GOP Waste Another Opportunity in CNN Health Care Debate

Last night, CNN hosted a debate on Obamacare, and as expected, they paraded out a bunch of victims demanding socialized medicine.  I can think of a few who understood that the federal government is responsible for the high cost of insurance and outrageous deductibles.  Most, including the hosts, pined for “free stuff.”

Senator Bernie Sanders led the charge for a single-payer system with the usual bumper sticker slogans with little to no thought.  He decried that it was easy to beat up on the federal government, but thought nothing about demagoguing insurance and pharmaceutical companies.  His performance was what I expected from a brainless socialist.

However, Senator Lindsey Graham was a disappointment.  I could not believe he spouted the liberal mantra that insurance companies are making record profits.  My mouth dropped open as he went down this road.  How long has this fool been a politician?  Bernie Sanders practically jumped out of his chair.  He couldn’t believe his luck.

I have a question for these two morons, if insurance companies are making record profits, then why are they leaving the exchanges? Hell, most are getting out of the business, altogether. And why are they demanding bailouts?  Why do 45% of the counties in this country have one insurance company if they’re making record profits?  The answer should be obvious.

The two Democratic senators, along with the hosts, bemoaned the Republican health care plans trillion dollar reduction in Medicaid funding.  They bewailed the prospect of 30 million people leaving the Medicaid plantation and buying their own insurance.  A disabled woman wondered what was going to happen to her.

First of all, Medicaid was established to service the poor and disabled.  But now they’re getting substandard service because the middle-class, who can no longer afford insurance,  qualify for this government program.  The Democrats have succeeded in destroying the middle-class. Congratulations, yahoos.

Neither Sens. Graham or Cassidy articulated the viewpoint that the Democratic Party created health insurance cartels where a few monopolize the industry.  They didn’t use this opportunity to educate the American people about the difference between health insurance and actual health care cost.  This would have been a perfect opportunity to demonstrate that Medicare is responsible for the high cost of health care and that a third party payer system has distorted the market.

Sens. Cassidy and Graham made some strong arguments for passage of their bill.  But when you’re dealing on an issue that is as emotional as this, you have to do a better job.

Source:

http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/25/politics/health-care-latest/index.html

Time to Declare: California is in a State of Rebellion

California is in a state of rebellion.  Their General Assembly passed a bill that gives sanctuary to millions of illegal aliens and are suing the Trump administration for building a wall.  This state is basically flouting our nation’s immigration laws.  They have become the Crimea of Mexico.

We cannot afford a populous state such as California to run roughshod over the rule of law and our nation’s sovereignty.  They have 53 House representatives along with 55 Electoral College votes.  It is safe to say that illegal aliens have more influence in Washington D.C. than American citizens and it is time to put a stop to it.  It is time to declare, California is in a state of rebellion.  

When the Yankees conquered the South in the War of Northern Aggression they passed the 14th Amendment which disenfranchised those who participated in the rebellion.  Sections 2 and 3 prohibited rebels from holding public office and reduced their representation in the House, along with their Electoral College votes.  

This measure didn’t just pertain to Confederate soldiers and a specific time period.  Twenty years after Reconstruction, a congressman reintroduced disenfranchisement as a form of punishment.  Here is an excerpt from Capitol Men:

In 1898, the Republican congressman Edgar D. Crumpacker of Indiana suggested that a 40 percent reduction in the Southern representation in Congress would adequately reflect the extensive disenfranchisement of Southern black citizens.  During the South Carolina convention, the Tillman forces had actually agreed that they would willingly reduce the state’s representation in the electoral college and in Congress, if necessary, because from their perspective, the ability to dominate state politics along racial lines meant far more than having a slightly larger voice in Washington.

 

The last black Southerner in Congress at the time,  North Carolina’s George H. White, also advocated for disenfranchisement.  Here is another excerpt:

White had remained true to the emancipation vision of Douglass and the postwar black Republicans, and in Congress he did not hesitate to assail racial injustice and inequality head-on.  Among other initiatives, he revived the idea that Southern states deserved a diminished representation in Congress because of their broad disenfranchisement of blacks…

Here is an interesting tidbit further down the paragraph:

...and he demanded that his white colleagues stop telling “darkie stories” and using “dialect and old plantation language” when trying to represent blacks’ views and beliefs.
 

Some things just don’t seem to change.

