Free Republic

It is not just the man on the street who is worried his health insurance premiums will skyrocket next year when the full load of the Affordable Care Act’s provisions go into effect. Dozens of lawmakers and their aides are so worried their health insurance will reach unmanageable levels that they are thinking about retiring early, or even just quitting. Obamacare’s mandates will cause their government-subsidized premiums to disappear at the end of this year.

There are many here smarter than I, so please help me with this theory. In all the rush to pass the debt bill, did we get tricked? I think the Super Congress committee is an unbelievable power grab. They have locked out anyone who voted against the bill, so conservatives will not be part of the process. Yet these conservatives are elected representatives of the people. That's just not right. To concentrate the power of the pursestrings in such a small group seems like a dangerous thing and easily corrupted. I think this structure has been put in place and...

Complete title: Failure Of Obama's Pet ShoreBank Costs Taxpayers $368 Million, Which Immediately Goes To Goldman Sachs Among Others ### After a lengthy attempt to bail out his pet bank, ShoreBank Chicago, Illinois, which included several alleged armtwisting episodes by the administration, the president has finally let the bank die (with its assets valued at about 50% of face). Yet instead of going to hell, it was immediately resurrected with a bevy of new owners, among them Goldman, Morgan Stanley, and BofA, all of whom received nearly $400 million in taxpayer money for their "generosity" to keep the bank zombified...

Televised Meeting to talk about healthcare..........

The Department of Health and Human Services is almost certain to take on responsibility for creating the criteria used to decide what health records technologies qualify for billions of dollars in reimbursements to medical offices under a new stimulus program, officials said Friday. The decision represents a significant restriction of the role played by a private certification group, begun several years ago by the technology industry, which until recently had served as the government's gatekeeper for endorsing systems designed to improve the sharing of medical records. The Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology, or CCHIT, came under sharp criticism in...

The real toxic assets on Wall Street are the people who run Wall Street. Their boundless recklessness and their grotesque desire to be enriched for that recklessness are what have brought this country to its current sorry state. Some think the wolves of Wall Street don't get it. Some think they are out of touch with ordinary Americans, who work hard and play by the rules and don't understand such naked greed. But the wolves do get it. That's the problem. They get it just fine. Because the way the system is set up, they cannot lose. If you are...