* "The House Democrats' health care overhaul bill released Thursday creates a government-run insurance program, provides insurance coverage to 96 percent of all Americans and sets the stage for major battles over politically risky cuts to Medicare, new taxes, high spending and the hot-button issues of abortion and immigration."
(Washington Times)* "The new House health care bill (H.R. 3962) unveiled by Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) yesterday clocks in at 1,990 pages and about 400,000 words. As written, the bill purports to cost only $1.05 trillion over the first ten years and is paid for by over $700 billion in tax increases and cuts to Medicare Advantage and Medicare prescription drug payments. But as troubling as those numbers are, the scariest thing about the bill is the solid foundation it lays for a complete government take over of the health care sector of our economy." (Conn Carroll,
"The Pelosi Blueprint for Government-Run Health Care," The Foundry, NRO)
* "Just as Americans United for Life had expected, the new House health care bill unveiled this morning includes the Capps Amendment language added during the Energy and Commerce Committee mark-up. This bill will explicitly allow federal funding of abortion through the public option and permits federal subsidies to go to private insurance plans that cover abortion. The bill also ensures that at least one health insurance plan must cover abortion in every area of the country."
(Americans United for Life President and CEO Dr. Charmaine Yoest)* "The word 'report' appears 364 times and 'tax' is used 214 times -- and while some of those refer to bookkeeping such as tax years, the bill does raise several key levies, such as a 'surcharge' of 5.4 percent on individual taxpayers who earn $500,000 or couples with incomes of $1 million.
Rep. Mike Pence, Indiana Republican, said the bill uses the word 'shall' 3,425 times, which he said was an indication that a lot of new mandates are being imposed. Among them is a requirement that chain restaurants print directly on their menus how many calories each item contains.
The bill also takes care of some long-languishing measures, such as reauthorizing the Indian Health Service, which has been kicking around for the past decade and was most recently held up by a fight over abortion."
(Washington Times)* "The Medicare end-of-life planning provision that 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin said was tantamount to "death panels" for seniors is staying in the latest Democratic health care bill unveiled Thursday. The provision allows Medicare to pay for voluntary counseling to help beneficiaries deal with the complex and painful decisions families face when a loved one is approaching death.
For years, federal laws and policies have encouraged Americans to think ahead about end-of-life decisions, and make their wishes known in advance through living wills and similar legal documents. But when House Democrats proposed this summer to pay doctors for end-of-life counseling, it touched off a wave of suspicion and anger. Prominent Republicans singled it out as a glaring example of government overreach.
Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, at the time a lead negotiator on health care legislation, told constituents at a town hall meeting they had good reason to question the proposal. 'I don't have any problem with things like living wills, but they ought to be done within the family," he said. "We should not have a government program that determines you're going to pull the plug on grandma.'"
(Fox News)
* "The Congressional Budget Office said Thursday a U.S. House health-care system re-write would extend health insurance to 96% of the nonelderly U.S. population by 2019, and spend $1.055 trillion to do so...The costs of the bill are fully offset by cuts to existing spending programs-- including the Medicare Advantage and other programs--saving $426 billion through 2019, and by tax increases raising $572 billion over that time, CBO said. In fact, the combined impact of provisions in the bill would be a net deficit reduction of $104 billion in the next decade, according to CBO."
(Martin Vaughan, Dow Jones Newswire)* "Whole industries and banks are biting the dust; unemployment lingers close to double-digits; government deficits rise like a mountain of nuclear waste; the communist Chinese are buying up our debt in anticipation of God knows what kind of future demands; and more soldiers die needlessly while the President dithers with his golf game. Purely mad social engineers -- Obama, Pelosi, & Reid -- are on a determined march toward nationalizing one sixth of the entire American economy. Their scheme will have far-reaching effects on one hundred percent of the men, women and children in this country. The whole idea is patently ridiculous, especially in light of the host of other impending disasters.
But the fact that these Democrat power-mongers are attempting to foist upon us a system already tried-and-failed so many times in so many places pushes the current national healthcare debate into the realm of pure lunacy.
As one of Einstein's most oft-quoted bits of genius reminds us, doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results, is insanity." (Kyle-Anne Shiver,
"Democrats' Healthcare Scheme Is Pure Insanity," American Thinker)
* "It runs more pages than War and Peace, has nearly five times as many words as the Torah, and its tables of contents alone run far longer than this story.
The House health care bill unveiled Thursday clocks in at 1,990 pages and about 400,000 words. With an estimated 10-year cost of $894 billion, that comes out to about $2.24 million per word. .
And for some members, that may not be enough...
And for those who cry 'read the bill,' beware. There are plenty of paragraphs like this one:
'(a) Outpatient Hospitals – (1) In General – Section 1833(t)(3)(C)(iv) of the Social Security Act (42 U.S.C. 1395(t)(3)(C)(iv)) is amended – (A) in the first sentence – (i) by inserting “(which is subject to the productivity adjustment described in subclause (II) of such section)” after “1886(b)(3)(B)(iii); and (ii) by inserting “(but not below 0)” after “reduced”; and (B) in the second sentence, by inserting “and which is subject, beginning with 2010 to the productivity adjustment described in section 1886(b)(3)(B)(iii)(II)'.
The section deals with 'incorporating productivity improvements into market basket updates that do not already incorporate such improvements,' if that helps."
(Jonathan Allen, Politico)* "The first red flag about the new bill is simply the size of it, at 1,990 pages in all. That's much larger than any of the previous House bills. 'The era of the 1,000 page bill is over,' said Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) sarcastically on the Senate floor.
I'm not going to say I read every page, but I flipped through every one of them. It is mind numbing for sure. But I did come up with a few interesting thoughts along the way.
