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POPSPrivate Health Insurance is a Defective Product DR. STEFFIE WOOLHANDLER: Right. Well, the private insurers are getting millions of mandatory new customers. The taxpayers are going to give subsidies. It’s not going to make healthcare affordable, but it’s going to cost the taxpayers a lot of money to give these subsidies. Private health insurance is a defective product. We know from our studies of bankruptcy that the majority of Americans who face medical bankruptcy start their illness with private health insurance but are bankrupted anyway by gaps in coverage, like co-payments, deductibles and uncovered services.
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POPSHere Are Some Important Passages in the 2,000 Page Legislation.
Eviscerating Medicare: In addition to reducing future Medicare funding by an estimated $500 billion, the bill fundamentally changes how Medicare pays doctors and hospitals, permitting the government to dictate treatment decisions. Sec. 1302 (pp. 672-692) moves Medicare from a fee-for-service payment system, in which patients choose which doctors to see and doctors are paid for each service they provide, toward what's called a "medical home." (The bill specifies that patients may have to settle for a nurse practitioner rather than a physician as the primary-care provider.) Sec. 1114 (pp. 391-393) replaces physicians with physician assistants in overseeing care for hospice patients. • Secs. 1158-1160 (pp. 499-520) initiates programs to reduce payments for patient care to what it costs in the lowest cost regions of the country. Sec. 1161 (pp. 520-545) cuts payments to Medicare Advantage plans (used by 20% of seniors). Advantage plans have warned this will result in . . . .
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POPSSeeing Through The Lies: The Worst Bill Ever It "pays for" about six years of program with a decade of revenue, with the heaviest costs concentrated in the second five years. The House also pretends Medicare payments to doctors will be cut by 21.5% next year and deeper after that, "saving" about $250 billion. ObamaCare will be lucky to cost under $2 trillion over 10 years; it will grow more after that. • Expanding Medicaid, gutting private Medicare. All this is particularly reckless given the unfunded liabilities of Medicare"now north of $37 trillion over 75 years. Mrs. Pelosi wants to steal $426 billion from future Medicare spending to "pay for" universal coverage. While Medicare's price controls on doctors and hospitals are certain to be tightened, the only cut that is a sure thing in practice is gutting Medicare Advantage to the tune of $170 billion. Democrats loathe this program because it gives one of out five seniors private insurance options.
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POPSPelosi Health Care Bill Blows a Kiss to Trial Lawyers While there is debate over the details, it is clear that medical malpractive lawsuits have some impact on driving health care costs higher. There are likely a number of procedures that are done simply as a defense against future possible litigation. Recall this from the Washington Post: “Lawmakers could save as much as $54 billion over the next decade by imposing an array of new limits on medical malpractice lawsuits, congressional budget analysts said today " a substantial sum that could help cover the cost of President Obama’s overhaul of the nation’s health system. New research shows that legal reforms would not only lower malpractice insurance premiums for medical providers, but would also spur providers to save money by ordering fewer tests and procedures aimed primarily at defending their decisions in court, Douglas Elmendorf, director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, wrote in a letter to Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah).”
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POPSIt's Alive! End-of-life counseling in health bill I don't get it. Haven't patients had the "option of speaking with their doctor about how they want to be treated......"? What a crock! and isn't this bill already messin' with Medicare and it's payments to doctors and hospitals? This bill is one big screw up!
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POPSHow Much Obamacare Costs the Average Family That Obama is charging premiums to those living at or on the border of poverty is absolutely incredible! And this from a candidate who pledged that he would not tax the middle class! If you have insurance, you will get hit by his proposed 40 percent tax on insurance premiums. When the tax -- and the legislation -- takes effect in 2013, all families making about $120,000 or more in combined household income (14 percent of all families or one in seven) will have to pay the tax. By the next year, 2014, the tax will hit every family making more than $100,000 (about 18 percent of all families or one in six). By 2019, 10 years hence, the tax will reach down to affect every family making more than $75,000 a year (31 percent of families or one in three). The tax will take 40 percent of all premiums above $21,000. So if you don’t have insurance, you will be socked with a mandate to buy coverage and pay a hefty proportion of your income to do it; and if you have insurance . . .
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POPSGenius: Mortgage Program Will Spend $3,000,000 per Loan Repair Three million mortgages are believed to be eligible for HAMP with 500,000 in a trial phase. The trial was supposed to last three months, but it has since been stretched to five months . The Doctor believes that many of these "repaired" loans will simply re-default. Why? For one reason, the underwriting (courtesy of TurboTax Tim) for the program uses "stated income", not verified income. These are the very same "liar's loans" that helped trigger the mortgage meltdown! Examining the chart, of the 50,130 trial modifications entered into in May, only 1,711 (or only 3%) resulted in a permanent modification! As The Huffington Post reported a few days ago, the low number of permanent modifications is still appallingly low ("HAMP will come nowhere close to keeping up with foreclosures"). Among the reasons for the low conversion rate: failure to make timely payments (doh!), failure to assemble necessary documentation (like income verification), and other . . .
