In a paper released in 2013 by The Heritage Foundation, it was estimated that “There are approximately 3.7 million unlawful immigrant households in the U.S. These households impose a net fiscal burden on U.S. taxpayers of around $54.5 billion per year. It’s obvious that there’s an opportunity here to free up additional money to subsidize healthcare for Americans. Deport as many illegal immigrant family members as can be identified and justified, and prevent more from entering each year. What the cost of such deportations would be is uncertain. But if only a million or just a half-million families could be removed from taxpayer expense, as much as $7-billion to $10-billion --less deportation costs--would be available to subsidize health insurance for Americans.
Allow consumers to purchase health insurance across state lines. Doing so would increase competition and consequently lower prices. But there’s a problem. Congress hopes to repeal and replace Obamacare through the reconciliation process, and permission to purchase insurance across state lines is excluded from this process. However, approval from Congress to do this can come immediately on the heels of the reconciliation process.
   There’s a lot of talk in Washington that the individual states themselves would not permit this to happen because each is “in bed” with the insurance companies doing business within their jurisdictions. Columnist Ann Coulter believes there is a way around this. She suggests: “Congress passes a law, pursuant to its constitutional power to regulate interstate commerce, that says: ‘In America, it shall be legal to sell health insurance on the free market. This law supersedes all other laws, taxes, mandates, coverage requirements, regulations or prohibitions, state or federal.’”
   Congress must act quickly in our interests on all of these suggestions. Or else, should foot dragging persist in a vain effort to produce the “perfect” replacement for Obamacare, it will crash and Americans will have no recourse for affordable, life-saving healthcare coverage.
   There’s no time left for self-absorbed members of Congress to continue sitting on their asses theorizing the flawless replacement for Obamacare when such perfection is attainable only by God Himself. Congress must make “good” the goal…and get it done ASAP.
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In 24 States, 50% or More of Babies Born on Medicaid; New Mexico Leads Nation With 72%
By Terence P. Jeffrey | March 24, 2017 | 12:49 PM EDT 
U.S. Capitol (J. Scott Applewhite)(CNSNews.com) - In 24 of the nation’s 50 states at least half of the babies born during the latest year on record had their births paid for by Medicaid, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
New Mexico led all states with 72 percent of the babies born there in 2015 having their births covered by Medicaid.
Arkansas ranked second with 67 percent; Louisiana ranked third with 65 percent; and three states—Mississippi, Nevada and Wisconsin—tied for fourth place with 64 percent of babies born there covered by Medicaid.
New Hampshire earned the distinction of having the smallest percentage of babies born on Medicaid. In that state, Medicaid paid for the births of only 27 percent of the babies born in 2015.
Virginia and Utah tied for the next to last position, with 31 percent of the babies born on Medicaid.
However, according to KFF, some of the nation’s most populous states shared the distinction of having 50 percent or more of the babies born there born on Medicaid.

