Bill Clinton says, if you don't pass it, you're gonna lose!

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Michigan Rep. Bart Stupak, the congressman who led anti-abortion rights Democrats in the House during health care negotiations, will retire this year, CBS News has learned. He is expected to announce his plans later this morning.

Had Stupak sought re-election, he would have faced challengers from both the left and the right backed by interest groups angered by Stupak's health care vote.

Link at Hot Air

 

[unregistered]

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

And, of course, the Tea Party splits the Republicans and Democrats win...

It’s War: SEIU Starting Third Party In North Carolina

In a shot across the bow of Dems, the labor powerhouse SEIU is starting a new third party in North Carolina that hopes to field its own slate of candidates, part of an effort to make the Democratic Party more reliable on issues important to labor, I’m told.

SEIU officials setting up the new party, called North Carolina First, are currently on the ground collecting signatures to qualify as a state party, SEIU officials tell me, adding that there are around 100 canvassers on the ground right now. The goal: To have the party up and running so candidates can run in this fall’s elections.

It won’t be lost on political observers that three House Dems who voted No on reform are from the state: Heath Shuler, Mike McIntyre, and Larry Kissell.

The new project is an outgrowth of SEIU’s earlier vow to hold House Dems accountable for voting against heatlh reform and against labor’s interests in general. That said, presuming the party qualifies at all, it remains to be seen how much clout it will wield.

http://theplumline.whorunsgov.com/p...-seiu-starting-third-party-in-north-carolina/

 

[unregistered]

 

[Saint Peter]

The Working Party!



You fuckers are toast.

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

The Working Party!



You fuckers are toast.

Vette, I think he's threatening us with violence!


I'm gonna cry like Nancy...



*sniff* *sniff*

 

[Saint Peter]

Vette, I think he's threatening us with violence!


I'm gonna cry like Nancy...



*sniff* *sniff*

A vote is a vote. Count the ants.

And get your nose out of my ass crack.

 

[Karen Kraft]

Michigan Rep. Bart Stupak, the congressman who led anti-abortion rights Democrats in the House during health care negotiations, will retire this year, CBS News has learned. He is expected to announce his plans later this morning.

Had Stupak sought re-election, he would have faced challengers from both the left and the right backed by interest groups angered by Stupak's health care vote.

Link at Hot Air

What would the world ever do without Baby-Killer Stupak?

 

[off2bed]

There's already a CPUSA and several other socialist/communist parties. Why another one?

 

[unregistered]

 

[unregistered]

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Anyone catch the news out of Massachusetts?




There's a reason that the only time the Liberals ever mention their health-care system is when they want to besmirch Romney...

Price controls force companies out of business and that what your new health care bill is designed to do, lead to single-payer national health care.

It seems when given the chance, people sign up for health care when they are sick and then drop it when they are well.

Who'da thunk???
__________________
"A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within."
Will Durant

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Health insurance reforms have most often been based on a pair of mandates targeting the individual and small group markets. The first is an underwriting method known as "community rating." The second is "guarantee issue." Under these new rules insurance carriers are forbidden to rate health plans by using actual group demographic and claim experience, known as "experience rating", and are required to take all applicants, regardless of existing health condition, gender, occupation, or age. The intent is to expand access to insurance by forcing carriers to accept all applicants. The thinking is that by community rating with guarantee issue, costs will be stabilized over a larger group of policyholders because insurers would be prohibited from cherry picking preferred-risk individuals and groups. Thus, access is expanded and costs are stabilized and ultimately reduced.

A review of history does not sustain this assertion.

As of April 1, 1993, the state of New York required insurers to adopt community rating and guarantee issue for individuals and small groups. According to Mark A. Hall's 2000 study of New York's health reform ("An Evaluation of New York's Reform Law", Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, 25 February 2000, p. 71-98), what was intended did not come to pass. With respect to enrollment, the percentage of non-elderly population without insurance in New York worsened from 16.5% in 1992, below the national average, to 18.3% in 1994, which was above the national average. Hall further concluded that enrollment in both the individual and small group markets also declined after the reform. Individual enrollments continued to decline until 1997, four years after the new regulations.

Hall also reviewed the impact to pricing. He found that indemnity rates for individual policies increased by nearly 40% per year for the first two years following reform. Small group rates increased between 10 and 14% during the same period. Hall also found that about 20% of small group and 25% of individual subscribers received rate increases of 40% or more following reform. Wellpoint's California DOI-approved increase that set Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius off a few months ago was, wait for it, 39%.

