I'm with STUPID ==> <== I'm with STUPID
Posted on 11/16/2014 12:55:56 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
[SNIP]
To figure out whether an individual mandate would count on the federal books — whether it would be more like the coal miners’ insurance or the wheelchair ramps — the C.B.O. laid out several factors. Would consumers be able to choose among a number of insurance plans? Would plans have differing levels of coverage from which people could choose, and be offered by different companies? The more clearly the answer to those questions was “yes,” the more lawmakers could rest assured that the individual mandate wouldn’t shift trillions of dollars in private-sector health spending onto the government’s books.
And for advocates of the Affordable Care Act, it was politically important that that be the case. These small differences in how the mandate was devised could be the difference between vastly expanding official government taxes and spending or keeping that spending officially in the private sector.
So the Obama administration officials and congressional Democrats who were writing the law had strong political incentives to ensure that the individual mandate they proposed would fit the C.B.O.'s definition of things that don’t have to be counted on the federal government budget.
What’s slightly curious about Mr. Gruber’s comments is that the versions of Obamacare that received public discussion and debate never broke from that goal. The same could not be said of the Clinton administration’s failed 1993 health reform effort, which stumbled in part on just this issue.
But it’s also the case that this wasn’t some obscure debate in which no one at the time knew what was going on. There was clear public guidance from the C.B.O. on how the individual mandate had to be devised in order to not move trillions of dollars of health care expenditures onto the federal budget, and the writers of the law used that guidance to make it so.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I'm with STUPID ==> <== I'm with STUPID
If only the left could deliver what they promise. It’s tempting. Of course, even the left understands it can’t deliver what it sells (by lies) to the masses. It knows care will have to be rationed, because government simply cannot afford to give premium care to everyone. Death panels anyone? If this isn’t stopped, that’s what’s in store for most of us.
Sadly, Gruber is partially right. Many Americans will gladly sell their independence for “free” health care, and they might even get decent care so long as their needs aren’t too serious or expensive. For some, anything is better than nothing, especially when they aren’t willing to earn it themselves and someone else is paying. They’ll only learn the joke is on them when they need serious and/or expensive care and find themselves shuffled off to a room for a final dose of morphine or some other end-of-life “care”. At least it will be painless...
There are a comprehensive set of guidelines detailing the sequential management decisions and interventions for the malignant cancers that affect 97 percent of all patients living with cancer in the United States. In addition, separate guidelines provide recommendations for some of the key cancer prevention and screening topics as well as supportive care considerations.
Explains Dr., Conroy, “they are fantastic for guidance in treatment plans, but imagine writing a program for any of the guidelines and then constantly changing them to meet new changes in care.” He goes on with another example, “Check out the Palliative Care guidelines, there is a section explaining how to order an IV infusion to sedate a terminal patient, the plan is for them to not wake up. The guidelines recommend that nurses who feel uncomfortable ethically with this order should be assigned elsewhere. This is a concern because Hospice is recommended over and over in the guidelines more than ever before.”
This is the real cost savings in Obamacare, as money runs out, you change the parameters for treatment. Age, stage, and diagnosis care exclude aggressive therapy. In the past, this was a decision of a patient, minister and family, now you have an insurance company/ government IRS agent making an “impartial” decision of no further treatment.
In a progressive secular society, ethics are not based on God or morality or individual wants and needs, but on the “common good” of the state. Concludes Dr. Conroy, “Obamacare is not about medical care but rather social and government control of the population.”........
In fact, in a constitutional democracy the means are the ends.
Consider the idea of due process. If we really wanted to convict criminals we would put suspects on the rack and torture them, waterboarding is very effective, until we get a confession and then check their confession out and very soon you have your guilty party. But we eschew that approach finding it repellent because we hold that the means by which we determine guilt or innocence are more important than the actual truth of it. That is why we have juries instead of experts and that is why, at the end of the day we still accept the judgment of nine berobed justices on the Supreme Court about matters of which they have very little expertise. Because we respect the process by which a matter reaches final adjudication in this court.
Those who so blithely dismiss as ill considered the impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton should consider whether an attack by the most powerful man in the world on due process, the means by which we determine our court cases, is important. His perjury and conspiracy amounted to an attack on the integrity of the system itself.
When we set up a procedure by which we make laws, just as when we set up a procedure by which we adjudicate disputes under those laws, the means must be respected or the entire edifice is corrupted.
