GayPatriot

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Obamacare architect settles fraud charges

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From The Daily Caller.

Vermont’s Attorney General has settled the state’s claims of fraud against Jonathan Gruber…one of the chief architects of Obamacare.

Under the terms of the settlement, Gruber will no longer work as a taxpayer-funded economic consultant for the state’s health care system and he won’t seek to be paid any money he might be owed…

For its part under the agreement, the Vermont’s attorney general will not pursue legal action under the Vermont Civil False Claims Act…

State Auditor Doug Hoffer, also a Democrat, originally referred allegations of Gruber’s overbilling to the attorney general.

Donovan, the attorney general and still another Democrat, said his office determined that Gruber did, in fact, violate the Vermont Civil False Claims Act…investigators concluded that Gruber sent two invoices — and possibly more — falsely charging the state and its taxpayers…

[Of Obamacare,] “Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass,” he said during one health care conference.

At another event, Gruber admitted that the Obama administration pushed through the so-called Cadillac tax — a tax on certain premium health care plans — “by mislabeling it, calling it a tax on insurance plans rather than a tax on people, when we know it’s a tax on people who hold these insurance plans.”

Premiums under Obamacare went up 24 percent in 2016. The average number of insurers in each marketplace fell from 5.9 to 3.9.

Nice job, Eric Owens of TDC! I can’t add a thing, except my surprise that the deceptive architect of Obamacare would accommodate my stereotypes so perfectly, as to also be apparently a deceiver/fraud in his personal actions.

Trump gets ready to be on offense?

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News-wise, it’s been a busy few days. Following Scaramucci’s appointment a couple weeks ago to replace Sean Spicer (as WH Acting Communications Director), now DHS Secretary Kelly is appointed to replace Reince Priebus (as WH Chief of Staff). We also heard that AG Sessions is finally going to crack down on leakers.

Spicer and Priebus both came to President Trump via the Republican National Committee. In other words, though perhaps good human beings, they were traditional Swamp creatures. Rumors have swirled for months that Priebus had Spicer working more on behalf of Priebus’ reputation than Trump’s, and that Priebus was one of “the leakers” who have caused trouble for Trump. Even if that isn’t true, I still can’t say that the Priebus-Spicer team has done a wonderful job of advancing an America First agenda.

Politically, Trump is a “fighting” President and the combination of Scaramucci and Kelly says that he wants to stop playing defense and go on offense. Scaramucci seems more genuinely combative than Spicer and more adept at new media (getting Trump to do his first Periscope live stream, for example). General Kelly seems like an effective manager who really believes in Trump’s agenda in terms of America First, controlling the border, cracking down on gangs (MS13), and so forth.

The rumor mill says that NSA McMaster could be on his way out. He is said to be yet another leaker, who carries forward Obama policies and appointees rather more than he should. He apparently championed a Syria war, and Trump has apparently decided against a Syria war. We shall see.

Our favorite Senator, Lindsey McCain, still hates Trump passionately. Here is video of Lindsey Graham saying that Trump is an enemy of the Rule of Law who “turns democracy upside down”. And video of John McCain pumping fists with Chuck Schumer (D) when the Senate failed to repeal Obamacare on Friday.

Why does John McCain love Obamacare?

UPDATE – Not so much on offense? Scaramucci has just resigned. This is probably not great, if Trump wants a forward communication strategy. And it’s probably something that Kelly wanted.

So, we would have a scenario where Scaramucci is brought in, takes out Priebus (by means of a conflict that I didn’t go into, above), makes room for Kelly to come in, and then Kelly says “I’m the boss – you’re done”?

UPDATE: A report says yes, the above is what Jared and Ivanka wanted. Scaramucci was just their blunt instrument for removing Priebus; Bannon, Kelly and others were never going to stand for having Scaramucci around.

Also, if you believe Jack Posobiec’s sources on Capitol Hill, McCain defeated the latest Obamacare repeal just to screw Trump and Rand Paul. Totally unprincipled.

