Why Does Scott Brown (R-MA) Hate Retired Americans? Why Does Scott Brown (R-MA) Believe In Social-Darwinism?

Why Does Scott Brown (R-MA) Hate Retired Americans? Why Does Scott Brown (R-MA) Believe In Social-Darwinism?

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have announced that over 14 million American seniors are getting special treatment under the affordable health care law, otherwise known as Obamacare. This special treatment is in the form of preventive benefits under Medicare.

The section of the law that I am referring to allows the elderly to receive an annual checkup, without paying a co-pay or deductible along with other preventive services, like cancer screening and mammograms. This all without an out-of-pocket cost to our senior citizens.

"These free preventive services are helping people in Medicare stay healthy and lower their health care costs," acting CMS Administrator Marilyn Tavenner said in a statement.

So before Sen. Scott Brown sides with the radical right and votes to repeal this law, perhaps Brown should read the bill also. By Brown voting to repeal, this benefit along with many others, like closing of the doughnut hole, will be ultimately detrimental to our elderly.

Maybe he will hold a town hall meeting to address this and our elderly will be able to ask him questions. I won't hold my breath, he hasn't held an open forum meeting yet in his two years in office.

Ray Medeiros

In Obamacare Constitutional? Obamacare Is No Different Than Tax Incentives For Mortgages

In Obamacare Constitutional? Obamacare Is No Different Than Tax Incentives For Mortgages

Earlier this week I argued that the Affordable Care Act should be ruled constitutional. There are genuine reasons to be concerned about the scope of Congress’ commerce power, which has been used to justify the federal laws concerning what appear to be non-commercial issues that could easily be addressed by local laws. Gonzales v. Raich, for example, affirms the federal government’s power to criminalize under the Commerce Clause the growth of marijuana for personal medical use, even in states where it would otherwise be legal. But I argued that the Commerce Clause of the Constitution was intended to give Congress the power it needed to address commercial issues that no state can readily solve on its own. This is what Jack Balkin calls the “interstate externalities principle.”

Nevertheless, Justice Kennedy suggested in oral argument that by creating “an affirmative duty to enter into commerce” the health care mandate is “unprecedented” and “changes the relationship between the federal government and the individual in a very fundamental way.” The health care act would arguably exercise the commerce power in a somewhat new way—Carl Cecere puts the debate in the context of the history of the commerce clause here. But Kennedy is wrong to suggest that it would really be any different from the way the federal government already uses its power.

The health care law doesn’t call for people who don’t get insurance to be thrown in jail. It calls for people who don’t have insurance to pay a fine. As I wrote earlier this week, fining people who don’t have insurance is essentially the same as offering a tax break for people who have insurance. And the federal government already offers tax breaks to encourage an enormous variety of activities, many of which are a lot less valuable than buying health insurance.

Consider that you can deduct the interest on your home mortgage from your federal taxes. Giving people who buy houses a tax break might seem different from penalizing people who don’t buy houses. But giving a tax break to people who have mortgages means relatively higher taxes for people who don’t have mortgages. The economic effect is to redistribute money from people who have outstanding mortgages to people who don’t have them. This effect is exactly the same as fining people who don’t have mortgages. The mortgage tax deduction actually seems a lot more problematic to me than fining people who don’t have health care—why should I pay a penalty for not buying a home? why am I financing homes for people who can’t otherwise afford to buy them? And the mortgage interest deduction is just one of the numerous deductions you can take.

There’s a real debate to be had over whether a health insurance mandate is a good idea. It would push Americans to buy into a free market version of a national insurance program, and have the effect of making those of us who don’t get sick subsidize the medical care of those who do. But let’s not kid ourselves that offering people an economic incentive to behave a certain way is some kind of radical new assault on freedom. That’s just overheated partisan nonsense.

The conservatives on the court think it is OK to strip search people stopped for running a red light and hold people only suspected of maybe having a connection to terrorism, indefinitely. So appeals to logic are probably not going to work. 

One can understand why America hating conservatives also hate green jobs and lie about the impact on the economy. Green jobs are on of the bright spots - Green jobs growing even as economy wilts

Why Does Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) Hate America and The Middle-class

Why Does Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) Hate America and The Middle-class

In his public resignation letter in today’s New York Times, former Goldman Sachs executive Greg Smith said that one of the fastest ways to get ahead with the firm is to persuade clients “to invest in the stocks or other products that [the firm is] trying to get rid of because they are not seen as having a lot of potential profit.” He lambastes a firm culture where colleagues openly boast of “ripping their clients off.”

