POWIP Piece of Work In Progress

Today’s Health Care Round Up

STEPHANOPOULOS: I’m doing well, thank you. You call this the collapse of health care reform. But, you see this now, united Republican opposition. The President's poll numbers at new lows. And a lot of leading Democrats believe that if this bill goes down, it will cripple the Obama presidency. Are you prepared to do that?

DEAN: Of course not. That's one of the problems. We've gotten to the stage, George, and you know this better than most, in Washington, where passing any bill is a victory. And that's the problem. Decisions are being made about the long-term future of this country for short-term political reasons. And that's never a good sign. There are some good things in this bill. The problem is, we're now committed to a solution using the private insurance companies. And you will be forced to buy insurance. If you don't, you'll pay a fine. And 27 percent of the money that you put in will not go to your health care. It will go to CEOs, who make $20 million a year. This is a bigger bailout for the insurance industry than AIG. And not one person- excuse me- a very small number of people will get any insurance at all until 2014, if the bill works.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But- Well, excuse me. The President says this is going to cover about 30 million Americans. And a lot of your fellow progressives and liberals are onboard. Listen to Senator Tom Harkin.

SENATOR TOM HARKIN (D-Iowa): I plead with all of my progressive friends, now is the time to get over this hurdle. If this bill, Rachel, were so bad, why are 40 Republicans on the hill going after it day after day after day and trying to kill it?

Hahahahahahahaaaaaaaa . . .

*******

“The fact is that benefits kick in on day one and the large majority of benefits kick in on day one,” [Franken] shouted.

But in reality, the overwhelming bulk of the spending in the new health care bill comes by expanding Medicaid and offering subsidies to individuals to purchase insurance on the new government exchanges, and those changes don’t go into effect until year five (or 2014).

The Congressional Budget Office found that just $9 billion of the $848 billion total spending aimed at expanding coverage from 2010 to 2019 would occur in the first four years, while the remaining $839 billion wouldn’t come until the last six. In percentage terms, a whopping 1 percent of spending would occur from 2010 to 2014. This was one of the accounting gimmicks that Democrats used to make the legislation appear cheaper over their 10-year budget window.

*******

The Medical Loss Ratios memo is the smoking gun. It shows that indeed, Democrats have been submitting proposals to the CBO behind closed doors and tailoring their private-sector mandates to avoid having those costs appear in the federal budget. Proposals that would result in a complete cost estimate — such as the proposal by Sen. Rockefeller discussed in the Medical Loss Ratios memo — are dropped. Because we can’t let the public see how much this thing really costs.

Crafting the private-sector mandates such that they fall just a hair short of CBO’s criteria for inclusion in the federal budget does not reduce their cost, nor does it make those mandates any less binding. But it dramatically reduces the apparent cost of the legislation. It is the reason we’re all talking about an $848 billion Reid bill, rather than a $2.1 trillion Reid bill.

If someone sold you a house, or a car, or a mutual fund this way, we would put them in jail.

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Some delicious schadenfreude from Greenwald(s).

And hide the decline.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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Working Family Party Expose

If you're going to read one thing today, make it Part I of City Hall's in-depth exploration of the organization and activities of the Working Family Party/Working Family Organization.

“Money is not supposed to work like this in politics,” said Tom Halper, chair of the Baruch College political science department, when briefed on the Working Families arrangement.

This article outlines five ways in which Working Families operates in distinct and previously little known ways:

*The leadership and almost all of the employees of the Working Families operations are shared between a political party, a 501 (c)3 tax-exempt organization, a 501 (c)4 tax-exempt organization and the for-profit company in an arrangement experts say is unlike anything seen before in the political history of the city, state or country, with employees drawing salaries from several at a time;
*Unions’ voting strength in Working Families candidate endorsements and nominations is directly tied to the amount of money that the unions pay into the Working Families’ legally separate non-profit;
*The Working Families’ lobbying arm, operated by almost entirely the same staff and with the same agenda as the Working Families Party, is officially separate on tax and lobbying filings though even many of the people lobbied by it consistently say they are unaware of the distinction;
*The Party has close connections and does collaborative work with the Progressive America Fund, which both provides the supporting research for Working Families efforts in New York and the organizational help for Working Families parties in at least 10 other states;
*A confederation of Working Families entities across the country are all backed by many of the same unions and ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, which also pays some operatives’ salaries. All are assisted and, in some cases, managed by Cantor and other top Party employees in New York, with help and financial assistance from the Working Families Organization and Progressive America Fund back and forth across state lines, as visible on campaign finance and lobbying records.

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That certificate lists four initial directors, starting with now-White House political director Patrick Gaspard, who was then a board member of the Working Families Party. The other three were ACORN chief organizer Bertha Lewis, Robert Master of the Communications Workers of America and Sam Williams of the United Auto Workers. These three also were and remain the three co-chairs of the Working Families Party.

(via Big Government)

Not surprisingly, though, it's Andrew Breitbart who's been summoned before a grand jury, presumably with regard to the ACORN video taken in Delaware, where ACORN isn't registered.