Wednesday feel-good movies

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They’re short, I promise. 😉 Here’s President Trump saying recently, “In America, we don’t worship government; we worship God”. (If you’re an atheist or agnostic, focus on the first part: “We don’t worship government”.)

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Today’s world is a titanic struggle between those who worship government and those who don’t. I’ll never forget the 2012 Democrat convention, where delegates cheered and defended the neo-fascist slogan, “Government is the only thing we all belong to.” What’s above is the opposite.

A couple more. [Read more…]

Reminder: Government health care is sub-DMV health care

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Talk to a leftie and you will often hear how wonderful Canadian health care is. “Why can’t we be like them?” Crowder did an expose of Canadian health care in 2009 that is still relevant:

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Here’s the summary. Canadians pay huge taxes for “free”, “universal” health care. It makes people wait, and wait, and wait. Many people either give up altogether (and their condition gets worse), or go to a private clinic.

That’s how they reduce patients to a manageable number. Economics 101 teaches us that all goods must be rationed by one means or another, and “waiting” for people to quit the queue is how they ration Canada’s public health care.

From Crowder’s anecdotes it seems that Canadians, if they don’t quit, will wait usually about four times as long as Americans. For example, last year I went to an emergency room on a Sunday afternoon. It took 20 minutes to get the triage nurse’s attention, then another hour to see a doctor. In Crowder’s video, they visit a Canadian emergency room on a Sunday. It takes them about an hour and a half to see the triage nurse, and then 5+ hours to see a doctor (except they quit at the 4-hour mark).

Likewise, an acquaintance of mine recently needed a cancer surgery. He got it in weeks; in Canada it would have taken months. This is what Bernie and Hillary want to bring us to.

Obama Watch

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Courtesy of ZH, a picture is worth a thousand words:

Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping stand together – away from President Obama.

Other news: Jonathan Gruber, Obamacare’s architect, brags about voter “stupidity” (his word) and how excellently he exploited it:

The conservative group American Commitment posted Jonathan Gruber’s remarks, reportedly from an Oct. 17, 2013, event, on YouTube.

“Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage,” says the MIT economist who helped write Obamacare. “And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass.”

Ed Morrissey’s piece gives you the video, and Ed adds:

Gruber goes a little farther than that. He tells the crowd that the bill was written to fake out the CBO — which is the Congress’ own analytical group. “This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes,” Gruber tells the audience with a smile. “If CBO scores the mandate as taxes, the bill dies.”…

Democrats insisted that CBO’s initial scoring showed that the bill was deficit-neutral in its first ten years, thanks to…dodges like trawling revenue before making outlays a few years later. How much else did Democrats lie to get that initially positive scoring? How much else are Democrats still hiding about the ACA and the HHS implementation of it?

And now HHS tells us that they’re projecting Obamacare’s 2015 enrollment to be kind of a failure.

Last, but not least: Yes, the media helped Obama cover up his flailing on Benghazi.

The day after the Benghazi attack, Obama gave an interview to Steve Kroft of 60 Minutes (CBS) where he pointedly refused to call the attack terrorism. But later, in a debate with Mitt Romney, Obama claimed that he had always been prompt in calling it terrorism. Obama spoke falsely. And CBS helped him, by hiding the relevant interview clip – until after the election.

UPDATE: A report that when Democrat senators need to know White House plans or positions, they ask MSNBC. (Which shows Obama’s isolation, as well as MSNBC’s deep subservience to the White House.) Via Citizens News.

It’s hard to blog about Obamacare

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It’s hard because there are so many items to choose from, weekly. And they’re mostly both technical and depressing (not fun to read). Obamacare is a mess of unbelievable proportions. Even now, I have 40+ related items open in browser tabs, that I had meant to get to sometime.

But here goes; I’ll try to hit a few highlights. First, President Obama’s top three Obamacare promises in 74 seconds, all lies:



The House GOP want to bless Obama’s delay of his “individual mandate” (that immorally forces people to buy insurance). Yet Obama means to resist them.

