Your Health Care Changes

"Barring a transformational event, voters will pull the lever against Obamacare in 2014," argues former NY Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey.  By then:

• 20- and 30-somethings will be clobbered with 100% or higher premium hikes;
• retail, hospitality and home care workers will lose on-the-job coverage, and in some cases their full time status (since employers with 50 or more "full-time" workers will be forced to pay substantially greater health insurance-related fees and costs);
• seniors needing hospital care will be shocked at cutbacks (Obamacare awards bonus points to hospitals that spend the least per senior); and
• hospital patients of all ages will wait longer for nurses (because hospitals will likely shed workers to accommodate an overall $247 billion in insurance payment cuts).

McCaughey has a warning for those who are forced into state exchange insurance plans:

Consumers directed to a state exchange will worry about handing their Social Security number and 15 pages of financial and family information to exchange “assisters,” temporary workers often from community organizations. Civil rights activists in California are resisting background checks for “assisters” because it would disqualify too many minority men with prior convictions.

The good news, as McCaughey sees it, is twofold.  "It’s a lot easier to take away an entitlement no one is accustomed to," and eliminating the Obamacare monstrosity will "reduce federal spending by $1.6 trillion through 2020."

Poll: Likely Voters Side with Republicans on Budget Proposal...

...but they don't seem to know it. In a blind test absent party affiliation, The Hill poll asked likely voters which of two budget plans they preferred:

• Plan 1 - $1 trillion in tax hikes, $100 billion in cuts, no budget balance [i.e., Senate Democrats]; or
• Plan 2 - no new taxes, $5 trillion in cuts, and budget balance [i.e., House Republicans].

Here are the results:

Poll question 2 reinforces the results of question 1:



Although a substantial majority side with the GOP plan, respondents say they trust the Democrats more on budgetary issues:

 

Questions 4 and 5:

A New Wave of Happy Housewives

"For the first time since the downturn of 2008, the percentage of stay-at-home mothers rose between 2010 and 2011, and some of the biggest increases have been among younger mothers, aged 25 to 35," writes the Daily Mail in Rise of the Happy Housewife.

One year ago, Kelly Makino, 33, quit her job running a program for at-risk children to stay home full time, because, she says, women are better at that job than men.

The mother-of-two and self-described 'flaming liberal' and feminist, told New York magazine: 'The feminist revolution started in the workplace, and now it’s happening at home.'

Mrs Makino, who has a Masters of Social Work from the University of Pennsylvania, and struggled to balance long hours with caring for her children 'properly,' said that no amount of professional success could compare to her happiness knowing her two children, Connor, five, and Lillie, four, were being looked after by her - not a nanny.

Her sacrifice of a salary pays her family back in ways Mrs Makino believes are priceless, and she is not alone. A new breed of young, educated, and married mothers are finding themselves untouched by the notion of 'having it all.'

A Freedom-Based Environmental Plan

Our environmental policies are increasingly more costly and less effective, and they are jeopardizing both the environment and liberty while enlarging distant bureaucracies. There is a better way, argues Becky Norton Dunlop, co-author of the American Conservation Ethic, a work that has since been incorporated in Heritage Foundation's Environmental Conservation: Eight Principles of the American Conservation Ethic. Dunlop discussed the eight guiding principles that should drive environmental policy in the U.S. at a recent Conservative Women's Network gathering.

Principle 1: People Are the Most Important, Unique, and Precious Resource. Human well-being, which incorporates such measures as health and safety, is the foremost measure of the quality of the envirnoment. A policy cannot be good for the environment if it is bad for people.

Competing Budgets: House, Senate, White House

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), chairman of the House Budget Committee, released his proposed budget this week. In addition to no new tax hikes, key features include:

• comprehensive tax reform that would close loopholes and consolidate income tax rates into two brackets: 10% and 25%;
• energy reform that would approve the Keystone Pipeline, open federal land to natural gas development (a supply equal to 90 years of America's needs), create thousands of jobs, deliver millions of new dollars to government treasuries, and put the U.S. on path to full energy independence;
• health care reform that includes repealing Obamacare and strengthening Medicare;
• welfare reform that incentivizes states to help people off welfare rolls and on to payrolls; limiting federal government spending increases to 3.4% per year rather than 5%; and
• a balanced federal budget by 2023.

In contrast, reports the Hill, "the first budget from Senate Democrats in four years includes nearly $1 trillion in new taxes but would not balance the budget." 

The president's budget, now two months behind schedule, is due out in April.

CATO's Dan Mitchell writes that, although it isn't a libertarian budget, the "Ryan Budget does satisfy the Golden Rule of fiscal policy."

As you can see in the chart, federal spending grows by an average of 3.4 percent annually, and that modest bit of fiscal discipline is enough to reduce the burden of government spending to 19.1 percent of economic output by 2023.

