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50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Five Realities to Remember about the Health-Care Debate The congressional Republican bill is flawed, but so are many of the talking points being used against it. By Michael Tanner

It has been barely a week since the Republican plan to (sort of) repeal and replace Obamacare was unveiled and already the proposal has been savaged from both left and right, by most of the media, by various interest groups, including doctors, hospitals, and insurance companies, and by virtually anyone else with an opinion. Outside of Paul Ryan, it is hard to find anyone who truly likes this bill. Indeed, in my opinion, this is a deeply flawed bill that perpetuates — and in some cases exacerbates — some of Obamacare’s worst flaws. Still, there are some important things to keep in mind.

1. There will be losers as well as winners. The Republican talking point that everyone will be better off under their proposal is silly and just gives opponents an easy target. Every piece of legislation creates winners and losers. Obamacare did. There were far more losers than winners, but some of those who won under Obamacare will be losers under the Republican plan. They will receive lower subsidies, have to pay more for insurance, or be forced to switch to less inclusive plans. Denying this simply allows Democrats and the media to search for someone getting hurt and blow it up into a big story.

2. There will be more winners than losers. The media coverage of the Congressional Budget Office’s report has focused on the reduction in insurance coverage (more on this below). But the report also showed that premiums would be lower under the GOP plan starting in 2020, about 10 percent lower by 2026. That represents a substantial savings for millions of Americans. The Republican plan would also give millions of Americans more choice of insurance plans, making it easy to find the type of coverage and the provider networks that suit their needs. Nor should we ignore more than $1 trillion in tax cuts, many for the middle class, or the $337 billion reduction in deficits over the next ten years. Those cuts mean more jobs and economic growth, a big win for everybody.

3. No, 14 million people are not having their insurance taken away. Media reports have focused on CBO’s conclusion that there would be 14 million fewer insured Americans next year under the GOP replacement plan, and as many as 25 million fewer by 2027, though more people would still be insured than before Obamacare. Those numbers may or may not be accurate (CBO’s model has consistently relied on a belief that the individual mandate would cause people to sign up for Obamacare, a belief that hasn’t held up in practice), but they are badly misleading. Much of the projected decline in coverage stems from CBO’s belief that, without the individual mandate, many people would choose not to buy insurance. Whether or not that is a wise choice on their part, free people should have the ability to make even unwise choices. That’s not “taking their insurance away,” it is treating people like adults.

4. Of the 25 million fewer insured in 2026, 14 million would come from a reduction in Medicaid enrollment. That may sound alarming, but Medicaid was not only fiscally unstainable in its current form, stressing both federal and state budgets, it provided barely minimal care. Reforming Medicaid in a way that encourages states to innovate and focus more of their resources on the most vulnerable populations, rather than, say, the elderly in nursing homes, many of whom are middle class and simply shifting the burden from their families to taxpayers, or single, childless men, can only benefit those most in need.

5. The alternative is Obamacare not Utopia. In comparing the GOP alternative to Obamacare, it is important to remember that Obamacare was teetering on the edge of collapse. Projections of how many people would be insured or what premiums would be ten years from now assume that Obamacare would survive that long. It couldn’t, not in its current form. When Democrats point out someone who would lose their insurance under the GOP replacement, we should ask what would happen to that person when — not if — Obamacare spirals into oblivion.

Unpacking the Complexity of Repeal and Replace Conservatives are anxious to repeal Obamacare, but repeal must be a true repeal. By Michael A. Needham & Jacob Reses

The debate over the repeal and replacement of Obamacare has been hard for many on the right to parse because the concept of “repeal” — a term with a straightforward meaning that is isolated from “replace” — can lose its clear meaning when the two are joined at the hip.

Obamacare touched on so many aspects of health policy — aspects any reform effort would inevitably need to address, albeit in a different manner — that evaluating any one element of the law in isolation from the others is enormously difficult. Which aspects are central, and which are peripheral, is no easy question to answer for such a massive law. That difficulty is compounded by the lack of consensus among Republicans on an ideal replacement. Sound Obamacare replacement ideas in the minds of some may double down on Obamacare’s worst features in the minds of others. A further complication is introduced by the sequencing of reform. Some replace concepts, though in isolation of potential merit, may take on a different character in a policy context where metastatic remnants of Obamacare remain on the books pending repeal at a later date.

“Repeal and replace” has become a mantra in many corners on the right but it has long been a source of unease for some conservatives who have feared that “replace” might in practice not represent true “repeal.” The reaction to American Health Care Act represents the eruption of such concerns, which have brewed under the surface of our Obamacare debates for years, into the spotlight.