The sad thing is, this sort of shady might well have been on the way to being curtailed if not for the actions of Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA). After Brown was elected to the senate in 2010, he threatened to join a Republican filibuster of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, using that threat to significantly water down the bill. Among the industry-favored concessions he extracted was weakening of the “Volcker rule,” which was meant to curb risky speculative investments that do not benefit customers.

Thanks to Brown’s maneuver, the final bill upped the amount of risky trading big banks like Goldman could engage in, increasing the amount of gambling they’re able to do by billions of dollars. Since then, financial industry lobbyists have been hammering away at the the rule in an attempt to render it completely meaningless.

The financial sector, of course, has repaid Brown with a flurry of campaign contributions. Between contributions from the firm’s leadership PAC and contributions from company employees, Brown has already received more than $40,000 in campaign cash from Goldman Sachs this cycle.

Brown hates the USA. he hates average Americans - consumers, small investors and middle-class families. he changes course according to which way the wind blows. he stands for nothing except making sure the powerful elite stay in power while the middle-class and working poor struggle. What Brown wants is for the USA to be the Pottersville in the nightmare part of Its a Wonderful Life. Brown and his radical conservative pals have no morals, no vision for America except taking more of what average Americas work hard to earn. he and his unhinged conservative elite want to continue to redistribute most of America's Gross Domestic Product upward to the 10% who work the least.

No, Obamacare’s Cost Didn’t Just Double. Sigh.

Sorting through the deceptive attacks on health care reform gets old, even for me. But on Wednesday the Republicans and their allies made a claim so obviously misleading that they, and the media outlets parroting them, must have known they spreading false information.

The basis for the claim is the Congressional Budget Office’s latest projections for the Affordable Care Act, which critics (and I!) like to call Obamacare. When Congress first passed the law, in the spring of 2010, CBO made official estimates of how much the law would cost, how many people would get insurance as a result, and so on. It updated that estimate one year later and has, now, updated it one more time.

The CBO distributed its report in the morning and, by 11 a.m., Republican offices on Capitol Hill were spitting out press releases about it. According to the Republicans, CBO had discovered that Obamacare was going to cost $1.76 trillion over the next ten years. “The CBO’s revised cost estimate indicates that this massive government intrusion into America’s health care system will be far more costly than was originally claimed,” Tom Price, chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee, said. Within a few hours, both Fox News and the Washington Times were carrying online stories making the same claim. According to the Fox News account, CBO was “showing that the bill is substantially more expensive—twice as much as the original $900 billion price tag.”

If CBO had truly determined that health care reform’s cost will be twice the original estimates, it would be huge news. But CBO said nothing of the sort.

To figure out the cost of health care reform, CBO looks at each of the law’s component parts and, for accounting purposes, groups them into different categories. It calls one category “gross cost of coverage expansions”—that’s the amount of money the federal government will spend to help people get insurance, mostly by offering Medicaid to more people or giving people subsidies they can use to help offset the cost of private insurance. Last year, CBO estimated that the gross cost of coverage expansion from 2012 through 2021 would be $1.445 trillion. Now CBO thinks the gross cost will be $1.496 trillion. The number shifted, in part, because the CBO has changed its projections for economic growth. (MSNBC’s Tom Curry has a nice explanation of this.) But, in the context of such a large a budget projection, that’s barely any difference at all.

In the this latest estimate, CBO extends its projection out one more year, to capture the expenses from 2012 to 2022, in order to capture a full decade. In 2022, CBO says, the gross cost of coverage expansion will be $265 billion. Add that to the $1.496 and you get (with rounding) the $1.76 trillion—the one in the press releases and the Fox story.

But there is nothing new or surprising about this. It’s only slightly more money than the previous year’s outlays. The ten-year number seems to jump only because the time frame for the estimate has moved, dropping one year, 2011, and adding another, 2022. Obamacare has virtually no outlays in 2011, because the Medicaid expansion and subsidies don’t start up until 2014, which means the shifting time frame drops a year of no implementation and adds one of full implementation.

Still, doesn’t that just validate what the law’s critics have always said, that the administration was playing games to hide the program’s true impact on the deficit? Hardly. Remember, this is just the raw cost of expanding insurance coverage we’re talking about here—in other words, the money the federal government is sending out the door. The new law also calls for new revenue, in the form of taxes and penalties. It also reduces spending, mostly through Medicare, to help offset the cost of the coverage expansion. When the Affordable Care Act became law, CBO estimated that the net result of all these changes, taken together, would be to reduce the deficit. Now, with this revised estimate, CBO has decided the law will reduce the deficit by even more money.