One trouble spot is still likely to be abortion. The language in the bill is exactly the same language that was narrowly approved in the House Energy & Commerce Committee, which over three dozen Democrats say is unacceptable."
(Jamie Dupree, KRMG)
Axe products (deodorants, scents, body wash, etc. which are sold as Lynx in some parts of the world) have made an awful lot of money for their parent company, Unilever. But they certainly have had their problems as well.
Remember how Anita Dunn's justification for describing Mao Tse-Tung as one of her two favorite philosophers, a figure she often turns to for guidance, was that Republican strategist Lee Atwater also quoted Mao a lot?
* "The House Democrats' health care overhaul bill released Thursday creates a government-run insurance program, provides insurance coverage to 96 percent of all Americans and sets the stage for major battles over politically risky cuts to Medicare, new taxes, high spending and the hot-button issues of abortion and immigration." (Washington Times)
Have any of you wondered what Vital Signs Ministries is involved in BESIDES the blog? Well, take a look at the October LifeSharer letter right here.
The fellows shown here are not presenting the cheapest in Halloween wear -- these are the "disguises" they came up with before breaking into an apartment in Carroll, Iowa. They were caught soon after leaving the scene of the crime after driving down the main street of this small town -- with the black ink still all over their faces.
Everyone knows that if you don't pay to maintain and repair your car, you limit its life. The same is true as human beings age. We need medical care to avoid becoming clunkers -- disabled, worn out, parked in wheelchairs or nursing homes.
Republican Congresswoman Michele Bachmann from Minnesota has a wake-up call you're not going to like.
There was Roasting Weasel in Congress yesterday as NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell was put on the grill by Iowa Republican Steve King. King's polite but direct questions showed Goodell's hypocrisy, absurdity and meanness in a light that Goodell just couldn't escape.
DER SPIEGEL invited Charles Krauthammer in for an interview and despite biased questions, Krauthammer delivered one of the most thoughtful, undaunted and well presented analyses of the Obama administration (as well as other things) you're going to find.
* Byron York -- "As promised, Barack Obama is bringing change to America. He's making it more Republican." ("Obama's Big Change: He Moves America to the Right," The Examiner, October 27)
By now you've probably heard about Rocco Landesman, President Obama's handpicked chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, and his amazingly foolish statement last week that "Barack Obama is the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar."
...We are indeed living in strange times with even stranger people running our government. The inmates are running the asylum. I'm afraid to report that 1984 is no longer a movie. Don’t know about you, but I’m not planning to star in the sequel to Soylent Green.
Scanning my Facebook page yesterday, I came across a nifty and practical new word that business advisor/musician David Nabity just invented.
Among the endless things the government needs your money for is to subsidize Amtrak, its nationwide rail network (well, semi-nationwide anyhow). You probably thought that after scaling down of service, the development of new technology, and the price of gasoline which might make travelers consider the train, Amtrak was turning a tidy profit and able to take care of itself.
Over at the Foundry (run by NRO) they have a nifty video clip of Barney Frank (when debating Ralph Nader) deliver this remarkably candid line, “We are trying on every front to increase the role of government in the area of regulation.”
Here's something to remember (and pass on to your pals) when you see those high-dollar, high-pressure ads from the AARP touting government-run health care; namely, that AARP is poised to make millions of dollars in royalties when Obamacare becomes the law of the land.
How is one to rationally explain the Democrats' belief that the government taking over another one-sixth of the American economy is a good thing?
I'm not much of a TV watcher so I didn't catch last Friday's episode of NBC's Law & Order even though I had read it was going to feature a storyline based on the murder of abortionist George Tiller.
William Kristol, not all that much of a rock-ribbed conservative himself, nevertheless argues that conservatives should consider themselves in high clover nowadays. For instance, the Gallup poll released Monday shows 40% of Americans call themselves conservative. That's as high as it's been in the two decades that Gallup has been asking the question. The poll also showed only 20% willing to call themselves liberals.
As regular visitors to Vital Signs Blog can easily guess, I'm delighted to see CNN's share of the cable TV audience plunging to new depths. In fact, the latest ratings roundup reveal that CNN's prime time shows finished dead last among the cable news networks.
Highbrow academic Nicholas Stern (the Baron of Brentford, a former chief economist of the World Bank and now a Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics), has a threefold message for the Western world, one that we must embrace if the planet is to be saved.
Friday morning: Claire and I drove down to Lincoln to picket the Regent meeting to protest the University of Nebraska's unconscionable push to expand embryo-destructive experiments. We were there for a couple of hours joining several pro-life champions who we have worked with for years including Julie Schmit-Albin, Mary Jane Ziola, Ann Bowen, Carolyn LaGreca, Pam McCabe and more. Including the school kids who came in from a Catholic high school outside Lincoln, we had about 45-50 pro-lifers present. (One press report said seven!) I gave interviews to the World-Herald, the Lincoln Journal-Star, the UNL student daily, and two TV stations. It was a strong and effective protest but the Regents and the NU President seem determined to head ever further into the culture of death by pursuing immoral, expensive and counter-productive experimentation. There are none so blind as those who will not see.
The oil-rich Arab nations build lush palaces and entertainment complexes for their politicians and businessmen. The skyline of Dubai as shown here illustrates that fact.
The White House has told Congress it will reject calls for many of President Obama's policy czars to testify before Congress - a decision senators said goes against the president's promises of transparency and openness and treads on Congress' constitutional mandate to investigate the administration's actions.
You just knew this kind of thing was coming, didn't you?
That was the conclusion of two Canadian Supreme Court justices in evaluating their country's government-run health care system 3 years ago.
Anyone who has been reading the Omaha and Lincoln papers in the last couple of weeks knows that they are working hand in glove with those University of Nebraska Regents who insist that the NU Medical Center expand its human embryo-destructive experimentation.
