She should have run for Senator of Ohio, it's an easier State to spell.Ann Althouse gets runner-up:
…as the female candidate goes on the attack in her effort to become the next… Senatorette!Moving foward!
Among the astonishing things about the ObamaCare debate-or lack thereof-is that Washington is inundated with warnings about the destructiveness of this plan, and it doesn't matter. The agency that runs Medicare rung the latest alarm bell on Friday, and good luck finding any media mention.My theory is that America is tired of hearing about this legislation and has already internalized the bad news coming:
Richard Foster, the chief actuary for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, reports that under his analysis national health spending will rise under the bills by $222 billion over the next 10 years. In other words, ObamaCare really does "bend the cost curve"---up.
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that just 17% believe passage of the legislation will achieve the stated goal of reducing health care costs. Fifty-seven percent (57%) think it will lead to higher costs.It's a national Stockholm syndrome. Please let it end.
Fifty-two percent (52%) also believe passage of the legislation will lead to a decline in the quality of care.
Labor leaders irate over a proposed tax on high-value health insurance plans met with President Barack Obama on Monday to express their frustration over his support for the levy. Some labor officials have warned Democrats of political fallout for backing the tax.I never thought I'd be on the same side of an issue with the AFL-CIO, the side agreeing that this is a tax on middle-class workers. The White House is only saying there was an "exchange of views." Hmmm.
The president of the AFL-CIO, Richard Trumka, said there was a frank discussion at the nearly two-hour White House meeting with about a dozen heads of the country's biggest labor unions. Earlier in the day Trumka delivered a broadside to Obama and Senate Democrats who are planning to pay for overhauling the nation's health care system with a tax on insurance plans that union leaders fear could hit their workers.
Trumka warned that Democrats risk catastrophic election defeats similar to 1994 if they fail to come up with a health bill labor likes.
President Obama met with House Speaker Pelosi, House Majority Leader Hoyer, Senate Majority Leader Reid and Sen. Durbin last night and told them that he wants a final bill that includes a tax on Cadillac insurance plans and an independent Medicare commission.Unless it will delay the negotiations, then under the bus it goes.
And he forcefully communicated his desire to pass reform in time for his State of the Union address, according to a Democratic insider familiar with the conversation.Quel surprise.
Obama also responded to Pelosi’s strong, repeated pitches for the public option by making it clear that, while he supports the proposal, he doesn’t think it is doable.Can't waste a moment.
Reid, who along with Durbin participated by phone, time and again steered the rather substantive policy discussions back to one central question – will it get 60 votes?Because otherwise, we might have to push off the mad dash to screw up one-sixth of the U.S. economy.
To class warriors, of course, abolition of the estate tax is a disgrace. The American Prospect's Tim Fernholz wonders why foes of the estate tax are so keen on "lining the pockets of the already-wealthy," and bristles at the thought of not taxing "folks who inherit huge fortunes" when their parents die. "It makes little sense," declaims USA Today in a recent editorial, "to shower tax breaks on a tiny sliver of the nation's wealthiest citizens."Here's my argument against the death tax: the money that everybody earns is taxed once as income tax. If we put it into the bank to save, the interest earned is taxed. If we invest that money, it's taxed with a capital gains tax. And if we spend it, there's a sales tax. (If we stuff it under the mattress, the value is eaten away by inflation, too.) From the moment the money is earned, it is taxed in a hundred different ways: can't we leave it alone in death?
But the nation's wealthiest citizens aren't the ones the estate tax hurts. The Rockefeller, Buffett, and Kennedy fortunes are secure, shielded from the IRS by flocks of tax lawyers and accountants. As Henry J. Aaron of the Brookings Institution and Boston College economist Alicia Munnell have sardonically observed, estate taxes "are penalties on those who neglect to plan ahead or who retain unskilled estate planners." Populist rhetoric notwithstanding, they add, American estate taxes "have failed to achieve their intended purposes. They raise little revenue. They impose large excess burdens. They are unfair."Then there's the immorality of punishing hard work, thriftiness, and savings:
The estate tax is pernicious because it punishes precisely the kind of behavior society should want to reward - work, prudence, savings - and it rewards behavior that should be discouraged - profligacy, overconsumption, and leisure. The easiest way to avoid all death taxes, after all, is to spend your money before you go. Work hard, reinvest your earnings, and leave your life's savings to your loved ones, on the other hand, and the IRS becomes one of your heirs. As economist Arthur Laffer memorably put it in an essay last year, "Spend It in Vegas, or Die Paying Taxes." That is hardly the message we should want our tax laws to convey.For every spoiled debutante like Paris Hilton waiting to collect on her inheritance, there are a hundred doctors or businessmen who worked or risked all they had to earn their fortunes. Bill Gates, for example, dropped out of Harvard to start a little company called Microsoft. His company then provided livelihoods to thousands of employees and he retired to run a foundation that hands out $1.5 billion a year to causes ranging from HIV research to education reform. But when Bill Gates dies, the federal government will take just a little bit more. Spreading the wealth around, you know.