Yes, you read that right: The real news of the CBO estimate is that, according to its models, health care reform is going to save even more taxpayer dollars than previously thought.

The above picture is yet another example of conservative desperation. Nowhere in his speech does Holder say the word brainwash. Conservatives must lie and lie often to win any debate - read more here, ZombieBreitbart.com Presents: Eric Holder — The Vettening and here, Right-Wing Media Uncover Holder's Plot To Discourage Lawbreaking

Romney Care is Working. Which Means Obama's Health Care Reform - Which is based on Romney Care, Will Work Too

Romney Care is Working. Which Means Obama's Health Care Reform - Which is based on Romney Care, Will Work Too

Fred Bauer has poured over the new health care data in John F. Cogan’s, R. Glenn Hubbard’s, and Daniel P. Kessler’s “The Effect of Massachusetts’ Health Reform on Employer-Sponsored Insurance Premiums” report and points out that health care premiums in the Bay State have grown at a lower rate since the passage of Massachusetts’ signature health care law in 2006.

Relying on data “for average health-insurance premiums from the federally sponsored Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS), this report suggested that, up until 2008, these reforms led to a relative increase in health-insurance premiums.” But new numbers through 2010 shows that “Massachusetts’ health-insurance premium growth declined relative to the nation as a whole in the years since Romneycare has been enacted“:

    Increase in employer-sponsored family premiums 2002-2006: MA: 40%; US: 34.50%
    Increase in employer-sponsored family premiums 2006-2010: MA: 19%; US: 22%

    Increase in individual premiums 2002-2006: MA: 32.70%; US: 29.10%
    Increase in individual premiums 2006-2010: MA: 21.70%; US: 20%



While it’s difficult to know how much of the decrease can be attributed to the Massachusetts law — which focused on expanding access rather than controlling costs — (versus decline in utilization as a result of the recession and other factors), the very fact that the law did not meet the doomsday scenario of critics and cause premiums to skyrocket is significant. (In fact, Massachusetts had the third-lowest average family premiums in New England by 2010, Bauer notes).

Ezra Klein notes that we may already be seeing a very similar trend with the Affordable Care Act, which grew out of the Massachusetts experience. The latest spending projections found a “$275 billion (5.6 percent) reduction [in health care spending] for 2020, compared with pre-reform estimates. Moreover, that projection represents a cumulative reduction of $1.7 trillion over the 10 years from 2011 to 2020.” The numbers suggest that providers may be becoming more efficient in preparation for the ACA’s reductions in Medicare reimbursements and updates.

Just think, conservatives may vote for a presidential candidate that passed the same health care reform as President Obama, but conservatives do not call Romney satan or a socialist. That is probably because modern conservatives are not about doing what is right for America, they are not honest, they are all about demonizing progress for average Americans. Kind of historic, a political movement - conservatism - running against progress and the common good.

Karl Rove's America Hating Neo-Fascist Crossroads GPS Tries To Smear Elizabeth Warren

Karl Rove's America Hating Neo-Fascist Crossroads GPS Tries To Smear Elizabeth Warren

Elizabeth Warren Slams Karl Rove’s Dishonest Attack Ad As ‘Factually Wrong And Morally Wrong’ | Feeling the heat of consumer advocate Elizabeth Warren’s lead over Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA), Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS unleashed an extremely disingenuous political ad that insinuated Warren was responsible for the 2008 bank bailout — a patently absurd claim given that the bailout was a Republican measure and that Warren was later chosen as the head of a panel providing much-needed oversight to the program. In fact, she has been a consistent advocate for greater accountability regarding the bailout funds. Warren blasted Rove for the ad, saying, “I can’t find the right words to describe how wrong that is. Factually wrong and morally wrong.” “Karl rove is not telling the truth,” she added. “I think anyone who is not telling the truth shouldn’t be running ads in this race.”

M's Warren is trying to run an honest campaign based on facts and advocacy for the average American rather than Karl's billionaire elitists who are financing the neo-fascist Crossroads. The only way conservatives know how to campaign is to run anti-American values smear campaigns. Its what they do. They couldn't be elected dog catcher if conservatives were forced to start being truthful.

Musing About Recusing - Why calls for Elena Kagan to recuse herself from the Obamacare case are ridiculous. If anyone should be recusing themselves it should be some of the rabid ideologues on the far Right who are on the court - Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia, both of whom attended a fundraiser for the Federalist Society last Thursday, just hours after wrapping up a conference on the ACA(ObamaCare) litigation.