Obamacare Will Bring Britain's Health-Care Problems To U.S.

For years I have been writing about the failures of the United Kingdom’s National Health Service as a warning for what the Affordable Care Act will do to health care here in the U.S.

London’s Daily Mail has chronicled the problems with the NHS, which include declining quality of care and availability of services coupled with increased costs. This is what is in store for us, if Congress does not repeal Obamacare.

According to the Daily Mail, “NHS hospitals are recruiting Spanish and Portuguese nurses in record numbers while British applicants are being refused because places on training courses have been slashed to cut costs.” More than 5,000 student nurse places, it writes, “have been axed since the General Election.” The reason? Foreign nurses cost less. Incredibly, they won’t be checked to see if they can speak English. The potential for confusion over medication and treatment because of language differences could be significant.

Another Daily Mail story is about Stewart Fleming, a man with severe stomach pains who waited six hours in a hospital cubicle because, said Andrew Horne, chief executive of Medway NHS Foundation Trust, “that evening was very busy; the hospital was full.” The 37-year-old father of two died.

The Daily Mirror reports that at Stafford Hospital in Staffordshire, 1,200 patients died over a four-year period. No one has been held accountable, but the person in charge of the health authority for part of that time, Sir David Nicholson, was promoted and for two years headed the entire NHS at a substantially higher salary.

In a cruel irony, Donald Berwick, the former U.S. Medicare administrator, who has said, “The decision is not whether or not we will ration care — the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open,” now heads a committee tasked with preventing the NHS from causing harm to patients. That’s easy: get rid of the NHS.

A 2010 column by the Daily Telegraph’s Janet Daley ran with the headline, “Copying the NHS is the last thing the U.S. should do.” She called instead for a “combination of state provision and private contribution” for health care.

The NHS should have been a lesson for the United States. After promising that Obamacare would not raise insurance costs, we are now seeing the reality. Daniel P. Kessler, a Stanford University professor of law and business, recently noted in The Wall Street Journal, “Despite what you read, premiums in Oregon and California are going up, especially for the young.” Other states, should they participate (and many say they won’t ) will inevitably have the same experience.

The Internal Revenue Service, which will enforce Obamacare’s individual and employer mandates, announced in February, according to CNSNews.com, that the “cheapest health-insurance plan available in 2016 for a family will cost $20,000.”

CNBC, citing a survey released by InsuranceQuotes.com, a company that allows people to compare insurance rates, recently reported that 64 percent of uninsured adults say they haven’t decided if they will buy insurance by the Jan. 1, 2014, deadline.

What happens here if people begin to experience long waits for treatment, higher costs, fewer doctors and nurses whose English is poor? Will they rebel or passively accept an unworkable system?

Two friends who live in a retirement community in Washington recently told me of a change in their nursing staff. The majority are now from West Africa. This change, they say, has made many residents uncomfortable and uncertain whether the nurses are competent enough to provide the quality of care they have come to expect.

During the Depression and the rise of fascism in Europe, Sinclair Lewis wrote the novel It Can’t Happen Here. It was his warning about how fragile democracy is and how easily it can be replaced by dictatorship. Obamacare has the potential for becoming a type of dictatorship.

The negative consequences from the NHS can happen here, and they are on the way, unless Republicans win enough congressional seats next year and then vote to replace Obamacare.

Cal Thomas writes for Tribune Media Services.

tmseditors@tribune.com

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Mike Lee’s speech: Bring back Judge Napolitano’s 'Freedom Watch'

Utah Sen. Mike Lee, like Kentucky’s Rand Paul and Texas’s Ted Cruz have added much to the discussion this past semester, but I would like to suggest they misunderstand their forum. As a business model, the Senate today should be looked at as a pirate ship where full and honest discussion is considered seditious and principled management models are eyed suspiciously as cloaking dissent.

In a speech to the Heritage Foundation on Monday, Lee said: “The single most important policy would be federalism,” which means making “as many decisions at the most local level as possible.”