The Mayo Clinic, praised by President Obama as a national model for efficient health care, will stop accepting Medicare patients as of tomorrow at one of its primary-care clinics in Arizona, saying the U.S. government pays too little.Keep in mind that this action was taken before the 21% drop in Medicare reimbursement rates that are required in the current health care reform legislation to make it deficit neutral.
2010: Physician Medicare payments decrease 21% effective March 1, 2010Keep in mind that nobody but nobody believes that Congress will reduce reimbursement rates to Medicare doctors by 21%. The political pressure to counteract these cuts will be intense meaning that Washington will depend on even more deficit spending. And suddenly I'm a big fan of "the trigger option." Why not wait until next year to see if Washington holds firm to their own legislation? If Congress can't find the fortitude to cut Medicare payments by one-fifth, let's call the whole thing off.
2011: “Annual Fee” tax on health insurance, allocated according to share of total premiums. Begins at $2 billion in 2011, then increases to $4 billion in 2012, $7 billion in 2013, $9 billion in the years 2014, 2015, and 2016, and eventually $10 billion for 2017 and every year thereafter. Two insurers in Nebraska and one in Michigan are exempt from this tax.
2012: Medicare payment penalties for hospitals with the highest readmission rates for selected conditions.
2013: Medicare tax increased from 2.9% to 3.8% for incomes over $250,000 (joint filers) or $200,000 (all others). (This is stated as an increase of 0.9 percentage points, to only the employee’s share of the FICA tax.)
2014: Individual mandate begins: Tax penalties for not having insurance begin at $95 or 0.5% of income, whichever is higher, rising to $495 or 1% of income in 2015 and $750 or 2% of income thereafter (indexed for inflation after 2016). These penalties are per adult, half that amount per child, to a maximum of three times the per-adult amount per family. The penalty is capped at the national average premium for the “bronze” plan.
2015: Establishment of Independent Medicare Advisory Board (IMAB) to recommend cuts in Medicare benefits; these cuts will go into effect automatically unless Congress passes, and the President signs, an override bill.
2016: Individual mandate penalty rises to $750 per adult ($375 per child), maximum $2,250 per family, or 2% of family income, whichever is higher (capped at the national average premium for the “bronze” plan). After 2016, the penalty will be increased each year to adjust for inflation.
2017: Itemized deduction for out-of-pocket medical expenses is limited to expenses over 10% of AGI for those over age 65.
But no one - other than the bomber - was seriously hurt, so we can discount it or play with it and be flippant or political in ways that we would avoid if there were specific and numerous victims.I don't have my copy of "The Looming Tower" at hand (I'm traveling for the holidays) but I'm suddenly reminded of an aspect of the 1993 truck bombing at the World Trade Center: at the time, some government and security officials failed to appreciate the building threat of Islamic terrorists because they became fixated on the fact that one of the truck bombers went back to the Ryder truck company to get his deposit. What a dope! Now I'm getting an unsettling deja vu that we'll be seeing "hot pants" gags on Leno. Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano doesn't help the situation when she claims "the system worked," sending the blogosphere into a feeding frenzy.
Number one, the only reason it ends up with a surplus is because it strips out - well, it assumes that there will be cuts in reimbursements for doctors of 21 percent next year with no increase over a decade. They're 100 percent certain that is not going to happen, but it's in the bill because [there will be] will be a separate provision that will strip it out. So once you calculate that in, you're already in the red.In other words, once the four years of tax hikes to fool the CBO have passed and the program needs to stand on its own, the "deficit neutral" health care reform will be anything but. So far, Americans have been more difficult to dupe:
Secondly, and this is the most important, it supposedly costs $850 billion over ten years. But 98 percent of the costs of the bill are in the last six years. So it's a trick. If you actually look at real charges, you start in 2014 when the benefits kick in and you go out ten years, then the cost is not slightly under $1 trillion. It is $1.8 trillion or $2.5 trillion, which means it will blow an enormous hole in the deficit.