In California, Florida and Illinois, for example, 50 percent of all babies were born on Medicaid in the latest year on record.
In New York, 51 percent of the babies were born on Medicaid.
In Ohio, 52 percent of babies were born on Medicaid.
The Kaiser Family Foundation gathered its data on the number of babies born on Medicaid in each state by surveying the state Medicaid directors.
“Medicaid directors were asked to provide the most recent available data on the share of all births in their states that were financed by Medicaid,” said a KFF report.
“About half of the states were able to provide data for calendar 2015 or fiscal year 2015,” said KFF. “Other states generally provided data from 2013 or 2014. On average, states reported that Medicaid pays for just over 47 percent of all births.”
“Eight states (Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Carolina and West Virginia) reported that Medicaid pays for 60 percent or more of all births in their state,” reported KFF.
The KFF survey said data from Hawaii was not available.
A study published by the journal “Women’s Health Issues” in 2013 looked at births covered by Medicaid in the years 2008, 2009, 2010. The report said it was trying to establish a “baseline” for Medicaid-covered birth before the Affordable Care Act’s—AKA Obamacare’s—expansion of Medicaid kicked in.
“Starting in 2014,” said this report, “some states will extend Medicaid to thousands of previously uninsured, low-income women. Given this changing landscape, it is important to have a baseline of current levels of Medicaid financing for births in each state.”
That study, done by researchers at George Washington University and the March of Dimes, determined that in 2008, 40.08 percent of the births in the United States were covered by Medicaid; and that, in 2009, 43.89 percent were covered by Medicaid.
By 2010, according this report, the percentage of births in the United States covered by Medicaid had risen to 47.75 percent—or 1,805,151 out of 3,780,519 total births.
Another report, published by the Centers for Disease Control and Preventionlater in December 2013, looked at the form of payment for births in the 33 states and the District of Columbia that as of 2010 had adopted the 2003 version of “U.S. Standard Certificate for Live Birth.” This certificate specifically asks the mother to say which of four categories the payment for her child’s birth falls into: private insurance, Medicaid, self-pay, or other.
This data, according to the CDC, covered all 2010 births in the 33 states and the District of Columbia, which accounted for 76 percent of all births in the nation in that year. According to the CDC, this data revealed that 44.9 percent of the babies born in these jurisdictions in 2010 were born on Medicaid.
In this 2010 CDC data for 33 states, New Mexico also led with the highest percentage of births on Medicaid—with 57.5 percent of all babies born there that year having their births covered by Medicaid.
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Doctor Reveals Muslim Woman’s “Unsanitary Habit” and Then Gets Disgusting Surprise
A Muslim surgeon put hundreds of hospital patients’ lives at risk daily all because she wanted to put her own well-being above the people entrusting their lives into her care.
It is mind-blowing to think there are people out there so brainwashed by a religion that they are willing to put other people’s lives in danger. A hospital in England has suspended a consultant anesthesiologist after he exposed a female Muslim surgeon who point blank refused to remove her headscarf while administering surgery, via Daily Mail.
This doctor, Dr. Vladislav Rogozov, got suspended for having the best interests of the patients at heart. Wearing a headscarf opens up the high risk of cross-infecting the patient’s open incision, which could lead to death.
Instead of accepting she was wrong, the Muslim surgeon has filed racial discrimination allegations against the Czech-born anesthesiologist.
This anesthesiologist has worked in Britain at his job for over ten years, with a spotless record. And now he’s suspended indefinitely until the allegations have been resolved. It’s despicable!
Would you be happy to have surgery done by someone willing to put your health at risk for the sake of their beliefs? Would you allow to have a loved one operated on by this dogmatist with her unsanitary habits?
Of course you wouldn’t! And that’s why the brave anesthesiologist reported the surgeon in question.
This is yet another case of a Muslim person thinking they are superior due to their religion and forcing non-Muslims to go along with what they want to do.
For the smallest of things, Muslims will claim discrimination or intolerance — even in this case where someone put safety regulations first. A “racial discrimination” lawsuit? That doesn’t even begin to make sense. Islam is a religion, not a race — and it was her religion that prompted her to risk the well-being of her patients.
To make matters even more complicated, Muslim doctors and surgeons often take breaks during surgeries to recite their prayers and speak phrases from the Quran rather than tend to their patients.
Unfortunately, in England, the government-run healthcare system means that you have to deal with Muslim surgeons and doctors and unsanitary practices. It is essential that we take this as a lesson and ensure that these practices do NOT become commonplace in the United States.
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The Accelerating Primary Care Doctor Shortage
This should not come as a surprise, given Obamacare.

While Paul Krugman continues to yap that Obamacare is a success because of the number insured, the real question should be  what kind of care will people get under centrally planned healthcare. It won't be good.

Whenever there is a "shortage" you have to look at controls in the pricing. Shortages can't occur in a free market, They do all the time where prices are centrally planned and that is going on as MarketWatch explains:

