...the plan is to have the President submit reconciliation legislation to be posted on the internet this weekend. The legislation will be crafted in a manner so that it can be passed using special reconciliation procedures created solely to enact laws to reduce the deficit as part of the annual budget. The next step is for the President to conduct his half day bipartisan summit at the Blair House on February 25th. With that faux-bipartisan stunt over with, the President will be free to pass legislation in a partisan manner that tosses aside the regular rules of business in the Senate...
Yet again, the Obama Administration has tossed aside transparency and has crafted this legislation behind closed doors. Not even all Congressional Democrats have been looped into this secret proposal...
According to the Grey Corpse (my pet name for The New York Times, and the one I hear they prefer), Rahm "Al Capone" Emanuel, Nancy "Stretch" Pelosi, Harry "The Body Odor" Reid and HHS Secretary Kathleen "Silly-us" Sebelius have set the stage for the legislative nuke.
The usually tame and nonpartisan Charlie Cook laid the smackdown on the dying Democrat Party.
...when unemployment numbers started proving to be much, much tougher and it started becoming more clear that the stimulus package hadn't worked properly, they just kept plowing ahead on health care. And this isn't a communications problem. This is a reality problem. And I think they just made some grave miscalculations and as it became more clear that they had screwed up, they just kept doubling down their bet.
And so I think, no, this is one of the biggest miscalculations that we've seen in modern political history.
...The thing that I think a lot of Democratic strategists are really concerned about is that some of these districts are going to be gone for a generation or more. I mean, they're not coming back. They're ones that had somehow managed to hang on in Democratic hands even after the Democratic Party fell out of favor in a lot of the South. But once they slip away, I'm not sure they're coming back.
Democrats are trying to leverage the news that health care premiums have exploded in California to market their incoherent and illegal cramdown. Wellpoint, for instance, raised premiums 39%, which set the village idiot of economists -- Paul Krugman -- into a predictable tizzy. Problem is, California's arcane regulations are entirely to blame: similar hikes did not occur in other states.
Wellpoint's rate hikes are the direct result of the Golden State's insurance regulations—the kind that Democrats want to impose on all 50 states. Under federal Cobra rules, the unemployed are allowed to keep their job-related health benefits for 18 to 36 months. California then goes further and bars Anthem from dropping these customers even after they have exhausted Cobra. California also caps what Anthem can charge these post-Cobra customers.
[Gee, who woulda thunk that price controls don't work?]
...This explains why Anthem lost $58 million in California on its post-Cobra customers in 2009. If WellPoint didn't raise premiums amid these losses, it would soon be under assault from its shareholders, if not out of business.
Government destroys any economic system it touches, which is why America's founders expressly forbade the insane Statist experiments in which the Soros-controlled Democrats now engage.
And, last I checked, 39% is almost order of magnitude less than the one-year increase in the federal deficit incurred since Barack Obama took office.
Massachusetts, with a state-controlled health care system, has the second highest health care premiums in the nation.
Thus, abandoning facts, logic and reason, Barack Obama and his Congressional sycophants appear ready to deliver a nuclear enema to the American people.
As Charlie Cook says, "It's a reality problem."
So when Barack Obama claims he's "not an ideologue", he's either lying -- or simply stuck on stupid, take your pick.
No comments:
Post a Comment