Congress is the only institution that can disenfranchise rebels in California and those fools can’t even pass a budget.  However, this shouldn’t be necessary.  The only reason illegal aliens have political clout is because the Census counts them.  That’s how we end up with traitors like Luis Gutierrez in Congress who advocate this third world invasion.    

If Americans are serious about illegal immigration, it will only happen if we convene a convention of States.  We cannot depend on Washington D.C. to correct a problem they created.  We must do it ourselves.  The rule of law and our national sovereignty depend on it.  

Source:

http://dailycaller.com/2017/09/16/california-goes-full-sanctuary-state-with-sweeping-immigration-bill/

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/california-file-lawsuit-over-trump-border-wall-130642062.html

https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/amendmentxiv

HIDDEN CAM: 'Stealing' Illegal Immigrant's Jobs!

Hate Has No Business Here, Except for ...

H/T:  Moonbattery

Education Has Become a National Security Issue

An explosion of absurdities and outright stupidity has contaminated the public weal.  Everyone is offended by something.  You can’t read an article, turn on the television or walk down the street lest you run into a triggered snowflake.  Hell, the other day a black woman was offended by a cotton stalk in Hobby Lobby.  Don’t tell me we haven’t fallen through the looking glass.  We have a full-blown blizzard in Wonderland.

I would like to blame the Obama administration, but we didn’t become a nation of morons overnight.  No, this took decades of indoctrination that trickled down from our university system into our public schools.  We also allowed the importation of third-worlders who believe Anglo-America stole their land and corrupted their native countries.  Unless you haven’t noticed, the white man is the cause for the world’s ills.

I read an article in The College Fix that should enlighten everyone as to the source of our problems.  Here is an excerpt:

Scrolling through a spreadsheet listing every possible diversity class within the University of North Carolina-Charlotte’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences might take some time.  That’s because the inventory is very extensive.

The 21-page list, dubbed “CLAS Diversity Courses,” details 345 classes representing a broad spectrum of fields and majors, including Religious Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, Languages and Culture Studies, and Africana Studies.

Department chairs and program directors helped aggregate the diversity list after students, during a forum, made requests for more diverse perspectives to be made readily available.

And what kind of diverse perspective is that?  

The spreadsheet of classes allots a sizable portion to those within the Women’s and Gender Studies, including courses such as “Changing Realities of Women’s Lives” and “Ecological Feminism.”

 The section of gender-focused classes even expands beyond gender boundaries.

 “Transfeminism,” for instance, offers students to “imagine connections between trans and feminist studies” and “explore feminist perspectives within trans studies–such as intersectionality–and consider the contours and legacy of feminist transphobia.”

These classes are nothing more than hate sessions for virulent androphobes.  The heterosexual, white male has become the bogeyman for all of these boutique self-help classes disguised as gender studies.  Since when did our university system become a mental ward for the afflicted and disaffected?

Let’s face the facts, education has become a national security issue.  Our college campuses have become Marxist breeding grounds hellbent on destroying our culture, history and language.  We have students who can identify a  hundred different genders, but couldn’t name a specific right guaranteed in the First Amendment.  That is pathetic.

We have another snowflake superstorm down the road in Raleigh.  Students at UNC-Chapel Hill are suing the state over a Civil War statue because this inanimate object fosters a racially hostile environment which they consider a violation of federal anti-discrimination laws.  According to plaintiffs, Silent Sam has the ability to do the following:

The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights defines a hostile environment under Title VI as “harassing conduct (e.g., physical, verbal, graphic, or written) sufficiently severe, pervasive or persistent so as to interfere with or limit the ability of an individual to participate in or benefit from the services, activities or privileges provided by a recipient.”        

Who knew a statue could be so hateful?  Silent Sam isn’t so silent to the hypersensitive and the chronically offended.  Maybe if he was forced to transition by wearing a tiara and a tutu the snowflakes wouldn’t be so triggered.

Progressives have been on a mission to indoctrinate our youth for well over a century and the end product is a generation of whiny bitches who hate their country.  The only way to reintroduce sanity and save our country from the thumb suckers is to take back our university system; our survival depends on it.  This is not without precedent.