Here’s what’s involved:
• How doctors get paid: Choosing to go into primary care is also a choice of lesser pay.
Starting salaries in high-paying specialties can range from $354,000 (general surgery) to $488,000 (orthopedic surgery), while primary-care fields tend to bring a sub-$200,000 starting salary, from$188,000 (pediatrics) to $199,000 (family medicine), according to a Merritt Hawkins report.
The pay disparities reflect America’s “fee for service” health-care model, which compensates providers based on the number and type of services they complete, and which inherently favors specialists.
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Federal judge in Texas rules Affordable Health Care Act unconstitutional
Ruling comes on eve of the deadline for Americans to sign up for coverage in the federal insurance exchange created under the law.
By RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR | The Associated Press 
December 14, 2018   WASHINGTON — A conservative federal judge in Texas on Friday ruled the Affordable Care Act “invalid” on the eve of the sign-up deadline for next year. But with appeals certain, even the Trump White House said the law will remain in place for now.
In a 55-page opinion, U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor ruled that last year’s tax cut bill knocked the constitutional foundation from under “Obamacare” by eliminating a penalty for not having coverage. The rest of the law cannot be separated from that provision and is therefore invalid, he wrote.
Supporters of the law immediately said they would appeal. “Today’s misguided ruling will not deter us: our coalition will continue to fight in court for the health and wellbeing of all Americans,” said California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who is leading a coalition of states defending the ACA.
The White House applauded O’Connor’s ruling, but said the law remains in place while appeals proceed. President Donald Trump tweeted that Congress should pass a new law.
“As I predicted all along, Obamacare has been struck down as an UNCONSTITUTIONAL disaster!” Trump tweeted. “Now Congress must pass a STRONG law that provides GREAT healthcare and protects pre-existing conditions.”
However, Congress is unlikely to act while the case remains in the courts. Numerous high-ranking Republican lawmakers have said they did not intend to also strike down popular provisions such as protection for people with pre-existing medical conditions when they repealed the ACA’s fines for people who can afford coverage but remain uninsured.
Still, Democratic Rep. Nancy Pelosi, who is expected to become House speaker in January, vowed to fight what she called an “absurd ruling.” She said the House “will move swiftly to formally intervene in the appeals process to uphold the life-saving protections for people with pre-existing conditions and reject Republicans’ effort to destroy the Affordable Care Act.”
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said: “We expect this ruling will be appealed to the Supreme Court. Pending the appeal process, the law remains in place.”
Legal expert Timothy Jost, a supporter of the health law, said O’Connor’s ruling would have repercussions for nearly all Americans if it stands. If the entire health law is invalidated, popular provisions that benefit Medicare beneficiaries and people with employer coverage would also be scrapped. That could include the section that allows parents to keep young adult children on their coverage until age 26.
About 20 million people have gained health insurance coverage since the ACA passed in 2010 without a single Republican vote. Currently, about 10 million have subsidized private insurance through the health law’s insurance markets, while an estimated 12 million low-income people are covered through its Medicaid expansion.
Saturday is the sign-up deadline for 2019 private plans through HealthCare.gov. Meanwhile, a number of states are expected to move forward with Medicaid expansion after Democratic victories in the midterm elections.
If the case were to reach the Supreme Court it would mark the third time the justices consider a challenge to fundamental provisions of the law. “Obamacare” opponents lost both the first two cases.
The five justices who upheld the health law in 2012 in the first major case — Chief Justice John Roberts and the court’s four liberals — are all still serving.
Since then public opinion on the ACA has shifted from mostly negative to generally favorable.
Preserving the law’s protections for people with pre-existing medical conditions proved to be a strong argument for Democrats in the midterm elections. Republicans who tried to undermine those safeguards during their failed effort to repeal the health law last year were forced on the defensive and went on record saying they, too, want to make sure people with health problems can get coverage.
Democrats set to take control of the House in January are talking about passing legislation that enshrines protections for pre-existing conditions. It’s unclear what form that would take, or if the Republican-majority Senate would go along and Trump would sign it.
The GOP-led states who brought the lawsuit asked O’Connor to toss out the entire law after Congress repealed the “individual mandate” penalty for going without coverage. The conservative judge had previously ruled against other Obama-era policies.
The Trump administration weighed in, saying the government would no longer defend some core components of the ACA, but that others could remain, including Medicaid expansion, subsidies for private insurance and health insurance markets.
Along with the requirement to have health insurance, the administration said the parts of the law that should go included:
— The requirement that insurers must take all applicants for comprehensive coverage regardless of prior health history, including pre-existing conditions. That includes a prohibition on insurers writing policies that exclude a particular condition — for example, a recurrence of breast cancer.
— The prohibition on insurers charging higher premiums to people with health problems.
The health insurance industry says doing away with consumer protections will destabilize a market that seems to be finding its footing, with modest premium increases and more plan choices next year.
The American Medical Association called O’Connor’s ruling an “unfortunate step backward for our health system that is contrary to overwhelming public sentiment to preserve pre-existing condition protections.”
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Published on Jul 28, 2017
​McCain's REVENGE VOTE Against TRUMP, Not Repealing Obamacare, said O'Reilly. McCain voted against the 'Skinny Bill', which would repeal parts of Obamacare, O'Reilly suggested that McCian was sticking it to Trump. It was suggested that McCain Not Repealing Obamacare is a REVENGE VOTE Against TRUMP.

