Death To America, ObamaCare-Style: ObamaCare Already A Nightmare For Doctors, Soon To Be A Nightmare For Poor, Sick Patients

Remember how Barack Hussein Obama said over and over and over again that if you like your doctor, his ObamaCare would allow you to keep your doctor, and if you like your health plan, his ObamaCare would allow you to keep your health plan?

He lied.  And in the minimum of 37 times he lied on that issue alone, Barack Obama became the most documented liar in all of human history as he looked more than 300 million Americans in the eye and lied like the hell that he is again and again and again.  It was “the lie of the year,” and you’ve got to be a world-class demon-possessed liar to emerge out of all the lies that we are told in this country today.

But that was hardly this demon-possessed liar’s only lie about ObamaCare.  Obama promised his ObamaCare would help doctors, that it would help poor, sick patients, that it would bend the cost curve for healthcare down.

All lies.

Here’s an article from Saturday’s USA Today that exposes these lies (it appeared in my print edition under the title, “Maddened by metrics”):

Quality payment incentives: What’s the point?
Jordan Rau, Kaiser Health News 6 a.m. EDT April 4, 2015

Dr. Michael Kitchell initially welcomed the federal government’s new quality incentives for doctors. His medical group in Iowa has always scored better than most in the quality reports that Medicare has provided doctors in recent years, he said.

But when the government launched a new payment system that will soon apply to all physicians who accept Medicare, Kitchell’s McFarland Clinic in Ames didn’t win a bonus. In fact, there are few winners: Out of 1,010 large physician groups that the government evaluated, just 14 are getting payment increases this year, according to Medicare. Losers also are scarce. Only 11 groups will be getting reductions for low quality or high spending.

“We performed well, but not enough for the bonus,” said Kitchell, a neurologist. “My sense of disappointment here is really significant. Why even bother?”

Within three years, the Obama administration wants quality of care to be considered in allocating $9 of every $10 Medicare pays directly to providers to treat the elderly and disabled. One part of that effort is well underway: revising hospital payments based on excess readmissions, patient satisfaction and other quality measures. Expanding this approach to physicians is touchier, as many are suspicious of the government judging them and reluctant to share performance metrics that Medicare requests.

“Without having any indication that this is improving patient care, they just keep piling on additional requirements,” said Mark Donnell, an anesthesiologist in Silver City, N.M. Donnell said he only reports a third of the quality measures he is expected to. “So much of what’s done in medicine is only done to meet the requirements,” he said.

The new financial incentive for doctors, called a physician value-based payment modifier, allows the federal government to boost or lower the amount it reimburses doctors based on how they score on quality measures and how much their patients cost Medicare. How doctors rate this year will determine payments for more than 900,000 physicians by 2017.

Medicare is easing doctors into the program, applying it this year only to medical groups with at least 100 health professionals, including doctors, nurses, speech-language pathologists and occupational therapists. Next year, the program expands Medicare to groups of 10 or more health professionals. In 2017, all remaining doctors who take Medicare — along with about 360,000 other health professionals — will be included. By early in the next decade, 9% of the payments Medicare makes to doctors and other professionals would be at risk under a bill that the House of Representatives passed in March.

The quality metrics used to judge doctors vary by specialty. One test looks at how consistently doctors keep an accurate list of all the drugs patients were taking. Others track the rate of complications after cataract surgery, say, or whether patients received recommended treatments for particular cancers.

There are more than 250 quality measures. Groups and doctors must report a selection — generally nine, which they choose — or else be automatically penalized. This year, 319 large medical groups are having their reimbursements reduced by 1% because they did not meet Medicare’s reporting standards.

Physicians who do report their quality data fear the measures are sometimes misguided, usually a hassle, and may encourage doctors to avoid poorer and sicker patients, who tend to have more trouble controlling asthma or staying on antidepressants, for instance.

Leanne Chrisman-Khawam, a primary care doctor in Cleveland, said many of her patients have difficulty just getting to follow-up appointments, since they must take two or three buses. She said those battling obesity or diabetes are less likely to reform their diets to emphasize fresh foods, which are expensive and less available in poor neighborhoods. “You’re going to link that physician’s payment to that life?” she asked.

Hamilton Lempert, an emergency room doctor in Cincinnati, criticized one measure that requires him to track how often he follows up with patients with high blood pressure.

“Most everyone’s blood pressure is elevated in the emergency department because they’re anxious,” Lempert said. Another metric encourages testing the heart’s electrical impulses in patients with non-traumatic chest pain, which Lempert said has led emergency rooms to give priority to these cases over more serious ones.

“It’s just very frustrating, the things we have to do to jump through the hoops,” he said.

In the first year doctors are affected by the program, they can choose to forgo bonuses or penalties based on their performances. After that, the program is mandatory. This year, 564 groups opted out, but even if all of them had been included, only 3% would have gotten increases and 38% would have seen lower payments, mostly for not satisfactorily reporting quality measures, Medicare data show.

Smaller groups and solo practitioners are even less likely to report quality to the government. “The participation rates, even though it’s mandated, are just really low,” said Dr. Alyna Chien, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. It’s “a level of analytics that just is not typically built into a doctor’s office.”

Dr. Lisa Bielamowicz, chief medical officer of The Advisory Board, a consulting group, predicted more doctors will start reporting their quality scores when the prospect of fines is greater. “They are not going to motivate until it is absolutely necessary,” she said. “If you look at these small practices, a lot of them just run on a shoestring.”

This year’s assessments of big groups were based on patients seen in 2013. A total of $11 million of the $1.2 billion Medicare pays doctors is being given out as bonuses, which translates to a 5% payment increase for those 14 groups getting payment increases this year. That money came from low performers and those that did not report quality measures to Medicare’s satisfaction; they are losing up to 1%.

The exact amount any of these groups lose will depend on the number and nature of the services they provide over the year. This year, 268 medical groups were exempted because at least one of their doctors was participating in one of the government’s experiments in providing care differently.

Officials at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services declined to be interviewed about the program, but said in a prepared statement that they have been providing all doctors with reports showing their quality and costs. “We hope that this information will provide meaningful and actionable information to physicians so that they may improve the coordination and integration of the health care provided to beneficiaries,” the statement said.

Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation.

How the hell do you think fining doctors – who are already operating on a shoestring – for not doing something that massively increases their costs because making those reports is very obviously not something they are equipped to do, is going to lower the cost of healthcare?  Are you really that stupid that you believe it will???

Doctors are frustrated and getting more and more frustrated.  We’ve already seen them retiring at the highest rate since Hippocrates was working on his oath millennia ago.  It’s been going on since the damn evil law passed and it’s going to pick up speed.  We’re seeing fewer and fewer doctors left to service larger and larger networks of patients.  Now they are increasingly dropping out of ObamaCare and its reporting requirements as fast as they can.  How in the hell is that supposed to improve patient care?  Are you really that stupid that you believe it will???

You’ve got to love this prophetic title from CBS News that heralds future doom:

Obamacare 2015: Higher costs, higher penalties

With the Affordable Care Act to start enrollment for its second year on Nov. 15, some unpleasant surprises may be in store for some.

That’s because a number of low-priced Obamacare plans will raise their rates in 2015, making those options less affordable. On top of that, penalties for failing to secure a health-insurance plan will rise steeply next year, which could take a big bite out of some families’ pocketbooks.

“The penalty is meant to incentivize people to get coverage,” said senior analyst Laura Adams of InsuranceQuotes.com. “This year, I think a lot of people are going to be in for a shock.”

Oops.  Sorry, poor people.  It sort of looks like Obama and his demonic minions didn’t actually give a DAMN about you, after all.

But the real lie – the lie that makes “Democrat” truly stand for “DEMOn-possessed bureauCRAT” – is the one about helping the poor and the sick get better access to medical care.  Let me replay the lines from the article:

Physicians who do report their quality data fear the measures are sometimes misguided, usually a hassle, and may encourage doctors to avoid poorer and sicker patients, who tend to have more trouble controlling asthma or staying on antidepressants, for instance.

Leanne Chrisman-Khawam, a primary care doctor in Cleveland, said many of her patients have difficulty just getting to follow-up appointments, since they must take two or three buses. She said those battling obesity or diabetes are less likely to reform their diets to emphasize fresh foods, which are expensive and less available in poor neighborhoods. “You’re going to link that physician’s payment to that life?” she asked.

Barack Obama – in his wickedness – has designed a system that pits doctors against the poorest, sickest patients.  The doctor can treat them, sure, but only if he or she is willing to pay severely for it and be punished for it by an evil system that promised to do the very opposite of what it is in fact doing.

Barack Obama looks down on that doctor from his satanic Mt. Olympus and he sees a doctor whose stats aren’t up to muster because that doctor is treating sick patients who will tend to get sicker even with the very best of care.  And Obama decrees, “That doctor must be punished!”  And the fines and the penalties start kicking in.  Better to just leave that poor, sick patient on the side of the road, modern-day Good Samaritan physician.  Because Obama will come after you with all the power of totalitarian government arbitrariness if you try to help that patient.

Here’s another demonic DEMOnic bureauCRAT lie for you: Obama promised fewer people would use emergency rooms; when the very OPPOSITE is happening BECAUSE OF HIS DEMONIC LAW as USA TODAY documents:

More patients flocking to ERs under Obamacare

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — It wasn’t supposed to work this way, but since the Affordable Care Act took effect in January, Norton Hospital has seen its packed emergency room become even more crowded, with about 100 more patients a month.

That 12 percent spike in the number of patients — many of whom aren’t actually facing true emergencies — is spurring the Louisville hospital to convert a waiting room into more exam rooms.

“We’re seeing patients who probably should be seen at our (immediate-care centers),” said Lewis Perkins, the hospital’s vice president of patient care and chief nursing officer. “And we’re seeing this across the system.”

That’s just the opposite of what many people expected under Obamacare, particularly because one of the goals of health reform was to reduce pressure on emergency rooms by expanding Medicaid and giving poor people better access to primary care.

Instead, many hospitals in Kentucky and across the nation are seeing a surge of those newly insured Medicaid patients walking into emergency rooms.

Nationally, nearly half of ER doctors responding to a recent poll by the American College of Emergency Physicians said they’ve seen more visits since Jan. 1, and nearly nine in 10 expect those visits to rise in the next three years. Mike Rust, president of the Kentucky Hospital Association, said members statewide describe the same trend.

Experts cite many reasons: A long-standing shortage of primary-care doctors leaves too few to handle all the newly insured patients. Some doctors won’t accept Medicaid. And poor people often can’t take time from work when most primary care offices are open, while ERs operate round-the-clock and by law must at least stabilize patients. […]

The same “experts” who didn’t see what we conservatives were predicting EVER SINCE THIS DEMONIC LAW THREATENED AMERICA TO BEGIN WITH are refusing the see the REAL cause: the law was based entirely on lies because the Democrats who shoved this evil monstrosity down our collectivist throats are demon-possessed liars.

Not one month ago, I wrote up my own experience with the Veterans Administration as to how this very arbitrary bureaucratic mindset is just taking over the entire system.  Within the span of one week, I suffered that arbitrariness of penalizing decent people because of the behavior of others TWICE.  First, I was contacted and ORDERED to take a urine test.  Why?  I wanted to know; I’d just taken one and that test had nothing to do with my healthcare.  Rather, it had been a drug test because I’m on oxycodone for the pain created by my service-connected medical condition.

Well, less than three months after the last test – which proved I was completely clean of anything but what I was supposed to be taking – I was being commanded to take it again.  And apparently under Obama I will have to be treated like a drug criminal at least four times a year from now on.

