Showing posts with label employment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label employment. Show all posts

ObamaCare: best of intentions, awful law, let's make that awfully clear

Patience is a virtue. For government, patients would be a gold mine. 




Via someone I follow on Twitter (and stupidly forgot who it was), I found this essential guide to the health care law.


(Revised Sep 26, 2013) What else do you need to know but how many initial claims about ObamaCare have been proven WRONG? With the best of intentions (or not, if you're totally skeptical about them), Democrats took a terrible approach to reform the United States' health system, in the Affordable Care Act, aka ObamaCare. Intentions aren't worth a damn if you ignore everyone affected by a law. The supporters of ACA all but ignored whole groups of people affected by the law, including: independent professionals, medical professionals and other small business owners, and many employees. It's one thing to try and help the needy, or to try and give the poor better health care, but it's another to spit in the face of those who would, effectively, pay for it. It is not good to effectively hurt employees through the resulting cuts in hours. ACA, like other government medical reimbursement plans, ignores the legitimate work of medical professionals, who will do the services, as they would get bargain basement returns from government plans that appear to be not at all interested in reasonable compensation for services rendered. 

ObamaCare is not a bible for a health care cure, it is a bible for centralized medical decision-making, whether by intent or not. Solzhenitsyn wrote of the failures of large-scale centralized health care in the former superpower, the Soviet Union, and while ACA is only a step in the same direction, Obama is on record as supporting a "one-payer" health care system (which means government health care for all). 

The U.S. government started out in the spirit of doing exactly the opposite of what ObamaCare wants. The American Experiment is going in reverse, thanks to ObamaCare (it is in addition to the impacts of Homeland Security measures and other big government expansions of recent years). 

The Democrats appear to have been quite wrong about ObamaCare. Or, cynically, they were intentionally misleading us about what was in it. Yet they are still convinced, or at least trying to convince us, that this gigantic addition to the cost of government and health care is a good thing for the country. How? I don't know. I can't see anything that's good about it any longer. The good intention to fix the system no longer exists in the enforcement. It is not fixing the system, it is making it worse, it seems to me. 

I applauded Obama for bringing health reform to the forefront of national discussion in 2008-09. To broach the subject was laudable, but it was only a start. Yes, the intent to fix health care was noble. But the approach? It was not just bad, but to me it was, and is, disturbing. It is the way Democrats handled it from the beginning, all but cutting out Republicans and others (maybe they included socialists and the Green Party), and the resulting law, that has been calamitous. Three years later it is being trashed by some once-convinced Democrats, leaders of unions and businesses. 

In light of national spending negotiations (Sept. 2013), ObamaCare is being defended, breathlessly, by Obama and some other Democratic politicians and sycophantic pundits, as if it's the only thing that'll assure a decent life for millions. Alternately, they claim that the (pick your cowardly labels given by leftists:) racist, poor-hating, greedy, selfish, angry, ignorant, dumb redneck conservatives are trying to destroy the country by way of refusing to fund ObamaCare. 

Democrats are accusing GOP House of trying to close government, of ruining the country out of political greed, by defunding the Affordable (not) Care Act. The House is not preventing the funding of anything else, really, but yet the supposedly (self-appointed) "more reasonable" White House and Democrats are accusing House Republicans of horrible political maneuverings. The political selfishness seems truly to be driven, hard, from the left. The far left. The few remaining supporters of ObamaCare on the left. 

Meanwhile, even some union leaders, and many employers, rail about how it'll hurt families, because it'll hurt jobs. That, because it will force companies to make cuts to retain their profitability (which doesn't matter to liberals, because many are too dumb to realize that profits should even matter at all to regular Americans). 

The briefly all-controlling Democrats -- in early 2010 having the WH, Senate and House they barely passed ACA -- cannot today force us all to follow their bidding. So, the most power-drunk among the Democrats still turn to absurd, desperate rhetoric defending a tragically, pro-socialist, anti-liberty law that would force most employers and employees and the medical industries into a corner, in the long run. They fight for ACA out of ego, not leadership: it is they who will lose if ACA loses funding, therefore loses its place in government. Obama, Pelosi, Reid, Schumer, and more, will all be seen, by more people, as failed leaders when it fails. So as Obama said recently, the argument isn't about the American people. He's leaving one of his biggest concerns out of his discussion of the matter, though. Who's name is on the bill, and who is okay with that? Obama. He is desperate to have a legacy, and Obamacare may be his only big domestic "success." The argument from his side is about retaining greater government control over health care, not about saving the middle class, as he claims it is. His goals may seem to be about American people, but if so, it is a very different America where the government rules with a bureaucratic supremacy. Some citizens foolishly support that. But with such a foolishness, the American Experiment is dying. Liberty is fading. The control of government over greater parts of everyone's lives is succeeding. That's not the America that a freedom pursuing populating wants. So I have to conclude that too many Americans have been lulled into believing government is the solution to their problems. Which, of course, is a pathetic fantasy. But when such fantasies are believed, even partially, we see government expanding its control. People are dreaming that government is a caretaker. I am not asleep with that dream, nor are many others. It's a tough effort to wake others to it. Gotta keep at it.