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WATCH: Air Force Vet Passes Law Requiring EVERY SINGLE Member of Congress To…
When true conservatives are given the keys to the nation, we see fair laws and a just system for everyone. The Left just doesn’t believe that.
On Thursday, the Republican House of Representatives passed the first law to repeal and replace Obamacare. However, the media isn’t reporting that Air Force veteran Marthy McSally added an amendment requiring Congress to participate in the new healthcare system. Finally!


One of the biggest flaws of Obamacare was that politicians were exempt from the law. In other words, it didn’t affect them, while the rest of us suffered. The mainstream media barely covered that little fact.
Fortunately, politicians are now going to be held accountable for their laws, and this is a good start. We cannot allow politicians to be treated differently than the rest of us. We will drain the swamp.
After eight years of Obama, we never saw accountability in the capitol. They dined on expensive food, while the rest of us cut our budgets in half. Because of Obamacare, employers would rather hire part-time employees to escape the toxic law.
With Obamacare on its way out the door, what will happen to the economy? The answer is simple: the economy will improve! We will start to see more full-time jobs with benefits. Employers hated paying for Obamacare. Why hire someone full-time when you can contract out the work? Who wants to invest in full-time employees when it will ruin your business because of a liberal law? Leftists just don’t understand business.
The Left hates business. They would rather live in a socialist nightmare than contribute to the economy. Thankfully, we elected Donald Trump to reverse this awful trend. With Trump in office, we will reject socialism.
The mainstream media is so sympathetic to socialism. It is ridiculous. Our country was built on capitalism, not socialism. The media tries to hide the truth, but they are awful at lying. They are so favorable to the Left that conservative voices are routinely silenced.
When we elected Donald Trump, we rejected the mainstream media’s lies, but they still won’t give up. We still hear them bash conservatism and Trump. When will it end?
We need more true conservatives in office and on the news. We are finally starting to see conservatives stand up against liberal oppression. We will not be silenced by their nonsense. After the Berkeley riots, it is clear that liberals will do anything to silence conservatives.
The Left just doesn’t care. They want to be the only ones allowed to speak. According to liberals, free speech is only for them. Not anymore, liberals. We will be heard. We voted in Donald Trump; we did NOT vote in the Clinton family.
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A Health Care Plan So Simple, Even A Republican Can Understand!
BY: ANN COULTER
MARCH 30, 2017
CARTOON BY NETRIGHTDAILY.COM
It’s always impossible to repeal laws that require Ann to pay for greedy people, because the greedy run out on the streets wailing that the Republicans are murdering them.
Obamacare is uniquely awful because the free stuff isn’t paid for through income taxes: It’s paid for through MY health insurance premiums. This is unfortunate because I wanted to buy health insurance.
Perhaps you’re not aware — SINCE YOU EXEMPTED YOURSELVES FROM OBAMACARE, CONGRESS — but buying or selling health insurance is illegal in America.
Right now, there’s no free market because insurance is insanely regulated not only by Obamacare, but also by the most corrupt organizations in America: state insurance commissions. (I’m talking to you, New York!)
Federal and state laws make it illegal to sell health insurance that doesn’t cover a laughable array of supposedly vital services based on bureaucrats’ medical opinions of which providers have the best lobbyists.
As a result, it’s illegal to sell health insurance that covers any of the medical problems I’d like to insure against. Why can’t the GOP keep Obamacare for the greedy — but make it legal for Ann to buy health insurance?
This is how it works today:
ME: I’m perfectly healthy, but I’d like to buy health insurance for heart disease, broken bones, cancer, and everything else that a normal person would ever need, but no more.
INSURANCE COMPANY: That will be $700 a month, the deductible is $35,000, no decent hospital will take it, and you have to pay for doctor’s visits yourself. But your plan covers shrinks, infertility treatments, sex change operations, autism spectrum disorder treatment, drug rehab and 67 other things you will never need.