Meanwhile, the SEIU gets served in Massachusetts.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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Paradox, Not Hypocrisy

Don't criticize until you've flow a few thousand miles in their private jet:

Mr. Bloomberg’s routine trips to Bermuda are even more carbon costly: the private jet produces 130 times more emissions than going commercial. On those jaunts, Mr. Simos said, the Falcon produces 4.3 tons of carbon dioxide; putting another two people on an American Airlines Boeing 757-200 that flies to Bermuda would produce only 66 more pounds.

This is not Bloombergian hypocrisy; it is a paradox, shared by most of humankind. I’ve lived within a block or two of a subway station since birth, yet owned a car since I got a driver’s license. There is a long list of public figures — from movie stars to politicians to journalists — who preach conservation for everyone else, while living in mega-homes and flying in Gulfstreams. It is probably not a good idea for the rest of us to look down our noses at people who cannot resist such temptations until we can afford them ourselves.

Get that? Phelim McAleer can entitle his next film project Not Hypocritical, Just Paradoxical.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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Okay, This Is Just Irritating [UPDATE]

Pope Benedict makes a pronouncement on stewardship of the environment and consumerism, and Stacy's take is:

Glad I'm a Protestant:

Industrialized nations must recognize their responsibility for the environmental crisis, shed their consumerism and embrace more sober lifestyles, Pope Benedict said on Tuesday. . . .
"This means that technologically advanced societies must be prepared to encourage more sober lifestyles, while reducing their energy consumption and improving its efficiency." . . .

"More sober lifestyles"? Next thing you know, he'll be talking Jimmy Carter "malaise" stuff. (Via AmSpecBlog.)

Look, I'm glad that Stacy's happy that he's a Protestant, but that's a category that covers an awful lot of ground, including mainstream Protestant churches that are much closer to Catholicism in their theological outlines than they are to other Protestant sects. If one considers, for example, Shaker spirituality---much celebrated in American liberal culture principally for its having evinced the virtue of largely dying out---one has to admit that it is somewhat more extreme than what the Pope advocates. The Amish, who, last time I checked, are considered a Protestant denomination, practice a rather austere anti-materialism, and it's not Papists who gave us Margaret Sanger or her latter-day acolytes in the climate hysteria camp.

America's material culture constitutes an expression of her greatness, but should not be mistaken for her greatness itself, and all too often it becomes fetishized. You could do worse in your choice of theologians. Merry Christmas.

UPDATE: Paul Zummo's piece about the ignorance factor in most coverage of the Church. I don't expect people to become experts in canon law to cover the Church, but it would behoove them, I think, to try to acquire a fundamental idea of how it works, in the same way they would a foreign government. At a minimum, anyone ought to have the common sense to take an al-Reuters version of what a cleric says with a grain of salt.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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Steel to Gibbs

"I look forward to seeing hordes of violent Jihadists lay down their AK-47s in response to the news that our terrorist prison is moving from the Caribbean to America’s heartland . . . ."

Meanwhile, the Lockerbie bomber released from prison after only 8 years for humanitarian reasons has gone missing.

Free Munir Hussain.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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Eldrick vs Edwards

Ed Morrissey:

Maybe if the news media took as much interest in the hypocrisy, disloyalty, and potential corruption of a public official as they do in the sexual antics of a professional athlete, they may have caught Edwards taking favors from a potential witness in the grand jury investigation.  That seems like actual news.  The fact that an attractive multimillionaire athlete committed perhaps dozens of sexual indiscretions and infidelities is a dog-bites-man story to everyone but the athlete’s wife.  Instead, we get daily focus on the latter story, eleven reporters assigned to dissect a political memoir by another VP candidate, and no one but the local media reporting on a story of alleged payoffs by a politician from campaign coffers to keep his squeaky-clean Two Americas image burnished.

He's exactly right.  And the abject hypocrisy of both Edwards and the media is compounded by his having likely used campaign contributions to pay her off, when he's independently wealthy.

He appears to have purchased her a $535,000 house in Charlotte, only to have balked at a demand that he also pay her $18,000 per month in child support.  That's pretty greedy, but you'd think that the media would be all over this.  They're not.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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Congressional Dems Desperate to Agree to Disagree with the American Public

From Capitol Hill

Sen. Ben Cardin of Maryland told Fox News Tuesday that he's frustrated at the lack of progress on a pubic option..

"We're trying to get this bill done," he said.  "I can't tell you that I'm angry. I'm a little bit frustrated that we've been negotiating and we haven't been able to nail down an agreement on the public option.

[Emphasis: Root]

From Main Street

Fifty-six percent (56%) of U.S. voters now oppose the health care plan proposed by President Obama and congressional Democrats.

Enoch_Root

AKA. Bobby Donn Brubaker (the most popular man in Mesa, AZ), the Umbrella of Terror, Jack Ketch.

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Links 12-15-09

Justice Department falling on sword over New Black Panthers.

Obama Administration monitoring social media.

Bankrolling Al Gore's fraud.

Another disgusting carbon credit profiteer.

The one attractive person from the Tiger Woods scandal, so far.

"A man known to police as 'Spider-Man' for his daring escapes and who has starred in gay porn videos with his twin brother . . . "

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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Andrew Sullivan Is a Ghostly Trio

Ace blogs about it.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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Prayers, Please

An acquaintance from Twitter, stay-at-home mother with husband deployed. Two-year-old son drowned in their pool today, couldn't be revived. Unthinkably horrible. Please pray for her, her husband, family, and friends.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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