What else do you need to know but how many initial claims have been proven WRONG? There were the best of intentions, but a terrible approach, in ObamaCare. And the promises have been proven to be a lie. I don't see why it should be funded, and I don't see a reason to even recognize the ridiculous language from the chief architects (and posers) behind ObamaCare. They've lost the war of reason, because all their claims are shown to be lies. Don't fund the damned thing!


- jR, aka AirFarceOne (Twitter)

The Lone Star, uh, Whatever: Texas county ballots printed with flag of Chile

Flag of Chile (bordered) Chile's flag. Note the one star and the colors. Image via Wikipedia.
Austin, TX: Texas county ballots wrongly have flag of Chile

So, they have a flag of Chile available in the voting offices, but not the state's flag? Where did they get flag clip art for Chile if they were looking for the dept.'s own official flag?!! I mean, this wasn't something that was a surprise requirement, I assume.

Amazing: just how could this go all the way to three weeks till election? 

Perhaps the attitude of removing incumbents is stopping too short with elected officials, and we should look into removing zombie state workers, too. Just don't get them a job that requires identifying their state's flag, it would be too much for some. Apparently, at least in one Texas county. 

The essential difference: Texas has the whole left hand side, perhaps a third of it, in blue, while Chile has the top left corner in blue, with one star in the top left corner of both. The red panel is across the entire bottom of Chile's flag (see image).

Is it a mistake anyone could make? Yes, if one didn't live in Texas and didn't work for Texas and didn't have the Texas flag all over everything. Otherwise, how embarrassing!

- jR
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Census reveals that more than half of renters are overstretched (or overreaching)

Median household income between 1965 and 2005....Median Household Income, 1965-2005; Image via Wikipedia
I think it is time to stop any talk about raising taxes, and start raising RAISES. Don't even talk about it, just get to it.


Housing costs are proving unaffordable for more than half of Americans who rent. And, go figure, many might even have gotten into a rental agreement during the recent drop in prices and are still drained! Sucks to not be the guy taking the rent or taking the taxes these days. Big time. I'm getting a little tired of it.

It makes sense to take what a household earns and say that 30% of it should be the cost of housing. Less would be better, obviously. The census finding reveals that, broadly, a little more than half of Americans are on the wrong side of two general types: those who spend beyond their means, whether their income is great or they are in lower income brackets, and those who are unable to afford living within their means. (But let's face it, this is middle-class and working-class families, overwhelmingly, and, in the past few years, recent college graduates who are anti-roommate or unable to move in with parents).


From USA Today:
More renters found housing unaffordable last year as incomes fell while costs increased, a one-two punch that squeezed lower-income households in particular. Affordability for homeowners, however, was stable.

The share of renters spending 30% or more of their household income on housing costs — the threshold set by the government to determine if housing is unaffordable — rose to 51.5% from about 50% in 2008, according to 2009 Census data released Tuesday.
To use myself as an example, I have been paying at least $1200 too much, annually, for rent (for what I was getting), ever since I moved to Florida in 2003. The market was certainly in a bubble, and in South Florida, it was comical. Or, frightening, depending on how you look at it. In some places, people were paying $700 or better rates to live between some very scruffy walls, and neighbors. That imbalance changed -- for me, at least -- when I relocated in January 2010, in the midst of the sunken housing market.  Some places were still asking far too much. Some folks have, some folks do not have, and some of the former are sloooow in reacting to change. I guess they can afford to be that way.

To get a bit class warfare about it, in 2009-2010, I found that those who are in the "have" category don't find a need to change their ways when the stuff hits the fan. (I don't take my little class war farther than that, though: I don't expect anyone to hand over a nice place to me.) It's a bit mystifying to me. There are those, however, both homeowners and apartment management companies, who were working with people during the 2008 till ?? (whenever it stops) downturn. I applaud their common sense and business sense.

The housing downturn started way back in April 2006, and good people have bad things happen to them in times like that. The landowners should respond appropriately, and not make it feel like a class warfare coming from their end. You get what I mean? If nobody gets all self-centered and needy when things are tense, we'll get through it much better. That goes for government types, too.

It's time to stop raising taxes, and start raising RAISES, including the best raise of all, a good, free market job (and getting off of unemployment) for the jobless who really need them. The U.S. Congress has not missed giving themselves a raise in 2008, in 2009, and will probably do so again in 2010 (wait till December, I believe that's when it will happen again, conveniently after the election cycle).

Check out the related articles, linked below (I like Blogger's Zemanta feature).

- jR, aka AirFarceOne (Twitter)
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