BP Oil Spill – Just the Facts Ma’am
I'm always out to catch our government doing dirty deeds and with the oil spill we have, yet again, found them up to no good.
In fact, let me make this short and sweet by providing a timeline for you:
1. Exxon Valdez disaster happens in Alaska in 1989.
2. President Clinton signs into law a bill allowing a cap of $75 million to oil companies for cleanup of oil spills leaving the taxpayers to pay the rest (you and me). In exchange, the feds are now allowed to tell the oild companies where to drill for oil.
3. BP asks the state of Louisiana if it can drill in 500 feet of water off their coast; Louisiana agrees. But the federal government vetoes the agreement and tells BP to drill further out at 5,000 feet.
Ok, so now you know why and how it happened where it did. Nevermind the fact that no oil company has ever drilled at such depths, nevermind BP was only required to set aside $75 million in case something goes wrong, and nevermind that the government has never monitored a well that deep.
So when the feds overruled the BP engineers and told them to drill out further because they (the feds) know best who can we blame in the trouble getting the leak fixed?
I won't go on much more because I think you get the point that when things go wrong we know who to really blame.
Judge Napolitano said it best when he hosted the Glenn Beck show. Here is a transcript: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2536573/posts
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Bruce Braley’s Email Isn’t So Honest…
I wrote Bruce Braley awhile ago about the health care bills and finally received a response from him. His entire email is below:
Thank you for contacting me regarding healthcare reform. This is an important issue and I am glad you have shared your views with me.As you may know, the House passed H.R. 3962, the Affordable Health Care for America Act, by a vote of 220-215 on November 7, 2009. After reading the bill, hearing from constituents at town hall meetings, and debating the bill's provisions in Congress, I voted in favor of this bill, because it is a good fix to our current system where costs have spiraled out of control leaving healthcare out of the reach of many Americans. H.R. 3962 will decrease health insurance costs, expand access to quality, affordable healthcare, and maintain Americans' choice of health insurance, while reducing the federal deficit. You can view detailed summaries and the text of this bill by going to my website: http://www.braley.house.gov/healthcare
Despite many claims, this bill does not mandate coverage under a government run plan or promote a government take-over of healthcare. This plan will expand access to health insurance by removing barriers to coverage including limits for pre-existing conditions and preventing insurance plans from dropping patients when they most need assistance. This bill establishes a minimum standard of benefits for health insurance coverage which existing plans will be required to meet by 2018, allowing anyone who enjoys their current healthcare coverage to keep it. This bill does not provide assistance to illegal immigrants (section 347, page 274), federal funds to cover abortion (section 265, page 160), or permit healthcare rationing (Section 1181(h)(1)(A), page 766). Members of Congress and federal employees are not exempt from the provisions of this bill, and the new requirements of this bill mirror requirements of the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program (FEHBP) which insures over 8 million federal employees and Members of Congress.
To address costs of healthcare, this bill removes the current anti-trust immunity that health insurers enjoy, providing for increased competition. This bill would permit states to enter into healthcare compacts, permitting insurance to be sold across state lines while ensuring the state's regulations are met by participating plans. Finally, this bill will reduce frivolous lawsuits by establishing a voluntary state incentive grants program designed to encourage states to develop and implement "certificate of merit" and "early offer" alternatives to traditional medical malpractice litigation. The "certificate of merit" approach would require certified affidavits from a qualified medical specialist attesting to the validity of a claim before it would be admitted to court. "Early offer" programs would encourage the settlement of malpractice claims to prevent them from ending up in court, reducing court costs and payouts.
For further information, I have included a sheet with answers to many frequently asked questions. I also encourage you to visit my website where you can access a detailed summary and the text of the bill.
Thanks again for contacting me. I occasionally provide electronic updates on issues I think my constituents might be interested in. If you would like to receive my E-newsletter, please sign up at my website at http://braley.house.gov. On my website you can also view my voting record, and get information about issues important to the First District. If I can be of any further assistance, please don't hesitate to contact me.
Sincerely,
Bruce Braley
Member of Congress
Ok, so where do I start? Well, lets break it down as we go.
At the beginning of the email Braley states, "After reading the bill, hearing from constituents at town hall meetings,..." and tries to give the impression that he cares and he did the due diligence required. However, lets take a look at some of the facts starting with his statement that he actually read the bill. According to a report by PolitiFact it would take more than 3 days to read the bill and that doesn't count any further research or study one might want to make on it after they've read it. In fact, members of Congress even brought in a professional speed reader to read the bill! What an embarrasement! Now Braley tells us that he's read it? I doubt it.