Why?  Because other veterans somewhere else are abusing their prescription drugs.  So the obvious thing to do – as obvious as it is to treat a 103-year-old Catholic nun in a walker like a young Middle Eastern terrorist male – is to treat EVERYONE like a criminal or an addict.

I have been receiving physical therapy for a major shoulder surgery.  I was given a month-and-a-half worth of appointments and I kept every single one of them.  In fact, I have NEVER missed an appointment with the VA.  But because somebody somewhere had missed appointments, the “system” decided to treat EVERYONE like a no-shower.

So I know firsthand exactly what these doctors are saying: it doesn’t matter if I do right or not; the system will punish me anyway.  And it will do so by protecting the very worst people (who of course vote Democrat, don’t they?) by redistributing the pain for the cost of their godawful behavior onto everyone else.  That’s what the welfare system is based on, baby: “Oh, you don’t have a job because you refuse to get off your fat, pimply ass and look for one and it’s easier to pump out ten kids and collect increased payments for each one?  Don’t worry, dearie, here’s the money somebody else earned by working his butt off.  Please don’t forget to vote for Messiah Obama unless you want mean Republicans to force you to produce something with your life besides flatulence!”

I’ve talked to several veterans who are as livid as I am.  And they are saying they’re just going to start buying the marijuana that the same damn DEMOnic bureauCRATS who are forcing them to take the piss tests for drugs are opening up for everybody else so they can be happier welfare recipients.  And why bother busting your ass to show up for appointments when you’re going to be treated like dirt whether you show up or not???

And so they are producing the very opposite thing to what they are stupidly claiming they are producing.

What Obama is producing is the same thing the ayatollahs Obama is appeasing and negotiating with are calling for: “Death to America!”

The fact of the matter is that ObamaCare was sold and marketed entirely on the basis of lies.  That is just a documented fact.

But the even sadder fact of the matter is that unless the Supreme Court finally steps in and does the right thing and overturns this fascist takeover of the American healthcare system, ObamaCare will destroy America because nothing will be able to prevent it from doing so.  It was crafted as a metastasizing cancer that will keep becoming larger and making the patient America sicker until that patient collapses and dies.

 

Yet Another Outright LIE: Obama Sold ObamaCare Under Promise That People Would Stop Going To Emergency Rooms For Treatment

The title of the following article says it all: the whole point of “fundamentally transforming” medicine into SOCIALIZED medicine was a lie.

1/02/2014 @ 2:30PM |Avik Roy, Forbes Staff
New Oregon Data: Expanding Medicaid Increases Usage Of Emergency Rooms, Undermining Central Rationale For Obamacare

For years, it has been the number one talking point of Obamacare supporters. People who are uninsured end up getting costly care from hospitals’ emergency rooms. “Those of us with health insurance are also paying a hidden and growing tax for those without it—about $1,000 per year that pays for [the uninsureds’] emergency room and charitable care,” said President Obama in 2009. Obamacare, the President told us, would solve that problem by covering the uninsured, thereby driving premiums down. A new study, published in the journal Science, definitively reaches the opposite conclusion. In Oregon, people who gained coverage through Medicaid used the emergency room 40 percent more than those who were uninsured.

The ‘free rider’ argument was always bunk

Just like the “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan” promise, the promise that Obamacare would make health care less expensive by expanding coverage was always a crock. Nationally, it’s estimated that we spend about $50 billion a year on uncompensated care for the uninsured. But Obamacare spends $250 billion a year of taxpayer money on covering the uninsured. Only in Washington is spending $250 billion to address a $50 billion problem considered “savings.”

In Massachusetts, under Romneycare, the math worked out in a similar way. The Bay State spent $661 million on uncompensated care in the year before Romneycare went into effect; by the 2009 fiscal year, that figure had decreased to $414 million: a savings of $247 million. But in 2011, the cost of the state’s insurance subsidy program was $830 million, and that doesn’t even count the tab paid by the federal government for the state’s expansion of Medicaid.

Did emergency-room usage in Massachusetts decline because of all this extra money? The opposite. ER visits actually rose by 7 percent between 2005 and 2007, and the state’s costs for caring for ER patients rose 17 percent between 2007 and 2009.

And one of the big holes in the myth of uninsured “free riders” is that the uninsured only account for 15 percent of the population, 14 percent of total ER visits, and 12 percent of aggregate ER expenditures, according to a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Medicaid beneficiaries, by contrast, accounted for 9 percent of the population, 15 percent of visits, and 9 percent of expenses.

Given all of this data and experience, it was obvious that expanding coverage through Obamacare would increase taxpayer costs, not reduce them. But predictably, the pro-Obamacare “fact-checkers,” like those at PolitiFact, have been nowhere to be found.

The latest data from the Oregon Medicaid experiment

Along come economists Amy Finkelstein of MIT and Kate Baicker of Harvard, who have been participating in the now-famous Oregon Medicaid experiment. Regular readers of The Apothecary will recall that this study compared a group of Oregonians who were uninsured, and stayed that way, to a group who had “won” a lottery to enroll in Medicaid. The study found that Medicaid “generated no significant improvement in measured physical health outcomes,” a finding that reinforces extensive published research. (I also discuss this research in my new book, How Medicaid Fails The Poor.)

Finkelstein and Baicker, in their new Science article, looked at emergency-room records for 24,646 residents of the Portland, Oregon area, spanning 12 regional hospitals, who had participated in the Medicaid experiment. The study was co-authored by Sarah Taubman of the National Bureau of Economic Research; Heidi Allen of the Columbia School of Social Work; and Bill Wright of Oregon’s Portland Medical Center. The authors found, as they had previously, that the subgroup that had gained coverage under Medicaid showed no improvement in the management of their chronic medical problems, such as high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and diabetes.

They also found that those on Medicaid used the emergency room 40 percent more than the uninsured did—1.43 ER visits per Medicaid enrollee, as against 1.02 for the uninsured. More to the point, a majority of the emergency room visits were unnecessary, because they involved conditions that could easily have been managed outside of the ER.

Of the 0.41-per-person increase in visits, 0.18 were “primary care treatable,” meaning they didn’t require ER care. 0.12 didn’t even qualify as emergency care. 0.04 did qualify as emergency issues, but could have been prevented by adequate primary care. The Medicaid-driven increases in each of these categories was statistically significant, meaning that the differences were large enough that they are highly unlikely to be statistical noise.

Medicaid is, in effect, designed to increase emergency-room usage

Why does Medicaid perform so poorly, given that we spend so much money on it—$450 billion a year? Because of fundamental flaws in the way the program was designed.

The authors of the 1965 Medicaid legislation believed that it was morally wrong to expect poor people to pay even modest sums for their own health care. So the law mandates that cost-sharing features, like co-pays, of Medicaid plans must be minimal to zero for both primary care coverage and emergency-room usage.

Because Medicaid was nearly free to the program’s enrollees, those enrollees ended up seeking—and receiving—lots of inappropriate care. That led to massive cost overruns that, even today, are bankrupting state governments. But states have had little flexibility to reform Medicaid’s cost-sharing features. The one thing they have been able to do is pay doctors and hospitals less and less to provide the same care.

That trend, in turn, has led many doctors to stop accepting new Medicaid patients. So it’s extremely difficult for Medicaid enrollees to get appointments with primary care physicians. They have to spend weeks on the phone to find someone who will treat them.

Put yourself in the shoes of that Medicaid enrollee. Why would you bother calling primary care docs all day and all week, if you can go to the emergency room and get the same care for the same price? So that’s what Medicaid patients do.

And then, consider that Medicaid pays hospitals far less than private insurers pay for the same care. Many hospitals say that they lose money on every Medicaid patient they see. But somehow, if we have more Medicaid patients, taxpayers will be better off?

It was bunk in 2009, and it’s bunk today. It’s why the states that have chosen to forego Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion were wise to do so. Governors and legislators who have ignored the data, and burdened generations of future taxpayers with this failed program, have a lot of explaining to do.

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Avik’s new book, How Medicaid Fails the Poor, is now available in paperback, Kindle, and iBooks versions.

Follow @Avik on Twitter, Google+, and YouTube, and The Apothecary on Facebook.

Or, sign up to receive a weekly e-mail digest of articles from The Apothecary.

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UPDATE: Some more details on the study, for those who are interested. The twelve hospitals in the study encompassed “nearly half of all inpatient hospital admissions in Oregon.” The period observed was approximately 18 months—from March 10, 2008 to September 30, 2009. There were “no statistically significant differences between the groups in demographic characteristics measured at the time of lottery sign-up.” As noted above, the increase in ER usage “from Medicaid is solely in outpatient visits…Medicaid statistically significantly increases visits in all classifications except for the ‘emergent, non-preventable’ category. The increases are most pronounced in those classified as ‘primary care treatable.’”

For a longer list of the President’s repeated promise that Obamacare would reduce emergency-room usage, read Michael Cannon‘s take on the study.

INVESTORS’ NOTE: Among the biggest publicly-traded players in Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid are Molina (NYSE:MOH), WellPoint (NYSE:WLP), WellCare (NYSE:WCG), Centene (NYSE:CNC), and Humana (NYSE:HUM).

Keep in mind that the overwhelming majority of those who are getting “health insurance” under ObamaCare are being thrown into Medicaid.  And keep in mind that having Medicaid is statistically no better than having no insurance at all in terms of health or longevity due to the crappy care of your new ObamaCare program.

People are waking up to the “sticker shock” of ObamaCare.  Whether or not they can afford the premiums is completely irrelevant when the average deductible PER FAMILY MEMBER is OVER $5,000 a year.  If you can’t afford that, you are for all purposes UNINSURED whether you have a stupid little card from Obama in your wallet or not.

Add to that the fact that the ObamaCare networks are unbelievably small and limited.  There are few doctors available for way, WAY, WAAAAYYY to many patients.  And if you want a specialist because the pain pill Obama wants you to take instead of treatment isn’t quite enough for you, well, I’d say “good luck” but even that would be overly optimistic.

The purpose behind ObamaCare was “to control the people.”  The purpose was to restrict health care to the masses.

It is by now beyond a joke to try to count how many times Barack Hussein Obama was caught in an outright lie in his effort to deceive the American people and impose his wicked worldview on what used to be the greatest nation in the history of the world.  Or how many different lies he told.

Fiscal Cliff Deal Is A Raw Deal For The Rich And For America. And It Sets Up ANOTHER Raw Deal In Sixty Days Over Out-Of-Control Obama Spending.

It’s a truly fascinating thing.  Had we “gone over the cliff,” do you know what would have happened?  We would have returned to the Clinton tax rates.

What is truly remarkable is that the Clinton tax rates are now nearly universally viewed by Democrats as having been 98% pure, distilled evil.  Because the Democrat Party has now been saying that Americans can’t afford to pay the stupid and evil tax rates that Democrats once demanded they pay.

But what would have been stupid and evil and harmful to the American economy for 98% of the population is in fact true for 100% of the population.  It is simply a gargantuan lie to try to argue that the laws of economics – that when you tax something you invariably get LESS of it – is true for 98% but is a lie for 100%.

Yes, it is a fact of history that the Republican Party under George W. Bush saved America with the tax cuts that helped the middle class grow more and spend more.  And it is now a fact of history that Democrats are now implicitly saying that the Clinton tax rates were 98% evil and counterproductive to a growing economy.  Democrats were completely wrong about their high tax rates; but Democrats are liars who won’t EVER admit they were wrong.  Instead they merely continually shift their demonization and demagoguery to a different target without ever admitting that it was only a relative few years ago that Democrats were attacking the middle class with high taxes that are suddenly now universally recognized as evil.

Isn’t it amazing how Obama, the Democrats and the mainstream media propaganda actually just claimed credit for 98% of the Bush tax cuts while still blaming Republicans as evil for creating the very thing that Democrats are on record as now being 98% for?  How does this kind of falsehood pass for truth???