Corruption is one of the key characteristics of a failed state and it is to be seen everywhere in the Third World. In those countries bribery is considered normal and integrity is equated with naïveté. The New York Times wants to make cynics of us all because for them the ends always justify the means.
Health care always has been and always will be rationed, everywhere on earth. It is simply not possible, and never will be, for any society to provide "premium health care" for all, at least if it's defined as the best available care.
In most countries health care is rationed by government policy combined with unavailability and waiting lists. In America health care used to be rationed largely by cost, lack of insurance and insurer policy. We are now moving towards the government control type of rationing.
But in all cases health care IS rationed.
If we were a rational society we could have a logical discussion of HOW we want to ration health care. But since we aren't rational we're reduced to both sides claiming their preferred policies will eliminate rationing.
Which just isn't true. And as health care technology and what it can accomplish continue to expand, the gap between truly "premium health care" and what we can afford as a society to provide for all grows ever wider.
Remember how liberals made fun of Bush43 and said they needed to explain things to him like explaining it to a child?
Read Gruber’s comic book....it is Obama’s one-liners about the ACA through and through. “You can keep your plan...” “This is not socialism...” etc.
The words and tone are so similar that either Obama used Gruber’s comic book to understand the ACA or Obama’s speeches were written at the same time Gruber’s comic book was written.
Either way, it shows the absolutely unbreakable link between Obama and Gruber.
David Horowitz, June 2000: “...........The first truth about leftist missionaries, about believing progressives, is that they are liars. But they are not liars in the ordinary way, which is to say by choice. They are liars by necessity—often without even realizing that they are. Because they also lie to themselves. It is the political lie that gives their cause its life.
Why, for example, if you were one of them, would you tell the truth? If you were serious about your role in humanity’s vanguard, if you had the knowledge (which others did not), that you were certain would lead them to a better world, why would you tell them a truth that they could not “understand” and that would hold them back?
If others could understand your truth, you would not think of yourself as a “vanguard.” You would no longer inhabit the morally charmed world of an elite, whose members alone can see the light and whose mission is to lead the unenlightened towards it. If everybody could see the promised horizon and knew the path to reach it, the future would already have happened and there would be no need for the vanguard of the saints.
That is both the ethical core and psychological heart of what it means to be a part of the left. That is where the gratification comes from. To see yourself as a social redeemer. To feel anointed. In other words: To be progressive is itself the most satisfying narcissism.
That is why it is of little concern to them that their socialist schemes have run aground, burying millions of human beings in their wake. That is why they don’t care that their panaceas have caused more human suffering than all the injustices they have ever challenged. That is why they never learn from their “mistakes.” That is why the continuance of Them is more important than any truth.
If you were active in the so-called “peace” movement or in the radical wing of the civil rights causes, why would you tell the truth? Why would you tell people that no, you weren’t really a “peace activist,” except in the sense that you were against America’s war. Why would you draw attention to the fact that while you called yourselves “peace activists,” you didn’t oppose the Communists’ war, and were gratified when America’s enemies won?
What you were really against was not war at all, but American “imperialism” and American capitalism. What you truly hated was America’s democracy, which you knew to be a “sham” because it was controlled by money in the end. That’s why you wanted to “Bring the Troops Home,” as your slogan said. Because if America’s troops came home, America would lose and the Communists would win. And the progressive future would be one step closer...........”
http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=24376
I see your point, but I don’t consider the free market to be rationing. There are certainly limits to what the free market can provide of course, but it tend to expand to meet demand. When I use the term rationing, I mean a fixed allotment of health care based on what government decides to dole out.
If the left has its way, the health care pie won’t only stop growing. It will likely shrink. The best health care technologies will be reserved for those well connected to the government. The rest of us will likely receive much poorer care and the only recourse will be to petition the government bureaucracy for mercy or pay for it entirely out of one’s own pocket, i.e. no or prohibitively expensive independent insurance.
Many Americans are probably voting for the above, health care rationing, without realizing it. Actually, maybe some know but just don’t care as some “free” care is better than working and paying for it. If a bunch of elderly people are sent prematurely to hospice, so what? So long as one is young and able to get free abortions and condoms, who cares? It’s sickening, but that’s what we’re faced with.
We haven’t had a free market in health care for many decades. This is obscured by the pretense that heavily government regulated insurance companies are actually private entities.
To those who are denied treatment, I think whether that denial is a result of government policy, insurance company policy, or simple inability to afford, makes little real difference.
A few dictators have gone with the “You control their health care” to get and stay in power. Hopefully there are too many people to control here.