Ok, so lets move on to his second statement of listeing to us at Town Hall Meetings. Here is only one, of MANY, videos of how well Braley listened to us. You'll see just before the 1 minute mark that everyone is cheering AGAINST the bill. Is he deaf, dumb, and blind!? Watch the video here:
I wanted to write this and target just that first paragraph (second paragraph technically) to show you the PERSONAL CHARACTER of Bruce Braley. He lied TWICE in a single sentence in which both ideas were related directly to who he is as a person. I hope you will join me in voting him out!
As for the rest of the email you can probably guess it is all bull as well. Here is an interesting thing to think about... it may be true (may is the key word) that it will reduce the premiums that we pay currently. However, how much in direct and indirect taxes are we going to end up paying that will cost us MUCH more in the long run?
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Is Going Green Going Into The Red?
As you may know, most of the new bills coming out of Congress are all about "going green" and saving the planet by attempting to prevent climate change.
Well, I honestly believe (and so do most professional scientists now) that this whole global warming, climate change, or whatever the latest popular terminology is can be chalked up as complete boloney.
You see, most of the data that Congress uses to justify their position came from the Climate Research Unit. Well, according to Fox News most, if not all, of the data that has come from them may now be found as worthless and unreliable.
I'm not the best writer in the world and because I have such a biased opinion on the matter (that is, I believe in common sense) I thought I would recommend an article to you by a friend of mine over at Political Math. I think you'll find his views more on the liberal side of things but at least he uses critical thinking skills to make his decisions and always backs up his statements with hard data.
You can find the Political Math article here.
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Vote Clears Way for Illinois Abortion Notification Law
The AP released a news article stating that the State of Illinois Medical Disciplinary Board has decided not to extend a 90-day grace period put into place in August.
Illinois' law had been passed in 1995 that forced abortionist doctors to provide parents with a 48 hour notice of girls 17 and younger who intended to get abortions. That law, however, was never enforced because of constant court actions to prevent it. Organizations such as The American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois intends to ask for a new temporary restraining order to keep the state from enforcing the law.
This is where things start to get a little interesting. You see, as a Libertarian I believe that individual right to privacy is an important natural right and should be observed at all times. However, we are dealing with the murder of an innocent baby for no other reason than the immature and irresponsible nature of a teenager who made a foolish choice.
I think that is why I call myself a Conservative Libertarian because Morals must come into play at some point and we aren't the Wild Wild West and so no baby should suffer such a fate. How about this, lets encourage these teenagers to have the children and put them up for adoption and possible force child support on them to help pay for the baby until it has been adopted by another family. That way our taxes are mitigated and the teenager(s) learn a continious lesson on what they have done.
Now, some of you out there might say something along the lines of, "...if we start charging teenagers money for babies they won't want they will force the abortion upon themselves without the aid of medical professionals, wont they?". I can see that as a legitimate concern for some of you out there but you are forgetting that I'm treating the forced and intentional abortion of a child as MURDER. The punishment for finding out that a teenager forced the abortion would be tried as such in a court of law and so it would highly encourage teens not to perform such an act.
I'd love to hear what all of you have to say about this. Don't be shy, no matter what side of the fence you are on let your comments rip. But I remind you, please use fact-based evidence to backup any statement you might make.
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Obama Administration Using Cloward-Piven Strategy To Topple U.S.
If you haven't heard of the Cloward-Piven's Strategy then you are probably confused as to why Obama and his administration are doing some of the things they are doing. However, once you've been schooled on the subject everything will become much clearer to you.
To give you a quick background on the Cloward-Piven's Strategy I recommend you take a look at this video provided by Glenn Beck as it is the best one I've found as of yet. If you can find a better one please let me know by using the comments section below.
Now that you have a basic understanding of the strategy I highly recommend you dive down into the details by reading the following article provided by DiscoverTheNetworks.org. Click on their name to learn even more about the strategy and other topics of interest.
First proposed in 1966 and named after Columbia University sociologists Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, the "Cloward-Piven Strategy" seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.
Inspired by the August 1965 riots in the black district of Watts in Los Angeles (which erupted after police had used batons to subdue a black man suspected of drunk driving), Cloward and Piven published an article titled "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty" in the May 2, 1966 issue of The Nation. Following its publication, The Nation sold an unprecedented 30,000 reprints. Activists were abuzz over the so-called "crisis strategy" or "Cloward-Piven Strategy," as it came to be called. Many were eager to put it into effect.In their 1966 article, Cloward and Piven charged that the ruling classes used welfare to weaken the poor; that by providing a social safety net, the rich doused the fires of rebellion. Poor people can advance only when "the rest of society is afraid of them," Cloward told The New York Times on September 27, 1970. Rather than placating the poor with government hand-outs, wrote Cloward and Piven, activists should work to sabotage and destroy the welfare system; the collapse of the welfare state would ignite a political and financial crisis that would rock the nation; poor people would rise in revolt; only then would "the rest of society" accept their demands.