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POPSThe Democrat’s War on Oncologists and Cardiologists cardiology and 19% on radiation oncology. They’re targets only because of cost: Two-thirds of morbidity or mortality among Medicare patients owes to cancer or heart disease. … Cancer doctors get hit because the Administration believes specialists order too many MRIs and CT scans. Certain kinds of diagnostic imaging lose 24% under new assumptions that machines are in use 90% of the time, up from 50%. There isn’t a radiologist in America running an MRI 10.8 hours out of 12, unless he’s lining up patients on a conveyor belt. But claiming scanners are used far more often than they really are lets the Administration “score” spending cuts. It’s like doling out healthcare by mimicking progressive income taxation; tax the haves into oblivion so eventually all can go without. And this change is applied to all expensive equipment, not just MRIs and CTs, so payments for antitumor radiation therapy will fall by up to 44%.
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POPS₱ro₱€r ₮iming i$ ₮h€ ₭€¥ ₮o $u¢¢€$$ Banks often process large payments ahead of small debit card charges made the same day -- a practice sometimes called reordering. It's a safeguard, banks say, to ensure important bills such as mortgage payments get paid off first -- but critics allege that reordering allows banks to increase the number of overdraft charges they collect. It's a "gotcha-type practice," said Greg McBride, senior financial analyst at Bankrate.com I call it "crap" and I don't know how many times I've been hit with compounding overdraft charges. If you keep your receipts, you should be able to prove the order of purchases. But, of course, we all toss them away once we get them. /Still, its a shiatty trick...
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POPSJoe Wilson Thought He Was At A "Mob Rule" TownHall
Hmmm, the other day I was pondering about the brainlessness within the Republican base and I have come to a conclusion about it. Some, especially media, have been giving these fools a break, acting as though they’re just normal “PASSIONATE” Americans, taking leave of their senses because they are so befuddled due to the fear of losing something that’s precious to them. BULLSHIT! Oh they’re frightened, that's for sure, but it’s not passion they’re expressing its pure unadulterated HATE! Worse than that! It’s BIGOTRY! They hate because never, NOT EVER, within their pea-pickin sized brains, did they fathom a black man as president of the USA. Not only that "THE" leader of their intolerant America! Yes, there are two Americas’ Virginia, they exist as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exists. One tolerant and broadminded, the other intolerant and narrow-minded! Sincerely, thinkingblue, from the TOLERANT USA. PS: Joe (You Lie) Wilson resides in the other USA
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POPSStudy: Bush Tax Cuts Cost More Than Twice As Much As Dems' Health-Care Bill In contrast, President Bush and his allies in Congress never even attempted to replace the revenue lost as a result of their enormous tax cuts. The Bush tax cuts were deficit-financed, which increased the national debt and resulted in greater interest payments on that debt, as already explained. These figures make clear that costs cannot be the real concern of lawmakers who oppose the House health care legislation and yet supported the Bush tax cuts. Their position seems to be that showering benefits on the wealthiest five percent of taxpayers and leaving the bill for future generations is preferable to making health care available for all at a much lower cost and paying that cost up front. That demonstrates a different set of priorities than most Americans have, but it doesn’t demonstrate much concern about costs.
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POPSPaypal - Request Money Request Money Bill customers by email Request Money allows you to receive or request money from anyone with an email address in 190 countries and regions that accept PayPal. To request money for an auction, request payment from a customer or send a personal payment request - just enter the recipient's email address and the amount you are requesting. The recipient gets an email and instructions on how to pay you using PayPal. Examples of uses for Request Money: * Receive secure, instant payments for auctions * Send a payment request to a customer * Receive charity donations * Collect money for a group gift, an event, or a dinner bill
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POPSGun Control Bill H.R. 45 Not a Hoax: Universal Licensing Requirement Updated. This article in a blog (inaccurately mentioning "Senate bill") was deleted, but the House Bill HR 45 is real (proof here at Thomas/Library of Congress) , not "an internet hoax", although not proceeding with any sponsors.. It was introduced on Jan. 6, 2009 before Obama's inauguration. This COULD happen, though it appears dead now. "Owning guns is not a right, but a privilege", will be their mantra--the 2nd amendment of the Constitution be damned. This was how your owning a car has been used against you too, first licensing, then collecting your SSN and other personal data, then attaching all kinds of other requirements (from draft registration to property taxes, child support payments, et al) in order to legally drive or even park a car that you purchased yourself as a "free American". Do not buy into this "privilege, not right" rhetoric which they will soon begin to parrot.
