The Onion Gets it Right on Health Care
The Onion nails it again:
Related: took my son to a dermatologist appointment last week. Insurance was balking, so we thought we’d have to cough up the $930 originally quoted. Turns out the cash price is $150…
Unintended consequences of Obamacare will reverberate through the economy for decades. In an extremely negative way.
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Real Danger of “Obamacare”: Insurance Company Takeover of Health Care
Election rhetoric shuns the big picture in favor of the bigger platitude. Now that The Show is over, we are left with the equivalent of a Sunday morning hangover following a binge of promises and lies. We leave the theatre of political spectacle on steroids for the real world of unstable economy, a globally and publicly subsidized financial sector, and increased costs of living on everything from food to education to health-care; outpacing declining median incomes. The average cost for health insurance for a family is $15,745 per year vs. a median income of $50,502, or about half post-tax take-home pay.
“Obamacare” is the name commonly used for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) of 2010. The very moniker is indicative of how name-and-image-centric our world has become; Medicare was never called “Johnsoncare” when President Johnson signed it into law in 1965 and Johnson was not exactly a man of small-personality. At any rate, Obamacare or the PPACA ranks as one of the most misrepresented issues from the campaign, by both sides of the ever-slimming aisle.
The Tea-Party Conservative types get it embarrassingly wrong when they call it a “government takeover of health care.” Likewise, Progressive Obama-supporters are deluded in accepting it as the most sweeping healthcare reform since Medicare. (Side note: I wish the word ‘sweeping’ could be retired from politics until it actually means -sweeping.)
Here’s why. The PPACA does nothing to restructure the health insurance industry, anymore than the Dodd-Frank Act restructures the banking industry. This means everything else it attempts to do, positive or negative, will be vastly overshadowed by an industry accelerating to morph itself into a acquisition machine in order to circumvent anything that even smells like a restriction, including laws that exist and ones to come.
How? By doing the same thing energy and telecom companies did after they were deregulated in 1996, and that banks did after they were summarily deregulated (after moving that way for decades) in 1999. They are merging, consolidating, eliminating competitors, and controlling their domain. They are manufacturing power.
Investment bankers are roaming the world to exploit this hot new opportunity. That’s one reason insurance companies don’t even call themselves that anymore. Now, they are ‘managed health care’ companies. Call yourself a managed health care company, and you can buy everything from other insurance companies to hospitals to clinics to doctors. The more consolidation, the more fees bankers rake in, and the more premiums and medical reimbursements and health care procedures, each company can control.
http://nomiprins.squarespace.com/thoughts/2012/11/10/real-danger-of-obamacare-insurance-company-takeover-of-healt.html
Colbert Super PAC SHH! – Secret Second 501c4 – Trevor Potter
Stephen learns how to give Colbert Super PAC money to himself and thereby hide it forever from all eyes and use it in a way that he wishes.
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/421160/november-12-2012/colbert-super-pac-shh—-secret-second-501c4—trevor-potter
unbelievable
“There is no freedom without justice.” Simon Wiesenthal
13 November 2012
Bart Chilton On Silver Manipulation – Gold and Silver Coiling For a Major Move – The Next Disaster
In discussing the government’s lack of reaction in reforming the high frequency trading developments in the market, the CFTC’s Bart Chilton remarks in the video below about the unfortunate tendency of regulators not to act until something unfortunate happens as being a:
“…tombstone mentality, when you wait for a disaster before you put something in place.”
The CFTC is hampered and opposed at every step of the way by the financial powers and their exchanges, who unfortunately wield a powerful and well-funded lobbying effort that tends to lead the political element in Washington by the nose, or their wallets as you prefer.
I have come to believe that the US government will do nothing effective to reform the gold and silver markets and the equity exchanges until there is a MAJOR dislocation in the markets, and a virtual ‘run on the exchange.’
Change will come after the US financial system is threatened by a major solvency or liquidity event.
Whether it comes from a failure to deliver in gold and silver markets that exposes them as a highly artificial and overleveraged house of cards, or another ‘flash crash’ that brings down a major exchange or trading house through counter party failures, I now believe that this is what it will take to bring meaningful reform to this highly unstable financial system.
Change will be not voluntary with these greedy, self-destructive jackals, especially after the moral hazard that was introduced by the unfortunate policy of no-strings bailouts from the last financial crisis. That was a policy error of the first order.
Reform will be accomplished, but only under the duress of the next financial disaster.
http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/2012/11/bart-chilton-on-silver-manipulation.html