Medicare For All: new name, same old

image credit: aapsonline.org

(Assoc. of American Physicians and Surgeons)

The Mueller bombshell was a dud, so the Democrat party and their colleagues in the media immediately pivoted to healthcare. Bruce Bialosky is a contributor to Townhall. He has a good roll-out of what is and is not true of the Progressive’s trumpeted “Medicare For All” plan; He cites facts and also draws from his own experience in the system. Here are a few extracts:

Medicare is a program begun in 1966 to cover people 65 years of age and older. The program is to be paid through lifelong payroll tax payments akin to social security.   Unlike social security, the benefits are not related to how much you have paid into the program. An important point to understand is (for most people) the vast majority of medical expenses are incurred near the end of one’s life. When the program was established, it was not anticipated that people would be living as long as they do.  This has also driven up costs; i.e., keeping older people alive.

As an aside, Medicare covers for pre-existing conditions. 180 million people who are covered by corporation health insurance also are covered for pre-existing conditions as well as those covered by Medicaid. That is over 90% of Americans, so we can dispense with that canard.  Some politicians want you to believe people are threatening to take away coverage for pre-existing conditions when that is just not true. 

. . .

. . . Medicare is far from free.  Less paperwork and figuring out what is or isn’t covered notwithstanding, decisions still have to be made under Medicare unlike what has been stated by some politicians.  

. . .

. . .  Medicare for All is a nice saying, but very misleading.   First, Medicare comes with a cost for all and that would have to be factored in -   it is not free for anyone despite all you paid into the fund.  Second, it does not cover everything as some politicians lead you to believe.  Third, if you want to keep your doctor, you may not be able to do so.  

The truth is Medicare for All is just a ploy to further move us to government controlled and administered health care.  I have been writing this point for years and wrote that Obamacare was just a step along the way.  The Left continues making private insurance more and more difficult to administer and then belittles the insurance companies for their operations.  There is one goal here: to have complete control over the health care system and then we will be at the lowest common denominator for the health care we receive.

As you have been told before, just look at the health care administered by the VA. The Trump administration has finally freed our veterans to see private care practitioners.   Thank God.  Please don’t make the rest of us suffer the fate of our veterans being covered by government-run insurance.

Lots more here.

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Vietnam Veterans Day

image credit: scrollsaaworkshop.blogspot.com

Celebrated every March 29, Vietnam Veterans Day is set aside as a day for Americans to honor the courage and sacrifice of those who served in the Vietnam War.

Thank a veteran today.

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Amnesty bill: Here we go again

ACTION ALERT! NumbersUSA just sent out an Alert, appended below. Senator Lindsay Graham turns out to have co-authored the amnesty bill coming up for consideration. Cleveland Tea Party patriots will want to call Ohio Senators to oppose DREAM Act Senate bill 874.

Sen. Rob Portman -- (202) 224-3353

Phone Sen. Sherrod Brown at (202) 224-2315

Majority of House Now Supports Nancy Pelosi's

Amnesty Bill: 224 Cosponsors

We must be ready for when Democrats' quest for amnesty

 meets Republicans' desire for cheap labor!

224 House members, all Democrats, have already cosponsored H.R. 6, the "American Dream and Promise Act of 2019." The news yesterday is that Republican Senator Lindsey Graham has already co-authored a Senate DREAM Act, S. 874, with Senate Democratic Minority Leader Dick Durbin.

Would President Trump ever sign either bill? Probably not as they currently stand. But the very grave danger is that congressional leaders may try to sweeten the pot just enough to get his support.  And those "pot sweeteners" could make the bill even worse, not better.

Lately, President Trump has been calling for even more legal immigration because his advisors are telling him it will boost the economy. AND the President says he supports legislation that would make permanent President Obama's DACA amnesty.

Could we end up with a bill that offers amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants, visas for millions of new employment-based immigrants and temporary workers, and some window dressing about border security? Could there be a new Gang-of-Eight "comprehensive reform" bill?

