How Obamacare keeps families trapped in poverty

Yet Another Reason ObamaCare Is Even Worse Than You Think
I don’t think this is quite what outgoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wanted the American People thinking about when she said we needed to pass ObamaCare to “find out what’s in it,” but a new Daily Beast column by Shikha Dalmia of the Reason Foundation is a perfect example of why that statement rightfully scared people half to death. Dalmia takes a look at aspects of the “reform” that haven’t gotten much attention thus far, but threaten to transform American health

Report: Colorado's Low-wage Workers Lag Even Further in Recession
The number of working poor families in our state has grown by 51 percent, from 32,124 families living in Poverty, representing 5.8 percent of Working Families, to 48,410 (8.3 percent). More than 25 percent of working families do not earn enough to meet their basic needs. That's 151,875 families. Six years ago, 20 percent were in this boat. More low-wage workers have little security for the future, with the number of workers without any type of employer-provided Pension growing by almost 275,00...

The Working Poor
© Unknown As the Middle Class in America continues to be slowly wiped out, the number of working poor continues to increase. Today, nearly one out of every three families in the United States is considered to be "Low Income". Millions of American families are finding that they can barely make it from month to month even with both parents working as hard as they possibly can. Blue collar American workers from coast to coast are having their wages decreased at a time when it seems like the ...

On the Trail of Elusive Facts
Today when I was looking for something else I stumbled upon a headline from the Washington Examiner — “How ObamaCare keeps families trapped in Poverty.” The article, by Mark Hemingway, appeared to be one more attempt to link the “doc fix” Medicare reimbursement issue to the the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). As I’ve explained in the past, the Medicare reimbursement shortfalls that have to be “fixed” every year are not the re...

Reason Writers Around Town: Shikha Dalmia on How ObamaCare Criminalizes Medicine
That ObamaCare is fiscally irresponsible, economically immature, and constitutionally pugnacious many people know. What they don't know is that it is also a big entrapment scheme, writes Reason Foundation Senior Analyst Shikha Dalmia. She notes in The Daily Beast that in the recently passed "doc fix," ObamaCare goes after Low Income Taxpayers to pay doctors. But then in the name of cracking down on "waste, Fraud and abuse," it goes after doctors to subsidize coverage for Low Income families, "p...

The top marginal income tax rate should be about 65%...
by Mike Kimel Cross posted at the Presimetrics blog. To maximize real Economic Growth in the United States, the top marginal Income Tax rate should be about 65%, give or take about ten percent. Preposterous, right? Well, it turns out that’s what the data tells us, or would, if we had the ears to listen. This post will be a bit more complicated than my usual “let’s graph some data” approach, but not by much, and I think the added complexity will be worth it. So here̵...

Paul Krugman the Scrooge
Oh, there’s nothing better than the Syracuse Post Standard to spread a little Christmas cheer. This morning after the gifts were unwrapped I found myself with an hour or so to spare while the Children built their little Lego® houses. I settled down to relax and read the Christmas edition of the morning newspaper before cooking breakfast. The opinion section contained columns by Cal Thomas and Michael Gerson that were totally appropriate for this holy day. Ah, but we cannot enjoy Christm...

Obama Brings Back End of Life Counseling
When it was discovered that ObamaCare included funding for end of life counseling, Controversy erupted and that language had to be stripped from the bill Obama eventually signed. So, how is it that end of life counseling is now being funded by the Federal Government? Through Regulation, of course. The New York Times reported that this is the way President Obama will operate for the next two years. The final version of the Health Care Legislation, signed into law by President Obama in March, a...

This Week's Health Industry News
With the Congress in adjournment and many business people taking off the time between holidays, we do not expect any substantive health industry news this week. But we could be surprised. Take, for instance, the news reported Sunday by our colleague Robert Pear in Washington. The Obama Administration, through an administrative rule, is resurrecting the notion of end-of-life planning services for older Americans — the same sort of planning that was falsely characterized as “Death Panels”

Media amnesia on "death panels" myth
One of the most frustrating aspects of the media's coverage of politics is the way they treat deceptive factual claims. As I've often pointed out, these claims are often reported in a "he said," "she said" format that provides readers with no indication that the statement in question is misleading or false. And even when reporters do characterize these statements accurately, it rarely creates a lasting precedent within their news organization. Instead, these outlets typically suffer a sort of ...

Backdoor Death Panels?
When the Health Care overhaul was stumbling its way through Congress early this year, Sarah Palin was excoriated by Democrats for suggesting that the nascent law included “Death Panels” for the elderly in order to save costs of treating the oldest and Most Expensive patients. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Palin wrote that Obama had asked Congress to create an independent Medicare Advisory Council--an unaccountable group of experts charged with containing Medicare costs. She p...

Fox News Tries To Rehabilitate Palins Discredited Death Panels Smear
As The New York Times reported yesterday, the Obama Administration has enacted Medicare Regulations to include an end-of-life planning provision similar to one struck out of the Health Care Reform Bill after Sarah Palin “touched off a political storm over ‘Death Panels.’” Palin’s “death panels” accusation wasn’t just a lie, it was PolitiFact’s Lie of the Year for 2009. But good ol’ Fox News resuscitated the lie and gave it new life by j...

Berwick Sets Up Death Panels By Fiat
"If they would rather die they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population." -- Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol Sarah Palin was right. John Boehner -- make that Speaker-elect of the House John Boehner -- was right. While Americans were busy celebrating with family and friends and presumably not paying attention to the news, the New York Times, in a story ironically dated Christmas Day -- a holiday celebrating the birth of the Prince of Peace -- reported the foll...