In Colorado, the state passed House Bill 1355 in 2007 which also mandated small group community rating. Phased-in over two years, HB 1355 removed discounts of up to 25% for healthy small groups and prohibited rating up small groups due to health status. The 2008 renewals were adversely impacted because the unhealthy small groups who were rated up could no longer be discriminated against because of their adverse health status. In 2009, groups that had a discount previously lost it at renewal. This, combined with the 2008 impact, caused yet another artificial rate increase. One group last year had a 23% increase. When one factors in the loss of their 17% discount, the implied actual increase would have been around 6%.

Another example is a small group of about 35 employees my team services. Last year, their renewal called for a 35% increase. To reduce the impact, the group cut benefits and increased employee premium cost sharing. This year, the proposed increase is 55%! Forget about the projected cost reductions, where's the stability of rates we were promised?

The fact of the matter is that community rating is a bill of goods that increases healthcare insurance costs. Hall notes, "Community rating increases cost for healthier subscribers, thereby at the margin driving some from the market, and guarantee issue attracts higher risks into the market."

Hall also commented on the impact of reform on market structure. He concluded that there was a large reduction in the number of indemnity insurers in the individual policy market. In total, nine insurers immediately left the market following New York's insurance reform. Two more withdrew over the next year. The result: fewer insurers who raised deductibles to catastrophic levels. The Wall Street Journal reported just last week that New York has some of the highest individual insurance premiums in the country.

Take a look at what is happening in Massachusetts today. The Boston Globe reports that the Massachusetts Department of Insurance denied nearly all rate increase requests and is now being sued by non-profit insurance carriers. In essence, the DOI is placing price caps on health insurance premiums and ignoring the actual cost of providing health care. They too have a community rating system introduced in their reform legislation. Read the linked article and pay close attention to what the insurers are saying about their ability to remain solvent after sustaining significant losses last year.

http://www.boston.com/business/heal...e_rejects_health_insurance_rate_hikes/?page=1

I thought Colorado was golden...


__________________
"The more communal enterprise extends, the more attention is drawn to the bad business results of nationalized and municipalized undertakings. It is impossible to miss the cause of the difficulty: a child could see where something was lacking. So that it canned be said that this problem has not been tackled. But the way in which it has been tackled has been deplorably inadequate. Its organic connection with the essential nature of socialist enterprise has been regarded as merely a question of better selection of persons. It has not been realized that even exceptionally gifted men of high character cannot solve the problems created by socialist control of industry."
Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

The Myths of Managed Health Care

John Dale Dunn, MD

I learned the hard way that human nature is the biggest obstacle to cutting health care costs. President Obama is not the first chief executive to foist onto us an unrealistic medical reform.

I left Nebraska to become Medical Director of a Health Maintenance Organization (HMO) in Louisiana in 1980. I believed the myths of managed care promoted by the smart guys. Health insurance premiums were spiraling up, and business and industry were concerned. People wanted good insurance cheap. Managed care was the answer.

The Nixon administration wrote the Health Maintenance Act of 1973, funding and promoting managed care by a non-profit community-controlled, federal benefit package, one community premium, no limits on preexisting conditions, preventive care, comprehensive care, first dollar coverage health care. To help them get started, the law said that a federally qualified HMO under the act could mandate an offer to an employee group.

Government experts promote myths when policy agendas solidify in order to encourage public support. The myths of managed care were that:

good medical science would eliminate unnecessary medical services;
new financial incentives would reduce costs; and
preventive health programs would improve things and reduce costs.

In 1980, I was a believer, living the dream. HMOs were a part of the grand solution for health care in America...but then reality intruded.

Myths busted by reality:

- Salaried physicians are less motivated than fee for service docs, producing increased costs.

- People who buy comprehensive 1st dollar insurance use it -- a lot. And they demand the frills, in Louisiana called lagniappe -- extra.

- The consumer movement attitude produces excess utilization.

- A community-based non-profit can't say no, even to inappropriate expenses.

- Reducing costs is important -- for someone else's care. Demands and expectations are high, complaints come quick, a litigious environment increases defensive medicine, and all of these increase costs of care.

...

The HMO act organizations are no longer in existence, with few exceptions, because the myths don't work. Some of the managed care concepts promoted in the '70s and '80s are embedded in commercial health care insurance programs, like restricting provider and hospital care to contracted entities, but no one uses the words "HMO" and "managed care" now -- the public always like to save money on somebody else's care, and the media turned on managed care as evil profiteering. Medical Directors became public enemies. I'm happy that I quit that line of work.

...

Comprehensive Healthcare Reform Myths

Private insurance companies are bad, government good.