The key to sparking this rebellion would be to expose the inadequacy of the welfare state. Cloward-Piven's early promoters cited radical organizer Saul Alinsky as their inspiration. "Make the enemy live up to their (sic) own book of rules," Alinsky wrote in his 1972 book Rules for Radicals. When pressed to honor every word of every law and statute, every Judaeo-Christian moral tenet, and every implicit promise of the liberal social contract, human agencies inevitably fall short. The system's failure to "live up" to its rule book can then be used to discredit it altogether, and to replace the capitalist "rule book" with a socialist one.
The authors noted that the number of Americans subsisting on welfare -- about 8 million, at the time -- probably represented less than half the number who were technically eligible for full benefits. They proposed a "massive drive to recruit the poor onto the welfare rolls." Cloward and Piven calculated that persuading even a fraction of potential welfare recipients to demand their entitlements would bankrupt the system. The result, they predicted, would be "a profound financial and political crisis" that would unleash "powerful forces … for major economic reform at the national level."
Their article called for "cadres of aggressive organizers" to use "demonstrations to create a climate of militancy." Intimidated by threats of black violence, politicians would appeal to the federal government for help. Carefully orchestrated media campaigns, carried out by friendly, leftwing journalists, would float the idea of "a federal program of income redistribution," in the form of a guaranteed living income for all -- working and non-working people alike. Local officials would clutch at this idea like drowning men to a lifeline. They would apply pressure on Washington to implement it. With every major city erupting into chaos, Washington would have to act.
This was an example of what are commonly called Trojan Horse movements -- mass movements whose outward purpose seems to be providing material help to the downtrodden, but whose real objective is to draft poor people into service as revolutionary foot soldiers; to mobilize poor people en masse to overwhelm government agencies with a flood of demands beyond the capacity of those agencies to meet. The flood of demands was calculated to break the budget, jam the bureaucratic gears into gridlock, and bring the system crashing down. Fear, turmoil, violence and economic collapse would accompany such a breakdown -- providing perfect conditions for fostering radical change. That was the theory.
Cloward and Piven recruited a militant black organizer named George Wiley to lead their new movement. In the summer of 1967, Wiley founded the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO). His tactics closely followed the recommendations set out in Cloward and Piven's article. His followers invaded welfare offices across the United States -- often violently -- bullying social workers and loudly demanding every penny to which the law "entitled" them. By 1969, NWRO claimed a dues-paying membership of 22,500 families, with 523 chapters across the nation.
Regarding Wiley's tactics, The New York Times commented on September 27, 1970, "There have been sit-ins in legislative chambers, including a United States Senate committee hearing, mass demonstrations of several thousand welfare recipients, school boycotts, picket lines, mounted police, tear gas, arrests - and, on occasion, rock-throwing, smashed glass doors, overturned desks, scattered papers and ripped-out phones."These methods proved effective. "The flooding succeeded beyond Wiley's wildest dreams," writes Sol Stern in the City Journal. "From 1965 to 1974, the number of single-parent households on welfare soared from 4.3 million to 10.8 million, despite mostly flush economic times. By the early 1970s, one person was on the welfare rolls in New York City for every two working in the city's private economy."As a direct result of its massive welfare spending, New York City was forced to declare bankruptcy in 1975. The entire state of New York nearly went down with it. The Cloward-Piven strategy had proved its effectiveness.
The Cloward-Piven strategy depended on surprise. Once society recovered from the initial shock, the backlash began. New York's welfare crisis horrified America, giving rise to a reform movement which culminated in "the end of welfare as we know it" -- the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which imposed time limits on federal welfare, along with strict eligibility and work requirements. Both Cloward and Piven attended the White House signing of the bill as guests of President Clinton.
Most Americans to this day have never heard of Cloward and Piven. But New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani attempted to expose them in the late 1990s. As his drive for welfare reform gained momentum, Giuliani accused the militant scholars by name, citing their 1966 manifesto as evidence that they had engaged in deliberate economic sabotage. "This wasn't an accident," Giuliani charged in a 1997 speech. "It wasn't an atmospheric thing, it wasn't supernatural. This is the result of policies and programs designed to have the maximum number of people get on welfare."
Cloward and Piven never again revealed their intentions as candidly as they had in their 1966 article. Even so, their activism in subsequent years continued to rely on the tactic of overloading the system. When the public caught on to their welfare scheme, Cloward and Piven simply moved on, applying pressure to other sectors of the bureaucracy, wherever they detected weakness.