This does indeed get to the crux of the matter, but you cannot get there from here. A hundred years of centralization cannot disappear overnight; it goes back further, to Jay’s Treaty in 1794 when Washington cast his lot with Alexander Hamilton and the New Yorkers in opposition to Jefferson, Madison, the South and western regions. The die was cast. But the end game of centralization came in 1913 with passage of the difficult-to-explain 17th Amendment, which fatally shifted focus from states to Wall Street in the election of senators. 

But this needs more discussion, more explanation, and I have heard Lee explain it perfectly on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s groundbreaking TV show “Freedom Watch,” which rose in a creative arc with the Pauls, Lee and Sarah Palin, and was suddenly pulled by its network a year before last President’s Day.

We need it back.

But the pull of empire is deeply embedded in American minds and hearts and has been here since the first moments. Possibly this jewel from The Life and Death of Sam Crow tells why: “Einstein said that any intelligent fool can make something bigger and more complex. But it takes a touch of genius and a lot of courage to make something in the opposite direction.”

Perhaps there needs to be a different place for discussion outside of Washington and New York; something more central to America today as Washington was central to the colonies. Possibly Richard Nixon’s idea of a regional matrix for states should be reconsidered, an idea that did not fit the times or the contours of culture back then. The great ambassador George Kennan has advanced a similar suggestion with a model more suited to the fully developed regional cultures of America today.

But “getting big” is not necessarily in our DNA. It is in the model of the post-WWII power arc. Possibly senators cannot solve this, and it must be the work of governors. There needs to be a counterweight to the 17th amendment if states are to countervail the pull of Washington and New York. 

Virginia Del. Jim Lemunyon suggested a few years back a Constitutional Convention. And it may take that, but it is really the red states, the heartland states, that are left behind by the centralization of power. It is they that need to find their own center. Possibly a “super committee of governors” for the time being could meet to discuss — hopefully in some centralized location such as Louisville or Indianapolis — but first of all we need to bring back Judge Nap and “Freedom Watch.”

Because right now we are and have been heading hell-bent in the direction of China, a totalitarian matrix for 5,000 years, many of those centuries a slave state; or ancient Egypt, not a state at all, but a vast and timeless universe in the shifting sands of wandering hordes.

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Trump: 'Is the Boston Killer Eligible for Obama Care to Bring Him Back to Health?'

Donald Trump asked a politically sensitive question Friday after it was announced that the second Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had been captured.

Via Twitter, "Is the Boston killer eligible for Obama Care to bring him back to health?"

Is the Boston killer eligible for Obama Care to bring him back to health?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 20, 2013

In a bit of instant karma, Tsarnaev is currently at Beth Israel Deaconness Medical Center where a dozen of his bombing victims are being treated.

Alas, many of Trump's followers didn't see the humor in this and voiced their displeasure.

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The Justices Are Not Ready To Bring Marriage Equality To Alabama, And They Want Prop 8 To Go Away

WASHINGTON, DC — There are probably five justices who object to California’s anti-gay Proposition 8 and who would prefer to see it struck down. Justice Kennedy, the conservative viewed as most likely to provide the fifth vote for equality, openly pondered whether Prop 8 violates the Constitution’s ban on gender discrimination. Kennedy at one point admitted uncertainty about whether there is sufficient evidence examining the effect of marriage equality on society, but he then pivoted to note that the nearly 40,000 children raised by gay parents in California suffer “immediate legal injury” because of Prop 8. His vote is not entirely clear, but Kennedy leaned significantly in the direction of justice.

A weak performance by Charles Cooper, the lawyer defending discrimination, probably went a long way to push Kennedy into the pro-equality camp. When Justice Sotomayor asked Cooper to identify a single example outside of marriage where discrimination against gay couples could be “rational,” Cooper responded “I cannot,” prompting Sotomayor to note that Cooper had more or less conceded that gay people meet the definition of a class entitled to heightened protection under the Constitution. Under longstanding precedent, a group which has experienced a a “‘history of purposeful unequal treatment‘ or been subjected to unique disabilities on the basis of stereotyped characteristics not truly indicative of their abilities” enjoys enhanced protection under the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause.

