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Does Congress Read Bills? |
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Written by Administrator
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Wednesday, 29 July 2009 12:27 |
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"President Obama is pushing Congress to pass health care legislation that could nationalize as much as 10 percent of the economy. Most members of Congress will vote on this bill with no idea what's in it. Rep. John Conyers Jr., Michigan Democrat, disparaged lawmakers for even pretending to read the laws they pass. 'I love these members, they get up and say, "Read the bill,"' he said last week at the National Press Club. 'What good is reading the bill if it's a thousand pages and you don't have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you've read the bill?' Mr. Conyers might think it's an antiquated notion that congressmen actually read legislation, but it is the most fundamental responsibility of elected representatives to know and understand laws and how they will affect the lives of their constituents. That is especially the case with such a gargantuan bill. The House version creates 53 new federal bureaucracies with everything from a Health Choices Administration to a Health Insurance Exchange Trust Fund to a Health Benefits Advisory Committee. Thirty-three entitlement programs are created or expanded. The notion is put to rest that government might cooperate with doctors and patients to work out what is best for providing care. The health care bill uses the assertive word 'shall' 1,683 times. These passages are government mandates that force doctors, consumers and others in the health care profession to do what Congress orders. The word 'penalty' is used 156 times for those who don't follow orders. 'Tax' is referred to 172 times. Mr. Conyers is right about one thing: A legal education would come in handy when reading through this legislation. The bill is 1,018 pages long, very complicated and surely will cause legal disputes about its meaning for years to come." |
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What the Left Doesn’t Want You to Know About Health Care |
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Written by Administrator
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Sunday, 12 July 2009 10:26 |
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President Barack Obama and Congress have vowed to fix the rising costs of health care, and to get more people insured. But the details in the liberal plans offered so far do not solve the problems of America’s health care system. Liberal Rhetoric If you like your health care package you can keep it: The President says that a “public option”—a government plan—would just be one of many health care plans that Americans could select. In fact, a public plan will lead many employers to drop private health coverage for their workers and dump them into the public plan—just as many employers in the 1990s pushed their workers into cheaper managed care plans. According to independent analyses, as many as 119 million Americans could end up in a public plan. This is hardly letting people keep what they have. The end goal is not a single payer system: The “single payer” here is Uncle Sam, using taxpayers’ money, and not just paying the bills but calling the shots and deciding what care every American will get—or not get. The inclusion of a public option is nothing more than a Trojan horse. The architects of the President’s proposals, and the sponsors of his proposals on Capitol Hill, know that once a government plan is in place, private insurance companies will be eventually run out of business. The quality of your health care will get better: One need only look at current government health programs to test this premise. Medicare has huge gaps in coverage. Medicaid’s quality is notoriously bad. They both offer substandard care compared to most private insurance plans. These persistent deficiencies are routinely overlooked in discussions of a government health plan. Rather than fixing Medicare and Medicaid, what the government proposes is to make these programs the foundations of a universal plan. Colossal Costs Analysts, including the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office–Congress’s own watchdog–have issued preliminary estimates that the cost could be high as $2 trillion over 10 years, with most of that borrowed money. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has estimated that the annual cost of the insurance subsidy program in an early version of the Kennedy-Dodd bill would rise 6.7 percent per year after it is fully phased in. There is nothing in the legislation that would lead one to expect that pace to slow after the first decade. For real solutions, and not just rousing rhetoric, check out The Heritage Foundation's health care website. |
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Passports with Chip from 20 feet |
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Written by Administrator
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Sunday, 12 July 2009 10:14 |
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Fox News has an AP story on a SF hacker driving around and needing as little as 20 minutes to be successful in acquiring a passport number: 'Zipping past Fisherman's Wharf, his scanner detected, then downloaded to his laptop, the unique serial numbers of two pedestrians' electronic US passport cards embedded with radio frequency identification, or RFID, tags. Within an hour, he'd "skimmed" the identifiers of four more of the new, microchipped PASS cards from a distance of 20 feet. ... Meanwhile, Homeland Security has been promoting broad use of RFID even though its own advisory committee on data integrity and privacy warned that radio-tagged IDs have the potential to allow "widespread surveillance of individuals" without their knowledge or consent.' |
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Car Impounded After Dog Drives Away From Car Wash |
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Written by Willy
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Friday, 07 November 2008 11:00 |
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PRYOR, Okla. — A dog waiting in a car while at a car wash slipped the vehicle into gear and drove in a loop before the car came to a stop. Pryor police officer Brent Crittenden said the dog's owner was washing the vehicle when the 70-pound pit bull jumped on the dash and somehow shifted the car into reverse. The car backed out of the car wash bay, continued onto a highway and then looped around before coming to a stop at an automated car wash lane. Crittenden said the vehicle was impounded because its owner was unable to provide proof of insurance. Because the dog was registered with the city, Crittenden said the owner was allowed to walk the pooch home. |
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War On String Not Winnable |
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Written by Willy
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Tuesday, 16 December 2008 08:40 |
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