In 1982, partisans of the Cloward-Piven strategy founded a new "voting rights movement," which purported to take up the unfinished work of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Like ACORN, the organization that spear-headed this campaign, the new "voting rights" movement was led by veterans of George Wiley's welfare rights crusade. Its flagship organizations were Project Vote and Human SERVE, both founded in 1982. Project Vote is an ACORN front group, launched by former NWRO organizer and ACORN co-founder Zach Polett. Human SERVE was founded by Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, along with a former NWRO organizer named Hulbert James.
All three of these organizations -- ACORN, Project Vote and Human SERVE -- set to work lobbying energetically for the so-called Motor-Voter law, which Bill Clinton ultimately signed in 1993. The Motor-Voter bill is largely responsible for swamping the voter rolls with "dead wood" -- invalid registrations signed in the name of deceased, ineligible or non-existent people -- thus opening the door to the unprecedented levels of voter fraud and "voter disenfranchisement" claims that followed in subsequent elections.
The new "voting rights" coalition combines mass voter registration drives -- typically featuring high levels of fraud -- with systematic intimidation of election officials in the form of frivolous lawsuits, unfounded charges of "racism" and "disenfranchisement," and "direct action" (street protests, violent or otherwise). Just as they swamped America's welfare offices in the 1960s, Cloward-Piven devotees now seek to overwhelm the nation's understaffed and poorly policed electoral system. Their tactics set the stage for the Florida recount crisis of 2000, and have introduced a level of fear, tension and foreboding to U.S. elections heretofore encountered mainly in Third World countries.
Both the Living Wage and Voting Rights movements depend heavily on financial support from George Soros's Open Society Institute and his "Shadow Party," through whose support the Cloward-Piven strategy continues to provide a blueprint for some of the Left's most ambitious campaigns.
What do you think of this strategy? Do you think, as I do, that Obama and his administration are in fact really trying to pull this off?
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Senator Grassley – Says No To Canadian-Style Healthcare
A couple of weeks ago I sent a letter to Senator Grassley requesting that he not support any health care changes. Here is the response I received:
Thank you for taking the time to email me. As your Senator, it is important for me to hear from you. Please accept my apology for the delay in my response.
I appreciate hearing your concerns about the current health reform debate. While I think we can all agree there are certain aspects of the U.S. health care system that need to be improved, I also understand why people are so worried about some of the proposals that are being discussed.
As I've travelled around Iowa, I hear a lot of concern about out-of-control government spending and a massive government takeover of our health care system. People are worried that health reform will result in lower quality, decreased access and government bureaucrats standing between patients and their doctors. Please rest assured that I recognize these concerns and will not support any legislation that leads to a government take-over of the American health care system. In fact, I have been one of the most vocal opponents of the so-called "public option", which many view as the first step towards single-payer -- Canadian-style -- health care.
The U.S. health care system is a private sector -- rather than a government-run -- system, which allows each citizen to make his or her own decisions about health care. I have found that most people would rather have control over their own health care rather than have the government make the decisions for them.
Despite the advantages of our current system, however, there are also many problems. We have too many people who can't find affordable insurance because costs are growing too quickly and insurers deny coverage because of pre-existing illnesses. The quality of medical care provided varies from world-class to inefficient and wasteful because the system pays based on the quantity of care provided instead of rewarding quality. I hope we can all agree that any meaningful health reform bill must get costs under control, make coverage more affordable and accessible, and not add to the deficit.Health reform must also address the challenges facing small businesses. Often small businesses face such high prices that they are unable to provide coverage for their employees. Fixing this has to be a top priority. Congress should build upon the broad agreement for prohibiting insurers from denying coverage and pricing employers and individuals out of the system. Health insurance exchanges - or a virtual shopping mall of health plan choices - also has strong bipartisan support and would provide assistance to people trying to find the most affordable health plan that meets their medical needs.
Finally, real health reform should also address the inefficiency in our current Medicare payment systems. Under current law, Medicare providers are rewarded for providing high-cost, low-quality care. We need to reconfigure how we pay for health care so that the best providers are rewarded for innovation and the best outcomes. As these changes in how Medicare pays for health care are voluntarily adopted by private health plans, it will help make sure we are getting the most bang for our health care buck. And to end the high-cost of defensive medicine, health reform should include effective medical malpractice reform.
I certainly recognize your concerns about the current health reform debate, and I will keep your views in mind as Congress continues to debate health care issues. In the meantime, please know that I will not support any legislation that I feel hands our private system of medicine over to a bunch of Washington bureaucrats. My goal is to find fiscally responsible policies that address the problems I have mentioned above, but also maintain all the things that are working well in the American health care system.