Similarly, when Cooper argued that same-sex marriages could somehow undermine opposite-sex marriages, Kagan asked him to explain the “cause and effect” behind this point. When Cooper fumbled the question, Kennedy pounced, asking if Cooper was “conceding the point” that same-sex couples are not a threat to other people’s marriages. Cooper was left to meekly assert that it is “impossible for anyone to foresee the future accurately enough to know exactly what those real-world consequences would be.”

Yet the question of whether California’s same-sex couples enjoy the blessings of liberty was rapidly eclipsed by a different, unspoken question — whether gay couples in Alabama also enjoy those rights. Three justices, Roberts, Scalia and Alito asked hostile questions to the attorneys supporting equality and appear very unlikely to vote against Prop 8. Similarly, while Thomas was characteristically silent, no one expects him to break from his past, anti-equality opinions in gay rights cases. Of the remaining five, at least three spent much of the argument grasping for ways to limit the scope of a decision striking down Prop 8.

Sotomayor, at one point, asked pro-equality attorney Ted Olson whether the Court’s decision could be limited to just California. Kennedy worried about the “uncharted waters” facing the Court if it struck down marriage discrimination nationwide. Justice Ginsburg, who famously accused Roe v. Wade of moving “too far, too fast,” alluded to the fact that racial marriage discrimination ended in two stages — first the Court struck down bans on interracial cohabitation, then it struck down bans on interracial marriage. The clear implication was that the Court could be similarly incremental here.

Yet a means of killing Prop 8 without also ordering Alabama to comply with the Constitution escaped the justices. Kennedy was openly dismissive of the Ninth Circuit’s rationale for limiting its decision striking Prop 8 to California. When Solicitor General Don Verrilli called for the Court to upgrade civil union states into full marriage equality states but leave the Alabama question for another day, most of the bench was skeptical. Ginsburg wondered why only states that have made significant progress towards equality are required to go all in. Kagan questioned how the facts supporting marriage discrimination could be different in another state. When Justice Breyer asked Verrilli which arguments could possibly support marriage equality in California but not Alabama, Verrilli was only able to respond “caution.”

By the end of the argument, a majority of the Court seemed to believe that they shouldn’t even be hearing this case in the first place. At least five justices — Roberts, Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan — at one point asked skeptical questions about whether the Court has jurisdiction to hear this case, a result that would potentially raise difficult legal questions about whether Prop 8 is still the law in California or not. Justice Kennedy repeatedly asked about another possibility — the Court could dismiss the case as “improvidently granted” — essentially reversing the Court’s prior decision to hear the case and leaving the Ninth Circuit’s decision to strike Prop 8 in effect. Sotomayor asked Cooper “[i]f the issue is letting the States experiment and letting the society have more time to figure out its direction, why is taking a case now the answer?”

In other words, the most likely answer to the question of whether Prop 8 is unconstitutional is that the Supreme Court will not answer this question at all. Too many of the five justices who appeared open to marriage equality posed too many questions about whether now is the time to bring equality to the nation as a whole, and they did not appear satisfied with any of the theories offered to limit their decision to just some of the states.

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Guestworkers Who Suffered Horrific Conditions At McDonald’s Bring Grievances To Congress

The group's lodging consisted of cots on the floor of a boiler room

When a group of young Latin American students arrived in the United States to work as guestworkers at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s, they thought they were in for an amazing experience — a chance to see the US up close, and to experience the culture that defines the country. But that’s not what they got at all.

Instead, Jorge Rios of Argentina, Fernando Accosta from Paraguay, Luis Fernando Suarez Mendosa of Peru, and Rodrigo Yanez of Chile say they saw the worst of American culture: The exploitation of low-wage workers with no voice.

At the McDonald’s where they were sent to work, they report that they were shoved into a basement room with six cots, and forced to pay for the inadequate lodging out of their meager wages — made all the more meager by the fact that their boss wouldn’t give them the 40 hours a week promised.

