Obamacare Insurer: Must Break Americans' 'Choice Habit'

From Philip Klein:

In a line that says a lot about where health care is heading under Obamacare, an insurance executive offering plans through the law was quoted in the New York Times on Tuesday as saying, “We have to break people away from the choice habit that everyone has.”

Marcus Merz, the chief executive of PreferredOne, made the remark in an article describing the trend toward narrow networks in health care plans. The article notes, "In the midst of all the turmoil in health care these days, one thing is becoming clear: No matter what kind of health plan consumers choose, they will find fewer doctors and hospitals in their network — or pay much more for the privilege of going to any provider they want."

Read more:
Obamacare Insurer Says Americans Have to Break the 'Choice Habit' (Washington Examiner)

See also:
Obamacare Insurers: "We Have to Break People Away from the Choice Habit" (Veronique de Rugy, NRO)

CyberTheft - the new Weapon

U.S. corporations have the "most valuable intellectual property anywhere in the world," and its being "systematically stolen" by cyber attacks. Worse, U.S. intelligence agencies are withholding information that could help corporations fend off cyber-thefts, reports Kelly Riddell in the Washington Times.

The Heartbleed bug is one example:

The government’s lack of information-sharing with companies was spotlighted last month in a report about the Heartbleed bug, a security flaw that allowed hackers to steal computer users’ passwords and other data.

The National Security Agency had known about Heartbleed for two years before private researchers discovered and repaired it in April, Bloomberg News reported. The NSA used the flaw to exploit computer networks and gain intelligence at the expense of businesses, Bloomberg reported.

Reports about Heartbleed compelled thousands of computer users to change their passwords, the Canadian government to suspend electronic tax filings, and computer companies such as Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks to provide patches to repair their systems. 

Shawn Henry, the former FBI official who is now president of the cyber-security firm CrowdStrike Services, pointed to December's attack on Target stores as another example of cyber-thefts that often end by 'blaming the victims'.

House and Senate members questioned top managers of Target in hearings this year after the retailer disclosed that it had experienced one of the largest breaches in U.S. history. Hackers broke into its payment systems around Christmas and compromised 40 million customers’ credit and debt card data. Target CEO Gregg Steinhafel resigned last week partly because of fallout from the breach.

Mr. Henry said “blame the victim” attitudes must change if the public and private sectors are to work together on cybersecurity. Many companies are on the front lines of attacks from Russia, China and Iran, which have more technical savvy and finances than the businesses they target, he said.

“Can you imagine if all the houses in the neighborhood were being broken into every single day by a gang that were stealing people’s televisions, raping their family members, and the mayor of the city stood up and said, ‘You haven’t done enough to protect your house. You didn’t have the right alarms on your house, you didn’t have the right locks; therefore, we’re holding you accountable?’” said Mr. Henry. “Can you imagine? That would never happen. The citizens of that community would stand up and say, ‘What are you doing? Where is your chief of police? Why aren’t you arresting people?’

“In cyber, we just say the victims didn’t do enough to protect themselves,” he said.

What an Electromagnetic Pulse Attack Would Do to US

"Expert testimony before Congress on Thursday warned that an electromagnetic pulse attack on our power grid and electronic infrastructure could leave most Americans dead and the U.S. in another century," write Investor's Business Daily editors. "That dire warning came from Peter Vincent Pry, a member of the Congressional EMP Commission and executive director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security."

As the Heritage Foundation has reported, an EMP attack with a warhead detonated 25 to 300 miles above the U.S. mainland "would fundamentally change the world:"

"Airplanes would fall from the sky; most cars would be inoperable; electrical devices would fail. Water, sewer and electrical networks would fail simultaneously. Systems of banking, energy, transportation, food production and delivery, water, emergency services and even cyberspace would collapse."

Not many are killed or harmed by the blast itself, but as the EMP pulse spreads across America, life changes in an instant, coming to a screeching halt as a country dependent on cutting-edge 21st century technology regresses at least a century in time instantaneously.

The potential to throw the US back into a horse-and-buggy age makes the nuclear and intercontinental ballistic missile capabilities of Iran and North Korea a "real threat and not the stuff of science fiction."

Wanted: A Devil's Advocate on Climate

In an editorial, the Boston Herald argues that the U.S. needs "a devil's advocate ... independent of the army of [climate] alarmists who have built careers on dubious dogma."

The Obama administration is trying to scare us with totally unverifiable projections of a disastrous global warming. We trust that most people are not going to fall for this outrageous scare-mongering.

The ballyhooed third National Climate Assessment, released last Wednesday by several agencies, alleges first, the world has warmed over the last century and second, it’s going to get much worse.

This is supposed to convince us of the wisdom of President Obama’s plans to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, the chief gas said to be warming the planet.

It has indeed warmed slightly (by at most 1.9 degrees Fahrenheit) over the past 100 years. Saying so ignores an unexplained cooling from about 1940 into the 1970s. It warmed from the 1970s to 1998; there has been no warming since even as carbon dioxide concentrations rose.

Predictions of floods here and heat waves there and falling sky somewhere else are produced by already failed computer models. None can reproduce changes in temperature observed in the past. Relying on such failed prophets is folly. ...