It’s also good news that the Ryan Budget calls for structural reform of entitlement programs, including Medicaid block grants and Medicare premium support. The budget also assumes the repeal of the costly Obamacare program.

And there’s also some good tax policy. Not bold tax reform like a flat tax, but top tax rates would be reduced to 25 percent and many forms of double taxation, like the death tax and capital gains tax, presumably would be reduced or eliminated.

Per Mitchell, "the Ryan Budget is a step in the right direction, but much more will be needed to restore limited, constitutional government."

Obamacare's War on Women

"An unintended consequence of the abomination that is called ObamaCare is the dropping of wives from husbands' employer-provided health care insurance," write editors at Investor's Business Daily. "It is a de facto war on women."

Mandating coverage for children up to age 26 is costly, so savings have to be found elsewhere. One of the ways employers can save is by dropping spouses from health insurance offerings, and the spouses that get dropped tend to be women, according to health care experts.

That's if the employer continues the health insurance coverage at all:

Many employees will lose their coverage when employers figure out that it's more cost-effective for them to stop insuring their workers and just let them fall into the exchanges.

How many? More than a few. The business journal McKinsey Quarterly surveyed 1,300 employers and found that "Overall, 30% of employers will definitely or probably stop offering ESI (Employer Sponsored Insurance) in the years after 2014."

But it's likely that a larger portion will actually make that choice as companies learn more about ObamaCare.

"Among employers with a high awareness of reform, this proportion increases to more than 50%, and upward of 60% will pursue some alternative to traditional ESI," the McKinsey Quarterly says.

Not all spouses will be jettisoned from employer coverage due to the dependent coverage mandate. Some companies will simply require their employees to pay a spousal surcharge rather than drop them from the insurance rolls. Expect those surcharges to be $500 to $1,000 a year, says Forbes.

Sure, the spouses will be able to keep their plans. But the higher-cost insurance will be a much worse deal than in the days before ObamaCare.

AP: ObamaCare Application as Easy as Tax Returns

From the Associated Press:

Applying for benefits under President Barack Obama's health care overhaul could be as daunting as doing your taxes.

The government's draft application is now on the Internet. It runs 15 pages for a three-person family. The online version has 21 steps, some with added questions. At least three major federal agencies, including the IRS, will scrutinize your application.

That's just the first part of the process, which lets you know if you qualify for financial help. You'd still have to pick a health plan. Some fear that consumers will be overwhelmed and give up. Administration officials say the application form is being refined.

Still, the idea that picking a health insurance plan could be as simple as shopping on the Internet is starting to look like wishful thinking.

Poll Worker, Professor Caught in Voter Fraud

Obama supporter Melowese Richardson, a 58-year-old veteran Cincinnati poll worker, was indicted on March 11, 2013, on eight counts of voter fraud. She voted twice for herself (once by absentee ballot, and once in person) in the November 2012 election, and voted  "in the name of five other people in various elections," according to Hamilton County prosecutors. If convicted, she could get up to 12 years in prison.

Prosecutors also reported that 54-year-old nun and college professor, Sister Marguerite Kloos, has pled guilty to one count of illegal voting for a deceased fellow nun.

Sister Marguerite Kloos also faces one count of illegal voting, for allegedly submitting an absentee ballot in the name of a fellow nun, Sister Rose Marie Hewitt, who had died before absentee ballots were sent out. She is accused of opening Sister Hewitt’s ballot, forging her signature and mailing it to the Board of Elections as a vote.

The 54-year-old Kloos has resigned as the dean of the Division of Arts and Humanities at the College of Mount St. Joseph in Cincinnati, where she still serves as an associate professor of religious and pastoral studies.

Investigations continue on other cases of possible voter fraud.

Electric Cars Not So Green After All

Good luck taking a long road trip in an electric car. A British test drive of the Nissan Leaf found that "recharging takes so long that the average speed is close to 6 mph — a bit faster than your average jogger," writes Bjorn Lomborg in the Wall Street Journal. Worse, the electric car is anything but a zero carbon emissions vehicle. "When an electric car rolls off the production line, it has already been responsible for 30,000 pounds of carbon-dioxide emission" — the equivalent of 80,000 miles of travel in the vehicle."

If a typical electric car is driven 50,000 miles over its lifetime, the huge initial emissions from its manufacture means the car will actually have put more carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere than a similar-size gasoline-powered car driven the same number of miles. Similarly, if the energy used to recharge the electric car comes mostly from coal-fired power plants, it will be responsible for the emission of almost 15 ounces of carbon-dioxide for every one of the 50,000 miles it is driven—three ounces more than a similar gas-powered car.

Even if the electric car is driven for 90,000 miles and the owner stays away from coal-powered electricity, the car will cause just 24% less carbon-dioxide emission than its gas-powered cousin. This is a far cry from "zero emissions."

Full article: Green Cars Have a Dirty Little Secret