By 73-18 percent, voters don't believe President Obama will be able to keep his promise to overhaul health care without increasing the federal deficit and by 56 - 37 percent they don't want the overhaul if it will increase the deficit.This debt explosion will be piled on top of this.
With the clock ticking down on health care reform, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has until Saturday to strike a 60-vote compromise if Democrats hope to meet a Christmas Eve deadline - but the obstacles kept piling up Thursday.That seems like a rather large obstacle (no CBO score either). Which begs the question: what's the big rush? Why must this legislation get passed in December instead of January or February, especially when most of the provisions of the proposed bill don't go into affect until 2014? As Jennifer Rubin notes, every day that ticks by reveals a new low in popular support:
Reid still had no legislative text and no cost analysis to release.
Time, of course, is the kryptonite of health-care reform, the one phenomenon that disrupts the hype and pressure on lawmakers to vote on something, anything, and do it right now. It forces lawmakers to reflect and to worry (Sixty percent of the voters in my state oppose this?), and it reveals that the only thing ReidCare has going for it is an illusion of urgency.I strongly suspect that the rank-and-file Democrats don't want to pass this awful legislation on a party-line vote. There's now strong incentive for at least a couple of Democrats to say: "hey, let's slow down, and do this right."
So a tax on bonuses at US banks would simply give back to taxpayers some of the money they have donated to the banks. That crack of the whip might also caution the banks against another speculative spree, encouraging the pursuit of long-term stability in place of short-term bonanzas. A bonus tax is not a cure-all for the banks’ vices, but it will do no harm and may do some good.It took exactly one comment for somebody to school the Globe on that thing we call "the Law"
Well, Globe, there is just one problem with your suggestion. It's called the Constitution of the United States which prohibits bills of attainder.Nice try.
They seem to be the last guys on the planet in love with the sound of his voice and their one interminable tinny tune with its catchpenny hooks. The usual trick is to position their man as the uniquely insightful leader, pitching his tent between two extremes no sane person has ever believed: "There are those who say there is no evil in the world. There are others who argue that pink fluffy bunnies are the spawn of Satan and conspiring to overthrow civilization. Let me be clear: I believe people of goodwill on all sides can find common ground between the absurdly implausible caricatures I attribute to them on a daily basis. We must begin by finding the courage to acknowledge the hard truth that I am living testimony to the power of nuance to triumph over hard truth and come to the end of the sentence on a note of sonorous, polysyllabic if somewhat hollow uplift. Pause for applause."This begs the question: does Obama read his own speeches or did he add that line in himself? (H/T Maggie's Farm)
It didn't come but once at Oslo last week, where Obama got bad press for blowing off the King of Norway's luncheon. In Obama's honor. Can you believe this line made it into the speech?
"I do not bring with me today a definitive solution to the problems of war."
Well, there's a surprise. When you consider all the White House eyeballs that approve a presidential speech, it's truly remarkable that there's no one to scribble on the first draft: "Scrub this, Fred. It makes POTUS sound like a self-aggrandizing buffoon."
Two articles this week suggest that buying "green" products like fluorescent bulbs and recycled plastic toys can be counterproductive. In Slate, Ideas contributing writer Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow discusses social-science research that has explored the effects of such small actions on our psyches. Studies have found that the warm glow of self-satisfaction they produce leads us to relax our ethical standards in other areas of our lives.The NY Times stripped bare the feel-good eco-movement a couple years ago with "Eco-socialites make cleaning green a priority"
In The Washington Post’s Outlook section, meanwhile, Mike Tidwell, executive director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, makes the more familiar case that small-scale individual acts are no substitute for large-scale public policy.
These days Ms. Barnett, a former assistant district attorney in Manhattan whom Women's Wear Daily once profiled under the headline "Sloan Ranger," is today a consumer reporter for KNTV, the NBC television affiliate in San Jose, Calif. She recycles and has tossed away her children's plastic sippy cups. Concerned with carbon emissions, she is about to replace the Barnetts' two family cars with hybrids. "I turn the water off when I’m brushing my teeth," she said. "I'm always learning, I'm always trying to improve."Heavens, no! How about some CFL bulbs?
Still, she has no plans to reduce the family’s significant carbon footprint by, say, selling the Manhattan second home. "I'm not a perfect person," she said. "I'm not the greenest woman in America." And there was scant indication that other guests, most of whom, presumably, knew their way up the steps of a private jet, were contemplating major lifestyle cutbacks. Glancing about the room, Ms. Barnett said, "We aren't all going to move to one-bedroom apartments."