Sensing that things might play out precisely this way, many conservatives, Heritage Action included, urged Congress to lay the groundwork last Congress for an immediate repeal of Obamacare shortly after the inauguration of Barack Obama’s successor. That process culminated in the passage of the 2015 reconciliation bill that the same conservatives have urged Congress to pass for the last several weeks. But that bill was imperfect, as many noted at the time. Its authors, reluctant to test the limits of the Senate’s Byrd Rule, which limits what can be included in a reconciliation package, prematurely omitted from the bill the repeal of Obamacare’s various insurance regulations. Though it repealed Obamacare’s taxes and spending, it was understood at the time to be a floor, not a ceiling, for repeal. More work, we all knew, would be needed.

Muslim IT Hackers in Congress Had Access to Everything Daniel Greenfield

It really speaks to the level of corruption and disorganization that this situation was able to go on for so long. Or that a clearly corrupt bunch that seemed willing to do anything had such access.

I’m not sure if that last sentence should be taken to refer to Congressional Democrats or the Pakistani Muslim IT brothers in their employ who are at the center of an access scandal. And a bunch of other scandals.

Awan ran technology for multiple House Democrats, and soon four of his relatives — including brothers Abid and Jamal — appeared on the payroll of dozens of other members, collecting $4 million in taxpayer funds since 2010.

“They had access to EVERYTHING. Correspondence, emails, confidential files — if it was stored on the Member system, they had access to it,” the former House Information Resources (HIR) technology worker with first-hand knowledge of Imran’s privileges told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

“There were some things – like access to the House email system that were totally controlled by the technicians at HIR. In order for certain permissions to be granted, a form was required to ensure that there was a paper trail for the requested changes. Imran was constantly complaining that he had to go through this process and trying to get people to process his access requests without the proper forms. Some of the permissions he wanted would give him total access to the Members’ stuff.”

“IT staff at HIR can be tracked for every keystroke they make,” the worker said. But by comparison, “when these guys were granted access to the Member’s computer systems there is no oversight or tracking of what they may be doing on the Member’s system. For example they could make a copy of anything on the Member’s computer system to a thumb drive or have it sent to a private server they had set up and no one would know.”

So we have some rather dubious people with access to everything on the system of Dems working on high level committees. And it’s a safe bet that they were no more secure about it than Hillary. On top of that you have Capitol Police, a sinecure position, investigating this, instead of the FBI or the Secret Service.

The central IT staffer said any suggestion that the brothers’ access didn’t span the full gamut of congressional intrigue was silly because they were the ones giving out permissions.

“When a new Member begins, they guide them on everything from which computer system to purchase to which constituent management system to go with and all other related hardware purchases. Then they install everything and set up all the accounts AND grant all the required permissions and restrictions,” the staffer said.

“In effect, they are given administrative control of the Members’ computer operations. They then set up a remote access so they can connect from wherever they are and have full access to everything on the Member’s system.”

You had Pakistanis with a backdoor to the systems of key figures who oversaw national security agencies. This is really bad. And yet keeping the investigation out of sight will bury it.

Another American City Destroyed by the Democrats The tragic story of Minneapolis. John Perazzo

“American politics is dominated by an enduring myth,” writes author Peter Collier—the myth “that Democrats are the party of the common man, the voiceless, the powerless, the poor. That if you care about what happens to the least among us, you will cast your vote in the Democratic column.”

But as Collier also points out, the vast majority of America’s voiceless, powerless, and impoverished people are concentrated in cities that have been run exclusively by Democrats for decades—even generations—without interruption. These are cities where stratospheric rates of crime, poverty, unemployment, out-of-wedlock births, homes without fathers and failed school systems have become a way of life—along with oppressive and confiscatory taxes whose only discernible achievement is to keep the leaky ship of city government afloat for as long as possible before it is inevitably capsized by economic and social calamity.



Minneapolis, Minnesota is perhaps the least likely case in point. Camouflaged by the state as a whole, a synonym for plainspoken stability, it is just one of the many American cities that were once thriving centers of industry, prosperity and optimism—until Democrats took them over. Since 1978, Minneapolis has been governed exclusively by mayors from the Democratic Farmer Labor Party (DFLP)—the state affiliate of the Democratic Party.

Prior to this long era of Democratic dominance, Minneapolis’ poverty rate was consistently lower than the national average. Throughout the 1980s, when the trickle down of the Reagan economic boom had a positive effect on cities nationwide, Minneapolis shared in these good times, adding some 3,000 new jobs to its downtown area each year from 1981-87. As of 1983, only 8% of the city’s metropolitan-area population lived below the poverty level, as compared to approximately 15% of the national population.