Here’s a little bit of fact for you: BILL CLINTON CUT TAXES FAR MORE THAN HE RAISED THEM.  It wasn’t until Clinton CUT the capital gains tax in addition to many other tax reforms that the economy truly took off and the budget deficit shrank.  Versus Barack Obama, who has stratospherically hiked taxes on the rich and on the middle class via massive regulation and the equally massive ObamaCare tax hike.

And keep in mind that Bill Clinton – who largely presided over a good economy with the help of Republicans who controlled both the House and the Senate – said “the era of big government is over.”  Obama reversed that and now America will pay dearly for it.

It is a fact of history that Democrats are now demanding that we keep 98% of Bush’s tax cuts while simultaneously taking credit for them.  While amazingly still saying that the Bush tax cuts – which they now say were 98% good – are still evil.

Democrats claim that their tax hike on the rich, on the other hand, will generate $620 billion in additional revenues.  Here’s the first problem with the deal that Republicans were trapped into: no it won’t.

History is now replete, full, satiated, gluttonously gorged with examples of Democrats’ stupid tax claims doing the very opposite of what they claimed it would do.  The most infamous example is the luxury tax or so-called “yacht tax” on the rich.  Democrats assured Americans that the rich could certainly pay a little more (there’s a line that stupid people keep arguing, isn’t it?) to own luxury items.  Democrats saw the government getting more and the rich paying “more of their fair share” (there’s another stupid line of demagoguery for you).  What in FACT happened was that it turned out that, guess what, rich people AVOID TAXES just like everybody else tends to do.

Falling Tax Would Lift All Yachts
By AGIS SALPUKAS
Published: February 7, 1992

The nation’s luxury-boat builders, many clinging to their businesses after two years of plunging sales, finally got some good news last week.

President Bush, in his budget proposals, asked Congress to repeal the 10 percent luxury tax on yachts priced at more than $100,000 (and also on private planes that cost more than $250,000). The repeal, which Congress is likely to approve, would be retroactive to Feb. 1.

Since the tax took effect in January 1990, hundreds of builders of large and small boats have spoken of it as a stake driven into the heart of an industry already suffering from the recession, tighter bank rules on financing and fallout from the gulf war.

In the last two years, about 100 builders of luxury boats — recreational craft costing more than $100,000 — cut their operations severely and laid off thousands of workers. Some builders filed for protection from creditors under Chapter 11 of the Federal Bankruptcy Code.

Now, sales personnel and owners of marine companies are hoping they will be swamped by buyers who have held off in the expectation that the tax will be repealed.

The 10 percent tax applies to the amount of the cost above $100,000, so that a boat selling for $300,000 carries a $20,000 luxury tax. That tax is in addition to any state and local taxes. […]

Also, boat prices have dropped as much as 40 to 50 percent, interest rates have fallen and some lenders have begun to offer financing, though on very strict terms.

In 1991, sales of luxury boats dropped 70 percent from 1990’s level, while overall boat sales fell 18 percent. Relies on Foreign Customers

“The luxury tax really hurt us,” said William J. Healey, the president of the Viking Yacht Company in New Gretna, N.J.

He gestured toward a few big luxury boats being built there. A 50-foot boat costing $800,000 is bound for Italy; a $1 million yacht may be sold in Japan. A 65-foot motor yacht costing $1.3 million is bound for Greece.

The business from overseas, developed in the last two years, is enabling Viking to limp along, its work force cut to 150 workers from 800. “Very fortunately, it has helped us weather the downturn,” Mr. Healey said as he pointed to two production lines that have been inactive for several years.

Domestic demand fell so sharply that a year ago Viking shut an operation in Tampa, Fla., that employed 800 workers. The plant was built in the boom of the 1980’s, when most boat makers could not keep up with demand.

Yeah, that’s right, stupid liberal.  Raising taxes on the rich a few percent won’t hurt anybody.  They can afford it.

And if you’re either stupid or demon-possessed, you still believe that damn Marxist class warfare lie.  But people who prefer the truth and have a clue about something called “history” sure don’t.

The fact of the matter is simple and straightforward: lower tax rates for EVERYBODY creates more incentive to work harder and invest more because you are allowed to keep more of what you earn.  It is a simple truth of American history that every single time tax rates have been cut, we have had growth that generated MORE revenue than we otherwise would have.

There’s a second and even more harmful reason that Obama won’t raise more revenue as he falsely claims: because he’s going to be targeting and attacking the small businesses that create jobs.  Yes, it’s true on one level that 97% of small businesses won’t see their taxes shoot up and force them to lay off workers and cut back to pay the dictator.  But as is often true, another word for “lie” is “statistic.”  Because here’s the thing: THAT THREE PERCENT OF THE BUSINESSES DO MOST OF THE ACTUAL HIRING.

I documented this back in July:

Please take a look at the US government census information on small businesses.  The latest data they have on file comes from 2008:

Out of 27,281,452 total firms, 21,351,320 are listed as “nonemployer firms.”  Which means that 78.23 percent of all small businesses hire ZERO employees.   So when Obama says that 97% of small businesses won’t be affected by his tax hike, please understand that the whopping majority of those businesses that won’t be affected aren’t hiring anybody.  Another 3,617,764 small businesses have no more than four employees.  Those small businesses that hire zero workers plus those small businesses that hire no more than four workers constitute 91.5% of ALL small businesses.

Here’s a more relevant way to look at it.  When you consider the businesses that employ more than four people, you are looking at businesses that hire 94.97 percent of ALL the workers who work for small businesses.  And while not all of the small businesses that hire between 5-9 employees are going to be paying higher taxes as a result of Obama’s class warfare on small businesses, most of them do.  And virtually none of the businesses that hire more than ten employees are going to earn less than $250,000 a year.

So, yeah, the kid who is an “independent contractor” working his paper route won’t be paying more taxes under Obama’s class warfare plan.  That’s great.  But the overwhelming majority of small businesses (defined as businesses employing 499 or fewer workers) are going to get the crap beat out of them.

So Obama and Democrats like to point out that 97% of small businesses won’t be affected by their tax hikes.  But more than 78% of small businesses in his “97 percent” figure are “nonemployer firms” and hire ZERO workers.  So no jobs.  And when you look at the businesses that hire workers, you are looking overwhelmingly at the businesses that are going to be hit by these new tax hikes.  That is simply a FACT.  And it is simply a FACT that they are going to be forced to raise their prices to accommodate their rising costs of doing business, which will in turn reduce demand for their products or services, which will then in turn force them to lay off workers because of aforementioned reduced demand.

So what Obama and the Democrats just did is savagely attack the only people who have any chance at creating more job opportunities and bringing the US economy off its back and onto its feet again.

Keep in mind that in pimping his ObamaCare, Obama promised that premiums wouldn’t go up; he promised that if you like your doctor, you could keep your doctor; he promised that he wouldn’t tax the middle class.  He lied about EVERYTHING.  And he is lying to you now.  Because he has over and over again demonstrated that he is a liar without shame, without honesty, without decency and without integrity.

But we’re just getting warmed up describing how truly godawful this “deal” is.

Obama – even on his regime’s own calculations – will only get 8 1/2 days of additional tax revenue by attacking the rich and sabotaging the US economy by hurting job creators.  The problem when you consider Obama’s trillion-plus dollar deficits every single year of his entire presidency is that he refused to do a damn thing about the OTHER 356.5 days of the year.

We raised $1.8 trillion in income tax revenue in 2012.  It will be a very interesting thing indeed to see if we raise $2.42 trillion as the Democrats claim.  I bet we won’t be anywhere near that because it was a lie from the beginning.

Obama has the blue-whale-sized balls to claim that he cut the deficit by over $1 trillion.  Even the überliberal Washington Post says he’s a Pinnochio-nosed liar.  But let’s just think like people who AREN’T insane and AREN’T demon-possessed for a second: the US national debt is now over 16.4 trillion and will be well beyond that by January 20 when Obama’s first term ends; it was $10.626 trillion the day Obama took office.

Do you remember when our demon-possessed current president demonized his predecessor by pointing out that the debt had grown by $4 trillion over Bush’s eight years in office?  I pointed out back in September:

If Obama is a one-term president, which he himself by his own rhetoric said he ought to be, he will have added more than $6 trillion to the debt in his four years by the time he leaves office.  The same man who viciously demonized his predecessor for adding less than $5 trillion over EIGHT years.  The national debt is over $16 trillion now, and it’s going to keep piling on and piling on until January 2013.  With at least $500 billion in interest to pay on top of that.

Again, Barack Obama is a liar and a hypocrite without shame, without decency, without honor and without integrity.  He is shameless.  The Democrat Party is shameless.  And the mainstream media which protects both with their propaganda machine are shameless.

And our real debt is actually now considerably over a beyond-insane $222 trillion.  And is growing by about one trillion dollars every single MONTH:

The U.S. fiscal gap, calculated (by us) using theCongressional Budget Office’s realistic long-term budget forecast — the Alternative Fiscal Scenario — is now $222 trillion. Last year, it was $211 trillion. The $11 trillion difference — this year’s true federal deficit — is 10 times larger than the official deficit and roughly as large as the entire stock of official debt in public hands.

And why are we that $222 trillion – and actually that is now more like $227 trillion given the rate of growth of that debt and the five months that have passed since that article documenting the true debt was written – you ask?  Easy, 99.99999 percent of that debt which guarantees the collapse of America came from Democrats, and specifically their boondoggle entitlement programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

It’s funny, in a sad, pathetic, ironic sort of way: Democrats demonize Republicans for trying to protect America and her interests abroad with a strong national defense.  But the only thing the Constitution specifically ordered the federal government to “provide for the common defense.”  And note that word, “provide.”  It means, “pay for to provide.”  The same liberals who demonize us for doing what common sense and the Constitution alike command us to do point to the phrase “promote the general welfare.”  Do you get that difference between “provide” and “promote.”  If you ask me to provide something, I’m on the hook for it in a financial way.  That’s what it means to be a provider.  If you want me to promote something, I’m going to say nice things about it and cheerlead for it.  But that’s all.  And so like everything else, Democrats turned the Constitution, basic morality and true Christianity on its head and made what is wrong right and what is right wrong.

If liberals were actually to “promote the general welfare,” they would cheerlead the private economy and encourage growth by keeping taxes low for those who are willing to work hard so they can keep what they earn.  And then, with the minimum size and minimum amount of regulation, they would get the hell out of the way.

What Democrats “promote” is the general cancer instead.

And that mindset became a rotting cancer that is just about to consume and kill the patient America.

This nation is doomed.  And if you voted for Obama, you are one of the people who doomed it.   We cannot possibly pay these debts that will ultimately bankrupt this country but only after our children and their children are forced to bear the burden and suffer because of your self-righteous and sanctimonious greed a.k.a. “your entitlement mindset.”  And one day you will stand before a holy God and answer for the fact that you are a toxic human being whose soul swims in every kind of lie.  Because that’s what Obama voters are: bad people who hate the truth and who prefer lies.  Aside from your dishonesty, you are greedy and hypocritical – feeling yourself entitled to seize other people’s money when you would scream if your own money were taken from you.  And aside from your dishonesty, greed and hypocrisy you are hurting the poor who ought to be helped.  Because as I pointed out above – and thoroughly document with the article I linked you to stating it – when you seize the wealth of private citizens who overwhelmingly worked hard and then planned well and then worked hard some more to get that wealth, you end up hurting the very poor you falsely profess to be helping.  Because you force businesses large and small alike to reduce their workers.  You rob the poor of dignity by preventing them from being able to find jobs.  And then you cynically exploit their desperation to get them to vote Democrat so they can be on welfare for life as long as they continue voting Democrat.  Oh, you will one day be forced to give an account for all of it, rest assured.  And you will be giving that account to a Someone who knows the truth from all of your lies and your slander.

