Health Care Law Problems

Yahoo News writes: – AARP's endorsement helped secure passage of President Barack Obama's health care overhaul. Now the seniors' lobby is telling its employees their insurance costs will rise partly as a result of the law.
In an e-mail to employees, AARP says health care premiums will increase by 8 percent to 13 percent next year because of rapidly rising medical costs.
And AARP adds that it's changing copayments and deductibles to avoid a 40 percent tax on high-cost health plans that takes effect in 2018 under the law. Aerospace giant Boeing also has cited the tax in asking its workers to pay more. Shifting costs to employees lowers the value of a health care plan and acts like an escape hatch from the tax. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101104/ap_on_bi_ge/us_aarp_health_plan
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Fix Healthcare Law writes: Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius sent a letter to America’s Health Insurance Plans warning them that “there will be zero tolerance” for “falsely blaming premium increases” on Obamacare. Specifically, Sebelius threatened to punish non-subservient firms by excluding them from the government regulated and mandated health insurance exchanges. Since these exchanges will be the primary way most Americans receive health insurance (especially if more private firms decide to end their current coverage) such a decision by Sebelius would be a death sentence for any insurer that does not comply.
Never before in the history of our republican form of government has an administration threatened to extinguish individual firms for merely communicating with their customers. But such are the dictatorial powers Obamacare grants to Secretary Sebelius. There are over 1,000 instances in the more than 2,700 page bill where Congress granted Secretary Sebelius new powers to regulate the health care industry. For example, her power to “determine” what does or does not count as a medical expense alone will decide the fate of many health insurance firms. (more…)  http://fixhealthcarepolicy.com/tag/hhs-secretary-kathleen-sebelius/
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Here is a 2 1/2 minute video from C-Span showing Rep. Peter Roskam of Illinois.  He asks why Obamacare subjects those who don't buy health insurance are subject to criminal penalties (5 years in jail and a fine of $250,000) as a way to "coax" them into a plan that is so fabulous?  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hgk76AKHzfc
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American Thinker Divulges: I know who's got my vote for the cutest couple since Bonnie and Clyde. It's the larcenous lovebirds from Chicago: Jan Schakowsky, the most far-left member of Congress, and her bank robber husband, Robert Creamer, who wrote Obamacare in jail.

What a romance! She waited as he served time for sixteen counts of bank fraud, selflessly devoting herself to trying to impeach Dick Cheney and to showering federal funds on her biggest, most ethically challenged contributors.

And he persevered inside the graybar hotel, aflame with the inspiration that became Stand Up Straight! How Progressives Can Win, a 628-page manual for how "to reshape the structure of one-sixth of the American economy" -- namely, health care.

Here's how David Horowitz's Discover The Network describes it:

Creamer's book advocated a "public plan" that would guarantee every U.S. resident's "right" to health care; this plan eventually would serve as a model for the "public option" in subsequent legislative proposals by Congressional Democrats.

In addition, Creamer laid out a "Progressive Agenda for Structural Change," which included a ten-point plan to set the stage for implementing universal health care:

• "We must create a national consensus that health care is a right, not a commodity; and that government must guarantee that right."
• "We must create a national consensus that the health care system is in crisis." [Sounds like one of the Rules for Radicals from Saul Alinsky.]
• "Our messaging program over the next two years should focus heavily on reducing the credibility of the health insurance industry and focusing on the failure of private health insurance."
• "We need to systematically forge relationships with large sectors of the business/employer community."
• "We need to convince political leaders that they owe their elections, at least in part, to the groundswell of support of [sic] universal health care, and that they face political peril if they fail to deliver on universal health care in 2009."
• "We need not agree in advance on the components of a plan, but we must foster a process that can ultimately yield consensus."
• "Over the next two years, we must design and organize a massive national field program."
• "We must focus especially on the mobilization of the labor movement and the faith community."
• "We must systematically leverage the connections and resources of a massive array of institutions and organizations of all types."
• "To be successful, we must put in place commitments for hundreds of millions of dollars to be used to finance paid communications and mobilization once the battle is joined."

"To win," added Creamer, "we must not just generate understanding, but emotion-fear, revulsion, anger, disgust." http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/10/why_doesnt_everyone_know_jan_s.html  

 [I am blown away by how closely this plan sticks to the Rules for Radicals, and also the Cloward and Piven strategy of collapsing our system of health care in America.  It is chilling, and we heard nothing of this at the time.]
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Now Jesse Jackson has called the repeal of Obamacare to be "creeping genocide"!
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WASHINGTON – Breast cancer surgeon Kathryn Wagner has posted a warning in her waiting room about a different sort of risk to patients' health: She'll stop taking new Medicare cases if Congress allows looming cuts in doctors' pay to go through.
The scheduled cuts — the result of a failed system set up years ago to control costs — have raised alarms that real damage to Medicare could result if the lame-duck Congress winds up in a partisan standoff and fails to act by Dec. 1. That's when an initial 23 percent reduction would hit.  "My frustration level is at a nine or 10 right now," said Wagner, who practices in San Antonio. "I am exceptionally exhausted with these annual and biannual threats to cut my reimbursement by drastic amounts. As a business person, I can't budget at all because I have no idea how much money is going to come in. Medicine is a business. Private practice is a business."
"http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101113/ap_on_he_me/us_medicare_cuts
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The red ink was even darker than expected.  It gets worse:  Without some form of "Congressional action" (read: bailout), the USPS projects it will hemorrhage $238 Billion over ten years, and could go bankrupt by the end of 2011.


The "problem" is that with the advent of email, people simply don't send snail mail at nearly the rate they used to.  A Democratic Congress might look at this problem and decide it's essential that the US Government intervene tand prop up the Post Office's shrinking and outmoded business model.  Hopefully a Republican Congress won't make that mistake.

Parting thought:  Didn't President Obama cite the US Postal Service as a positive example of how to strike a happy balance between the public and private sectors during his Obamacare push?  Yeah, he did. 

http://townhall.com/tipsheet/GuyBenson/2010/11/15/us_post_office_lost_$85_billion_last_year