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News/Politics 11-6-13

What’s interesting in the news today?

First up, a preview of things to come? Let’s face it, our govt’s own literature and training manuals call them potential terrorists. Others are following their lead.

From FoxNews  “An Army veteran living in Georgia says she wants an apology from her daughter’s former school after being banned from the building for posting a photo of her concealed weapons permit to her Facebook page, WRDW.com reports.

Tanya Mount says she was approached by a police officer from the Richmond County Board of Education at McBean Elementary School and was warned that she was about to get a criminal trespass warning.”

“The officer told her that the principal at the school was “scared” of her and did not want her on the school property, she told the station.

“He asks: ‘Were you in the Army?,”‘ she said. “I said, yes. He’s like, ‘Do you have a concealed weapons permit?’ I said yes,” she told the station.

A phone call from FoxNews.com to Richmond County Board of Education was not immediately returned. WJBF.com asked Janina Dallas, the school’s principal, if the “no trespass order” was issued over the post, and Dallas responded: “Yes, it was.”

So school administrators are now stalking parents Facebook pages?

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We now know the feds intentionally ducked final security requirements for the ObamaCare website.

From CBSNews  “The health care website went down again Monday for an hour and a half, and no one is sure why. It’s being taken offline on purpose every night from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. for repairs. Millions are still having trouble buying insurance on it, and it turns out that even when the website works, it may not be secure enough to protect privacy.

As HealthCare.gov was being developed, crucial tests to ensure the security and privacy of customer information fell behind schedule.

CBS News analysis found that the deadline for final security plans slipped three times from May 6 to July 16. Security assessments to be finished June 7 slid to August 16 and then August 23. The final, required top-to-bottom security tests never got done.

The House Oversight Committee released an Obama administration memo that shows four days before the launch, the government took an unusual step. It granted itself a waiver to launch the website with “a level of uncertainty … deemed as a high (security) risk.”

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Here’s 6 million people who wouldn’t be happy to hear about their shortcuts possibly exposing their private info. 

From WeaselZippers  “BOMBSHELL: Contractor For Healthcare.gov Cited For Exposing Info Of Millions”

“One of the government contractors involved in building Healthcare.gov and now subsequently in charge of helping fix it QSSI or “Quality Software Services Inc” was cited in a June 2013 Inspector General’s Report.”

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Here’s another successful govt run vote buying program.

From TheWeeklyStandard  “In a continuing crackdown on the federal government’s Lifeline program, sometimes known as “Obama phones,” the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has revealed that fraud and abuse in the program exceeded two million subscribers. New rules were established after it became clear that subscribers and providers were taking advantage of the system:

The FCC’s Enforcement Bureau has worked aggressively to enforce these new rules since their adoption, taking actions worth over $15 million, in addition to today’s $32.6 million in proposed forfeitures. Numerous additional investigations are ongoing. Moreover, over 2 million duplicate subscriptions have been eliminated, and the FCC’s reforms are on track to save the Fund more $2 billion over three years.

The two million is up from a figure of 1.1 million in an FCC press release just a month ago.”

Like everything with this admin, the numbers once revised, are always worse.

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15 thoughts on “News/Politics 11-6-13”

  1. If anyone is interested, I decided to ask two well-informed liberals I know what they think about the state of the exchange website, the 29 times O said “you can keep it. Period.” and the fact that those who are canceled are forced into way-more expensive plans with coverage they don’t need.

    Like a typical liberal, my sister didn’t answer them, but this is what she did say, “The average liberal thinks that Obama care is a big stinking pile of #$%^ (I think you can find me using that exact phrase somewhere online when the act was passed), and was the unfortunate compromise the democrats were forced into to get any healthcare legislation out of the republicans in congress. Assisted by the Insurance lobby that wouldn’t give up control, and used their money buying politicians wisely. The average liberal wants SINGLE PAYER health care, extending medicare to the general population, or in the very least a “public option” in the current act. We got neither. For the average liberal the current act is an orphan.”

    I’ll let you know what the other person says.

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  2. p.s. I didn’t respond to her because I originally said it wasn’t argumentative and I wouldn’t, but I’d love to ask her why O & Co. are touting it so strongly if it is, indeed, awful. She also linked to a uTube saying, “Also, if you doubt my perspective, here are 2 liberals discussing it in detail:”

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  3. In single payer healthe care, who does the paying?
    The Government.
    Where does the government get the money?
    From the people.
    How does the government get money from people?
    Through taxes, and fees.
    What makes anyone think the government is better at taking money and distributing it to people who need it than private companies who are experts at this?
    The present system works very well.
    Single payer is going to be like the War on Poverty.
    It’s still going on, no end, and poverty is ahead, so far.