Albion W. Tourgee, a radical Republican during and after Reconstruction, complained about education in the South.  He was concerned that children were being indoctrinated to hate the national government.  Here is an excerpt from Aaron’s Rod in Politics (1881):

It is a very significant fact, that in nearly every one of the Southern States the text-books prescribed by the authorities openly and ably defend the right of secession, extol the Confederacy and its leaders; assail the national government and its defenders, and, in short, tend directly to diminish the respect due to the government, and justify the action of those who sought its disruption,.   No man can read the Southern school histories without being assured that their purpose and intent is to instill the extremist doctrines of State sovereignty and secession, both by direct argument, and by subtle deprecation of the federal government and its acts and agencies.

Tourgee considered southern education a direct threat to the national government, and it was vital that Congress should provide oversight of States instruction, especially if they accept federal funds.  I bet Tourgee would be surprised to find out today's threat to our country was made up of self-loathing Americans instead of states’ rights southerners.   

Source:

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/national/article174071181.html

https://www.thecollegefix.com/post/37051/

https://www.annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org/americans-are-poorly-informed-about-basic-constitutional-provisions

http://www.charlotteobserver.com/opinion/op-ed/article173076231.html

https://www.jstor.org/stable/25100933?seq=21#page_scan_tab_contents

Antifa and Hypocrisy

Medicare is Responsible for High Health Care Cost

I cannot believe some of the op-eds that are published in the Charlotte Observer.  Do they have a fact checker?  Shouldn’t the editorial board question the assertions of some of these writers?

The latest absurdity that was published in the Disturber was written by J. Edward Bell from the Charleston School of Law.  His solution for affordable healthcare is to dump catastrophic illnesses onto Medicare.  Here is an excerpt:

This idea can be the ultimate fix that makes health care affordable for most Americans.

Almost half of health care premiums are for catastrophic illnesses – the most expensive illnesses people experience. Two systems have developed to deal with these illnesses – the Medicare system for people 65 and older, and the system for everybody else.

People under 65 often are charged more than actual health costs because medical providers often take advantage of enhanced billing to recoup some of the costs they incur for treating people without insurance. These “cost-shifts” are variable costs that are hard to control, which leads insurers to charge a lot for premiums of people under 65.

But if you are covered by Medicare, the program pays actual costs to a medical provider. Because Medicare only pays actual costs, the overall cost of treatment for the Medicare patient is much less than for the patient under 65.

The difference in costs is amazing, according to research by the Charleston School of Law. Consider a patient under 65 who has an average catastrophic medical bill of $1.6 million. The cost for a Medicare patient with the same illness: about $320,000, or 80 percent less. That’s a savings of more than $1 million.

First of all, you can’t buy catastrophic insurance unless you are granted an exemption from the federal government, and once that is obtained you are limited to the exchanges and god forbid you don’t qualify for a subsidy.

Second, Medicare is the main driver for all healthcare cost.  They set the standard.  The Washington Post let the cat out of the bag back  in December 2013.  Here is an excerpt:

Economists believe that the Medicare prices are even more important than that massive scale suggests, because in the absence of a traditional market for medical services, the Medicare prices form the foundation for private insurers, as well.

That is partly because Medicare is such a huge player in the market, accounting for more than a fifth of the money spent on personal health care. But there is a second, possibly more important impetus: Because of the complexity of modern medicine, setting prices is an arduous, time-consuming task. Insurers save money by letting Medicare do the work.

To measure the impact of Medicare prices, Gottlieb and Jeffrey Clemens at the University of California at San Diego analyzed millions of claims to see how changes in Medicare prices were followed by changes in the prices that private insurers paid. The results were stark.

 “Our results indicate that the private sector will copy Medicare’s pricing errors,” Gottlieb said. “On the flip side, they would gain when Medicare payments better reflect the value of what is being delivered.”

 While that paper largely studied physician fees and outpatient services, other research published in May found that Medicare pricing for hospitals is similarly influential. The paper, by health care researcher Chapin White and published in Health Affairs, found that a 10 percent reduction in Medicare pricing yielded a 3 or 8 percent reduction in private prices, depending on the statistical method used

I published a blogpost back in 2012 about how Medicare and the third party payer system had distorted the healthcare market.  Since the consumer/patient is factored out of the cost/benefit analysis, market pricing no longer exist.  No one knows the cost of a procedure or for that fact an aspirin.  Hence, we have hyperinflation in an industry whose pricing is determined by a government entity.  And everyone wonders why no one can afford healthcare.