Thank you again for contacting me. Please do not hesitate to contact me if I may be of assistance with any federal matter. My offices in Iowa, as well as in Washington, D.C., are here to serve you. Keep in touch!
Sincerely,
Chuck
I'm pleased to say that he seems to be on our side and I expect him to stay that way. I agree some things can be done differently and I, of course, have my own ideas on how to solve the situation. But, we'll save that for another post on another day. What do you think about the Senator's letter and/or the healthcare "reform" plans coming to vote tomorrow?
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Is Obama Poised To Cede US Sovereignty?
The following video and text references are quite scary and when you stop to think about them you can realize just how possible (likely?) this is and how bad it would be for us if it were to take place. Quick Fact: Did you know that foreign treaties take precedence over our Constitution (that is actually written in the Constitution)? THAT is why it is so scary! Video after the following statement.
The following text was taken directly from the video comments:
On October 14, Lord Christopher Monckton gave a presentation in St. Paul, MN on the subject of global warming. In this 4-minute excerpt from his speech, he issues a dire warning to all Americans regarding the United Nations Climate Change Treaty that is scheduled to be signed in Copenhagen in December 2009.
A draft of the treaty can be read here:
http://www.globalclimatescam.com/docu...
Chuck Norris has an article in WorldNetDaily with a good analysis of the treaty:
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE....
There has been considerable debate raised about Monckton's conclusion that the Copenhagen Treaty would cede US sovereignty. His comments appear to be based upon his interpretation of the The Supremacy Clause in the US Constitution (Article VI, paragraph 2). This clause establishes the Constitution, Federal Statutes, and U.S. TREATIES as the supreme law of the land. Concerns have been raised in the past that a particularly ambitious treaty may supersede the US Constitution. In the 1950s, a constitutional amendment, known as the Bricker Amendment, was proposed in response to such fears, but it failed to pass. You can read more about the Bricker Amendment in a 1953 Time Magazine article:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/art...,9171,806676-1,00.html
Lord Monckton served as a policy adviser to Margaret Thatcher. He has repeatedly challenged Al Gore to a debate to which Gore has refused. Monckton sued to stop Gore's film "An Inconvenient Truth" from being shown in British schools due to its inaccuracies. The judge found in-favor of Monckton, ordering 9 serious errors in the film to be corrected. Lord Monckton travels internationally in an attempt to educate the public about the myth of global warming.
UPDATE:
Check-out this story from the 10/29/09 Wall Street Journal:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001...
What do you think about this? Can this really happen!?
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Senator Grassley – Fighting The Good Fight
Fellow patriots, I ask you today to review this statement released by our Senator Chuck Grassley in regards to the America's Healthy Future Act. He really fought for us on this one and we owe him a bill of thanks. His contact information can be found at the end.
Sen. Grassley delivered part of this statement, then submitted the rest into the committee record.
Markup of the America’s Healthy Future Act
Senate Finance Committee
Statement by Senator Chuck Grassley, Ranking Member
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Mr. Chairman, first of all, I want to commend you for bringing this markup to where it is today. It seems like a long time since we started on September 22nd. We’ve been able to air our differences and have the votes. I wish I felt better about the substance of the bill.
The chairman’s mark has undergone many changes during this process and they are not to the good. I’ll highlight a few of the changes I find most disturbing. As I highlight these issues, it will be clear that this bill is already sliding rapidly down the slippery slope to more and more government control of health care.
It has the biggest expansion of Medicaid since it was created in 1965.
It imposes an unprecedented federal mandate for coverage backed by the enforcement authority of the Internal Revenue Service.
It increases the size of the government by at least $1.8 trillion when fully implemented.
It gives the secretary of Health and Human Services the power to define benefits for every private plan in America and to redefine those benefits annually. That’s a lot of power over people’s lives.
It will cause health care premiums for millions to go up, not down.
It tightens further the new federal rating bands for insurance rates. That means that millions who are expecting lower costs as a result of health reform will end up paying more in the form of higher premiums. The new rating reforms alone will raise premiums by as much as 50 percent on millions.
It imposes new fees and taxes. These new fees and taxes will total about a half trillion dollars over the next few years. On the front end, these fees and taxes will cause premium increases as early as 2010 even before most of the reforms take effect.
Then after forcing health premiums to go up, this bill makes it mandatory to buy it.
On several occasions, Republicans tried to take the chairman’s mark in a different direction. We tried to ensure that the President’s pledge to not tax middle-income families, seniors, or veterans was carried out. We were rebuffed every step of the way.