This myth is part anti-capitalist, part statist. However, sixty years of government tax rules and mandates has destroyed free-market insurance and increased health costs. Economic good sense is out the window in a mandate-controlled, third-party-payer system. A free lunch will result in a crushing tax and debt burden.

Amy Finkelstein of MIT has shown that Medicare and Medicaid independently and significantly increased health care costs by distorting markets and increasing utilization, but also by causing cost shifting. Comprehensive reform advocates destroy competitive insurance and Health Savings Accounts options.

The uninsured numbers prove that America has failed.

Uninsured is a choice, not a disease. For the truly needy, America has charity care and a Social Security Title 16 and Title 2 safety net. Devon Herrick shows that the uninsured numbers are exaggerated by the advocates, but even so, most uninsureds are healthy, and if they get sick in America, then America takes care of them.

The head of financial services at the Cleveland Clinic ruined the president's drama about a lady with leukemia by explaining that she was being cared for and qualified for Cleveland Clinic's generous annual 100 million charity care and Medicaid because she was a working citizen. America takes care, and the safety net works.

Uncompensated care is ruining any chance of fiscal integrity of the health care system.

America spends 2.2 trillion dollars annually on health care. The uninsured care cost is less than 100 billion, less than 5%. Crisis? Jack Hadley in Health Affairs explains that the uninsured are not a sick group. The system is expensive, but it works, with adequate safety net provisions for the needy.

We need to stop wasting money on emergency departments.

The total cost for emergency care in the United States is less than 5% of the total of $2.2 trillion America pays every year for health care. One hundred and twenty million visits, insured and uninsured, billed for $120 billion. Most of it paid for with insurance or cash. Crisis? Again? Emergency departments are convenient, open 24/7, and they offer access to high tech resources. Universal insurance will not reduce E.D. use because in a reformed system, it will be free to the patient. Robert Samuelson insightfully discusses these things in the Washington Post.

Reformers will use computers and make everybody's health record on a government databank, resulting in better care for all.

Computers are expensive, take providers away from the patient, magnify mistakes, and don't reduce costs. Computers don't take care of patients, systems crash, data decays and is not securely private. Computer problems that cause errors have not yet been solved.

Comparative effectiveness panels and guidelines writers will save money and improve care.

The guideline and practice control projects will provide a way to ration or deny unapproved care for economic or medical reasons, but evidence does not show better care. The Leap Frog project in one thousand hospitals was reported as a disappointment by Leslie Kernisan in JAMA.

Lack of insurance is a killer.

The president and others wave the bloody shirt of a 2009 study claiming that a lack of health insurance causes 45,000 deaths in America per year. John Goodman and William Tate both exposed the study as irresponsible and flawed propaganda by Woolhandler and Himmelstein, unreliable and self-declared fanatic advocates of socialized medicine. In contrast, Dr. Steven Asch and Drs. Helen Levy and David Meltzer find no real benefit to health outcomes from health insurance.

New preventive care projects will save money and lives.

Preventive health myths flourish in spite of the evidence. Michael Fumento in National Review and Joshua Cohen in a comprehensive medical journal review report that claims of preventive care benefits are exaggerated and unimpressive in reality, and there are downside risks to screening healthy populations.

The American health care system isn't safe. Government needs to intervene and punish and penalize hospitals, nurses, and physicians.

The only comprehensive American hospital care patient safety studies over four decades show a rate of negligent patient injury less than 0.25%. Denigrating health care providers and hospitals promotes the savior role of nine-to-five government mandarins with clipboards, furrowed brows, and red pencils. Government experts as guarantors of safety and quality may be the biggest myth of all.

We are in the last stretch of the hijacking, intended to create a command-and-control health care reform by a mean rank of self-assured tyrants, monitoring and intruding into every nook and cranny of American life. Health care will open the door to the state dictating living and lifestyles. Those in charge will meddle and mandate to affirm their power, sense of superiority, and good intentions.

Eric Hoffer, longshoreman philosopher, said, "The intellectuals and the young, booted and spurred, feel themselves born to ride us."

__________________
"We know that the moment of greatest danger to a society is when it comes near realizing its most cherished dreams."
Eric Hoffer

 

[Mike_Yates]

Abortions = less illegitimate babies, less welfare, and less taxes on the working class.

As much as I've opposed it throughout the years, I'm beginning to see it as more of a means of population control, and getting rid of would-be gang members, drug dealers, and violent criminals.

I think this is called "eugenics".

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

You're on the same page with Hitler, Stalin, Mao and the Obama Administration...





Kudos on being such a new millennium kinda guy.

No politics of the past here...