In sixty days this “fiscal cliff deal” that the mainstream media is so damn giddy about will come boomaranging back in the form of a massive political crisis caused by Obama’s morally insane and fiscally evil out-of-control spending binge.

Further, this stupid deal did nothing to avert the sequestration that Obama’s White House invented that will cripple our economy.  Just for starters, 1.53 million defense industry workers are going to get their 60-day layoff notices that they frankly should have already received according to federal law that Obama abrogated for cynical political purposes.  The defense industry has already began to suffer because everybody knows that Obama is at war with our ability to defend ourselves against war.  Obama has already cut $480 billion from defense; and his sequestration gimmick will soon devastatingly cut the Pentagon by $500 billion more.

Republicans were maneuvered into an impossible rhetorical battle against a master demagogic rhetorician.  They were demonized as “the party who was willing to force everybody’s taxes to go up over the wealthiest two percent of the country.”  When how the hell were the Democrats not “the party who was willing to force everybody’s taxes to go up over the wealthiest two percent of the country”???  Weren’t Democrats threatening to go off the cliff unless they got to attack the top two percent of earners?  How were they not doing the very thing they slandered the Republicans for doing???

This country is going to shut down in sixty days over that “spending issue” that Obama and the Democrats absolutely refused to deal with.  Because this “deal” did nothing to slow down the debt, nothing to slow down Obama’s shocking deficits, nothing to avert a debt ceiling showdown and nothing to avert the REAL fiscal cliff of Obama’s sequestration plan.

The markets that stupidly surged today will just as stupidly collapse then.  Because anybody who isn’t a fool should see this confrontation over insane and immoral debt coming.

Meanwhile, it is God damn America, full speed ahead to ruin.  And then the Antichrist and the Tribulation will come.

Fearmongering Obama Holding Gun To Seniors’ Heads With Social Securty Threat. The FACT Is He Is A Lying Demagogue

The words of Barack Hussein Obama, our fearmonger-in-chief:

Obama in an interview with CBS said he couldn’t guarantee Social Security checks would be sent out on Aug. 3 if Congress did not raise the debt ceiling by Aug. 2, when the Treasury Department has said it will no longer have the money to pay all of the U.S. bills

Republican Allan West is entirely right in saying, “That’s fear mongering that’s not leadership, that’s sad and pathetic.”

Allow me to point out first of all that this fearmongering from Obama is nothing new.  Allow me to quote a Wall Street Journal article from almost immediately after Obama was sworn in as president:

“President Barack Obama has turned fearmongering into an art form. He has repeatedly raised the specter of another Great Depression. First, he did so to win votes in the November election. He has done so again recently to sway congressional votes for his stimulus package.”

Obama’s fearmongering then resulted in our undertaking a suicidal $3.27 TRILLION pork-laden “stimulus” that has massively failed to do what Obama promised it would do at a giantic cost to our children.  But he is an evil, cynical loathsome man who has experience in the fact that the lowest common denominator often wins.

Let’s move on to a demonstration of a man who is A) a liar; B) a fearmonger; and C) the worst kind of demagogue.  Let me begin by citing the Bipartisan Policy Center:

Bipartisan Policy Center: U.S. Won’t Default on Debt If Congress Fails to Raise Debt Ceiling
Posted in Weekly Standard – 8 July 2011 – No comments

With under a month left until the U.S. hits its statutory limit to borrow more money, Republicans and Democrats continue to disagree about what exactly would happen if Congress and the president fail to reach an agreement that raises the debt ceiling.

“Failure to raise the limit would precipitate a default by the United States,” wrote Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner earlier this year. No, that’s not true, say Republicans. There’s enough federal revenue to pay the interest on the debt as well as fund the troops and entitlement programs.

According to a study by the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC), Treasury could indeed avoid a debt default by prioritizing payments, but failure to raise the debt ceiling would mean deep and immediate cuts.

Which is to say that Democrats are lying and fearmongering, and Republicans are telling the truth.  But seriously what else is new???

And, with that, a piece of an article from Market Watch that provides the numbers to support what the Republicans are saying and to factually disprove what lying Obama is saying:

Q: What is a default?

A: In this case, a default would be the failure by the U.S. Treasury to make payments of principal or interest on its debt in a timely manner.

Q: In a given month how much does the Treasury owe as interest on its debt?

A: Roughly about $15–20 billion (more on this in a moment).

Q: How much revenue does the Treasury take in on average in a month?

A: Roughly about $200 billion.

Q: Are you saying the Treasury could pay interest on its debt 10 times over (or more) from monthly income?

A: Yes.  Therefore the likelihood of not paying interest on its debt is zero.

Q: But, what about redeeming bonds that come due?

A: As bonds come due, the Treasury would again use monthly income to pay them off. This would lower the debt owed beneath the so-called debt ceiling.  Then, the Treasury could turn around and issue debt in that amount up to the debt ceiling.

Q: Why then do Treasury Secretary Geithner and others in government make such apocalyptic statement about the horrors of default.

A: I’m afraid Secretary Geithner and others in government are doing the moral equivalent of yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater and they are doing so for political reasons rather than financial reasons.  They simply do not want any interruptions in the bloated spending underway in Washington and they want to scare Americans into thinking the end of the world is nigh unless the gravy train keeps chugging along.

Math is hard for politicians

Now, let’s do the math to flesh out some of these points.  I know that for many politicians and pundits math is hard, but I’ll try to make it as simple as possible. If we do not raise the debt ceiling by August 2nd, we will not default on Treasury obligations.  Nor, will we have trouble making Social Security payments.  However, there would be a big drop — roughly 44% — in government spending because that percentage represents the difference between government revenues which would be about $200 billion for the full month of August and $172 billion for August if we start counting after the first week when the deadline hits.  Spending is slated to be over $300 billion that month.

Here are the numbers from an excellent and highly detailed study by the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) quoted in this piece [emphasis added]:

…The BPC study found that the United States is likely to hit the debt limit sometime between August 2 and August 9. “It’s a 44 percent overnight cut in federal spending” if Congress hits the debt limit, [BPC’s Jay] Powell said. The BPC study projects there will be $172 billion in federal revenues in August and $307 billion in authorized expenditures. That means there’s enough money to pay for, say, interest on the debt ($29 billion), Social Security ($49.2 billion), Medicare and Medicaid ($50 billion), active duty troop pay ($2.9 billion), veterans affairs programs ($2.9 billion).

That leaves you with about $39 billion to fund (or not fund) the following:

Defense vendors ($31.7 billion)

IRS refunds ($3.9 billion)

Food stamps and welfare ($9.3 billion)

Unemployment insurance benefits ($12.8 billion)

Department of Education ($20.2 billion)

Housing and Urban Development ($6.7 billion)

Other spending, such as Departments of Justice, Labor, Commerce, EPA, HHS ($73.6 billion)

The decision to prioritize payments would fall on the Treasury department, and Powell points out it would be chaotic picking and choosing who gets paid (in full or partially) and who doesn’t…

No doubt picking and choosing who gets paid and who doesn’t would be chaotic.  And, lots of programs would not get their funding and that would lead to plenty of screaming.  Nonetheless, it should be clear from this exactly how much we are spending in excess of government revenues.  And, that could and should lead to a sober assessment of what government can and cannot do.

We can easily make all of our debt payments (both interest and principal), our Social Security payments, our contributions to Medicare and Medicaid, our payments to our active duty soldiers and provide funding to the VA system.  With room to spare.  Barack Obama and Timothy Geithner (a lying weasel who didn’t pay his own taxes) are lying weasels.

They are treacherous and un-American.  They are the very worst kind of cockroaches.  They represent everything that is wrong with this country’s political system.  What Obama is doing is low and loathsome beneath contemptible.  The only way that we wouldn’t send out Social Security checks is if Obama decides to fund demonic ACORN instead of sending out those checks (see here and then see here and here).  And the scumbag might actually do that because he’s simply that wicked and depraved and uncaring about the American people or their suffering.

Obama – the liar, the demagogue, the fearmonger – falsely demonized Republicans by claiming that they were using the debt ceiling as a gun to the American people’s heads.  HE’S THE ONE USING THIS ISSUE LIKE A GUN.

This is what happens in God damn America.

The beast is coming.  And with Obama’s help imploding America, he is coming soon.

At Least HALF Of All Employers Will Likely Shove Workers Into ObamaCare. The Beast Is Coming.

At a town hall meeting in New Hampshire on Aug. 11, 2009, President Barack Obama repeated a line he’s used many times in describing his health care proposal: “If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan.”

Politifact says that claim was “half true” on their truth-o-meter.  But half truths quite often amount to whole lies.

What was it that Nancy Pelosi said before Democrats rammed through ObamaCare using every deceitful trick and tactic available?  Oh, yeah: “But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy.”

Well, here are just some of the increasingly bleak truths that we are learning:

A report by Price Waterhouse Coopers (PWC) on medical cost trends for 2012 provides a dismal forecast of continued increases that consumers will see in their health care costs.
Key findings of the PWC report indicate:

• The Democrats’ health care law has done little to ease the compliance burdens facing employers – as the PWC report points out, “employers have had their hands full complying with the avalanche of new regulations under PPACA.”
• Medical costs are expected to increase:  PWC expects medical costs to increase 8.5% in 2012, up from 8% in 2011.
• More Americans will NOT be able to keep the health care coverage they have and like, with the report noting that “some employers are becoming less confident in their ability to offer health benefits on a long term basis.”

Of note:

• 84% of employers are likely to make changes to offset the costs associated with the Democrats’ health care law,
• 86% are likely to re-evaluate their overall benefits strategy, and
• 50% are considering significantly changing or eliminating company subsidies for dependent medical coverage.

Well, THAT sure sucks.  Sorry for all you schmucks who worked so hard in your personal lives – went to college, stayed on the straight and narrow, scrimped and saved when others bought the latest fad items, showed up on time every day and worked hard while others slacked off around you – just so you could get a job with DECENT BENEFITS.  But those days are gone now because Democrats imposed their will to create a massive boondoggle.  And now, as a result of Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid – and of course the now-famous Anthony Weiner – you get to be tossed into a bad, smelly place where you won’t be able to get a doctor to save your life.  And if you get thrown into Medicaid, where Obama most wants you, then God help you, because Obama sure won’t.

The “fog of controversy” is lifting.  Now we’re starting to see that the FACT that Democrats have created a monster that will eat us alive.

I think of fellow communist country North Korea.  You’d think leftists would care about their people, but they don’t.  Back in 2004, the New York Times wrote of fellow socialist traveller North Korea – “that claims to follow the world’s purest brand of communism” – “almost 10 percent of the population is believed to have starved to death.”  And nothing has changed since then.

Let’s consider the attitudes of leftists.  Take Chairman Mao – who has been publicly praised by top Obama officials.

“The atom bomb is nothing to be afraid of,” Mao told Nehru, “China has many people. . . . The deaths of ten or twenty million people is nothing to be afraid of.” A witness said Nehru showed shock. Later, speaking in Moscow, Mao displayed yet more generosity: he boasted that he was willing to lose 300 million people, half of China’s population.” [Annie Dillard, “The Wreck of Time” in Harper’s from January 1998].

Here’s a little more of Chairman Mao’s attitude for his people:

LEE EDWARDS, CHAIRMAN, VICTIMS OF COMMUNISM MEMORIAL FOUNDATION: In 1959 to 1961 was the so-called “great leap forward” which was actually a gigantic leap backwards in which he tried to collectivize and communize agriculture.