And Republican efforts to provide consumers with a lower cost benefit option were consistently defeated – this means that despite the promises, a lot of people aren’t actually going to be able to “keep what they have.”
It imposes higher premiums for prescription drug coverage on seniors and the disabled.
And it creates a new Medicare commission with broad authority to make further cuts in Medicare and it makes that commission permanent.
In our group of six negotiations, I resisted making the commission permanent. And I certainly wasn't going to agree to target prescription drug premiums.
But this bill now requires the Medicare commission to continue making cuts to Medicare forever. The damage this group of unelected people could do to Medicare is unknown.
What's more alarming is that so many providers got exempted from the cuts this commission would make that it forces the cuts to fall directly on seniors and the disabled.
The Congressional Budget Office has confirmed that the commission structure requires it to focus its budget axe on the premiums seniors pay for Part D prescription drug coverage and for Medicare Advantage.
Sooner or later, it has to be acknowledged that, by making the commission permanent, those savings are coming from more and more cuts to Medicare.
Finally, I can’t help but note the incredible cynicism in an amendment that took benefits away from children. That amendment was offered and passed because the chairman’s mark had the audacity to let children get covered through private insurance.
In 41 states, children would have received access to the EPSDT benefit.
EPSDT benefits cover vitally needed services for children such as rehabilitation services, physical, occupational and speech therapy particularly for children with developmental disabilities.
But those benefits were deleted by Rockefeller Amendment C21. Now children in 41 states won’t have access to health care and they’ll be left in a grossly underfunded public program. And they lost these important benefits.
What this mark up has shown is that there is a clear and significant philosophical difference between the two sides.
Throughout the markup, we have focused on trying to reduce the overall cost of the bill. We were told ‘no’.
We focused on trying to reduce the pervasive role of government in the chairman’s mark. We were told ‘no’.
We tried to make it harder to for illegal immigrants to get benefits. We were told ‘no’.
We tried to guarantee that federal funding for abortions wouldn’t be allowed under this bill. We were told ‘no’.
We tried to allow alternatives to the individual mandate and harsh penalties. We were told 'no'.
We tried to reward states with extra Medicaid dollars if they passed medical malpractice reform. We were told not just ‘no’ but shockingly we were told Medicaid isn’t even in the committee’s jurisdiction.
We have watched while the other side has expanded public coverage.
We saw Democrat amendments move millions from private coverage into public coverage.
We saw Democrat amendments create new government programs that cover families making close to 90 thousand dollars.
And at the end of the day, after raising billions in new taxes, cutting hundreds of billions from Medicare, and imposing stiff new penalties for people who don’t buy insurance, and increasing costs for those that do … 25 million people will still not even have health insurance.
I don’t think this is what the American people had in mind when we promised to fix the health care system.
As I said when this process started, the chairman’s mark that was released 27 days ago was an incomplete, but comprehensive, good faith attempt to reach a bipartisan agreement.
But then the modification pulled that attempt at bipartisan compromise very far toward a partisan approach on several key issues.
With this markup nearing its conclusion we can now see clearly that the bill continues its march leftward.
The broad bipartisan character of the reform proposal has changed.
This partisan change is precisely what Republicans feared would occur at later stages in the legislative process.
Today we see that those fears were legitimate and justified.
Nevertheless, I still hold out hope that at some point the doorway to bipartisanship will be opened once again.
I hope that at some point the White House and leadership will want to correct the mistake they made by ending our collaborative bipartisan work.
I hope at some point they will want to let that bipartisan work begin again. And then, they need to back that effort and give it the time needed to get it right.
But it is clear that today is not the day when that is going to happen.
Again, please send a quick note to Sen. Grassley thanking him for his hard work on this issue! As promised, here is his contact information:
Iowa Sen Chuck Grassley (R) - (202) 224-6020
http://grassley.senate.gov/contact.cfm#emailform
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We Want To Be Regulated
Efforts in Washington to write a major climate-change law are causing some Bootlegger/Baptist coalitions to fall apart and new ones to emerge. In late September Exelon Corporation, a major electric utility, followed industry partners PG&E and PNM when it resigned from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber opposes the Waxman-Markey climate-change bill, which would sharply limit carbon emissions, raise the cost of power, and in effect impose as much as a 15 percent tax increase on each U.S. household. Exelon, PG&E, and PNM favor the law. They are heavy nuclear-power producers.
In an earlier comment on the fracturing of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), an industry-environmentalist coalition pushing for cap-and-trade carbon emission controls, Environmental Defense Fund president Fred Krupp repeated a commonly held misconception about government regulation when he said: “It’s very unusual for big corporations to raise their hands and say, ‘We want to be regulated for something that we’re not regulated for now.” Exelon, PG&E and PNW apparently make his point.