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POPSFormer Rep. William "Dollar Bill" "Cold Cash" Jefferson (D-LA) Is 11x Guilty The verdict comes four years after the Aug. 3, 2005 raids of Jefferson’s homes in New Orleans and Washington, D.C., in which the FBI found $90,000 in cash hidden in the freezer of his D.C. home, money the government said Jefferson was going to deliver as a bribe to Atiku Abubakar, then vice president of Nigeria, to gain his help with a telecommunications deal in Nigeria being pursued by Lori Mody, a Northern Virginia businesswoman. The money was the lion’s share of $100,000 in FBI cash that the congressman was videotaped receiving packed in a briefcase days earlier in a suburban Virginia parking lot from Mody, who, beginning in March of 2005, had become a cooperating witness for the FBI, secretly taping her conversations with Jefferson. The jury did not find him guilty on the Foreign Corruptions Practices Act, which was the count linked to the money in the freezer.
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POPSAuto Czar Quits Post Six Months Into the Job Mr. Rattner, a former investment banker and His Former Firm Are Involved in a Long-Running Investigation by the New York Attorney General's Office. It seems to me that this would have immediately disqualified him from being appointed to this post to begin with.
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POPSSticker Shock Threatens To Stall Health Care Overhaul even if that means it will take longer for the economy to recover." costs are "a boulder no one can move." The White House has said "it it can save $622 billion in health care costs over the next 10 years by paring hospital subsidies to the uninsured, changing how certain Medicare payments are made to providers, and cutting waste and fraud from Medicare and Medicaid." The rest would likely be paid for in tax increases. The Congressional Budget Office analyzed the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, which would subsidize people to help them pay for insurance premiums, and found that "those subsidies alone would cost an estimated $1.28 trillion." "Tanner warned"and CBO officials agreed"that such initial estimates are the 'floor, not the ceiling' on costs" (Lightman and Douglas, 6/19). Republicans and Democrats alike are questioning those costs, The Los Angeles Times reports. On ABC's "This Week”, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.,
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POPSThe Great American Bubble Machine a suspiciously self-serving plan to funnel trillions of Your Dollars to a handful of his old friends on Wall Street. Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton's former Treasury secretary, spent 26 years at Goldman before becoming chairman of Citigroup " which in turn got a $300 billion taxpayer bailout from Paulson. There's John Thain, the asshole chief of Merrill Lynch who bought an $87,000 area rug for his office as his company was imploding; a former Goldman banker, Thain enjoyed a multibilliondollar handout from Paulson, who used billions in taxpayer funds to help Bank of America rescue Thain's sorry company. And Robert Steel, the former Goldmanite head of Wachovia, scored himself and his fellow executives $225 million in golden parachute payments as his bank was selfdestructing. There's Joshua Bolten, Bush's chief of staff during the bailout, and Mark Patterson, the current Treasury chief of staff, who was a Goldman lobbyist just a year ago, and Ed Liddy, the former Goldman director . . .
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POPSBarney Frank: Let’s Spend TARP Profits Before Taxpayers Can Get Them the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act” and apply it to a trust fund that Frank has long wanted to create for low-income rental housing. (The measure, unfunded, was part of last year’s bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.) Next, Frank would take $1.5 billion from TARP dividends for a so-called “neighborhood stabilization” fund. Republican critics have charged that both measures might allow federal dollars to be distributed to activist groups like the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now, or ACORN. Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch recently complained that TARP funds are “now being used as a go-to solution to address all of our nation’s economic ills.” Hatch and Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln recently introduced a bill that would require that TARP money goes back to the Treasury for debt reduction. Spending the dividend payments now, as Frank proposes, would reduce the chance that TARP might ever be a break-even deal for the taxpayers.
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POPSWho Voted FOR The Economy-Destroyer Called Cap-and-Trade? Some of the key Democrats who voted to support the preliminary vote are the supposedly "conservative" Democrats. Call them now: Boyd (FL) 202-225-5235 -- Voted FOR Driehaus (OH) 202-225-2216 -- Voted FOR Kratovil (MD) 202-225-5311 -- Voted FOR Kanjorski (PA) 202-225-6511 -- Voted FOR Teague (NM) 202-225-2365 -- Voted FOR Check out the complete list of fence-sitters and make some calls now. Stop Pelosi and her bill, which was summarized perfectly by GOP Rep. Rohrbacher, who said, "If this passes, jobs will go to China and economy will go to hell." He's not overstating things. And congratulations are due to the House GOP and its leadership: John Boehner and Eric Cantor. Not a single Republican voted for Pelosi's Socialist nightmare. Well done -- and keep up the good fight.
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