And they came to him after the first year and they said, “Chairman, five million people have died of famine.” He said, “No matter, keep going.” In the second year, they came back and they said, “Ten million Chinese have died.” He said, “No matter, continue.” The third year, 20 million Chinese have died. And he said finally, “Well, perhaps this is not the best idea that I’ve ever had.”

CHANG: When he was told that, you know, his people were dying of starvation, Mao said, “Educate the peasants to eat less. Thus they can benefit – they can fertilize the land.”

With liberals, “One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic.”

Think of energy.  Liberals have demonized oil, gas, coal, nuclear and everything else that actually produces energy.  They want to leave us with “renewable energy” which produces about 8% of our energy needs.  What are we going to do for the rest?  Obama says he plans to bankrupt the coal energy which supplies half of America’s electricity.  Obama has continued to pursue this reckless policy with regulations that are crippling us.  What are we going to do?  And the shocking secret is it doesn’t matter to them.

And the reason that the Kim Jong Ils and the Chairman Maos and the Joseph Stalins and the Barack Obamas stay in power is that people simply can’t believe that their leaders are truly that depraved.

I’ve been a voice shouting in the wilderness that the mantras of the Democrat Party are virtually identical with the mantras of Marxism.

They don’t care about your LIFE, let alone about your health care.  These people hate God, and they want to create massive government in place of God, and they want to be the high priests of that government, and they want you to come hat in hand and bow down before them such that they get to decide who the winners and losers are.

Liberals want to crash the system and impose the Marxism they have always dreamed of.  Think Cloward and Piven.  Think of the liberal strategy to crash the US economy.

The beast is coming.  He too will be a leftist.  He will actually be able to create what the left have been dreaming of for a generation and beyond: a one-world government.  He will be a big government totalitarian who will promise to take care of everybody just as every leftist has done from Karl Marx to Stalin to Hitler to Chairman Mao to Kim Il Sung Pol Pot Mao to Kim Jong Il.  He will produce a government system in place of God, and then he will declare himself as god over that government (Daniel 9:27; Matthew 24:15-21; 2 Thessalonians 2:3-4; Revelation chapter 13.

People who truly value individuals value the individual freedoms inherent in a free market economy.  What we are now seeing in these last days are people who DON’T value individual human lives.  They have snuffed out more than 53 million human lives in America alone through the Holocaust of the abortion mills.  And they have transported their hell with them to Asian countries that have created an unnatural and monstrous imbalance as “a woman’s right to choose” has murdered millions upon millions upon millions more WOMEN.  They have been working and laboring to bring the hell of the Antichrist to this world and to this very country for decades.

And this hell is now at our very doorstep.

D. James Kennedy issued a prophetic warning: “Watch out, Grandpa!  Because the generation that survived abortion will one day come after YOU!”

Senior citizens – and those close to being senior citizens – are going to find out that they aren’t working anymore, which means they are no longer productive.  Their going to find out that aging people consume vastly more medical resources than younger, healthier people.  They’re going to find out that Obama has already spent America into staggering debt that it cannot possibly repay.  And they’re going to find out that liberals think they’ve already lived their “complete lives.”

And the left WILL come after you, Grandma and Grandpa.  They’re going to come after you through socialized medicine and the ObamaCare monster that created it.  They’re going to kill you by the tens of millions.  They’ve done it before; they’re literally doing it right now.  And you aint seen nothing of the HELL that these people are laboring to create yet.

 

From Bad To Worse: Japan Was On Path To Debt Default BEFORE Earthquake, Tsunami And Meltdown. America Next.

Meltdown.  That’s a good word for Japan these days.

And I’m not talking about the nuclear reactors, either.  I’m talking about what had been one of the most powerful economic engines on the planet.

Look at the facts in late 2010 BEFORE the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear reactor.  They didn’t look pretty then; they’ve become nightmarish since:

Japan Will Default as Economy Unravels, Bass Says
October 13, 2010, 4:19 PM EDT
By Nikolaj Gammeltoft and Susanne Walker
 
Oct. 13 (Bloomberg) — Japan will be forced to default on its debt, Greece’s economy is “done” and Iceland is worse off than Greece, said J. Kyle Bass, the head of Dallas-based Hayman Advisors LP who made $500 million in 2007 on the U.S. subprime collapse.

Nations around the world will be unable to repay their debt and financial austerity in a country such as Ireland is “too late,” Bass said today at the Value Investing Congress in New York.

Japan’s economy may unravel in the next two to three years, and its interest payments will exceed revenue, he said. “Japan can’t fund itself internally,” Bass said.

The country’s year-over-year gross domestic product was 2.4 percent as of June 30. It has the world’s largest public debt, approaching 200 percent of its GDP amid a 5.1 percent jobless rate. Consumer price fell by one percent in September and has been negative each month since May 2009, as deflation has taken hold.

Pricing on Japanese interest-rate swaps is the best he’s ever seen, Bass said. Investors could make 50 to 100 times their capital betting on them, he said, calling them a lottery ticket on Japan’s economy.

Japanese bonds have returned 3.3 percent this year, according to Merrill Lynch Indexes, compared with a return of 0.872 percent in 2009.

Crisis

Bank Of Japan’s Governor Masaaki Shirakawa refused to expand monthly purchases of government bonds this year even as deflation persisted. The bank on Oct. 5 instead created a 5 trillion yen ($60 billion) fund to buy bonds and other assets, and pledged to keep its benchmark interest rate at “virtually zero” until the end of deflation is in sight. Deflation has been entrenched in the economy since 1998. The GDP deflator, a gauge of prices across the economy, has fallen 14 percent since 1997, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

A financial crisis in 1997-98 precipitated by bad loans on Japanese lenders’ balance sheets stemming from burst land and stock-price bubbles of the early 1990s set off Japan’s deflation. Property prices have slumped for 17 of the past 19 years, and stocks remain 76 percent off of their 1989 peak, according to the Nikkei 225 Stock Average.

Japan’s currency traded at 81.79 per dollar, compared with 81.72. It touched 81.39 on Oct. 11, the strongest level since April 1995.

Bass began buying securities with shorter durations last year as he predicted central bank and government actions globally to rescue the financial system will result in “outright currency debasement.”

He began buying shorter-term debt and precious metals then, anticipating hyperinflation will lead to higher interest rates. Bass also said in May that Europe’s debt crisis will not be solved by the $1 trillion loan package the International Monetary Fund and the European Union agreed on earlier that month.

–Editors: Nick Baker, Dave Liedtka

And that was all BEFORE Japan went from the frying pan into the nuclear fire.

What’s being said now?

Quake shattered Japan poses global debt worry
GARETH COSTA, The West Australian
March 15, 2011, 6:11 am

Concerns have emerged in global credit markets over how heavily-indebted Japan will be able to pay for its biggest economic reconstruction effort since World War II.

The Bank of Japan’s promise yesterday of a ¥15 trillion ($182 billion) cash injection into its banking system managed to soothe global equities, but not debt markets as Japanese government credit default swap rates used to insure against debt default soared 13 points to 92.

Although not yet at critical levels, analysts said yesterday’s sharp spike in the CDS rates highlighted debt market concerns about Japan’s funding pressures within a cash-strapped global economy.

“When you have a market the size of Japan down this much, it’s going to affect everybody,” Stephen Halmarick, head of investment markets research at Colonial First State Global Asset Management, said.

“A tragedy of this proportion is going to take up a lot of economic resources.

“It’s going to have quite a negative impact on growth.”

Credit markets were already concerned that Japanese government debt had ballooned to $US12.2 trillion, or 200 per cent of GDP.

Insurance experts estimate the repair bill carried by foreign reinsurers will be capped at $US34 billion, with the rest borne by Japanese insurers, the Government and uninsured homeowners.

Japan has so far managed to function under its debt because it has predominantly been funded by domestic investors and because it runs a steady trade surplus.

However, analysts caution that short-term liquidity constraints could prompt strong yen repatriation flows out of foreign markets as occurred after the Kobe earthquake.

Early estimates suggest the cost of the Sendai earthquake will easily exceed the $US100 billion Kobe earthquake in 1995.

Japan’s increased funding pressures are also occurring in a global economy far more cash-constrained than in 1995, and unless export earnings begin flowing soon, escalating funding costs could push the country’s financing costs over the tipping point.

Japan has been one of the biggest buyers of US Treasury debt and in January pledged to also buy up to one-fifth of bonds from the European Financial Stability Fund that was created to bail out Greece and Ireland, all of which will become secondary to Japanese funding needs for the next few months.

The country is also one of the world’s biggest holders of gold bullion.

Any decision to cash in on bullion’s record price and offload much of its sovereign holding would likely depress the gold price.

Japan’s Nikkei equities index slumped 6.2 per cent, its worse daily performance in two years.

[…]

What impact will it have on the global markets if the 3rd largest economy in the world defaults?  What effect will it have on the ability of the world’s largest debtor – that’s YOU, America – to continue to get credit as WE begin to look more and more like a default-likely credit risk???

Japan was the second largest purchaser of American debt, and was so far ahead of #3 (Japan buys 3 1/4 times more of our debt than Britain), that it’s not even funny.  The U.S. needs a sucker, I mean an investor, to continue to artificially prop-up our insane lifestyle.  Who’s going to do that now?

What you’re going to see is either the Fed dramatically hasten the rate at which it devalues the dollar, which in turn will hasten the inevitable result of America becoming a banana republic, or a giant spike in interest rates as other U.S. debt buyers demand more reward for their risks.

A third alternative is that Japan could begin to sell off its US debt to raise money to rebuild.  While that seems like the obvious course, it turns out in this crazy world it isn’t; were Japan to sell it’s U.S. debt, the result would surely kill the U.S. dollar, but it would also dramatically strengthen the yen and hurt Japan’s export market just when they need it most.

My point is it’s a lose-lose.  And the U.S. loses right along with Japan.

Yet “no drama” Obama didn’t care.  He didn’t even bother to mention Japan or it’s earthquake or its tsunami or its nuclear meltdown in his address the day after the disaster.  And just to demonstrate that he truly truly, truly didn’t give a damn, he played 18 holes of golf.

See the photos of Obama’s golf outing from Sadhill.

Then there’s the unfortunate fact that this disaster has coincided with the far more important NCAA basketball tournament.  A president has to choose his priorities, and clearly the basketball won out.

Note #1: this is hardly new behavior from the man who promised “hope and change.”

Note #2: the mainstream media excoriated Bush for golfing a tiny fraction as often as Obama.  One example is the liberal Washington Post headline from August 5, 2002, “Before Golf, Bush Decries Latest Deaths in Mideast.”  I wonder what the Post’s headline would be about Obama if they had even a shred of fairness in their coverage?

We’re in trouble.  And our leader is a fool.  And we have a media that is hell-bent (literally) on ignoring or explaining away this fool’s actions and responses.

One of the things I came to believe as I realized that Obama would actually quite possibly get elected president was that our economy was dead meat.  I entirely got out of the U.S. stock market entirely and won’t return until Obama and the Democrats are out of power.  The reason is that I believed – and STILL believe – that when our economy collapses, it will happen very suddenly, like a house of cards falling down.  And it might not start in America; rather, an event in another country will set off a spiral that will envelope us and expose us for what we truly are.

And just where truly are we?

News from globeandmail.com
The scary real U.S. government debt
Wednesday, October 27, 2010

NEIL REYNOLDS

Ottawa — reynolds.globe@gmail.com

Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff says U.S. government debt is not $13.5-trillion (U.S.), which is 60 per cent of current gross domestic product, as global investors and American taxpayers think, but rather 14-fold higher: $200-trillion – 840 per cent of current GDP. “Let’s get real,” Prof. Kotlikoff says. “The U.S. is bankrupt.”