They also say they had to walk a dangerous highway to get to work:

Adding insult to injury, each student had paid $3,000 just to get into the guestworker program.

But now, in coordination with the broader National Guestworkers Alliance, those students and others have filed complaints with the State Department and Department of Labor. McDonald’s says it is investigating the complaints, which are against a single franchise owner and not the company as a whole.

The students also brought their grievances to the apex of the immigration debate, Capitol Hill, on Wednesday. They told their personal testimonies to legislators, trying to convince them that any immigration overhaul must include the language in the guestworker protections.

“When we asked for solutions, the sponsor didn’t solve our problems. When we asked for help, the Department of State didn’t assist us. I feared losing everything I had spent to come here,” said Jorge Rios, who originally contacted the Guestworker Alliance to report the abuses he experienced, “I feared being devoid of the opportunity to travel around the country. I feared suffering the humiliation of being sent back home. I feared being blacklisted and losing the chance to re-enter the US in the future. I was paralyzed by fear.”

Republicans have insisted that if they are going to consider any immigration reform legislation, a guest worker program must be a part of the package. Such programs generally bring in low-wage workers to do jobs Americans won’t, and those workers remain in the country on a J1 visa for some number of months before returning to their country of origin.

But story after story reveals that such programs have become exploitative, and the Southern Poverty Law Center has refered to the work as “close to slavery.” If an expanded guestworker program does become part of the larger immigration reform package, questions about the guestworker program and its treatment of young students are bound to come up.

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Boehner: Pope Francis will bring ‘fresh eyes,’ reform to Vatican

By Molly K. Hooper - 03/17/13 11:50 AM ET

Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), a practicing Catholic, praised the election of Pope Francis and said he was optimistic the new pope would bring reform to the Vatican.

“I do believe that Pope Francis is the right person to really bring reform to the church,” said Boehner on ABC’s “This Week.”

The Speaker said the Vatican is plagued by “a number of issues” that he believes “need fresh eyes.”

“He’s clearly made a commitment to clean up some of the problems that the church has had,” said Boehner of the new pope. “And it's pretty clear-- from his humble nature that-- that his papacy will be one that I think a lot of people will appreciate.”

The Vatican cardinals last week elected Argentinian Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio as the new pope. He took the name of Francis, succeeding Pope Benedict XVI, who formally resigned in February. 

“This is the first time that we've had a pope from the Americas,” Boehner added.  “So, I think it's a giant step forward for the church. Latin America is a very, very Catholic continent.”

Boehner declined an invitation from the White House to join a delegation that will attend the papal installation mass, saying that he would need to stay in Washington to move the House budget and to meet the Irish prime minister, who is arriving this week.

Boehner, though, said he was “grateful for the invitation” from the White House. 

"Unfortunately, my duties in the House next week -- including hosting President Obama and the prime minister of Ireland at the Capitol on Tuesday, and the debate on the budget -- make that impossible," Boehner said last week.

Vice President Joe Biden is leading the delegation to Rome, and will be joined by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

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Missouri Gay Teen Wins Right To Bring Boyfriend To Prom

This spring, a gay Missouri teen who challenged his school’s policy barring same-sex dates will get to bring his boyfriend to the prom.

Stacy Dawson found out he could not bring his boyfriend because of a single line in the school handbook stating, “high school students will be permitted to invite one guest, girls invite boys and boys invite girls.”

“I’m doing this for anyone to bring anyone they want to prom,” Dawson told LGBTQ Nation before the ban was reversed. “I hope that my school and the school board members understand it’s a wrong policy. [...] It isn’t fair that a school can randomly disregard students’ rights because it doesn’t agree with who you want to take to prom.”

Just one day after the Southern Poverty Law Center threatened a lawsuit on Dawson’s behalf, the school quickly removed its ban.

SPLC’s letter to Scott County Central High makes the strong case for the ban was unconstitutional. The letter cites Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, where the Supreme Court determined students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gates.” And a second federal case in Mississippi, McMillen v. Itawamba County School District, decided a student expressing “her identity through attending prom with a same-sex date” was “the type of speech that falls squarely within the purview of the First Amendment.”