But by 1988, then-mayor Donald Fraser—a member of the DFLP—had grown troubled by the stark contrast he saw between the majority of his city and who were thriving economically, and a number of African-American neighborhoods where crime, teenage pregnancy, and welfare dependency were experiencing a growth spurt. Taking a page out of the same playbook other big city Democrat mayors were using, Fraser believed that the cure was redistribution of income. He decided to revamp the way in which social-welfare expenditures were allocated and believed, specifically, that federal and local agencies needed to focus more of their resources on the economic problems confronting unwed mothers (who were disproportionately black) and their children.



The Health Bill’s Fiscal Bonus The best chance in a generation to control a runaway government.

The furor over the Congressional Budget Office’s report on the House GOP health bill is concentrated on predictions about insurance coverage, which suits Democrats fine. Lost amid the panic is that CBO shows the bill is a far-reaching advance for the market principles and limited government that conservatives usually favor.

The CBO is not omniscient, but if its projections are even close to accurate then ObamaCare repeal and replacement is the most significant government reform in perhaps three decades. Under conventional (static-revenue) scoring, the bill cuts spending on net by $1.22 trillion and eliminates a raft of new taxes worth $883 billion through 2026.

Despite this tax reform and new refundable tax credits for individual insurance purchases, the bill still reduces the deficit by $337 billion. Reducing spending, the tax burden and further debt generation is an enormous pro-growth fiscal bonus.

President Obama sought to permanently increase the government’s share of the economy to redistribute income to reduce inequality. ObamaCare was his spending wedge to force tax increases long after he had left office. The House health-care bill is the first crucial step to limit that wedge and restore the federal fisc to a more sustainable long-term path.

Absent reform, the brutal budget math is that the U.S. is headed for a debt crisis; major tax increases that subtract from GDP and living standards; or deep and immediate cuts to entitlements that Americans have planned their lives around—or maybe all three. The longer Washington waits, the more painful and politically convulsive the corrections will be.

We keep reading that President Trump and Speaker Paul Ryan are on a collision course over entitlements, though when was Medicaid demoted from entitlement status? The bill transitions the program’s funding formula to block grants starting in 2020—for the first time, limiting the automatic and open-ended commitment that defines an entitlement.

GOP Senators Say House Health Bill Won’t Pass Without Changes Concerns mounted after independent report showed millions would be uninsured By Kristina Peterson, Michelle Hackman and Louise Radnofsky

WASHINGTON—Republican senators, alarmed by a nonpartisan report showing millions would lose insurance under the GOP health-care plan, warned Tuesday that the bill wouldn’t become law without fundamental changes.

At least a dozen Republican senators, including some who had previously kept a low profile in the health debate, made clear they had concerns over the bill’s policy proposals, complicating House leaders’ hopes that the bill’s momentum would overpower internal GOP infighting over legislative details.

Flashpoints included the potential loss of insurance coverage, changes to Medicaid, the trajectory of premium prices and the bill’s impact on costs paid by older, low-income and rural Americans.

Concerns mounted on Capitol Hill after the Congressional Budget Office, the independent legislative analyst, released a report on Monday that estimated the GOP health plan would reduce deficits by $337 billion over the coming decade and increase the number of uninsured by 24 million in 2026, compared with current law.

While many Republicans lauded the plan’s impact on the deficit and the high cost of premiums, the rising chorus of concerns means congressional GOP leaders and the White House will have to delicately balance modifying the bill in ways that appease one faction of Republicans without alienating another.

On Tuesday, the White House sought to discredit the report’s projections as unreliable, while Republican senators said they would push for an array of changes, including more assistance for older and low-income people to buy health insurance.

“This is difficult—it’s 18% of the economy,” said Sen. John Boozman (R., Ark.). “My concern is not with the timeline; my concern is doing it right.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Scott Pruitt’s Opening Salvo The new EPA leader takes aim at the heart of climate-change orthodoxy. By Julie Kelly

It’s hard to overstate the significance of the recent comment by EPA administrator Scott Pruitt that there is disagreement about whether carbon dioxide is the main cause of global warming. In an interview on CNBC on March 9, Pruitt said:

Measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do, and there is tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact. So, no, I would not agree that it [CO2] is a primary contributor to the global warming that we see. But we need to continue the review and the analysis.

This statement is truly extraordinary: A leading U.S. official is taking direct aim at the heart of the international climate-change crusade.. It represents a total reversal of the past eight years, when everyone from the president down to low-level bureaucrats warned that climate change was a bigger threat to mankind than terrorism — to the point where they forced us to endure costly, job-killing federal regulations to stop it. Now the head of our top environmental agency is questioning the whole thing. Of all the conservative pit bulls in Trump’s Cabinet, Pruitt might be the biggest badass of them all.