But as a matter of fact, industry support of regulation is not rare at all; indeed, it is the norm. And in the United States it is as American as apple pie.
A somewhat casual investigation of business history reveals that it was the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, with the special assistance of General Electric president Gerard Swope, that supported passage of President Roosevelt’s 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act. The Act, with its Blue Eagle codes affecting 2.3 million employers, attempted to place all American industry in a price-fixing cartel. But while the Chamber and many large firms supported FDR’s cartel, many firms, including Ford Motor Company, did not.
Going back further, we are reminded by Howard Marvel, writing in the 1977 Journal of Law of Economics, that it was the owners of the newly built water-powered textile plants that supported the English Factory Acts (1802 and on), not the owners of older mills that used far more labor per unit of output. The legislation limited child labor and hours and conditions of work, which raised the costs of labor-intensive producers. The industrialists who joined with other crusaders to support the legislation are remembered as philanthropists.
In 1907 it was the electric utility industry led by Samuel Insull that lobbied for state regulation in the hopes of escaping a less predictable and intractable municipal control. And it was in 1910 that American Telephone and Telegraph Company chairman Theodore Vail successfully called for federal regulation of long-distance telephone just when the Bell patents were expiring and new competition was, as he put it, “skimming the cream” from the market. Even Magna Carta (line 35) specifies a standard width for all cloth sold in the kingdom — all in the name of consumer protection, scholars tell us. The standard happened to be the width of looms operated by the London weavers. The less fortunate Bristol weavers had to break and modify their looms to compete.
A focus on environmental regulation reveals a host of Bootleggers and Baptists who have coalesced, sometimes quietly, to support output restrictions. In hearings before passage of the 1972 federal Water Pollution Control Act, industrialists located along the Ohio River argued for the law. They faced pollution controls imposed by the Ohio River Sanitation Commission and wanted a national level playing field. Only federal regulation would solve their problem, and they supported it. It was the coal interests in Ohio and West Virginia, along with environmentalists, that lobbied for the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments requiring scrubbers on newly built and modified coal-fired electric utilities. As Bruce Ackerman and William Hassler famously noted in their 1981 book, Clean Coal/Dirty Air, the scrubber requirements eliminated the clean-burn advantage of western coal and kept the higher sulfur eastern coal producers happily operating.
Yes, industry support of legislation that imposes restrictions on output is commonplace, but one begins to understand this more fully after careful scrutiny of the lobbying process. It is seldom the case that every firm in an industry supports restrictions. When John Deere petitioned EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) to increase the stringency of the air-emission standard on small gasoline engines, it was because Deere had a patent on cleaner engines. When the Chicago meat packers lobbied Congress to pass the 1906 Meat Inspection Act, it was because of markets lost to consumer fear over Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and Argentine beef producers who were invading the U.S. market with lower priced food.
And when nuclear-power producers Exelon, PC&E, PNM, and others lobby for a federal statute that would impose high costs on coal-fired competitors, there should be no question why.
Article taken from Foundation for Economic Education - http://fee.org
URL to article: http://fee.org/articles/regulated/
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TIME CRITICAL – We’re In the Fight Of Our Lives
The US House plans to vote on their massive takeover of our healthcare as early as this Friday. Everything we have done up until this point has just been the prelude. We have got to mobilize everyone we know to contact Congress on a daily basis. We are now in the fight of our lives, literally.
I will be contacting my own Representatives today and each day via phone and email for the rest of the week. However, Braley and Harre have made it clear where they stand, and it's not in support of their constituents. We will be focusing the remainder of the week on the Blue Dog Democrats who were elected in conservative districts and are fearful of re-election. They may be our only hope. Our work is cut out for us. Don't give up now. . .or we might as well kiss our beloved America good bye.
Contact your representative today and tell him we reject HR 3962 because:
1) We CANNOT afford this:
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the legislation will cost $1.05 trillion over the next ten years and $150-$200 billion annually. This massive expansion in government spending will increase the already bloated size of the federal government by about 5%.
With the federal deficit reaching $1.4 trillion in 2009—an all time high—and unemployment reaching 9.8% in September—a 26 year high—now is not the time to spend money that we simply do not have.
2) Our taxes will go up:
The federal government expects to generate revenue from tax increases that include but are not limited to:
A tax increase of 2.5% of adjusted gross income earned by individuals who do not purchase government-mandated insurance. This tax increase could affect individuals earning as little as $9,350 a year.
The repeal of tax incentives offered to those who purchase medical care with Health Savings Accounts (HSA) and Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA).