The government is the only entity of the above that can compel you to comply with deadly force.
Cordially,
True, but if I will die without a specific treatment, my being refused it constitutes a form of deadly force.
As I said, it makes little difference to me what mechanism is used to make that refusal.
Here's where the NYT gets it completely wrong (as usual). The PP act - Obamacare is the 'Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act'. The PP act RAISES health care costs by trillions of dollars. The NYT admits this in this statement. The increased cost comes from mandating additional coverage of people and covered procedures and drugs.
The issue is not how to move this cost away from the federal budget, but rather, who's going to pay for it. Trillions of dollars don't suddenly materialize by passing a law. They have to come from SOMEWHERE. Simply passing them on to someplace other than the federal budget doesn't make them suddenly materialize. It's obvious now that wringing them out of the economy does nothing but stifle economic prosperity.
A lie told in furtherance of the revolution is not a lie.
They (Progressives) lie and get away without feeling shame because the revolution is everything and a lie is nothing, normal, and not a lie.
There is no shame, because even though lies are told they are not lies because lies told in furtherance of the agenda are not lies even if they are.
Lies and so-called wrong-doing are not lies and wrong-doing when done in furtherance of the agenda which is paramount.
Even when I lie, it is not a lie, and I am not guilty of a lie, even though it is, when I do it in furtherance of the revolution and the glorious agenda.
See, dontcha know?
IMHO
There is a simple rule to apply to all FedGov laws and proposals; they mean the exact opposite of their title.
"Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act" = "patient insurance rate raising act".
Especially now after the new voting breakdown is in, a significant majority of the 50 and over white voters voted R, They (the government bureaucrats) will now insist on denying that age group health care, to knock them off so they can win future elections.
Watch him tell a daughter of a over 100 year old mother, "maybe she is better off foregoing the surgery and taking a pain pill."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rin4h4cRs6Y
POINTS TO PONDER: (1) WH sign-in sheets show Gruber went there at least nineteen times. (2) Gruber, himself, talked about Obama being in the room when the Cadillac tax was invented. (3) Based on his Obamacare experiences, Gruber took tax dollars from several states to set up Obamacare exchanges....and earned millions of dollars doing so. (4) Nancy Pelosi is on-tape citing Gruber as a source. (5) Gruber was there when Hillarycare was developed. (6) Another Gruber confession involved a conspiracy w/ Teddy Kennedy to manipulate a rip-off Medicare to finance Romneycare.
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I'M SURE VALERIE KNOWS (/SNIX)---Obama is downplaying Gruber's role, claiming he had no part in passing healthcare.
But if Gruber was NOT the Obamacare architect---then Gruber took money under false pretenses and should be prosecuted for govt fraud. He took tax dollars from the feds and state govts "posing" as an expert.
TAXPAYERS DEMAND CONGRESS GET ANSWERS WRT GRUBER'S CASHING-IN ON THE BACKS OF "STUPID" TAXPAYERS
Four U.S. states and the federal government (read taxpayers) have padded Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber's wallet to the tune of $5.9 million since 2000, including millions connected to his work on the Affordable Care Act.
We need investigations---to see how our tax dollars changed hands---and landed into Gruber's pockets. The disdainful, preening Gruber was paid tax dollars to spin his web of lies...and to reiterate his contempt for taxpayers who are footing the bills.
Even more disturbing is the massive, multi-billion-dollar slush fund the self-serving Gruber hid from "stupid" Americans in Obamacare. Gruber made dam sure it was kept hidden from us stupid taxpayers.
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The Untraceable $8 Billion ObamaCare PR Budget---truly govt fraud at its finest. Egged on by Pelosi, Democrats slavishly voted for Obamacare by an historic straignt-party line vote. But not one Democrat told Americans about Obamacare's Section 4002---which mandates an $8B untraceable fund to "promote" Obamacare (apparently b/c Boobamba had so little confidence in his signature legislation).
THE PAYOFF--WHO GETS THE MONEY? In 2010 Taxpayers are extorted $500 million, in 2011, $750 million, 2012, $1 billion, 2013, $1.25 billion, 2014, $1.5 billion, and, in 2015 and on, $2 billion
<><> Where is all that money going?
<><> Was cashing-in the incentive in getting the thing passed.
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Taxpayers demand to know ---- why Gruber/Obama/Pelosi didnt reveal that Obamacare contains a multi-billion dollar slush fund?
Exactly who is cashing in?
The sound of wire-transfers to offshore banks is almost palbable.
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