Right on cue, the climate tribe went ballistic, trotting out the usual platitudes about a 97 percent consensus, settled science, climate deniers, blah blah blah. Obama’s EPA chief Gina McCarthy slammed Pruitt without (of course) refuting his claim head-on: “When it comes to climate change, the evidence is robust and overwhelmingly clear that the cost of inaction is unacceptably high.” Senator Kamala Harris (D., Calif.) — who weirdly asked Mike Pompeo about his position on climate change during his Senate confirmation hearing for the post of CIA director — subtweeted Pruitt’s comments and said: “This is absurd. Denying causes of global warming will hurt our nation and our planet in the long-run.”

Pruitt is setting the stage for a long-overdue and critical debate about how much of an impact CO2 has on global warming. He is not the only one speaking out. In her recent report, “Climate Models for the Layman,” Judith Curry says that global climate models (GCM) are “running hot” and “predict too much warming from increased atmospheric carbon dioxide.” Curry, a climate scientist and co-founder of the Climate Forecast Applications Network, says scientists frequently make ad hoc adjustments to climate models that often overestimate carbon dioxide’s impact on warming.

By tying rising carbon dioxide levels to a projected rise in temperatures, the models predict that temperatures will be much higher than they really are. Curry says in her report that current models for this century projected warming at about twice the rate of observed temperatures: “The reason for the discrepancy between observations and model simulations in the early 21st century appears to be caused by a combination of inadequate simulations of natural internal variability and oversensitivity of the models to increasing carbon dioxide.”

Schumer Threatens Government Shutdown Over Border Wall Democrats flip sides on legislative tactics. Matthew Vadum

After Democratic lawmakers’ years of shrieking and televised temper tantrums over how shutting down the federal government somehow approximates treason, Democrats have suddenly embraced the tactic in their quest to keep the nation’s borders wide open for Muslim terrorists and illegal aliens.

Democrats are threatening to force a shut-down of the government after it runs out of operating funds after April 28.

Outnumbered in both houses of Congress, and facing a Republican in the White House for the first time in eight years, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and other Democrats say they will oppose efforts to finance President Trump’s planned border wall in spending legislation needed to keep the government open for business. Adding favored projects to must-pass spending bills, instead of dealing with the projects as freestanding legislation outside the budget process, is a time-honored way of getting things done in Congress. Both parties do it when in the majority.

But Schumer is now a professional obstructionist committed to undermining the Trump administration so at long last he sees things differently.

“The border wall is impractical and unpopular,” said Schumer on Sunday, “a pointless burden that this administration is trying to pay for by taking money away from the programs that actually keep Americans safe.”‎

Democrats wrote to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and other Senate leaders warning that they will throw a wrench into efforts to appropriate funds for wall construction if the request is wrapped inside in a spending measure needed to keep the government’s doors open beyond April 28.

“Given these and other concerns, we believe it would be inappropriate to insist on the inclusion of such funding in a must-pass appropriations bill that is needed for the Republican majority in control of the Congress to avert a government shutdown so early in President Trump’s Administration,” the Democrats wrote.

The Obamacare IED Republicans won’t be able to please everyone. So what will they choose? Bruce Thornton

The Republicans have started fixing the Obamacare disaster. For Trump, doing something about this failed program is critical, since it was a central issue he campaigned on. As his consigliere Kellyanne Conway says, there is a “binary choice … you’re either making good on the promise to repeal and replace Obamacare or you’re not.” Failing to deliver on this promise will have serious repercussions for the 2018 midterm elections and Trump’s own reelection

But right now, the Congressional bomb-squad trying to defuse this political IED are squabbling among themselves. Some claim that the changes proposed so far are a good start, for a complex and flawed entitlement like Obamacare will take time to fix. Others say what Paul Ryan et al. have proposed is merely “Obamacare lite,” Republican lipstick on that budget-busting entitlement pig. Dems on the sidelines are piling on, desperate to preserve Obama’s “legacy,” which also happens to be a big step toward the Holy Grail of progressives–– government-run, single-payer health care on the European model.

But the real problem continues to be ignored––the success of the progressive movement in addicting Americans to getting something for nothing because that “something” is defined as a “right.” And voters don’t like their rights messed with.