Writing in the September issue of Finance and Development, a journal of the International Monetary Fund, Prof. Kotlikoff says the IMF itself has quietly confirmed that the U.S. is in terrible fiscal trouble – far worse than the Washington-based lender of last resort has previously acknowledged. “The U.S. fiscal gap is huge,” the IMF asserted in a June report. “Closing the fiscal gap requires a permanent annual fiscal adjustment equal to about 14 per cent of U.S. GDP.”

This sum is equal to all current U.S. federal taxes combined. The consequences of the IMF’s fiscal fix, a doubling of federal taxes in perpetuity, would be appalling – and possibly worse than appalling.

Our actual debt is not the fourteen trillion dollars that would be scary enough; it is $200 TRILLION.

That isn’t some rightwing thinktank saying that; it’s the IMF.

Japan had a literal meltdown.  It is about to have a financial meltdown.

And America will not be far behind.

As you look at the current fiscal situation, with Democrats not just fighting to keep the status quo of reckless and morally and mentally insane spending that will necessarily bankrupt America – and with Democrats literally sitting back waiting to demonize Republicans as “mean-spirited” the moment they try to do what is absolutely necessary to get our skyrocketing spending under control – realize that the United States is necessarily going to explode and collapse just like those reactors in Japan.

Democrats murdered America.  It was Democrats who were responsible for nearly ALL of those $200 trillion in debt that will destroy us (it is a simple fact that the Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid that constitute virtually all of our actual debt were all Democrat programs).  And it is Democrats who will literally fight to America’s death to prevent the nation from doing what is necessary to fix our situation before it is too late.

Social Security is now paying out more than it takes in.  Workers under forty are rightly quite confident that the system will collapse before they get a chance to collect.  Republicans want to fix the system before it collapses in order to save it.  But Democrats lie about the Republicans efforts (which would kick in slowly and not affect current retirees at all).  And Democrats race us faster, ever faster toward the collapse and nightmare that surely awaits America.

We’re a dead nation walking.  We just don’t realize it yet.

That’s the hope and change you voted for, America.  I hope you enjoy your starving in the soon-coming banana republic your false-messiah president created for you.

ObamaCare Declared Unconstitutional – Not That Democrats Give A Damn About The Constitution

ObamaCare is unconstitutional.  But Democrats could frankly care less what that meaningless moldy old document says.

Twenty-six states demanded that ObamaCare be declared unconstitutional in this decision, not counting Virginia which previously got its own successful decision against ObamaCare.

Federal District Judge Roger Vinson’s incredibly well-reasoned Constitution-based decision is available here.

A good article on this story was written by David Whelan for Forbes:

Justice Roger Vinson of the U.S. District Court in Pensacola ruled today that the primary mechanism used by the health reform legislation to achieve universal insurance coverage–the individual mandate–is illegal. If his ruling stands it would void the 2,700 page, $938 billion health reform bill passed last year.

“Because the individual mandate is unconstitutional and not severable, the entire Act must be declared void. This has been a difficult decision to reach, and I am aware that it will have indeterminable implications,” Vinson writes.

With this ruling, and a similar one in December by Judge Henry Hudson in Virginia, it’s likely that the U.S. Supreme Court will be the final arbiter of whether ObamaCare stands. Two other lawsuits–one in Michigan and one in Virginia–were thrown out by other federal district judges last year who ruled the constitutional challenge lacked merit.

Most analysts were expecting a ruling in favor of the 26 states hoping to overturn the bill. Vinson, in an earlier ruling, suggested that the federal fine for not buying insurance is more of a penalty than a tax. If it’s a penalty, the legislation relies on a broad interpretation of federal regulatory powers. If it’s a tax, as the Department of Justice’s lawyers argued, it’s much more difficult to make a constitutional objection.

In today’s ruling Vinson considered two arguments made by Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum, the lead plaintiff on the lawsuit. The first was the legislation forces states to expand Medicaid in a way that’s unaffordable. Vinson quickly dispatches that legal theory, pointing out that Medicaid is and always has been a voluntary program.

The second argument revolves around the individual mandate. The health reform legislation makes it illegal for insurers to discriminate against patients regardless of their health. With that change there’s a risk that only sick people would buy insurance and healthy people would wait or be priced out of the market. To address that problem, the bill forces everyone who does not have insurance to buy it. The combination of “guaranteed issue” and the “individual mandate” is the beating heart of the health bill.

While the new rules banning medical underwriting are popular, the individual mandate has bred resentment. The bill’s authors never anticipated the mandate would become a ripe target for legal challenges.

The argument that’s had the most traction is based on the limitations of the Commerce Clause of the Constitution. The Commerce Clause explicitly allows the federal government regulate interstate commerce. But it also has been used to justify federal laws that affect other kinds of economic activity. The question raised by the lawsuit against the health reform bill is whether refusing to buy insurance constitutes interstate commerce. In his ruling Vinson says that in the past the Commerce Clause has been used to regulate activities like growing marijuana or navigating a waterway, but not used to force someone to do something they weren’t already doing. “It would be a radical departure from existing case law to hold that Congress can regulate inactivity under the Commerce Clause,” he writes.

Vinson rejects the administration’s argument that the health care market is unique since nobody can truly opt out–and that not buying insurance is in itself an economic activity since the cost of care then falls on others. Vinson mocks this argument, writing: “Everyone must participate in the food market… under this logic, Congress could [mandate] that every adult purchase and consume wheat bread daily.” If they didn’t buy wheat bread they might have a bad diet which would put a strain on the health care system, he writes.

Later he offers another analogy: “Congress could require that everyone above a certain income threshold buy a General Motors automobile — now partially government-owned — because those who do not buy GM cars (or those who buy foreign cars) are adversely impacting commerce and a taxpayer-subsidized business.” Vinson concludes: “The individual mandate exceeds Congress’ commerce power, as it is understood, defined, and applied in the existing Supreme Court case law.”

Judge Vinson marshalled quite a few opinions against ObamaCare.  Interestingly, one of them was Obama’s himself.

From the Washington Times:

In ruling against President Obama‘s health care law, federal Judge Roger Vinson used Mr. Obama‘s own position from the 2008 campaign against him, arguing that there are other ways to tackle health care short of requiring every American to purchase insurance.

“I note that in 2008, then-Senator Obama supported a health care reform proposal that did not include an individual mandate because he was at that time strongly opposed to the idea, stating that ‘if a mandate was the solution, we can try that to solve homelessness by mandating everybody to buy a house,’” Judge Vinson wrote in a footnote toward the end of the 78-page ruling Monday.

Democrats have established quite a recent history in thumbing their noses at the Constitution.

Charles Krauthammer had this to say on Fox News Special Report on January 5th about Democrats literally boycotting the reading of the Constitution on the House floor:

KRAUTHAMMER:  “It is truly astonishing. One member of Congress called it a long, dull document.  The New York Times editorial reading of the Constitution in the House is presumptuous.  Liberals got in trouble in the 60s and 70s for being on the wrong side of the flag and the anti-war demonstrations and now three decades later, they want to be on the wrong side of the Constitution.

The Constitution, after all – when these members were sworn in today, that they did not swear to defend the country or the army or the people; it was to defend the Constitution. That is the essence of America, and it is what makes us unique and why we are a country not of blood or race but ideas.  For liberals to think that there is actually an advantage in dismissing reading the Constitution and the requirement of having a constitutional reason to introduce a bill is real bad politics.”

It wasn’t just “bad politics.”  Krauthammer underscored that better than anyone.  It was contemptible citizenship.  It was the act of unAmerican people.

One Democrat actually called the reading of the U.S. Constitution “propaganda,” adding that a reading of the Constitution amounted to “total nonsense.”  He added that Republicans were reading it “like a sacred text.”  When, of course, so many Democrats treat it more like toilet paper.  Liberal Ezra Klein added historical ignorance to his moral ignorance by saying that the Constitution is confusing, having been written “a hundred years ago,” and that it is no longer binding.  Obviously, liberal Ezra Klein is an ignorant fool.

It is beyond official at this point.  We can separate the population of the United States of America into two groups: the American people and the unAmerican people.  And the Democrat Party has become the party of the unAmericans.

UnAmericans don’t give a damn about America.  They want to change it, pervert it, warp it, distort it.  They want to make it into something that it never was and never should have been.  And they call their effort “hope and change.”

Mind you, that’s “hope and change” in the direction set by Karl Marx; never the one set by George Washington.

A Muslim extremist named Tayyip Erdogan had this to say about democracy, comparing democracy to a bus: “You ride it to your destination, and then you step off.”  Democrats were elected democratically; and then they started imposing their 2,700 pages of fascism using every procedural gimmick in the book.  Nancy Pelosi actually said:

“But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.”

Let’s take another bus tour to how we got ObamaCare shoved down our throat:

Speaker of the House of Representatives, Rep. Nancy Pelosi:

(CNSNews.com) – When CNSNews.com asked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Thursday where the Constitution authorized Congress to order Americans to buy health insurance–a mandate included in both the House and Senate versions of the health care bill–Pelosi dismissed the question by saying: “Are you serious? Are you serious?”

Youtube audio of Nancy Pelosi dismissing constitutionality:

Yeah, people who actually care about the Constitution, and care about the fact that our lawmakers – who take an oath to uphold the Constitution – actually consider it.

Rep. Pete Stark, responding to a question on health care:

Questioner: “If this legislation is constitutional, what limitations are there on the federal government’s ability to tell us how to run our private lives?”

Rep. Stark: “I think that there are very few constitutional limits that would prevent the federal government from rules that could affect your private life.  now the basis for that would be how does that affect other people.”

Questioner: “The constitution specially enumerates certain powers to the federal government, and leaves all other authority to the states.  The constitution is very limited as to what it can do…. if they can do this, what can’t they do?”

Rep. Stark: “The federal government, yes, can do almost anything in this country.”

Watch the Youtube video of this question and answer:

Liberal Supreme Court justices imposed abortion on the grounds of a fundamental right to privacy – which is actually nowhere to be found in the Constitution – based on nothing more than “penumbras and emanations” discerned from gazing into the Constitution like a crystal ball rather than like a historical document.  Now they are saying there IS no right to privacy of any kind, whatsoever in order to impose government health care and all the violations of rights and liberties that go hand-in-hand with that imposition.  Because it never was about the Constitution or even about any right to privacy; it was always about using whatever rhetorical argument they wanted to get the result they wanted.  So they said we had a right to privacy until the right to privacy got in their way.

If the federal government can do almost anything in this country, how then do you stop the next dictatorship?  How do you stop tyranny?  How do you stop totalitarian big government?

And let’s consider a corresponding Democrat’s statement on the same subject of government health care:

Democrat Rep. John Dingell:

“The harsh fact of the matter is when you’re passing legislation that will cover 300 million American people in different ways, it takes a long time to do the necessary administrative steps that have to be taken to put the legislation together to control the people.”

And, of course, Dingell is right: it takes time and effort to abandon the Constitution – which places limits on federal power – and then impose controls on the people that utterly abandon any scintilla of any meaningful form of constitutional government.

Democrat Robin Carnahan, Missouri Secretary of State and candidate for the United States Senate:

Carnahan: “We’re going to also have a libertarian and a Constitution Party candidate running.  And I will tell you no one’s going to know who they are, but it’s not going to matter, because Glenn Beck says you’re supposed to be for the Constitution, and there is some percentage of people who will go vote for them.  And in our internal polling about six or seven percent goes like that to the Libertarian and Constitution Party.  So I’m quite sure that whoever wins is going to do it with less than fifty percent of the vote.” […]

Donor: “You just don’t sound like those Constitution Party votes are going to come out of your account.”