However, the fight against same-sex discrimination at proms carries on elsewhere, as an anti-gay Indiana group faces major backlash for proposing a gay-free prom.

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Sorry, New Orleans: The Super Bowl Won’t Bring A Major Boost To Your Economy

New Orleans is gearing up to host Super Bowl XLVII, the National Football League’s annual championship that will pit the Baltimore Ravens against the San Francisco 49ers on Sunday, February 3. The city and its businesses are predicting an economic boom that will result in the ultimate comeback for a city that was decimated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Officials expect 150,000 people to descend on the city for the Super Bowl, and economic impact studies estimate that the game will bring $434 million to the city’s economy. Hosting three mega sporting events — the 2012 NCAA men’s Final Four and this year’s Super Bowl and women’s Final Four — will boost the city’s economy by more than $1 billion, according to an estimate from the International Business Times. And business leaders and lawmakers think the media exposure involved with hosting the big game will push the boom to immeasurable levels.

Those estimates, though, are likely fool’s gold, according to an assortment of academic research into the actual economic impact of Super Bowls and other major sporting events. When professors Victor Matheson and Robert Baade studied the economic impact of Super Bowls from 1973 to 1997, they found that the games boosted city economies by about $30 million, “roughly one-tenth the figures touted by the NFL” and an even smaller fraction of what New Orleans officials predict. A later Baade and Matheson study found that the economic impact of a Super Bowl is “on average one-quarter or less the magnitude of the most recent NFL estimates.”

Similarly, a 1999 paper from professor Philip Porter found that the Super Bowl had virtually no effect on a city’s economy. Research on other events New Orleans has hosted, including the men’s Final Four, is similar. When Baade and Matheson studied Final Fours, they found that the events tend “not to translate into any measurable benefits to the host cities.”

There are multiple reasons the estimates are often overstated. Impact estimates usually take into account how much money will be spent in the city during an event like the Super Bowl without examining how much potential spending will be lost because people don’t visit or leave the city to avoid the crowd — that is, the impact studies account for gross spending, but not net spending. And the estimates rarely include the additional cost of putting on the event, further distorting the disparity between gross and net spending figures.

Another factor is the possibility of leakages, whereby money spent doesn’t remain in the local economy. Much of the spent money will be at hotels, which often raise prices three-fold for events like the Super Bowl. But as Matheson notes in one study, those price increases don’t translate into three-fold increases for hotel employees, so much of the increased spending never makes it back into the local economy. And many Super Bowl services are outsourced to outside contractors, who don’t return all of their earnings back to the local economy either.

But even if the Super Bowl creates activity to match the most generous estimates, that wouldn’t be nearly as big a deal as it seems. Total economic activity for the New Orleans metro area totaled $80.3 billion in 2011, meaning a $434 million boost would amount to about 0.5 percent of the city’s yearly economic activity.

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Bring Back Mark Davis!

It’s time to stand up for a friend.

For 18 years, Mark Davis has been a talk radio staple in North Texas. Over the last several, he has regularly filled in for Rush Limbaugh and had an ever-widening influence over the conservative movement. Through it all, he has been a faithful friend to conservatives, effectively articulated what we stand for and championed the TEA Party movement from day 1.

As of this week, Mark is off the air at WBAP. Cumulus bought the station and the parties were unable to reach an agreement on a new contract. While most of his listening audience assumes that he’s on vacation (since no formal announcement was made), Mark is left hanging in the wind.

Cumulus has a reputation in the talk-radio community for being cheap when it comes to salaries and they are trying to gut Mark’s now that they own the station. It also appears that station owners think that Americans are tiring of conservative talk radio and specifically of the style that Mark delivers.

I’ve been a loyal listener of Mark’s show for the majority of my life and have kept my dial tuned to WBAP in large part because of his influence. Even when we disagree on issues or candidates, Mark has always been kind, articulate and principled. He’s exactly the kind of man we need on the air, reinforcing conservatives and spreading our message.