Last month, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) found that Obamacare will weaken the economy. Along with other Obama policies, it effectively raises marginal tax rates, giving people less incentive to work. “…the CBO…reported that by 2024 the equivalent of 2.5 million Americans who were otherwise willing and able to work before ObamaCare will work less or not at all as a result of ObamaCare.” Labor unions agree that Obamacare will slam wages and work hours.

Even Dana Milbank (liberal at the Washington Post) agrees that young people are rejecting both Obamacare, and Obama. “The administration announced last week that only 1.08 million people ages 18 to 34 had signed up for Obamacare by the end of February…If the proportion doesn’t improve significantly, the result likely will be fatal for the Affordable Care Act.”

Robert Tracinski asks, What was the point of Obamacare? Because it’s not insuring the uninsured; many of them are finding Obamacare unaffordable (!) and not signing up. The Washington Post agrees.

Along those lines, Catherine Austin Fitts observes, “I don’t see Obamacare as something designed to offer healthcare…It was designed to create a framework that would allow three things. One…to use digital technology to radically reduce labor costs…Second…you wanted, as the baby boomers were aging, to…dramatically reduce the healthcare services available to them…Third…to use healthcare to really control the population…an effort to centralize power.” – Austin Fitts sees government bureaucrats as profoundly competent, once you know their real plan. What they achieve in practice (which may be bad) was very likely their real plan, as opposed to what they told the public.

Bonus article: The Greeks are finding that socialized medicine doesn’t work, once you get older and need more of it.

UPDATE: Obamacare raises family insurance costs MORE than the previous eight years, combined. Just like Obama adding more to the national debt than the previous 8 Presidents combined, I guess.

The disaster that is Obamacare (ongoing)

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My earlier post may have to become a series. As before, you may know the following already from news or other blogs, but it deserves to be acknowledged here at Gay Patriot.

UPDATES (late morning):

Obama hammered in polls

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This is everywhere; may as well be here. Per a CNN poll,

Only four out of 10 Americans believe President Barack Obama can manage the federal government effectively…

…53% of Americans now believe that Obama is not honest and trustworthy…

Fifty-six percent say he is not a person they admire, and an equal number say he does not agree with them on important issues. Fifty-six percent also say he does not inspire confidence, and 53% don’t view him as a strong and decisive leader. All of those figures are all-time records for Obama in CNN polling.

Ouch. But will voters remember, by the 2014 midterm elections?

Another Obamalie, his mother’s medical insurance?

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From Mona Charen’s new column:

Remember President Barack Obama’s mother? …The moving and infuriating story was a staple on the 2008 campaign trail. His mother had insurance, he explained, but when she came down with cancer, her insurance company claimed her disease was a “pre-existing condition” and refused to pay…In a debate with Sen. John McCain, Obama said: “For my mother to die of cancer at the age of 53 and have to spend the last months of her life in the hospital room arguing with insurance companies because they’re saying that this may be a pre-existing condition and they don’t have to pay her treatment, there’s something fundamentally wrong about that.”

There would be, if it had been true. But when New York Times reporter Janny Scott researched the issue for her biography of the president’s mother, she discovered letters proving beyond doubt that Cigna never denied Stanley Ann Dunham coverage for her disease. The dispute was over a disability plan…

The White House did not deny Scott’s account, but shrugged it off…

The Dunham tale was meant to personify the hundreds of thousands — or millions — of Americans who were “dumped” by insurance companies when they became sick. This is an invented tale, and might have been rebutted by the insurance industry if they hadn’t gotten into bed with Obama in 2010 in return for millions of coerced new customers…

There’s more; RTWT.

Charen touches on a great point: The insurance companies are at fault, but not for the Left’s mythical reasons. The real fault is that Obamacare is based on coercion: forcing people to do business with the insurance companies, when people might choose not to. That is immoral. Obama was wrong to propose it, the Democrats were wrong to impose it, and the insurance companies were wrong to go along with it.