Twitter roundup
BrendanNyhan Dec 28, 2010 at 1:01pm As predicted (https://j.mp/c9Fe3v), overemphasis on Obama staff as cause of/solution to structural political problems https://j.mp/gYxThi Blaming staff for structural problems - Brendan Nyhan Back in January, I predicted a rash of process-based explanations of President Obama's declining political fortunes in 2010: During the next eleven months, it will become increasingly obvious th... Obama's insular White House worries his allies - latimes.com Bren...

White House May Reintroduce 'Death Panels'
The Obama Administration has restored one of the most Controversial provisions of the new Health Care law. The New York Times reported the new policy will let the government pay doctors for end-of-life counseling. That counseling could include doctors discouraging patients from trying everything medically possible that might keep them alive. "The infamous Section 1233 is still alive and kicking," said Elizabeth Wickham, Executive Director of LifeTree, a pro-life Christian educational ministry....

'Death panels' controversy: Is Obama avoiding Congress? (The Christian Science Monitor)
Washington – In a move that could resuscitate the partisan battle over what Sarah Palin dubbed "Death Panels," the Obama Administration is set to implement a Controversial federal health-care provision by executive authority. The new rule would pay doctors to consult with Medicare patients who want voluntary counseling about health-care options in the case of terminal illness. The Obama Administration casts the change as minor, saying that these are common-sense discussions t...

End-of-life counseling part of new Medicare policy
The New York Times reported over the weekend that a provision of Health Care reform Legislation that was abandoned after it became the focus of conservative outrage is making a return, this time as part of a new policy outlined in a Medicare Regulation. Voluntary counseling on end-of-life decisions was attacked by conservative pundits and politicians throughout the debate over Health Care reform, eventually labeled as “Death Panels.” The service would require Medicare to pay for end-...

Three-quarters of U.S. uninsured employed
MENLO PARK, Calif., Dec. 28 (UPI) -- Seventy-five percent of the some 50 million of the U.S. population with no Health Insurance come from Working Families, researchers say. The report by the Kaiser Family Foundation says 57 percent of people in the U.S. under age 65 receive health Insurance Coverage as an employer benefit. Medicare covers virtually all those who are age 65 years and older, but the non-elderly who do not have access to or cannot afford private Insurance now go without health co...

Viking Pundit
"We must now be unfair to someone" - This too-good-to-excerpt Robert Samuelson article confronts the dilemma that America faces by failing to honestly address entitlement spending. Either we pare back on Medicare and Social Security (unfair to seniors) or we impose much higher Tax Rates on workers (unfair to future generations). The alternate choice is to continue to pile up unprecedented peacetime Debt levels and risk the implosions of Greece and Ireland or the slow decline of Japan. ...

Using Regulation Against The Will Of The People
Written into the Declaration of Independence is a simple imperative, “Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Our nation was built on this concept, but the Obama Administration is using its power to write Regulation to circumvent the will of the people and advance its own agenda. Three recent examples of this over reach are shocking and all Americans should demand an end to the practice and a reversal of what has already been don

Today in Capitalism
Has anyone else noticed that every other ad on Cable Television these days is for Medicare Advantage plans? I guess “ObamaCare” didn’t kill Medicare Advantage after all. I also noticed a news story about a company called High Road Capital, which seems to be in the business of buying things, snapping up a whole lot of Health Care businesses. Private Equity firms have snapped up many companies that provide medical billing, coding and document processing this year in an effort ...

Federal Government Manages Finances So Badly They Cant Be Audited
The U.S. Government Accountability Office said it could not render an opinion on the 2010 consolidated Financial Statements of the Federal Government, because of widespread material Internal Control weaknesses, significant uncertainties, and other limitations. “Even though significant progress has been made since the enactment of key financial management reforms in the 1990s, our report on the U.S. government’s consolidated financial statement illustrates that much work remains to be...

Charles Krauthammer Offends Mark Shields by Saying 'ObamaCare'
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: The biggest element in Debt is healthcare expenditures, Medicare and Medicaid, that’s where the money is, even more than Social Security. And the problem with ObamaCare is it freezes in place these huge expenditures. It does not cut costs. There’s going to be an additional half a Trillion in taxes devoted to the ObamaCare plan. And, it, it, it siphoned off whatever cuts you’re going to have in Medicare, half a trillion, for the new entitlements. So there is...

Video: Charles Krauthammer Offends PBS Mark Shields by Saying ObamaCare
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: The biggest element in Debt is healthcare expenditures, Medicare and Medicaid, that’s where the money is, even more than Social Security. And the problem with ObamaCare is it freezes in place these huge expenditures. It does not cut costs. There’s going to be an additional half a Trillion in taxes devoted to the ObamaCare plan. And, it, it, it siphoned off whatever cuts you’re going to have in Medicare, half a trillion, for the new entitlements. So there is...

Khodorkovsky convicted after trial denounced by the world
Mikhail Kkhodorkovsky, once Russia's Richest man, has been found Guilty of stealing billions of dollars worth of oil from his own companies and laundering much of the proceeds, a verdict that could keep him behind bars for another seven years. Mr Danilkin's monotone was often drowned out by about 300 Khodorkovsky supporters who gathered outside the Courthouse, chanting "freedom" and "shame" in the street. About a dozen of them were arrested by Riot Police for blocking traffic, with some dragged ...