INSURANCE COMPANY UNDER ANN’S PLAN: That will be $50 a month, the deductible is $1,000, you can see any doctor you’d like, and you have full coverage for any important medical problems you could conceivably have in a million years.
Mine is a two-step plan (and you don’t have to do the second step, so it’s really a one-step plan).
STEP 1: Congress doesn’t repeal Obamacare! Instead, Congress passes a law, pursuant to its constitutional power to regulate interstate commerce, that says: “In America, it shall be legal to sell health insurance on the free market. This law supersedes all other laws, taxes, mandates, coverage requirements, regulations or prohibitions, state or federal.”
The end. Love, Ann.
There will be no whining single mothers storming Congress with their pre-printed placards. People who want to stay on Obamacare can. No one is taking away anything. They can still have health insurance with free pony rides. It just won’t be paid for with Ann’s premiums anymore, because Ann will now be allowed to buy health insurance on the free market.
Americans will be free to choose among a variety of health insurance plans offered by willing sellers, competing with one another to provide the best plans at the lowest price. A nationwide market in health insurance will drive down costs and improve access — just like everything else we buy here in America!
Within a year, most Americans will be buying health insurance on the free market (and half of the rest will be illegal aliens). We’ll have TV ads with cute little geckos hawking amazing plans and young couples bragging about their broad coverage and great prices from this or that insurance company.
The Obamacare plans will still have the “essential benefits” (free pony rides) that are so important to NPR’s Mara Liasson, but the free market plans will have whatever plans consumers agree to buy and insurance companies agree to sell — again, just like every other product we buy here in America.
Some free market plans will offer all the “essential benefits” mandated by Obamacare, but the difference will be: Instead of forcing me to pay a premium that covers Mara Liasson’s special needs, she’ll have to pay for that coverage herself.
I won’t be compelled to buy health insurance that covers everyone else’s gambling addiction, drug rehab, pregnancies, marital counseling, social workers, contact lenses and rotten kids — simply to have insurance for what doctors call “serious medical problems.”
Then, we’ll see how many people really need free health care.
Until the welfare program is decoupled from the insurance market, nothing will work. Otherwise, it’s like forcing grocery stores to pay for everyone to have a house. A carton of milk would suddenly cost $10,000.
That’s what Obamacare did to health insurance. Paul Ryan’s solution was to cut taxes on businesses — and make the milk watery. But he still wouldn’t allow milk to be sold on the free market.
Democrats will be in the position of blocking American companies from selling a product that people want to buy. How will they explain that to voters?
Perhaps Democrats will come out and admit that they need to fund health insurance for the poor by forcing middle-class Americans to pay for it through their insurance premiums — because otherwise, they’d have to raise taxes, and they want to keep their Wall Street buddies’ income taxes low.
Good luck with that!
STEP 2: Next year, Congress formulates a better way of delivering health care to the welfare cases, which will be much easier since there will be a LOT fewer of them.
No actual money-making business is going to survive by taking the welfare cases — the ones that will cover illegal aliens and Mara Liasson’s talk therapy — so the greedy will get government plans.
But by then, only a minority of Americans will be on the “free” plans. (Incidentally, this will be a huge money-saver — if anyone cares about the federal budget.) Eighty percent of Americans will already have good health plans sold to them by insurance companies competing for their business.
With cheap plans available, a lot of the greedy will go ahead and buy a free market plan. Who wants to stand in line at the DMV to see a doctor when your neighbors have great health care plans for $50 a month?
We will have separated the truly unfortunate from the loudmouthed bullies who simply enjoy forcing other people to pay for their shrinks and aromatherapy.
And if the Democrats vote against a sane method of delivering health care to the welfare cases, who cares? We have lots of wasteful government programs — take it out of Lockheed Martin’s contract. But at least the government won’t be depriving the rest of us of a crucial product just because we are middle class and the Democrats hate us.
There’s your health care bill, GOP!

