Last week we passed along the news that the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority is considering cutting more than 6,000 surgeries to make up for a $200 million budget shortfall. British Columbia Medical Association president Dr. Brian Brodie called the proposed surgical cuts “a nightmare.” Unsurprisingly, the collapse of Canda’s government-run health care system is not confined to the West Coast. The Canadian Press reports today: The incoming president of the Canadian Medical Association says this country’s health-care system is sick and doctors need to develop a plan to cure it. …
The Examiner’s Tim Carney had a fine op-ed last week warning conservatives not to trust health insurance companies on health care: Insurance companies lobby for big-government regulations, subsidies, mandates, and tax-code distortions that funnel them money, keep out competition, and stultify innovation. These policies preserve the employer-based health-care system that mocks the idea of free-market competition. Then they cry “unfair competition” when government threatens to encroach on their government-protected monopolies. But they’re not just lobbying against a government option. Today, health insurers are lobbying to force you and me to …
The Wall Street Journal reports today on Tennessee’s experiment with health care reform: In 1994, Tennessee launched an ambitious public insurance program to cover its uninsured. The plan, TennCare, fulfilled that mission but nearly bankrupted the state in the process. As originally envisioned, the Tennessee plan expanded Medicaid, the government health-care program for the poor, to cover people who couldn’t afford insurance or who had been denied coverage by an insurance company. With an initial budget of $2.6 billion, TennCare quickly extended coverage to an additional 500,000 people by making …
These are the new magical words with which the Obama administration is now trying to sell a plan to take away both choice and competition in the health care market. Administration henchmen (and women) doing the TV rounds this Sunday repeated the incantation, verbatim or in derivatives, a record time, making it clear that this is the new talking point from the White House. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zkaQaSi1RA[/youtube]
In exchange for the release of John Yettaw, the American who provided Burma’s ruling junta an excuse to extend the house arrest of democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi, Senator Jim Webb provided the junta an opportunity for saturation media coverage of what will pass there as US endorsement of its rule. This was a simple transaction. Junta chief Than Shwe got what he wanted, and he gave up something (someone) that had already served the regime’s purpose. It will not lead to a new opening in US-Burma relations – …
USA Today has a great editorial today on the Obama administration’s effort to abandon the 9/11 Commission’s REAL ID recommendation: Four years have passed since Congress enacted an ambitious law, the Real ID Act, to avoid a repeat by making it tougher to obtain a driver’s license fraudulently. Yet compliance remains wildly inconsistent. … Now, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who previously was governor of Arizona, one of the lagging states, is proposing to junk Real ID and replace it with what she says is a practical compromise. But the …
The headlines are encouraging: The AP reports, “White House appears ready to drop ‘public option’.” Politico reads, “White House backs away from public health care option.” And the front page of USA Today says, “Obama may drop public option in health care.” These headers all stem from Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’ comment on CNN Sunday Morning that the public option “is not the essential element” of President Barack Obama’s health care plan. But by Sunday night the White House was already walking back Sebelius’ statement. An anonymous …
In an interview with the Atlantic in July, Nobel Prize winning economist Thomas Schelling was quoted: I sometimes wish that we could have, over the next five or ten years, a lot of horrid things happening — you know, like tornadoes in the Midwest and so forth — that would get people very concerned about climate change. And what better way is there to get people excited about global warming than to hope they perish in Katrina-like natural disasters? Al Gore, Paul Krugman, Thomas Schelling…maybe this Nobel Prize thing isn’t …
Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) has been telling his constituents that he would not be hosting any townhalls this summer. But then on August 11th, he sent a blast email to the Obama administration controlled Organizing for America announcing a “roundtable” at Ohio State in Columbus on August 12th. Check out this video of Brown constituents who were shut out of the townhall roundtable, while OfA members were let in: [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCnd8iMDbgA[/youtube] Also check out this video from the same event where an OfA member both admits OfA is controlled by the …
Embedded video from CNN Video Earlier this week, we shared with you a video shot during a local townhall where Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee appeared to take a call on her cell phone during a cancer survivor’s question. This video has caused quite a bit of controversy, and in fairness, we thought it was appropriate to share Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee’s “response”, which she gave to CNN’s Rick Sanchez. Was she talking to some hotline that gives her answers to difficult questions? Was she talking to a constituent? Was the …
