As a follow-up to earlier posts on the so-called consumer protections included in the bills backed by Congressional leadership, a state level survey by America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) offers additional analysis of the effects of regulation on health insurance premiums. The AHIP report shows that the states with the three highest premium averages all require community rating and guaranteed issue. Of course, a range of other factors (such as demographics) affect the price of insurance, but these regulations do play a significant role in driving up costs. As the …
Given the apparent political motivations behind so many of the recent decisions at the Department of Justice (DOJ) — from the dismissal of the voter-intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party to the re-investigation of CIA interrogators after DOJ prosecutors had already reviewed the matter and decided there was no reason for further criminal prosecution — the latest news about the dropping of the investigation against New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, Obama’s former nominee to be commerce secretary, raises a lot of questions. The Associated Press report cites a …
On Wednesday of this week, former Democratic National Committee chairman and presidential candidate Howard Dean spoke at a health care townhall hosted by Rep. Jim Moran (D-VA). When asked by a Moran constituent why medical malpractice reform was not included in Obamacare, Dean demonstrated some admirable candor. Watch:
From the department of irony, Britain’s weather supercomputer for predicting climate change is one of the nation’s largest emitters of carbon dioxide: The Met Office has caused a storm of controversy after it was revealed their £30million supercomputer designed to predict climate change is one of Britain’s worst polluters. The massive machine – the UK’s most powerful computer with a whopping 15 million megabytes of memory – was installed in the Met Office’s headquarters in Exeter, Devon. It is capable of 1,000 billion calculations every second to feed data to …
If you want to know what cap and trade will to do our economy, we’re living it. According to new data released from the Energy Information Administrations, United States carbon dioxide emissions are down 9% since 2007. The calculation compares the emissions of coal, petroleum and natural gas in the first five months to the emissions of the first five months in 2009. The current recession means people are driving less, people are flying less, and companies are pumping out less carbon dioxide because people are simply buying less. The …
As we reported yesterday morning, it now seems all but certain that the Obama Administration has abandoned our anti-missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic. This is a terrible decision that reduces NATO’s security, encourages Iran to proceed full speed ahead with its nuclear program, kowtows to Russian pressure, and stabs our Polish and Czech allies in the back, after they made the difficult decision to support us. And now the administration appears to have added insult to injury. World War II began on September 1, 1939, when Germany …
ABC and NBC have so far refused to run a 33 second advertisement by the League of American Voters that questions the Obama health care plan. ABC has argued that the ad is partisan – yet ABC did not think that giving a megaphone to the Obama administration to make the Democrat’s case on health care was partisan. Fox News reports: [Dick] Morris, a onetime advisor to former President Bill Clinton, said he was particularly troubled by ABC’s decision not to air the spot. “It’s the ultimate act of chutzpah …
During a July 7th Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hearing on the 1,500 page Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade legislation, Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) got Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lisa Jackson to admit that “U.S. action alone will not impact CO2 levels.” This is 100% consistent with all the best science which shows that the carbon reductions under Waxman-Markey will not affect global temperatures in any material way. For example a recent study of cap-and-trade by MIT concluded: The different U.S. policies have relatively small effects on the CO2 concentration if other …
August 28 is a significant date for the Western Hemisphere. Colombia and Honduras will stand again in the limelight. They are there primarily thanks to Venezuela’s authoritarian-populist Hugo Chavez, a man who increasingly crafts the rules for setting Latin America’s political and security agenda. In Bariloche, Argentina, leaders representing the 12 members of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) will debate a U.S.-Colombian decision to utilize airfields in Colombia for anti-drug operations. Chavez wants UNASUR to condemn the U.S. and Colombia’s President Uribe for an agreement that will allow …
Heritage’s Bill Beach: If the root cause of the problem is high health care costs, the White House’s solution only makes tings worse. President Obama’s health reform will impact thousands of small business owners who are creating the jobs and wages for most Americans. These taxes will hurt small businesses by keeping them from expanding and adding new jobs. It will hurt workers by stagnating wage growth or even eliminating jobs. New research from Heritage’s Center for Data Analysis reveals these new taxes could mean 400,000 employees could lose their …