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THE PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY REPORT 
Obamacare Repeal Is on the Way 
by John and Andy Schlafly 
January 10, 2017
As soon as the newly elected 115th Congress was gaveled to order last week, both houses got to work on the long-promised effort to “repeal and replace” the failed legislation known as Obamacare. The Senate, with its more cumbersome rules, began 50 hours of debate on a budget resolution that will eventually repeal much of the law by reconciliation, which requires only a simple majority of 51 Senators. 
In the House, “replace” was launched with a bill endorsed by the 170-member Republican Study Committee, which is by far the largest caucus in the chamber. In introducing the bill, RSC chairman Mark Walker and lead sponsor Dr. Phil Roe stressed their intention to protect the small number of Americans who currently benefit from Obamacare, while improving the system for the much larger number who have been harmed. 
Only about 16 million Americans (5% of our population) directly benefit from Obamacare. That number includes 12 million covered by Medicaid expansion plus 11 million who bought insurance on the exchanges, minus 7 million of those who previously had insurance. 
Another estimate by the American Action Forum puts the number of Obamacare beneficiaries at only 13-14 million people, which is just 4% of the population. On the other hand, about 8 million Americans have been hit with fines for refusing to buy an inferior product.
For the great majority of Americans who received no benefit from Obamacare, their damages include higher premiums for health insurance, higher deductibles, higher taxes to fund the system, and reduced competition among insurance providers. It’s no wonder that polls have consistently shown that Americans want to throw out Obama’s signature law and start over with better ideas.
A poll by CNN in July 2014 reported that only 18% of Americans believed that Obamacare made them or their families better off, while 35% said it made them worse off. More recently, a poll conducted in February 2016 by the liberal National Public Radio (NPR), which spent years promoting Obamacare with our tax dollars, found that only 15% of those polled said they were personally benefited or directly helped by Obamacare, while 26% said they were directly harmed by the law.
The fraud of Obamacare started with calling itself “affordable.” Its basic theory was to force everyone to buy a very expensive standardized plan, and then set up a complex system of subsidies to help people pay for what they can’t afford. 
To accomplish that impossible goal, the Democratic Congress in 2010 passed a 2,500-page bill, which the Obama administration reinforced with 20,000 pages of regulations. The new Republican bill, at only 184 pages, understands that the key to making health insurance “affordable” is to allow people to save money by buying the insurance they need for their families, without the unwanted mandated benefits that jack up the price. 
So much of the high cost of health insurance is due to benefits mandated by federal and state government. The latest mandate for health insurance is to provide gender transition, including surgery, for people who feel the need to live in the opposite sex. 
In California, a man serving a life sentence for murder has just received sex-reassignment surgery, and will spend the rest of his life sentence in a women’s prison. That surgery cost an estimated $100,000, which will be split between federal and state taxpayers.
In New Jersey, a woman who wants to become a man is suing a Roman Catholic hospital for refusing to perform a hysterectomy. The lawsuit claims that an Obamacare regulation requires all hospitals, regardless of their religious beliefs, not to “discriminate” against transgender persons.
So long as the medical profession observed the 2,500-year-old Hippocratic Oath, which cautions first, do no harm, most doctors would refuse to remove a healthy organ for purely psychological reasons. Now doctors are told that basic health care for transgender persons includes surgery to mutilate their bodies by removing healthy organs.
The transgender mandate can be traced to Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which issued a new rule last May purporting to implement a provision of Obamacare. Fortunately, a federal judge in Texas has temporarily enjoined that regulation, ruling on December 31 that it “is contrary to law and exceeds statutory authority.”
The Republican “replace” bill includes several simple ideas to give families much greater freedom of choice over their own health care. It would eliminate the crippling restrictions on health savings accounts, such as the rule that prevents you from using your HSA to pay health insurance premiums.
By unleashing health savings accounts, the bill would finally realize the vision of Phyllis Schlafly’s friend, the late J. Patrick Rooney, who built Golden Rule into the nation’s largest provider of individual health insurance. Seeking to level the playing field between individual and employer-owned insurance, Rooney recognized that a part-time waitress without employer coverage should enjoy the same access to health care as a corporate executive.
John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) whose 27th book, The Conservative Case for Trump, was published posthumously on September 6.

