Thursday, March 18, 2010

Time for Change in Minnesota

I wrote Sen. Amy Klobuchar to express my strong opposition to the current health care bill that she voted for in the Senate. In her response she was quick to point out how she "saved" Minnesotans $18 Billion in new taxes on medical device manufacturers. What she didn't highlight was that she voted FOR adding $20 Billion in new taxes TO medical device manufacturers, some of which are based right here in Minnesota. This is everything from pacemakers to tongue depressors.

Of course, in reality, they won't pay those taxes. They'll just raise the prices on all the devices and you and I will pay for them through higher insurance rates, higher hospital costs and through more taxes for Medicaid and Medicare.

So, in other words, to supposedly lower the cost of healthcare, the Demwits have just raised the prices on a significant portion of our healthcare products!

Of course, that's just the tip of the iceberg on the new, onerous taxes that we will ALL be paying shortly if the Demwits in Congress have their way on Sunday. Taxes we will begin paying IMMEDIATELY, but will have to wait four years for any possible benefits (and then I wouldn't hold your breath!)

So, I think it's time to begin the campaign to get rid of those who vote for things NOT in the best interest of Minnesota....or the United States, for that matter. I'm brainstorming some ideas and came up with this one!

I think it would look great along I-694 and I-35 near Medtronic's headquaters. What do you think?

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Obama: The Smartest President Ever!

We learned yesterday that Obamacare will result in a 3000% decrease in my health insurance premiums.

Wow!!

I spend about $600 a month, or $7,200 a year. Just a 100% reduction would save me $7,200. But now Obama is going to have my insurer give me another $208,800 per year ($7,200 times 2900%.)

This is going to be awesome!

Does anyone still think this man is as smart as we were led to believe back during the election??

You know, back when he had visited 57 of our 58 states?

Since then we've learned the Marine Corpse has corpsemen.

Had George Bush or, perhaps, Dan Quayle made such an idiotic gaffe, it would be recited by every news outlet endlessly for decades to come!

But when the Annointed One continually sticks his foot in his mouth, reporters all just look around nervously and pretend they didn't hear it!

It's becoming painfully obvious that we have nothing but an empty suit in the White House, a mere puppet dangling on the strings of Andy Stern and the SEIU, along with George Soros and their socialist/communists friends who have put him there.

He's well on the way to making FDR look not so bad....and we know the long-term damage he inflicted on America.

Friday, March 12, 2010

Heritage.org: Deformed Healthcare Reform

From Heritage.org's newsletter:

Deformed health care reform
Many conservatives, including Heritage Foundation experts, have been arguing that the President's supposedly "fresh" 11-page health care proposal is virtually no different from the Senate bill. It's true. The President's draft includes most of the same bad proposals that the Senate bill does. But there is one key difference between the two: The Senate bill actually exists.

Until the President's proposal is drafted as official legislation, the only proposal the House can and will consider is the bill the Senate passed. But the differences between the Senate bill and the one that cleared the House are stark.

To get their bill through the House, Senate liberals and the White House are offering some flaky "fixes." As Heritage's Conn Carroll explains:

The "fixes" that the White House is promising wavering House Democrats they will make all sound easy at first glance: 1) scaling back the tax on high-end health insurance policies; 2) closing the Medicare D loophole; 3) boosting insurance subsidies; 4) increasing Medicaid payments; and 5) fixing the Cornhusker Kickback. But when you take a second look, you see that all of these "fixes" will cost more money. Just look at the Cornhusker Kickback which the President chose to address, not by taking away Nebraska's special Medicaid payments, but by extending those extra Medicaid payments to every state! Every single item in the President's proposal either increases spending or reduces new revenues. And he didn't put forward any way to pay for them. If passing health reform were as easy as giving away free candy, Obamacare would be law already. Finding a way to pay for all these fixes is going to be just as difficult as every earlier effort to pay for this bill. So don't expect any solutions anytime soon.

This doesn't even begin to address abortion, a major roadblock the Senate bill faces in the House. Fox News reports that a coalition of seven House Democrats, led by Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI), has threatened to kill Obamacare altogether if federal funding for abortion is not explicitly prohibited in the final legislation, as it is in the House bill.

So, to appease their colleagues, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) are offering a "pie-crust promise" -- easily made and easily broken -- to remove abortion language after the House vote during the Senate's reconciliation process. Is this realistic, though? "Never before in the history of the 34-year abortion funding debate have pro-life members of Congress approved a bill containing abortion funding on the promise that a subsequent vote will fix the problem," Heritage expert Chuck Donovan argues. In short, the left is resorting to bad procedure to advance an even worse health care policy.

Instead of rushing the process with oddly-structured concessions, and instead of passing the bill to "find out what's in it," as Speaker Pelosi argued, lawmakers should focus on starting over. The American people support health care reform, just not this one.

A better idea would be a reform that upholds core American principles. For example, our experts advocate a state-based approach to reform. "Home-grown reforms tailored to the prevailing conditions in the states make the most sense," writes Heritage health care expert Bob Moffit. So let's start over by allowing states to "compete in the arena of health policy and see which ones best achieve the nation's universal health care goals.