Just in case you hadn’t already heard, President Barack Obama will deliver what the media is describing as a “make or break” health care speech tonight. But don’t feel bad if you have to miss it. According to the Wall Street Journal, President Obama has already given 27 speeches entirely devoted to health care and he has mentioned the issue prominently in another 92. The American people already know what Obamacare looks like: more power to Washington, less choice for patients and doctors, trillions in new deficit spending, job killing …
America’s health care system is one-sixth of the entire economy—larger than Britain’s. Restructuring something that large and complex in one massive bill rammed through Congress is a fool’s errand. There are bound to be major problems. Instead, we must incrementally reform health care in stages, by letting the 50 states act as laboratories for solutions. Let’s find out what works and doesn’t. Two major reforms already have broad support and can move us forward. 1: Give states more freedom from federal rules to experiment with reform measures, like medical malpractice …
The White House’s assertion that you’ll be able to keep your health insurance if you like it is wrong given the incentives built into the House and Senate bills (i.e., employer mandates and creation of a government-run health plan). Companies will find it easier to pay a tax or fine and dump their employees out of their existing private coverage and onto a public plan or other alternatives. And it won’t just be the health insurance options that are limited. Under current legislation, the government would have the authority to …
According to a New York Times story on Sunday, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) plans to propose a new “fee” on insurance companies to help pay for a costly liberal health reform package. This “fee” would allow Congress to penalize their straw man du jour, insurance companies, while attempting to pay for part of one of the trillion dollar proposals being debated in Congress this week. However, these “fees” are nothing more than taxes hidden behind a thin veil of “fairness” rhetoric. They would actually fall on ordinary …
In Venice, Italy for the premiere of an adulatory documentary, “South of the Border” directed by Oliver Stone, Venezuela’s peripatetic, anti-American president Hugo Chavez said he was ready for better relations with President Obama. “With Obama we can talk,” enthused Chavez, “we are almost from the same generation, one can’t deny that Obama is different (from Bush). He’s intelligent, he has good intentions and we have to help him.” Although inclined to quote Castro, Lenin, or Karl Marx, Chavez added, “I’m entirely dedicated to building a real democratic model in …
Defense Secretary Robert Gates indicated on September 1st that staff would recommend President Obama veto any legislation that continues to fund the F136, the alternate engine for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF). “We feel strongly there is not a need for the second engine,” he told reporters. That same day, however, General Electric and Rolls Royce offered to sell the F136 to the military through a fixed-price contract, an arrangement that some say could cut costs by 20%. The primary engine, the Pratt and Whitney F135, by contrast, is …
Not many people enjoy a micromanager – having their boss hover over them monitoring their every move. Well, if Congress passes a cap and trade bill, they will be micromanaging our economy and controlling our decisions. Just one example of many: tree planting. Section 205 of the Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill creates a program to subsidize targeted tree-planting programs by retail power providers in “residential and small office settings.” To be clear, we are not against planting trees. They are aesthetically pleasing and good for the environment. But do …
In economics, signaling to convey information about can come in a variety of forms. You can signal in job interviews by what you reveal on your resume; you can signal to people just by the type of car you drive. In New Zealand, the parliamentary committee is suggesting the country should implement carbon caps to signal to the rest of the world, even if it does nothing to improve the environment, that New Zealand is “doing something.” The Wall Street Journal reports: To the annals of global warming lunacy, add …
Climate skeptics – those who do not believe that global warming is a crisis justifying a blank check response – have always had the soundest arguments in this debate. These arguments are getting sounder still as the planetary warming has stalled out for most or all of the past decade, and as new findings cast further doubt on what was once claimed to be “settled science.” And the policy argument that the risks of global warming, however great or small, should be balanced against the risks of costly global warming …
The Heritage Foundation has reached an important milestone in our ten-year Leadership for America campaign. At the end of August, our membership rolls topped half a million for the first time, reaching 515,000. That’s up from 395,000 at the start of the year and 281,000 at the start of 2007. This brings us one step closer to our goal of one million members by 2017. These members are concerned Americans from every state, from all walks of life, who have supported our work financially in the past two years. (Not …