Mark has been standing with us for 18 years and it’s time that we stand up and let his station owners know that we want Mark back on the air. I hope that you will sign our petition to get Mark back on the radio at WBAP!

We will be sharing your comments online and forwarding them to the station owners. With your help, I hope we can communicate an idea of the influence that Mark has had over the conservative movement and how badly we want him back on the air.

Visit TXAction.com to sign the petition and you can share our “Bring Back Mark” graphic on Facebook through our page.

Make no mistake, this is an attack on conservative talk radio as a whole. Today it’s Mark Davis. Who knows who it’ll be tomorrow. We need to make a concerted effort to fight for those who so eloquently champion our cause.

Whether you’re in Texas or not, it’s time that we stand up for one of our own!

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It Was Inevitable. Now Bring on President Both Ways

Believe it or not, I’ve only been up for about thirty minutes. I’m under the weather today.

I would still be asleep except my CNN Alerts on my iPad went nuts. Turns out Rick Santorum is out of the race.

It was inevitable.

Mitt Romney’s campaign has used a money advantage to shut out the competition. As I said when he won Ohio, Romney will be the nominee.

The way forward for Romney depends on the economy. For the longest time I did not think he had much of a shot against the President, but as I’ve said several times recently, the economy seems to be struggling, which gives Romney an opening.

Between a struggling economy and a President who wants to have it both ways in rhetoric and in practice wants to side with those hostile to the idea of American exceptionalism, Romney has an opening if he’ll aggressively take it.

If I may be so bold, I think the greatest thing Karl Rove or Reince Priebus or Mitt Romney or any outside group could do right now is introduce the American Public to what I’ve started doing on my radio show: recounting the amazing adventures of President Both Ways.

As Rory Cooper noted on Twitter, on August 26, 2011, President Both Ways claimed the Buffett Rule would “stabilize our debt and deficits for the next decade.”

And now? President Both Ways claims, “No one ever suggested that implementing Buffett Rule would contribute in large measure to reducing the deficit.”

President Both Ways strikes again.

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Bring Back Mark Davis!

It’s time to stand up for a friend.

For 18 years, Mark Davis has been a talk radio staple in North Texas. Over the last several, he has regularly filled in for Rush Limbaugh and had an ever-widening influence over the conservative movement. Through it all, he has been a faithful friend to conservatives, effectively articulated what we stand for and championed the TEA Party movement from day 1.

As of this week, Mark is off the air at WBAP. Cumulus bought the station and the parties were unable to reach an agreement on a new contract. While most of his listening audience assumes that he’s on vacation (since no formal announcement was made), Mark is left hanging in the wind.

Cumulus has a reputation in the talk-radio community for being cheap when it comes to salaries and they are trying to gut Mark’s now that they own the station. It also appears that station owners think that Americans are tiring of conservative talk radio and specifically of the style that Mark delivers.

I’ve been a loyal listener of Mark’s show for the majority of my life and have kept my dial tuned to WBAP in large part because of his influence. Even when we disagree on issues or candidates, Mark has always been kind, articulate and principled. He’s exactly the kind of man we need on the air, reinforcing conservatives and spreading our message.

Mark has been standing with us for 18 years and it’s time that we stand up and let his station owners know that we want Mark back on the air. I hope that you will sign our petition to get Mark back on the radio at WBAP!

We will be sharing your comments online and forwarding them to the station owners. With your help, I hope we can communicate an idea of the influence that Mark has had over the conservative movement and how badly we want him back on the air.

Visit TXAction.com to sign the petition and you can share our “Bring Back Mark” graphic on Facebook through our page.

Make no mistake, this is an attack on conservative talk radio as a whole. Today it’s Mark Davis. Who knows who it’ll be tomorrow. We need to make a concerted effort to fight for those who so eloquently champion our cause.

Whether you’re in Texas or not, it’s time that we stand up for one of our own!

View the original article here