A 2.5% excise tax on medical device manufacturers that will be passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices.
A new tax on insurance policies—expected to raise $2 billion—which will be passed on to consumers in the form of higher premiums.
Vast expansions to the Medicaid program which will undoubtedly add to state and local taxes paid by individuals.
A 5.4% tax increase on the income of most small business owners which will equate into job losses.
An 8% “tax on jobs” for businesses that do not purchase government-mandated insurance.
A 2.5% excise tax on the purchase of private insurance plans.
Tax increases on healthcare, health insurance and jobs do not make health care more affordable.
3) Our insurance premiums will go up:
The new, $2 billion tax on insurance policies will be passed on to consumers in the form of higher premiums.
According to estimates by CBO, changes to the Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit will raise premiums paid by seniors enrolled in Medicare Part B by $25 billion.
Seniors enrolled in Part D will see premiums rise by 20%.
And those who purchase private insurance or are on Medicare won’t be the only ones affected by higher premiums. According to the CBO, the government-run public option “would typically have premiums that are somewhat higher than the average premiums for the private plans in the exchanges.”
4) Congress will use the force of government to make you buy a product:
The House bill includes an individual mandate which will make every American purchase health insurance. Non-compliance with this mandate could result in a tax increase of up to 2.5 percent of adjusted gross income. Forget to pay this tax and you could be fined an additional $25,000 and even face up to a year behind bars.
5) Mandating health insurance is unconstitutional:
Supporters of the House bill argue that Congress is granted constitutional authority to mandate health insurance under the Commerce Clause. Article 1 Section 8 of the Constitution gives Congress the power, “to regulate Commerce… among the several States.” However, the Supreme Court has held that in order for something to be considered commerce it must at the very least be an economic activity. A mandate on health insurance forces Americans to purchase a product simply because they are alive. Merely existing is not an economic activity. Giving Congress the ability to force citizens to buy a certain product eliminates every restraint put in place by our nation’s founders and imposes upon the liberties that our government was established to defend.
6) The House reform bill hurts consumers and employees:
The House bill aims to fund reform by placing higher tax burdens upon the insurance industry, the pharmaceutical industry, medical device manufactures and employers. Instead of footing the bill for these higher tax burdens, however, companies will pass taxes on to consumers in the form of higher prices and on to employees in the form of lower wages. Consumers and employees will suffer as a result of these “corporate” tax increases. If passed, the bill will ensure that prices go up which is the exact opposite of what we were told reform would do.
7) The House proposal hurts seniors:
A great deal of the spending included in the House reform bill is offset by hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to Medicare. Such cuts will raise senior’s premiums and weaken their control over their own personal health care destiny. According to CBO estimates, changes in Medicare Part D will raise Medicare Part B premiums by $25 billion and Medicare Part D premiums by 20%. The bill also proposes over $150 billion in cuts from the popular Medicare Advantage plan which one out of every five senior citizens uses to get more benefits than traditional Medicare offers.
8.) Passing the “Doc Fix” as a separate bill is dishonest and will NOT preserve the bill’s “deficit neutral” status:
This deception explains why the House bill is estimated to reduce the deficit. If the “doc-fix” were included in the House bill, however, it would add at least $200 billion to the deficit in the first 10 years, and most likely much more beyond that. Splitting higher reimbursements into a separate piece of legislation is an underhanded attempt by Congress to deceive Americans about the true cost of their health care overhaul.
9) Sadly, Congress has missed an opportunity to incorporate reforms that make healthcare more accessible and affordable for American families:
HR3962 DOES NOT:
Allow families and businesses to purchase health insurance across state lines
Provide the same opportunities to individuals as are provided to corporations and unions
Provide equal tax treatment for all Americans
Provide adequate tort reform
Any Congressman who votes to pass this legislation is looking out for his own special interests and agenda. We are educated and we are watching. You work for us and the 2010 election is just a year away. VOTE NO.
Iowa Congressmen include:
Rep Bruce Braley (D-1st) - (202)225-2911
https://forms.house.gov/braley/webforms/issue_subscribe.html
Illinois Congressmen include:
Rep Phil Hare (D-17th) - (202) 225-5905
http://hare.house.gov/?sectionid=74§iontree=44,50,74
Please use the Share the Wealth feature at the bottom of this post to let everyone know about this post and the message we are trying to get out there. Once you've done that you need to call your friends and family and ask them help you to contact the Congressman in their districts and states because we need to overload the Congressional server and phone lines.
For more information:
http://www.freedomworks.org/publications/top-10-reasons-to-oppose-nancy-pelosi%E2%80%99s-takeover-o
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703399204574505423751140690.html
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