The country needs a devil’s advocate, with adequate funds for research independent of the army of alarmists who have built careers on dubious dogma.

What Socialist Economic Policies Have Done for Cuba

"Socialism is, by a very wide margin, the worst disaster in the history of the human race," writes John Hinderaker."Nothing else comes close. It always fails, and it always brings death-dealing totalitarianism in its wake. Socialism is, in essence, rule by a criminal gang. It generally works for members of the gang, but it never works for anyone else."

In City Journal, Michael Totten reports on his visit to “The Last Communist City,” Havana. Cuba has the fascination of a train wreck. Among the country’s most striking features is its rigid caste system. Members of the ruling elite–the criminal gang, i.e. the Communist Party–live in a semi-capitalist bubble and are able to enjoy not just power, but relatively luxurious living conditions. Everyone else bears the full brunt of socialism, and is mired in want and misery:

"Outside its small tourist sector, the rest of [Havana] looks as though it suffered a catastrophe on the scale of Hurricane Katrina or the Indonesian tsunami. Roofs have collapsed. Walls are splitting apart. Window glass is missing. Paint has long vanished. It’s eerily dark at night, almost entirely free of automobile traffic. I walked for miles through an enormous swath of destruction without seeing a single tourist. Most foreigners don’t know that this other Havana exists, though it makes up most of the city—tourist buses avoid it, as do taxis arriving from the airport. It is filled with people struggling to eke out a life in the ruins. …"

In Cuba, they don’t have a minimum wage: they have a maximum wage. The stupidity of their economic model can hardly be imagined:

"In the United States, we have a minimum wage; Cuba has a maximum wage—$20 a month for almost every job in the country. (Professionals such as doctors and lawyers can make a whopping $10 extra a month.) Even employees inside the quasi-capitalist bubble don’t get paid more. ..."

Read Hinderaker's post, When Will They Ever Learn?, for the rest of the story on what socialist economic policies have done to a once thriving island nation and its people.

IRS Abuse Directed By Washington After All

"New documents obtained by Judicial Watch demonstrate conclusively that the IRS policy of targeting tea party and conservative groups came directly from Washington D.C., not a rogue office in Cincinnati," writes Paul Mirengoff at powerlineblog.com. "They also show that Sen. Carl Levin was working with the IRS to make sure tea party and conservative groups were targeted for harassment."

As to the first point, a July 2012 email from IRS Attorney Steven Grodnitzky confirms that tea party group applications for exempt status were being handled in Washington. Grodnitzky wrote:

[We are] working the Tea party applications in coordination with Cincy. We are developing a few applications here in DC and providing copies of our development letters with the agent to use as examples in the development of their cases.

Chip Hull [another lawyer in IRS headquarters] is working these cases. . .and working with the agent in Cincy, so any communication should include him as well. Because the Tea party applications are the subject of an SCR [Sensitive Case Report], we cannot resolve any of the cases without coordinating with Rob.

“Rob” is believed to be Rob Choi, then-Director of Rulings and Agreements in IRS’s Washington, DC, headquarters.

On Fox New's Special Report, Charles Krauthammer said the emails reveal "a major abuse of power" and "gives lie to the Administration claim that it had nothing to do with the election, nothing to do with targeting the opponents of the Administration."



For a timeline of key dates and revelations on the IRS scandal, see Pepperdine law professor Paul L. Caron's article in USA Today.

See also: 
NEW: IRS office in D.C. Heavily Involved in Tea Party Assault (Washington Times)
Documents Reveal Lies on IRS Scandal (American Thinker)

Timothy Geithner's Gamble with American Debt

Former Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner—"the man most responsible for the federal bailouts of 2008"—admits that he didn't see the mortgage crisis coming and didn't grasp the severity of the problems after it occurred," writes WSJournal editor James Freeman in a review of Geithner's book, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises.

One of the themes in "Stress Test" is Mr. Geithner's difficulty in understanding the health of large financial firms. He admits that he didn't see the mortgage crisis coming and didn't grasp the severity of the problems after it appeared. He didn't require that the banks he was overseeing raise more capital because his staff's analysis couldn't foresee a downturn as bad as the one that occurred.

None of this is particularly surprising in a man who, at the time he became president of the New York Fed, had never worked in finance or in any type of business—unless one counts a short stint in Henry Kissinger's consulting shop. At Dartmouth, Mr. Geithner "took just one economics class and found it especially dreary." After three years at Kissinger Associates, he spent 13 years at the Treasury Department, becoming close to both Robert Rubin and Larry Summers, and then worked at the government-supported International Monetary Fund. Messrs. Rubin and Summers recommended him to run the New York Fed. "I felt intimidated by how much I had to learn," he writes of taking up the job in 2003.

Freeman argues that we can't know if Geithner's actions—putting American taxpayers on the hook for private company financial failures—were better or worse than the alternative.

What we do know is that, six years later, the economy is suffering through a historically weak recovery and the emergency programs haven't ended. The Federal Reserve is still providing easy credit for banks and for the U.S. government, which has racked up more than $8 trillion in additional debt since the end of 2007.