Source:

http://costonscomplaint.blogspot.com/2012/09/is-medicare-distorting-health-care.html

http://www.charlotteobserver.com/opinion/op-ed/article170495982.html

https://www.healthinsurance.org/faqs/what-is-the-acas-catastrophic-plan-and-who-is-eligible/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/medicare-pricing-drives-high-health-care-costs/2013/12/31/24befa46-7248-11e3-8b3f-b1666705ca3b_story.html?utm_term=.33e504fbc6f3

DUMBEST ANTI-TRUMP PROTESTERS EVER

Activist Judge Ruled Illegal Aliens Don't Have to "Show Papers"

When historians look back at this time in history, they’ll condemn Congress for dereliction of duty.  It’s bad enough that our elected representatives take five week vacations without addressing our national healthcare crisis, which they created, or a looming budget showdown.  No, this body would rather conduct oversight hearings that accomplish nothing and pass continuing resolutions that fund a bloated government.

However, I’m here to say that their real sin is not reining in an out-of-control federal judiciary.  We have judges who’re adjudicating and enforcing policies that are way beyond their jurisdiction.  Congress is the only body that has the authority to pass immigration laws.  It is Congress, who dictates what the federal judiciary can and cannot address as per Article III in the U.S. Constituion.

We have a crisis of epic proportions in this country due to judicial activism.  We have judges actively endangering the lives of citizens and undermining the value of citizenship.  Here is the latest outrage as reported by USA Today:    

The ruling by U.S. District Judge Orlando Garcia halts the planned implementation Friday of Senate Bill 4, according to the American-Statesman.

The law allows local law enforcement to ask anyone who is legally detained or arrested for their immigration status during routine interactions such as traffic stops, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Garcia granted the preliminary injunction after five Texas cities, several counties and sheriffs challenged the law's constitutionality.

The judge wrote in his 94-page order that there is "overwhelming evidence" that the law "will erode public trust and make many communities and neighborhoods less safe," the Los Angeles Times reported.

Garcia also wrote that "localities will suffer adverse economic consequences which, in turn, will harm the state of Texas.”

Immigrants' rights groups complained that the measure could force anyone who looks as if they are in the country illegally to "show papers."

Do they not teach American history in law school?  Citizens have been demanding immigrants to “show papers”  before there was a United States.  Here is an excerpt from The Great Wagon Road by Parke Rouse, Jr. that I found interesting:

In the November rains, the two Moravians started southward again.  They found creeks swollen with muddy rainwater.  When they reached the Rappahannock, they crossed in a canoe and stopped at an inn kept by a German emigrant named Christopher Kuefer.  For several days they plodded through Virginia’s highlands in the rain.  Near Orange County Courthouse they were stopped by an English settler who demanded to see their passport.  When Schnell demurred, several farmers conducted him with rifles to a justice of the peace of Orange County.  But the German produced his passport there, and he and Hussey were permitted to proceed.

A federal judge does not have the authority to create law, that is Congress’ responsibility.  It’s also Congress’ responsibility to limit the jurisdiction of these rogue justices and if possible eliminating repeat offenders.  

Source:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2017/08/30/federal-judge-blocks-texas-tough-sanctuary-cities-law/619168001/

Marxist "BAMN" Teachers Protected by Unions and NEA

Progressives have rendered both university and public school systems rotten to the core. Marxist teachers and professors are nursing a generation of Jacobins who have no regard for the American creed.  These so-called teachers are tenured and untouchable.  These vipers are protected by regional and local unions along with the NEA.

 

Yvette, Felarca, a Berkeley middle school teacher, incited a riot against peaceful protesters in Sacramento.  She is also accused of indoctrinating and recruiting students.  Here is an excerpt from the Daily Caller:

Despite repeated warnings, the district said Felarca continued to try to recruit students into her radical organization, including during work hours. The leftist teacher frequently tried to bring students on school-sponsored trips to BAMN-related activities, the district said, describing the trips as attempts to “indoctrinate” the students.

The school district accused Felarca and other BAMN members of weaponizing students to derail disciplinary hearings for Felarca, after student protesters repeatedly swarmed into the disciplinary hearings. The school district claimed that Felarca and other BAMN members “were actively trying to brainwash and manipulate” students to serve her “own selfish interests,” calling her conduct “particularly reprehensible.” Felarca continues teaching today.

The community, at large, need to rise up against any union who protects and promotes this kind of behavior.  Children should not be subjected to radical teachers who have no regard for life, liberty or property.  

Source:

http://dailycaller.com/2017/09/01/public-school-teachers-behind-violent-antifa-group/