That’s the political conundrum facing the Republicans. Those in the Paul Ryan camp defend their adjustments to Obamacare by pointing out the greater participation of the market in their reforms. Here’s Ryan making the case:

It’s something that we as conservatives have always said if you really want to get free market principles injected into the health care system, you need to have an individual market where people care about what things cost, where people have real freedom, where those providers of health care services, be they insurers, doctors, or hospitals and everybody in between, compete against each other for our business based on value, based on price, based on quality, based on outcome. You don’t get that if you don’t have a viable individual free market.

All true, except the one thing Ryan doesn’t mention, and that’s the individual’s responsibility for his free choice. Whenever we talk about freedom of choice in the free market, we have to be clear that making the wrong choice, or a bad choice, will have consequences. Freedom without responsibility and accountability for how we use our freedom is a recipe for disaster. We all know, for example, that a lot of health-care money is spent on ailments related to lifestyle choices. About 28 million Americans have type-two diabetes. Obesity, poor diet, and lack of exercise are mostly responsible for this rising epidemic. In 2013 we spent $250 billion treating this disease, including the cost of lost productivity. The government paid 62 percent of this tab, and one in three Medicaid dollars was spent on diabetes. These costs will increase significantly as an aging, longer-living population becomes more vulnerable to the disease. And everyone expects the government to foot the bill.

The Trouble With Barry By David Solway

Alfred Hitchcock’s black comedy The Trouble with Harry bombed at the box office when it was first released in 1955; it has now achieved the status of a classic. Today, a bizarre melodrama playing in all the major political theaters, which might be called The Trouble with Barry, has become an overnight smash hit. Starring Barack Obama, a prodigy of the art of surveillance and Teflon-like resilience, it will eventually run its course. However the plot may develop, one thing is certain: it will not be regarded as a classic.

The trouble with Barry, like Hitchcock’s moribund Harry, is that he never seems to go away, constantly emerging at the most inopportune moments. Unlike every other president in American history, Obama has dedicated himself to the practice of what the Washington Examiner has described as “post-presidential meddling.”

He has thrown himself fully into Alinsky-style “community organizing,” stirring up resistance to the Trump administration in every way conceivable: installing, according to the New York Post, a “shadow government,” dubbed Organizing for Action, comprising more than 30,000 agitators and 250 chapters across the U.S., in order “to sabotage the incoming administration”; renting a dwelling and setting up command headquarters around the corner from the White House; cooking up the Russian hacking fable; and most recently, allegedly wiretapping Trump Tower, which seems disturbingly probable following the salient remarks of Ret. Army Intelligence Officer Tony Shaffer on Fox and the revelations from Breitbart News. Mark Levin’s accusation that Obama is orchestrating a “silent coup” against Trump rings true. As Daniel Greenfield points out:

There is now a President and an Anti-President. A government and a shadow government. The anti-President controls more of the government through his shadow government than the real President.

Obama and his Deep State have engaged in “a criminal conspiracy of unprecedented scope.”

And yet, even today, few media outlets are willing to investigate the innumerable instances of lying, lawbreaking, corruption, broken promises and cronyism for which Obama is clearly answerable. That he is likely involved in a wiretapping operation against a political opponent should not come as a surprise to anyone who has observed or researched the man. As Matthew Vadum comments in FrontPage Magazine, “It might be said that every day of his presidency he committed at least one impeachable offense” — whether abusing executive powers, bypassing Congress, leaking classified information, misrepresenting Obamacare, being ultimately responsible for the Fast and Furious and Benghazi infamies, and more.
Hugh Hewitt Presses Trump to Fire Obama Holdovers

The wiretapping affair is only the latest in a vast and ongoing sequence of misdemeanors, scandals and illegalities — a list compiled by Doug Ross runs into hundreds of such instances of impropriety and malpractice. No matter. The list will only grow. The editor of a prestigious conservative site wrote me calling this latest outrage a “game changer.” That remains to be seen. I would have thought, for example, that Obama’s first Executive Order (13489) on January 21, 2009, sealing his vital records would have been the game changer we were waiting for, but Barry sailed on unscathed.

There have been weak presidents, deluded presidents, and harmful presidents before him, but never has there been anyone as sinister or questionable as Obama, not excluding even the malefic Jimmy Carter or the sleazy Bill Clinton. What J. R. Dunn writing in American Thinker has said of Hillary, “the most repellent and corrupt American presidential candidate since Aaron Burr,” is equally true, in my estimation, of Barack Obama. Meanwhile, it is Trump who faces a barrage of threats, calls for impeachment and acts of disobedience that would have been more explicable if levied against Obama for his historic deceptions and malfeasances. Under the pestilential reign of Obama, and indeed years of Democratic incumbency, the shining city on the hill has become a murky city in the swamp.