Health care reform is the subject that is on everyone’s minds nowadays and for good reason, as President Obama and the Democrats are intent on passing a Government takeover of the US health care system and they want it passed now, even before the legislation is completed.

It turns out that this might be the only way that they will get it passed as recent polling has shown that 52% of Americans oppose Obamacare while only 42% expressed support for it. 

The reality is setting in and people have had a chance to look at the provisions (that have actually been written) to get a glimpse of just what President Obama and the Democrats have in store for the US health care system.  What they are finding out is very concerning to most and seem to be putting the brakes on the efforts to pass it in the next 2 weeks.

In light of the recent turn in Americans support for Obamacare the President decided to make another prime time address to make a big push for the reforms and the reasons for doing so.  As is usually the case, the President made numerous false claims and contradictory statements that need to be addressed.

Now, six months ago I took office amid the worst recession in half-a-century. We were losing an average of 700,000 jobs per month, and our financial system was on the verge of collapse.

As a result of the actions we took in those first weeks, we’ve been able to pull our economy back from the brink. We took steps to stabilize our financial institutions and our housing market.

1. Funny, the new mantra on the left when it comes to recent job losses is that they did not know the economy was this bad due to insufficient 4th QTR 2008 data, yet, in the 2008 elections Obama was running around declaring this the worst economy since the great depression (unemployment in 82 reached 10.5% while it was at 7% when Obama was making those claims), then when pushing for his stimulus bill he continued by saying that if it did not get passed unemployment would reach 9% by 2010 but if it were passed it would only get to 8%, we now know that over 2 million jobs have been lost since it passed and unemployment is now at 9.5%.  Obama and the Democrats shamelessly speak out of both sides of their mouths.
2. President Obama claims credit for stabilizing the financial institutions while most of the efforts and steps taken to do so were done under Bush (Tarp, Bailouts, forced mergers, etc…), if he were a humble & honest man he would have said that he continued to take steps to stabilize the financial institutions.
3. He claims to have taken steps to stabilize the housing market indicating success in that area, yet, recent reports show the exact opposite:

One in every 159 U.S. housing units have received a foreclosure notice already this year.  Foreclosure filings during the first quarter of 2009 increased 24 percent over the same quarter in 2008, according to the U.S. Foreclosure Market Report. The pace also appears to be increasing with 17 percent more default notices, auction sale notices and bank repossessions reported in March than in February. March 2009 saw 46 percent more foreclosure filings than March 2008. Both the March and first quarter 2009 totals were the highest on record since the report was first published in January 2005.

“In the month of March we saw a record level of foreclosure activity, the number of households that received a foreclosure filing was more than 12 percent higher than the next highest month on record.

President Obama continues:

And we passed a Recovery Act that has already saved jobs and created new ones, delivered billions in tax relief to families and small businesses, and extended unemployment insurance and health insurance to those who’ve been laid off.

This has to be one of he most absurd claims that I have ever heard a US President make!  After losing 2.5 million jobs since the passage of the Recovery Act & unemployment 1.5% higher than he claimed it would get with its passage & even .5% higher than his worst case scenario if it did not pass, he has the audacity to claim that he saved and created jobs?

It’s an economy that simply wasn’t ready to compete in the 21st century, one where we’ve been slow to invest in clean-energy technologies that have created new jobs and industries in other countries, where we’ve watched our graduation rates lag behind too much of the world, and where we spend much more on health care than any other nation, but aren’t any healthier for it.

1. Spain is arguably the country that, more than any other, staked their economic future on investment in clean-energy tech, yet, a recent study, released last month by researchers at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, uses data from the Spanish government and European Union to demonstrate that each job created in Spain’s renewables industry costs as much as 2.2 jobs elsewhere in the economy.  Their current unemployment stands at 9.6%.
2. Clean energy Government subsidies under Bush were far greater than they were under the Clinton Admin, especially in Ethanol subsidies which turned out to be a total waist of money and resources and all the while ended up proving to have no positive impact on the environment or maybe even causing more harm.
3. As for graduation rates, education is more of a serious crises than anything in our health care system, we spend far more per child on education than anyone in the world and we score near dead last in every conceivable measure when compared to other nations.  Now, who is it that has a monopoly on education in the US?  the Government, yet, every solution they come up with involves more money, if we would allow student vouchers and inject competition into the system things would turn around in a hurry.  This is a great example of why letting the Gov run health care is a terrible idea, they say they will make it cheaper?  Annual cost per student for Gov schools Avg = $6,857 & private schools = $3,116, enough said!

Reform is about every American who has ever feared that they may lose their coverage if they become too sick, or lose their job or change their job. It’s about every small business that has been forced to lay off employees or cut back on their coverage because it became too expensive. And it’s about the fact that the biggest driving force
behind our federal deficit is the skyrocketing cost of Medicare and Medicaid.

I’ve also pledged that health insurance reform will not add to our deficit over the next decade, and I mean it. In the past eight years, we saw the enactment of two tax cuts _ primarily for the wealthiest Americans _ and a Medicare prescription program, none of which were paid for. That’s partly why I inherited a $1.3 trillion deficit.

