Healthcare with Heritage: Nina Owcharenko
The White House turned strategy-making on its head. What they are doing will fail and fail in spectacular style. Here is how strategy making is supposed to work. The president makes the hardest decisions up front. He defines the mission…the goals and makes a commitment on the resources that will be dedicated to reach the goals. Witness FDR on the eve of World War II or Ike during the Cold War, each started by leading…they knew the goal, non-negotiable surrender for WW II, containment for the Cold War, before they …
Throughout the health care debate, President Barack Obama repeatedly promised the American people that his health care plan “will help bring our deficits under control in the long term.” The problem is that the White House could not get the Congressional Budget Office to cooperate. Throughout the summer the CBO issued report after report showing that the versions of Obamacare working their way through Congress all added to the deficit. First, CBO found that the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) bill would increase the deficit by …
The Congressional Budget Office preliminary estimate of the Senate Finance Committee’s work is a devastating revelation. The bill is a platform for an enormous jump in federal spending, and yet it still leaves 25 million Americans without health insurance. The gross cost of new federal outlays increased from $738 billion to $829 billion. Meanwhile, the Baucus bill will accelerate, contrary to the president’s rhetoric, the government’s “takeover” of the health care sector of the economy. Nearly half of the individuals who gain insurance will be through Medicaid, a poorly performing …
One year and a week after Congress enacted legislation creating the $700 billion “Troubled Asset Relief Program,” the Treasury Department next week is expected to launch its first initiative to buy, well, troubled assets. Odd as it may be, in the year since its creation TARP has been used for just about everything but the original purpose of buying troubled, or “toxic,” mortgages and other securities from financial institutions. Now comes word that a long-planned Treasury program to acquire assets will be ready to begin. That’s bad news. Not only …
The road to Hell was paved with good intentions and so too are California’s green energy initiatives. Environmental activists point to California as the petri dish for the burgeoning of a green economy. Last week, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator, Lisa Jackson, gave a speech at the Governor’s Global Climate Summit change held in Los Angeles, which highlighted the important role that California has played in climate change legislation: California has been out front on energy efficiency, greenhouse gas reduction, transportation innovation, and so much more. In many ways, the country …
It was a sad week for American support for oppressed nations. The White House announced that it will not be meeting for now with the Dalai Lama, one of the world’s pre-eminent defenders of human rights and most recognized religious leaders, during his visit to Washington. President Obama will wait until he has had a chance to travel to China in November, one of the world’s five remaining communist dictatorships. It is a strange and troubling reversal for “the leader of the free world.” The cause of Tibet has in …
Each of the health care bills moving through Congress expands Medicaid by making the government-run program available to all adults with incomes at or below 133 percent of the federal poverty line (PVL). The change would dramatically multiply eligible recipients: 33 states would see increases of at least 30%, including 10 posting jumps of 50% or more. Fastest-growing Medicaid monsters? Nevada (82.1%), Montana (80.7%) and Texas (76.9%), as this chart shows: Go here to see a larger, printable PDF of the chart.
Peter Suderman, associate editor for Reason Magazine, has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on the track record of Obamacare like reforms at the state level. The full article is posted below and as an added service we found all the studies mentioned and provided links to view them: Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously envisioned the states serving as laboratories, trying “novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.” And on health care, that’s just what they’ve done. Like participants in a national …
As unemployment and debt both spiral up, the US economy should brace itself to avoid what could be a real knockout punch. Even before the financial market collapse a year ago, several key countries have voiced their growing concern over the role of the US dollar as the reserve currency in world trade, and many have suggested a new world currency take its place. The world mandate to Obama and Congress is that they are spending too much money and the rest of the world does not want to be …