Carnahan: “What do you think?” (Audience laughter)

Donor: “I think you’re right.” (Audience laughter)

Here’s the Youtube audio of that exchange:

Stop and think about that: it is a matter of mocking derision that no one who actually cares about the integrity of the Constitution is going to vote for the Democrats.  And in fact Robin Carnahan – who is serving as a Democrat in the office of Secretary of State – cynically intends to exploit the fact that she can divide those who care about the Constitution and win by attrition.

And they mock the fact that no one who votes Democrat gives a leaping damn about the Constitution.

Take Democrat Rep. Jan Schakowsky on “The Stephanie Miller Show” on 9/30/2010:

“Actually, I think really what it was was an effort to get the Tea Partiers to think that they really have some sort of revolutionary plan, because at the beginning they quote a lot from the Constitution, the idea that free people can govern themselves, that the government powers are derived from the consent of the governed.

All that stuff that I think that, that that’s an effort to try to appeal to those people, the Tea Party.

They embrace the Tenth Amendment – ‘tenthers,’ you know?”

The audio of the interview is available here.

That Tenth Amendment is a real load of crap, right?

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Let’s just go ahead and abolish it so we can have the kind of totalitarian big government that Democrats yearn for.  Because Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Fidel Castro, Kim Jong Il, and all these other leftist dictators were just such groovy people, and we need their ilk here in red, white and blue America.

Yeah, that’s right.  Ridicule me, Rep. Schakowsky.  Call me a “tenther” like I’m a “birther” or a “truther” or some sort of nutjob because – unlike Democrats – I actually honor our Constitution and our Bill of Rights.

Jan Schakowsky calls Tea Party people “extreme” because they actually take their Constitution seriously.  But this is a woman who was perfectly willing to abandon principles to turn ObamaCare into a Trojan horse for a socialist single payer system (and see also here).  This is a woman who said:

“A public option will put the private insurance industry out of business and lead to single-payer” – Rep. Jan Schakowsky (to wild applause).

Marxism and communism is not extreme.  Nope.  It’s not extreme to use ObamaCare as a vehicle to put the private sector out of business so you can sneak in a government-planned economy.  What’s “extreme” is believing in the Constitution that Democrats such as Jan Schakowsky once deceitfully swore an oath to uphold.

Democrats spent over a year imposing 2,700 pages of unconstitutional “laws” upon a people who never wanted it.  And now, amazingly, they’re demanding that Republicans merely recognize that it’s done and over with, and move on.

Fortunately, Republicans DO care about the Constitution.  And they’re going to fight Democrats for the soul of this country.

If Democrats give a damn about the American people, they will join Republicans in demanding that this verdict go immediately to the U.S. Supreme Court for a final judgment.  Rule 11 of the Supreme Court allows particularly important cases that are of imperative public importance to gain such an emergency hearing.  But only if both sides agree.  If Democrats don’t demand this, they will continue to do even more harm in keeping the American people in the dark about how to plan.  Businesses will continue to hold off on hiring, and the economy will continue to suffer until this decision is finalized.

ObamaCare Is Killing Private Practice Physicians

First ObamaCare had death panels.  Then massive public outrage forced Democrats to abandon the death panels.  Then Obama brought back his death panels by sneaking them in via backdoor regulation in secrecy.  Then the public exploded in anger again.  And now the death panels are gone again.  At least until the next time these dishonest rodents go behind our backs to impose vile policies the people have already loudly rejected.

Then there’s the case of all the waivers.  As of now, 222 businesses have been given waivers from ObamaCare provisions because otherwise they would have to dump their employee health coverage altogether.  Including quite a few unions that pushed for ObamaCare, by the way.

Doctors are still getting shoved into nasty little death panels, however.  Because ObamaCare is murdering them:

12.21.10 | Sandy C. Pipes | MedCitizen
Private practice doctors: Another Obamacare casualty?

While making the case for his health reform package, President Obama argued that his proposal would make life easier for small-business owners.

Unfortunately, Obamacare threatens to undermine a group of small-business owners that is perhaps more important than any other to his reform effort — doctors in private practice.

The number of privately owned medical practices has declined sharply in the past five years. In 2005, at least two-thirds of practices were in private hands. That figure has dropped to less than half today — and is expected to sink below 40 percent by next year.

Many doctors, specifically those who have just completed a resident specialty, are now choosing not to enter private practice in the first place. Instead, they’re heading to salaried positions at large hospitals. Last year, 49 percent of first-year specialists chose hospital employment.

Obamacare will only exacerbate these trends. Some of the law’s dictates will make it more expensive to operate small practices — even though the rules are supposed to reduce medical costs.

Take the new law’s health IT initiative, which pushes doctors to set up extensive electronic health records in hopes of better coordinating care among providers. More information, the law’s boosters argue, means less waste and lower costs.

But many private practices can’t afford to drop five or six figures on expensive health IT systems that may not even save them money.

Boosters of health IT acknowledge that large organizations are more likely to enjoy its benefits. But shoving patients into ever-larger medical groups may not actually bring down costs.

The reason, as representatives of the American Medical Association recently warned, is that big hospital networks have greater market power. They can use that power to keep prices high, and there’s little that insurers — and even less that consumers — can do about it.

Paying more for treatment doesn’t necessarily guarantee better access or quality. Without an ownership stake in their practices, salaried doctors have an incentive to work the hours for which they’re paid — and no more. Fewer hours for doctors means fewer appointments for patients.

History demonstrates that these incentives matter. In the 1990s, several large hospitals bought up practices and put doctors on flat salaries. As Dr. Bill Jessee, CEO of the Medical Group Management Association, observed, doctors suddenly “weren’t working as hard as they were before their practice was acquired.”

Proponents of Obamacare have conveniently ignored these lessons. President Obama’s top health care aide Nancy-Ann DeParle, for instance, wrote in the August issue of the Journal of Internal Medicine that the new law is “likely to lead to the vertical organization of providers and accelerate physician employment by hospitals.” These organizations are called Accountable Care Organizations, or ACOs.

Such vertical integration may prove costly. Already, hospitals lose money on a substantial chunk of the people they see. In New York, for example, hospitals take a loss on more than 70 percent of patients.

That’s mostly because of the stingy reimbursement rates paid by government health programs like Medicare and Medicaid. In 2008, the average Medicare reimbursement in New York represented a 4.7 percent underpayment. Medicaid’s reimbursements were even worse — as little as 64 percent of a hospital’s actual treatment cost. Those with private insurance are forced to pay more for care to make up the difference.

Hospitals’ Medicaid losses are compounded by the fact that the program’s beneficiaries use far more medical services than other patients. On average, the privately insured visit the doctor three and a half times a year. Medicaid patients make an average of seven visits.

Yet Obamacare will add 18 million new individuals to the program’s rolls by the end of the decade — and thus stretch our healthcare infrastructure even thinner.

Primary care physicians are already in short supply. The Center for Workforce Studies predicts that by 2020 there will be a shortage of 45,000 family doctors and 46,000 surgeons. Unfortunately, Obamacare provides no funding to significantly increase their numbers.

Emergency rooms will have to pick up the slack. The new law could result in as many as 41 million additional trips to the emergency room each year.

The health reform law was sold as a way to fill in the cracks in America’s fractured healthcare system. Instead, it has only made them wider.

This is just another example of how Marxist Democrats imposed their utter contempt for the free market system.  Doctors who don’t have their own practices have far less incentive to work hard when they receive the same salary whether they work hard or not.  And at the same time, the Medicaid patients go to the hospital twice as often as people who have insurance because it doesn’t COST them anything to do so.  Contempt like that is only possible for freeloaders who don’t have a stake in anything and don’t have to worry about their premiums going up like the people who pay into the system to keep the whole thing running.

This is why I keep saying that Democrats are either genuinely evil or totally stupid.  And either way they are moral idiots.

This is hardly the only article, and hardly the only issues that explain why ObamaCare is so vile.  I’ve got plenty of articles which detail plenty of reasons why ObamaCare is murder for the doctors whom our entire medical system depends upon:

Medical Pros Needed To Staff ObamaCare Getting Canned Because Of ObamaCare

Medical Doctor Points Out That Doctors Will Be Fined Or Jailed If They Put Patients First Under ObamaCare

ObamaCare Driving Essential Primary Care Physicans Out Of Medicine

Doctor Cassell: ‘If You Voted For Obama, Seek Urologic Care Elsewhere’

ObamaCare Factoid: Access To Health Care Doesn’t Mean Squat When Hospitals, Doctors And Pharmacists Bail

38 States Now Working To Preempt ObamaCare Disaster

Mayo Clinic Realizes ObamaCare A Total Disaster, Stops Accepting Medicare

Harvard Medical School Dean Flunks Democrat Health Bill

Why Won’t Obama Invite The Doctors Who Will Resign If His Health Agenda Passes?

Wall St. Journal Bursts The Obama Bubble: ObamaCare Is All About Rationing

And yes, that IS just for starters.

ObamaCare pledges to push something like 30 million more people into the health care system even as it forces the doctors who ARE the health care system to leave medicine.

How does that NOT sound like a total disaster in the making?

Latest ObamaCare ‘Oopsie’: HealthCare Destruction Act Already Killing People

“It’s too expensive…so we’re going to let you die.” – Robert Reich, lifelong Democrat “expert”

“A program that saves young people produces more welfare than one that saves old people” – Obama Regulatory Czar Cass Sunstein

“At least we can let doctors know — and your mom know — that you know what, maybe this isn’t going to help. Maybe you’re better off, uhh, not having the surgery, but, uhh, taking the painkiller.” – The Hussein himself, informing a woman that it’s basically time to let her mother die.

“ObamaCare Factoid: Access To Health Care Doesn’t Mean Squat When Hospitals, Doctors And Pharmacists Bail” – Title of article by Michael Eden now factually demonstrated to have been completely right.

Before I provide the article of the day, allow me to show you some things that I posted/wrote nearly a year ago:

This is nothing compared to what might happen under Democratic health overhaul plans, which would slash Medicare spending by nearly $500 billion over 10 years. As Medicare actuaries recently pointed out in understated fashion, such cuts “may be unrealistic.” But, if Congress actually carried them out, about one in five hospitals, nursing homes and home care agencies could lose money, they warned in their report. As a result, such providers could drop Medicare, leaving seniors with less access.

[…]

Don’t think for a second that this isn’t directly related to the disaster known as ObamaCare.  Democrats are gutting Medicare reimbursements and blocking the essential “doctor fix” from their bill to create the contrived and bogus illusion that their boondoggle will provide “deficit neutrality.”  They are playing all kinds of games and gimmicks, such as taxing for ten years and only providing benefits for five, to support that illusion. It will fail, and a lot of people will die.

[…]

And so, what do you think will happen when Democrats cut the reimbursement rates?  People who have commons sense know: hospitals and doctors will begin to see fewer and fewer Medicare patients, as a matter of simple economic necessity.   That isn’t a “reform,” but a disaster.

And this stuff is why the dean of the Harvard Medical School gave ObamaCare a failing grade.  It’s why the California Medical Association recently came out strongly against the bill.  It’s why more and more state governors – Democrats as well as Republicans – are beginning to scream that ObamaCare merely turns Medicaid into a giant deficit-creating unfunded mandate on the states (again, to create the illusion of being “deficit neutral”).

And, now, without further delay, the article of the day’s latest demonstration that the Democrat Party is the political arm of the devil and Barack Obama is leading America into ruin not seen since the last time socialism devastated Europe when our grandparents were young kids…

It is somehow ironically fitting that this destruction of our health care system would be described in Obama’s hometown.