1. Really, I thought the biggest driving force behind our budget deficit was the Bush tax cuts?   We know that is not true as CBO forcasts 1 Trillion deficits for next 10 years even after they expire in 2010.  Well, given the fact that 2 Gov run health care programs are the biggest cause of the deficits, how is it then that Obama and the Dems conclude that handing the rest over to the Gov will not only make the deficits worse but yet make them better?
2. This years deficit is going to be more like 2 Trillion & with Obama’s $800 Billion stimulus and $400 Billion omnivus spending bill, that is 1.2 Trillion right there & did President Obama forget that the Dems have been in control of appropriations since 2006?  Their problem with Bush was that he did not spend enough, hence that additional $400 billion added to this years budget as soon as Obama took over.
3. Medicare ended up costing 7 times more than they projected when the program was passed into law, they say Obamacare will cost more than 1 trillion over 10 years, probably safe to assume it will be more than 2 times that projection.
4. Obamacare does not make it cheaper for those small business’s that can not afford to provide health care coverage to their employees, in fact, he will charge them a penalty for not doing so increasing their costs at a time when they are struggling just to make payroll.  Can you say, more job losses?

Now, if you don’t have health insurance or you’re a small business looking to cover your employees, you’ll be able to choose a quality, affordable health plan through a health insurance exchange, a marketplace that promotes choice and competition.

The House bill has a provision that says "Except as provided in this paragraph, the individual health insurance issuer offering such coverage does not enroll any individual in such coverage if the first effective date of coverage is on or after the first day" of the year the legislation becomes law.

So we can all keep our coverage, just as promised — with, of course, exceptions: Those who currently have private individual coverage won’t be able to change it. Nor will those who leave a company to work for themselves be free to buy individual plans from private carriers.

So what is the Republican solution one might ask

 

Since we almost all agree that costs are the problem and that we want to make health care coverage more affordable it might be a good idea to focus on what are some of the causes of high health care coverage costs.

1. There is no national market/competition between health insurance providers, you cannot purchase a plan from an insurer that operates in Utah if you live in California.  Part of the reasoning for this is that states want to be able to mandate what providers cover which leads to the next problem.
2. Government mandates requiring insurers to cover everything from doctors visits, to aids treatment, to venereal diseases, etc…..  this prices young people out of the market who are generally healthy but would like to have catastrophic coverage that would cover major injuries and health issues and is primarily responsible for the problem we refer to as pre existing conditions, if we allowed younger people to get cheap  catastrophic coverage they would be able to remain insured throughout their lives and would not have that problem as insurers cannot drop you if you continue your policy, which leads to the next problem.
3. Employers getting the deduction for providing coverage instead of the employee getting it for purchasing coverage, if we gave the deduction to the employee they would have portability as they do with their auto insurance, they would be able to shop around to find plans that are better suited for them personally.

These are 3 areas that if reformed and resolved would go along way to producing more affordable coverage while at the same time providing quality health care to Americans.

If after making these innovative reforms we find that the problems continue we can then look even more seriously at the Gov option that most feel would be a disaster.

It looks as though Fannie & Freddie are going to hand out $210 Million in retention bonuses to their employees, these are the Government sponsored enterprises that arguably played the largest role in the financial & economic crises that were now experiencing.

Get the entire story on Fannie, Freddie, the banks & financial industry as well as the politics of it all  here

In short, Freddie & Fannie did everything possible to facilitate overwhelming growth of the sub prime mortgage market that nearly caused the collapse of our financial system, they bought up any loans that banks made to risky borrowers (AKA: Affordable Housing) then turned around and repackaged them into CDOs and other securitized debt vehicles and sold them throughout the financial sector on wall street, all the while giving the impression that these were safe due to their backing from the Federal Government.

My question is where is all of the outrage from the media, Congress, the Populists?  Where is the act of Congress to punish them?  Where are the Government officials threatening to “out them” so that the mob can harass them?

That’s right, the Democrats were in bed with Freddie & Fannie, they were the ones that refused to pass tougher regulations on them to limit their size and monitor their practices closer, they were the ones that said that the warnings of the threats that Fannie & Freddie posed to our financial system if they were not limited and regulated more closely were ridiculous and in fact were an effort by some to Lynch the CEO of Fannie Franklin Rains!

Certainly the Democrats do not want to bring more attention to this and neither do their friends and allies in the main stream media!

A snapshot of New Zealand's climate 40 million years ago reveals a greenhouse Earth, with warmer seas and little or no ice in Antarctica, according to research recently published in the journal Geology. The study suggests that Antarctica at that time was yet to develop extensive ice sheets. Back then, New Zealand was about 1100 km further south, at the same latitude as the southern tip of South America -- so was closer to Antarctica -- but the researchers found that the water temperature was 23-25°C at the sea surface and 11-13°C at the bottom. "This is too warm to be the Antarctic water we know today," said Dr Catherine (Cat) Burgess from Cardiff University and lead-author of the paper. "And the seawater chemistry shows there was little or no ice on the planet." These new insights come from the chemical analysis of exceptionally well preserved fossils of marine micro-organisms called foraminifers, discovered in marine rocks from New Zealand. The researchers tested the calcium carbonate shells from these fossils, which were found in 40 million-year-old sediments on a cliff face at Hampden Beach, South Island... "Our work provides another piece of evidence that, in a time period with relatively high carbon dioxide levels, temperatures were higher and ice sheets were much smaller and likely to have been completely absent." The rock sequence from the cliff face covers a time span of 70,000 years and shows cyclical temperature variations with a period of about 18,000 years. The temperature oscillation is likely to be related to the Earth's orbital patterns.

(Excerpt) Read more at sciencedaily.com ...