Posts Tagged ‘obamacare’

It’s not a death panel but we’re getting rid of it again.

Posted: January 5, 2011 by datechguy in opinion/news
Tags: , , ,

Remember how the left and the media insisted that Sarah Palin was “lying” about death panels but suddenly decided to drop them?

Just 5 days ago Rep Blumenauer’s (D-Shhhh) memo leaked that they were back in but we don’t want to talk about it.

Well now they are out again:

The Obama administration, reversing course, will revise a Medicare regulation to delete references to end-of-life planning as part of the annual physical examinations covered under the new health care law, administration officials said Tuesday.

The move is an abrupt shift, coming just days after the new policy took effect on Jan. 1.

The article in the Times mentions Palin specifically:

Sarah Palin, the 2008 Republican vice-presidential candidate, said in the summer of 2009 that “Obama’s death panel” would decide who was worthy of health care. Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the House Republican leader who is to become speaker on Wednesday, said the provision could be a step “down a treacherous path toward government-encouraged euthanasia.”

…but somehow omits Rep Blumenauer’s (D-Shhhh) memo and the fallout thereof. The Hill manages to bring it up while still calling it a “lie”.

But you can’t blame the times, with 43 candidates she endorsed being sworn in today perhaps Palin and Boehner are the story today.

I regret talking about those death panels that aren’t really there

Posted: December 31, 2010 by datechguy in congress, opinion/news, politics
Tags: , ,

Remember that old death panel debate that the MSM called a lie when Sarah Palin brought it up, but then was suddenly pulled from the legislation? Well guess what:

And now they’re able to accomplish through regulatory fiat what they couldn’t get through Congress, even with a playing field tilted steeply in their favor.

Now the author of a memo on the subject being a representative of the people elected in an open election decided to of course be totally open about this…or not

“While we are very happy with the result, we won’t be shouting it from the rooftops because we aren’t out of the woods yet,” Mr. Blumenauer’s office said in an e-mail in early November to people working with him on the issue. “This regulation could be modified or reversed, especially if Republican leaders try to use this small provision to perpetuate the ‘death panel’ myth.”

So according to Representative Blumenauer they shouldn’t talk about this “good thing” that they are doing because Republicans will know about. There’s open government for you.

Well now that the cat is out of the bad suddenly we hear a different tune from Representative Blumenauer

Blumenauer now says he regrets the letter’s secretive language, which has only bolstered conservatives’ claims that the Obama administration tried to sneak the provision in under the radar.

Yeah why would the idea that you said you didn’t want to let this be public make people think that you are doing something sneaky?

Weasel Zippers describes him best:

Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Shhhh)

yet these same democrats from the land of Shhhh are accusing Republicans of a “lack of transparency”

SEIU and the everchanging story

Posted: December 2, 2010 by datechguy in opinion/news
Tags: , , , , ,

Last week the Lonely conservative reported on the SEIU dropping dependent health care:

The fund informed its members late last month that their dependents will no longer be covered as of Jan. 1, 2011. Currently about 6,000 children are covered by the benefit fund, some until age 23.

We touched on it briefly on Saturday’s show, Michelle Malkin now reports that the SEIU is in full spin control mode today:

So if the new spin is now Gospel Truth, shouldn’t SEIU 1199 apologize to the 30,000 families that received the letter blaming Obamacare for making children’s coverage “financially impossible?”

What new spin? Apparently when dropping coverage the union said this:

“…(N)ew federal health-care reform legislation requires plans with dependent coverage to expand that coverage up to age 26,” Behroozi explained in an Oct. 22 letter to members. “Our limited resources are already stretched as far as possible, and meeting this new requirement would be financially impossible.”

Whoa Whoa Whoa we can’t be blaming Obamacare when our union worked so hard for it, so the message is changed anew to cover themselves.

To the union members who supported democrats and worked for democrats and watched your dues go to democratic coffers instead of your own pension funds I say this: You did this to yourselves!

“they did what they needed to do to survive”

Posted: November 18, 2010 by datechguy in economy
Tags: , ,

Michelle Malkin talks a bit about the Wavers and what position the administration has put business:

One company official expressed concern to me that media coverage was demonizing businesses who applied for the waivers. I certainly don’t see these waiver applicants as villains. They were potential victims of top-down government mandates and they did what they needed to do to survive. As for the unions who all pushed hard to ram Obamacare down America’s throat and then rushed to the front of the line for tax and regulatory exemptions, thanks for proving what an ill-fated scheme the federal health care takeover was from the get-go.

But a lot of friends of the O have been taken care of too:

It’s all about control. If central planners can’t dictate what health benefits qualify as “good,” what plans qualify as “affordable” and how health care dollars are best spent, then nobody can. The ultimate goal, of course: precipitating a massive shift from private to government insurance.

McDonald’s, Olive Garden, Red Lobster and Jack in the Box are among the large, headline-garnering employers who received the temporary waivers. But perhaps the most politically noteworthy beneficiaries of the HHS waiver program: Big Labor.

The Service Employees Benefit Fund, which insures a total of 12,000 SEIU health care workers in upstate New York, secured its Obamacare exemption in October. The Local 25 SEIU Welfare Fund in Chicago also nabbed a waiver for 31,000 of its enrollees. SEIU, of course, was one of Obamacare’s loudest and biggest spending proponents. The waivers come on top of the massive sweetheart deal that SEIU and other unions cut with the Obama administration to exempt them from the health care mandate’s onerous “Cadillac tax” on high-cost health care plans until 2018.

This is simply foolish, if companies and unions have to escape Obamacare to survive then how much the small business and the avg guy?

It’s like a man named Walter once told me, You fish where you can catch them.

Older Entries
Newer Entries