Medicaid cuts: teeth pulled, transplant called off
By The Associated Press
Posted Dec 15, 2010

CHICAGO —

In Illinois, a pharmacist closes his business because of late Medicaid payments. In Arizona, a young father’s liver transplant is canceled because Medicaid suddenly won’t pay for it. In California, dentists pull teeth that could be saved because Medicaid doesn’t pay for root canals.

Across the country, state lawmakers have taken harsh actions to try to rein in the budget-busting costs of the health care program that serves 58 million poor and disabled Americans. Some states have cut payments to doctors, paid bills late and trimmed benefits such as insulin pumps, obesity surgery and hospice care.

Lawmakers are bracing for more work when they reconvene in January. Some states face multibillion-dollar deficits. Federal stimulus money for Medicaid is soon to evaporate. And Medicaid enrollment has never been higher because of job losses.

In the view of some lawmakers, Medicaid has become a monster, and it’s eating the budget. In Illinois, Medicaid sucks up more money than elementary, secondary and higher education combined.

“Medicaid is such a large, complicated part of our budget problem, that to get our hands around it is very difficult. It’s that big. It’s that bad,” said Illinois Sen. Dale Righter, a Republican and co-chairman of a bipartisan panel to reform Medicaid in Illinois, where nearly 30 percent of total spending goes to the program.

Medicaid costs are shared by the federal and state governments. It’s not just the poor and disabled who benefit. Wealthier people do, too, such as when middle-class families with elderly parents in nursing homes are relieved of financial pressure after Medicaid starts picking up the bills.

Contrary to stereotype, it’s the elderly and disabled who cost nearly 70 cents of every Medicaid dollar, not the single mother and her children.

In California, Medicaid no longer pays for many adult dental services. But it still pays for extractions, that is, tooth-pulling. The unintended consequence: Medicaid patients tell dentists to pull teeth that could be saved.

“The roots are fine. The tooth could be saved with a root canal,” said Dr. Nagaraj Murthy, who practices in Compton, Calif. “I had a patient yesterday. I said we could do a root canal. He said, ‘No, it’s hurting. Go ahead and pull it. I don’t have the money.”’

Murthy recently pulled an elderly woman’s last tooth, but Medicaid no longer pays for dentures.

“Elderly patients suffer the most,” Murthy said. “They’re walking around with no teeth.”

States can decide which optional services Medicaid covers, and dental care is among cutbacks in some places. Last year’s economic stimulus package increased the federal share of Medicaid money temporarily. But that money runs out at the end of June, when the federal government will go back to paying half the costs rather than 60 to 70 percent. So more cuts could be ahead.

During the Great Recession, millions of people relied on the Medicaid safety net. Between 2007 and 2009, the number of uninsured Americans grew by more than 5 million as workers lost jobs with employer-based insurance. Another 7 million signed up for Medicaid.

Just when caseloads hit their highest point, the nation’s new health care law required states not to change the rules on who’s eligible for Medicaid. That means states can’t roll up the welcome mat by tightening Medicaid’s income requirements.

So states have resorted to a variety of painful options.

In Arizona, lawmakers stopped paying for some kinds of transplants, including livers for people with hepatitis C. When the cuts took effect Oct. 1, Medicaid patient Francisco Felix, who needs a liver, suddenly had to raise $500,000 to get a transplant.

The 32-year-old’s case took a dramatic turn in November when a friend’s wife died, and her liver became available. Felix was prepped for surgery in hopes financial donations would come in. When the money didn’t materialize, the liver went to someone else, and Felix went home. His doctor told him he has a year before he’ll be too sick for a transplant.

“They are taking away his opportunity to live,” said his wife, Flor Felix. “It’s impossible for us or any family to get that much money.” The family is collecting donations through a website and plans a yard sale this weekend, she said.

The choices are difficult for states that have already cut payments to doctors and hospitals to the bone.

“If we don’t see an economic recovery where state revenues rebound, they’re really going to be very strained on how they can make ends meet,” said Diane Rowland, executive director of the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured.

States may consider lowering payment rates to nursing homes or home health agencies or further reducing payments to doctors, Rowland said.

“The problem here is the program is pretty lean, and payment rates are pretty low,” she said. Patients can’t find care because fewer doctors accept the low payments.

Prescription drug coverage in states is an optional benefit, another possible place to cut, Rowland said. “But if you cut back on people’s psychotropic drugs, is that penny-wise and pound-foolish? Do they end up in institutions where Medicaid pays more for their care?”

In Illinois, late payments became the rule.

Tom Miller closed his pharmacy in rural southern Illinois this summer and is going through bankruptcy, largely because the state was chronically late making Medicaid payments to him. Most of his former customers are in the program.

With the state sometimes months behind in payments, he couldn’t pay his suppliers. Five workers lost their jobs when his business closed.

“You can only fight it for so long,” said Miller, 54. He now works as a pharmacist in a hospital. He misses his old clients, the families he grew to know.

“I was in my third generation. I’ve had moms who had kids. I saw the kids raised, and they had their own children,” he said. As a neighborhood pharmacist, “you’re their friend. You’re family.”

The death panels are right around the corner.  To the extent that they’re not already here right now, as with the case of Francisco Felix, who is being denied life by being denied a liver by Medicaid.

Francisco Felix never stood in front of a death panel; but bureaucrats don’t need you wasting their time with bothersome questions when they decide to let you die a slow and agonizing death due to medical neglect (or maybe you’re fortunate enough to get that pain pill from Obama?).

We told you so.  We told you so.  We told you so.  WE TOLD YOU SO.

As one speaking from the lofty vantage point of one having a one-thousand percent batting average, let me forewarn you Democrats yet again: Someday, when you’re burning in hell for all eternity for your direct participation in the murder of 52 million innocent human beings in America alone through abortion, realize that God is going to turn up the fires a few billion extra degrees for the coming horror that is going to come to this country as a result of your ObamaCare disaster.

Leading Democrat Expert On Health Care Turns Against Boondoggle ObamaCare

Apparently Ron Wyden joins such illustrious Democrat company as John Conyers (“What good is reading the bill…?”), Nancy Pelosi (“We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it”), and Ben Nelson (“I don’t think you want me to waste my time to read every page of the health care bill”), in not bothering to read the evil ObamaCare bill that he personally voted for and vigorously supported.

I’m wondering if the only Democrat who actually bothered to read the health care takeover bill he voted for is John Dingell, who accurately said of the bill, “It takes a long time to do the necessary administrative steps that have to be taken to put the legislation together to control the people.”

Here’s the story of Democrat Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) actively turning against the ObamaCare boondoggle:

SEPTEMBER 3, 2010
Wyden Defects on ObamaCare
The Oregon Democrat breaks ranks with the White House.

Most Democrats have come to understand that they can’t run on ObamaCare, but few have the temerity of Ron Wyden. The Oregon Senator is the first to break with the policy underpinnings of the bill he voted for.

Last week Mr. Wyden sent a letter to Oregon health authority director Bruce Goldberg, encouraging the state to seek a waiver from certain ObamaCare rules so it can “come up with innovative solutions that the Federal government has never had the flexibility or will to implement.”

One little-known provision of the bill allows states to opt out of the “requirement that individuals purchase health insurance,” Mr. Wyden wrote, and “Because you and I believe that the heart of real health reform is affordability and not mandates, I wanted to bring this feature of Section 1332 to the attention of you and the legislature.”

Now, that’s news. One of the Democratic Party’s leading experts on health care wants his state to dump the individual mandate that is among ObamaCare’s core features. The U-turn is especially notable because Mr. Wyden once championed an individual mandate in the bill he sponsored with Utah Republican Bob Bennett. We have differences with Wyden-Bennett, but it was far better than ObamaCare and would have changed incentives by offering more choices to individuals and spurring competition among providers and insurers.

Mr. Wyden should have known better than to vote for ObamaCare given his market instincts and health-care experience. Even so, the price for his support included the Section 1332 waivers that he is now promoting. In addition to the individual mandate, states may evade regulations about business taxes, the exact federal standards for minimum benefits, and how subsidies are allocated in the insurance “exchanges”—as long as the state covers the same number of uninsured and keeps coverage as comprehensive.

Medicaid also grants some indulgences toward state flexibility, even if those waivers are difficult to acquire. The Secretary of Health and Human Services would need to approve the ObamaCare alternative of Oregon or any other states, and the waivers don’t start until 2017, three years after ObamaCare is supposed to be up and running. It is also hard to see how anyone in the current Administration would grant them.

These practical realities aside, Mr. Wyden’s move may be more important as a political signal. Mr. Wyden is running for re-election this year. And while he is now well ahead of GOP challenger Jim Huffman, in a year like this one he has cause to avoid becoming Barbara Boxer or Patty Murray, who may lose because they’ve remained liberals from MSNBC central casting.

This sort of thing also isn’t supposed to happen to newly passed entitlements. Democrats have long believed that once an entitlement passes, however unpopular at the time, voters and business will grow to like it and then Republicans begin to come around. The exception was a catastrophic-coverage program to replace private “Medigap” policies, which Democrats passed in 1988 and repealed a year later amid a public furor.

On ObamaCare, Democrats are having the first political second thoughts, at least in this election season. Mr. Wyden is essentially saying that what his party passed is not acceptable, and if such thinking builds, opponents may have a real chance to replace ObamaCare with something better.

Democrats are now actively running from the Democrat Party and the Democrat Platform.  Democrats are running campaign ads that literally omit the fact that they are Democrats.  They are running as opponents of Obama and his agenda.  They are running in droves as opponents of Nancy Pelosi (even when such Democrats actually VOTED for her as House Speaker).

These same cowardly and corrupt Democrats who were in lock step passing Obama’s Marxist agenda are now claiming that they will offer an “independent voice.” But no, they won’t.

Never forget, “Democrat” actually stands for “Demonic bureaucrat.”  And whenever Obama or Democrat leadership needs a vote from a Democrat, they’ll get it.  Votes are largely assigned in the party machine.  Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid will allow vulnerable members to vote ‘no’ on their pork barrel bills if they have enough votes to pass them.  But virtually all of those representatives and senators who voted ‘no’ on bills like the $862 billion stimulus and ObamaCare would have voted ‘yes’ if it had been necessary for them to do so.

And just as many Democrats said they’d vote against ObamaCare until they voted for it (think Bart Stupak and his gang of supposedly pro-life Democrats) – often getting incredibly sweetheart deals for their treachery (think “Louisiana Purchase,” think “Cornhusker Kickback,” among others), the fact of the matter is that you can’t trust Democrats to follow through with whatever the hell they promise they will or won’t do.  If you like relentless liberal socialism, then vote for Democrats.  But don’t be stupid and vote for your Senator or Representative because they say they’ll oppose Obama.  Because the next time they’re needed, they’ll be right back on board, voting as they’re told to vote.

I mean, quit being Charlie Brown thinking Lucy will finally hold the football so you can kick it.  She won’t.  And Democrats won’t oppose the liberal agenda; they’ll support it, they’ll be its footsoldiers, just like they were the last two years.

ObamaCare is more than just bad.  It is evil and it will lead to rationing and Sarah Palin’s death panels in spades.  There are 160 new federal bureaucracies created under ObamaCare, in the nearly 2,400 incomprehensible pages of the bill, and every single one of them both individually and through bureaucratic pinballing will ultimately amount to a death panel.

The stimulus was equally awful for our economy.  And Americans overwhelmingly recognize that, just as they overwhelmingly recognize that ObamaCare was awful.

If you want less of this, please don’t vote for the party that imposed it.  Vote for the party that united against it: the Republican Party.

Democrats have repeatedly demagogued Republicans as “the party of no” even when THEY had been the party of no when Republicans were in charge.  But being the party of no is a GOOD THING when the party in power seeks to pass one awful, America-destroying bill after another.