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  4. Well, I’d say the present system does need some attention. A medical worker told me recently that things have been getting messed up & costs going up ever since the advent of the HMOs.

    But there are other private sector fixes and models that need to be explored — and it needs to be a bipartisan approach. The government being in charge of our health care is truly a bad idea.

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  5. Donna, I’m glad to hear that – it has always been my opinion that the concept of the HMO is what led our society down the path of believing that ALL of their health-related expenses should be covered by insurance. I believe that the overall solution is to offer only major-medical plans (for the catastrophic events) and then we all pay for everything else ourselves. I sincerely believe this would also drive down costs and over-testing.

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  6. “was the unfortunate compromise the democrats were forced into to get any healthcare legislation out of the republicans in congress. Assisted by the Insurance lobby that wouldn’t give up control, and used their money buying politicians wisely.”

    Linda,

    That’s, well to be honest, a steaming pile of horse manure. This is their baby, whether they acknowledge parenthood or not. She shouldn’t have mentioned Republicans at all, since they had nothing to do with it. This was forced on America by liberal Democrats. They weren’t forced into it. They had the votes and passed it without Republican input or votes. They own it, whether she admits it or not. They got nothing out of R’s. They couldn’t get their own party to go single-payer like they wanted, so they forced this on us instead. Talk about revisionist history. Yikes. 🙂

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  8. So, am I understanding the argument–this wasn’t about health CARE, access to which I believe IS important, but health INSURANCE because the mean Republicans and their health lobby friends FORCED it on the president.

    I actually can see that argument, except, NO ONE seems to have read the 1000 page bill before it was passed. IMHO, they all should have lost their jobs over that one point alone.

    😦

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  9. Linda, this medical worker told me that employer-provided health insurance before HMOs was actually very good at paying most if not all of people’s medical bills, very little came out of pocket for the patient who was well covered (of course, office visits were like $10 back then — 1960s I believe was the time period she was referring to — and having a baby cost all of $150, including all the prenatal; so even if you did pay, it wasn’t nearly the burden the amounts are now when an overnight hospital stay can run into the thousands).

    The other elements that began making costs spiral out of control were things like malpractice insurance rates that went through the roof for doctors — but, also, we have some very sophisticated medical care now that really does just plain cost a lot of money.

    My own GP for several years now has refused to take any HMO patients (I was grandfathered in when I had one back when, now we don’t even offer anything like that where I work so I’m on the costlier PPO). I recall he got quite a run-around when ordering a test and medication for me once several years back, he was thoroughly frustrated by the HMO insurance bureaucrats who were trying to tell him how to practice medicine. I can only imagine what he thinks of government-run care …

    I don’t know how to fix it all, but Obamacare wasn’t the way. 😦

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  10. Linda,

    I think part of the problem here is that the worldview that allows you to stretch the truth and blame R’s is the same worldview that thinks it’s OK for the President to lie in order to push things like Obamacare. Obama and dems lie repeatedly, because their supporters allow, expect, and encourage it as long as it’s a means to an end.

    How can people expect R’s to negotiate with people who will lie to their faces, just like they do the public?

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  11. Well, my sister answered my questions. I hope you are as amused at her answers as I was.

    Personally, I don’t think anyone (as in congressmen and Obama, not to mention the general public) understood the bill that the insurance lobbyists wrote, and they are just as surprised as anyone in what it actually says. And this is just the beginning of THAT story, because they also don’t understand that what most people will be able to afford are plans with deductibles in the thousands, and the “average man on the street liberal” doesn’t really know that yet either. When people actually GET the insurance they have to buy there will be a much more massive fallout than what we are hearing now.

    Most people weren’t paying attention, and believed FOX news, or MSNBC, republican, democrat, liberal, conservative, and they think we got socialized medicine and they are either happy about that (happy = liberal and people without employer provided insurance) or pissed (pissed = conservative and people WITH employer provided insurance). The few people who were actually paying attention know that what we got is 180 degrees the opposite of socialized medicine (which would be single payer, or a public option). What we got was a giant government handout to the insurance industry. I think Obama was totally blindsided by the cancellations because grandfathering in the existing plans was part of the legislation and that’s as far as anyone near him had any conversation about existing plans, and everybody ignored the fine print that said “plans existing before 2010” (when the bill was enacted) “that hadn’t be modified since”.

    Also, the insurance companies, and proponents of the AHCA, want you to believe that the plans are being cancelled because they are substandard and don’t cover everything required by the act, but that is not the case. The insurance industry is taking advantage of the fine print to cancel ANY plan that has been modified since 2010, regardless of the coverage. There are multiple anecdotal stories about people with gold plated plans that are also getting cancelled.

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