House Repeals ObamaCare and Defunds Planned Parenthood
May 4, 2017
WASHINGTON – Today, the House of Representatives passed, 217-213, H.R. 1628, known as the American Health Care Act (AHCA) of 2017, which repeals major provisions of ObamaCare and defunds Planned Parenthood for one year.
H.R. 1628 is a special type of legislation called a "reconciliation bill." This means that it cannot be blocked in the Senate by filibuster and will only need 51, rather than 60, votes to pass.
Planned Parenthood currently receives approximately $553 million in federal funding per year. For one year, the AHCA eliminates more than $390 million, or 80 percent, in annual federal funding to the largest abortion mill in the nation.

AHCA repeals the ObamaCare premium tax credits, which subsidize abortion on demand. It also eliminates the ObamaCare employer and individual mandate penalties, which allows employers or individuals to forgo offering or purchasing coverage if doing so violates their conscience. AHCA’s ObamaCare replacement components include pro-life funding restrictions regarding tax credits, the Patient and State Stability Fund, and the Federal Invisible Risk Sharing Program. The AHCA also repeals some of the other ObamaCare mandates and allows states to pass a waiver of certain other mandates that have driven up insurance costs.
“The vote to repeal ObamaCare and defund Planned Parenthood is a victory for the American people,” said Mat Staver, Founder and Chairman of Liberty Counsel. “A few days ago, Senate Democratic leaders said with excitement that they had defeated President Trump’s agenda. Today, those same people are sad puppies. Obama’s so-called legacy is melting before our eyes,” said Staver.
“Going forward, the Senate Republican leadership must do away with the filibuster rule. It makes no sense to need 60 votes to pass legislation. The only possible sense in having a filibuster is to temporarily delay a vote to have more time to consider the bill. But to allow a filibuster to permanently block a vote makes no sense. Fortunately, today’s action by the House is not subject to the filibuster rule in the Senate,” said Staver.
Liberty Counsel represents Sandra Merritt, the journalist whose courageous undercover work exposed Planned Parenthood’s barbaric practices of harvesting organs from babies and selling them to StemExpress and other organ procurement organizations for extreme profit. The videos she helped produce stirred the conscience of America and led to the defunding of Planned Parenthood in more than 10 states.
Liberty Counsel is an international nonprofit, litigation, education, and policy organization dedicated to advancing religious freedom, the sanctity of life, and the family since 1989, by providing pro bono assistance and representation on these and related topics.
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FDR's New Deal Agencies- Partial List from 1933-1939:                                                                                            

1. AAA
1933
Agricultural Adjustment Act

2. CAA
1933
Civil Aeronautics Authority (now Federal Aviation Administration)

3. CCC
1933
Civilian Conservation Corps

4. CCC
1933
Commodity Credit Corporation

5. CWA
1933
Civil Works Administration

6. DRS
1935
Drought Relief Service

7. DSH
1933
Subsistence Homesteads Division

8. EBA
1933
Emergency Banking Act

9. FAP
1935
Federal Art Project (part of WPA)

10. FCA
1933
Farm Credit Administration

11. FCC
1934
Federal Communications Commission

12. FDIC
1933
Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation

13. FERA
1933
Federal Emergency Relief Administration

14.FHA
1934
Federal Housing Administration
                                                       15. FLSA
1938
Fair Labor Standards Act

16. FMP
1935
Federal Music Project (part of WPA)       

17. FSA
1935
Farm Security Administration

18. FSRC
1933
Federal Surplus Relief Corporation

19. FTP
1935
Federal Theatre Project (part of WPA)

20. FWA
1939
Federal Works Agency

21. FWP
1935
Federal Writers' Project (part of WPA)

22. HOLC
1933
Home Owners Loan Corporation

23. NIRA
1933
National Industrial Recovery Act

24. NLRA
1935
National Labor Relations Act

25. NLRB
1934
National Labor Relations Board /The Wagner Act

26. NRA
1933
National Recovery Administration

27. PRRA
1933
Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration
                                    
28. REA
1935
Rural Electrification Administration (now Rural Utilities Service)

29. SEC
1934
Securities and Exchange Commission

30. SSA
1935
Social Security Administration

31. SSB
1935
Social Security Board (now Social Security Administration)

32. TVA
1933
Tennessee Valley Authority

33. USHA
1937
United States Housing Authority

34. USMC
1936
United States Maritime Commission

35. WPA
1935
Works Progress Administration