She plans to practice conservation, to a point. Energy-saving light bulbs are fine - for the utility closet, perhaps. In other rooms, "they don’t give a very pretty light," she said.Classic stuff.
Not that the press corps cares anymore, but the omnibus also continues the earmark explosion that Speaker Nancy Pelosi vowed to end when she was trying to oust Republicans in 2006. The Heritage Foundation counts 5,224 earmarks, bringing the total for the year to about 10,000, or about 23 for every Congressional district. There is money for bike paths, skate board parks, museums, water-taxis to resort towns, and other absolute necessities.Not exactly Hoover Dam and the USS New Jersey.
Senator Kent Conrad, the ranking Democrat on the Budget Committee, is a walking example of the split Democratic spending personality. He frets that U.S. debt will soon be 114% of GDP, a level he says is "absolutely unsustainable" and a "threat to the economic security of America." Yet he keeps voting for every spending bill and will vote for the multitrillion health bill too.Emphasis on "you" because, no matter how much the Democrats swear the tax burden will only fall on the "rich," there's simply not enough in Bill Gates' bank account to cover all this spending. Washington is playing with the monopoly money of China's easy credit but, just like my post-Christmas credit card bill, we gotta pay in the end.
….
After so much double talk, we've concluded this is all part of a conscious political strategy. Spend so much and run up the deficit to unprecedented levels, then turn around and claim that there's a fiscal crisis that can only be solved with higher taxes. They spend, you pay.
Senior Senate Democrats reached tentative agreement Tuesday night to abandon the government-run insurance plan in their health-overhaul bill and to expand Medicare coverage to some people ages 55 to 64, clearing the most significant hurdle so far in getting a bill that can pass Congress.Wait...what? Wasn't the new health care program going to be funded by a half-trillion dollar cut in Medicare?
The American Medical Association said it opposes expanding Medicare because doctors face steep pay cuts under the program and many Medicare patients are struggling to find a doctor. Hospitals also said expanding Medicare and Medicaid is a bad idea.So doctors, hospitals, insurance companies, state governments, and the American people all think this health care reform is a dog. But Congress is going to cram it down our throats and Obama is going to sign any piece of paper with the words "health care" on it. But it's all gonna work out: you have to believe!
The move means the president will make two separate flights to Scandinavia this month, one to pick up his Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo and another to the Copenhagen conference. Originally, he had planned to combine the trips.Clearly, Gaia can take another hit for "the One."
Sources who have been briefed on the negotiations say that Medicare buy-in is attracting the most interest. Expanding Medicaid is running into more problems, though there's some appeal because, unlike increasing subsidies, expanding Medicaid actually saves you money. There's also ongoing discussion about tightening regulations on insurers, but I don't know the precise menu of options being considered.Medicare expansion? Would that be the same Medicare that will be cut by a half-trillion dollars to pay for health care reform? Which includes Medicare expansion. This is truly a Mobius strip of fiscal logic.
A Nov. 26 article in the District edition of Local Living incorrectly said a Public Enemy song declared 9/11 a joke. The song refers to 911, the emergency phone number.That would be "911 (is a joke)" from 1990, suckah!
Congressional innumeracy – Weekly Standard "Obamacare's ugly math." At least there's this glimmer of sanity in tonight's news: "Senate's progress over health care bill grinds to a halt"
It's that time of year again: Washington is talking about cuts to Medicare. President Obama's health-care reforms depend on them - up to $400 billion worth over 10 years. As a psychiatrist, I'll break the bad news gently: Medicare cuts are like Santa Claus and his flying reindeers - often talked about, never actually seen.These Medicare cuts will never materialize and the health care reform bill will explode the deficit. Simple as that.
The federal government has long fought to control Medicare spending. Today's Medicare program costs taxpayers twice what it did 10 years ago. But whenever lawmakers from either party agree to savings, Congress reverses course, fearing cuts will anger voters on Election Day.
Congress reversed planned cuts in 1999. And 2005. And 2004. And 2006. In fact, since 1997, when members of both parties agreed to automatic cuts if spending rose faster than population and economic growth, the program has been cut just once, in 2002.
At one point, Congress voted to postpone a 10% cut in Medicare doctors' fees fromDecember 2007 until mid-summer 2008. Just weeks later, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi attacked the rescheduled savings as "exactly the wrong medicine."
So come July 2008, despite massive deficit projections, Congress voted to abandon the planned savings altogether. President George Bush vetoed that decision - only to have Congress, both parties, override him.