That's exactly what we will get if our elected officials only hear from the cheap-labor lobby.  We need them to hear from people like you!

I’ll post on this again as the bill goes forward.

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Ohio Sanctuary Cities: new bill

State Representatives Niraj Antani & Candice Keller 

have introduced  legislation (House Bill 169) to 

BAN Sanctuary Cities & Sanctuary School Districts in Ohio 

(via Ralph King)

(click to embiggen)

Propaganda for fun and profit

art credit: no-gods-no-masters.com

Corruption in the media just keeps getting worse. The anchors and pundits brazenly lie. They hardly ever retract. I had assumed the propaganda was ideologically-driven and power-driven, but I had not really considered how much money could be made by manufacturing blatant propaganda for gullible -- or at least uncritical viewers/readers. Stephen Ryan at American Thinker puts a few things together:

Right now, left-leaning mainstream media is getting flogged, and they deserve it for their dishonest reporting on the Trump/Russia conspiracy theory. Mass firings and a month of apologies by Jeff Zucker and Rachel Maddow would not be sufficient to mend the harm these organizations have done to America’s trust in news reporting.

But the folks who truly deserve to be put in their place and totally humiliated are the viewers of these pretend news shows. At what point do the Wellesley and Williams-educated elites look in the mirror and accept the fact that they have been taken for fools? They have enabled progressive media to manufacture rotten journalism. They never turned the channel.  

Most people got a glimpse of Rachel Maddow’s ringmaster act when she ran the elephants around a circle for forty-five minutes entertaining the masses with the promise that Trump’s tax returns would shortly be shot out of a cannon.  As the fuse burned and Rachel Maddow whipped the crowd into a frenzy, insinuating that she had caught the tax cheat, MSNBC producers were madly counting the gate.

Slate Magazine writes: “There was, of course, the mid-month burst of global attention surrounding the program’s unveiling of President Trump’s 2005 tax return, a scoop that yielded a series-best audience of just over 4 million viewers.”

Then suddenly… Boom!  - “TRUMP PAID HIS TAXES IN FULL!!!” Whoops. Cut to commercial.

For a nanosecond, media critics seemed embarrassed.  Slate called it a “mini-backlash among critics who accused Maddow of overhyping the discovery.”

But the ringmaster understood that nobody listens to the critics. What mattered most was the act: the bearded lady would be on the show the next day and the mob would show up.

The Trump tax return debacle, in certain ways, was a game changer for progressive media.

The fallout from the Trump tax return show was that network news producers tossed their journalistic ethics out of the window. The ghost of Walter Cronkite could finally be ignored -- the news legend’s white privilege delegitimized his legacy.  News organizations found themselves free to manipulate or willfully lie to their audience every single day.

And nobody seems to care. Certainly, Maddow’s audience doesn't care -- they show up every night.  Network news producers understand that now. In today’s world, it’s no longer the New York Times’ laughable and pretentious axiom “All the news that’s fit to print” that matters, it’s Randy Newman’s tune, “It’s money that matters,” that news media organizations dance to. Just ask Rachel.

Will there be any reckoning? The rest of the article is here.

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Mark Steyn: Mueller & the Deep State Dumpster Fire

Photo credit: sharonherald.com

We all know the bottom line: no more indictments from Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his band of witch-hunters. However, some of the unfolding developments in the investigation over the past two years have been complex and difficult to follow. The exposure of Deep State corruption in the FBI and DOJ; the cast of characters including bad cops and insubordinate staffers; the blatant abuse of the FISA court in targeting Carter Page as a means of expanding surveillance into the Trump campaign; the weaponization of the previous administration; and the collusion of most of the media – it’s a scandal of intimidating proportions, all of it intended to invalidate the results of the 2016 Presidential election.

My favorite columnist, Mark Steyn, has the best summary that I have read. And as always, it’s succinct, easy to follow, and entertaining. He begins:

For two years, the prefatory "Russia" has been intended to give the word "investigation" more heft, to make it seem as if there was something more than let's-get-Trump-on-anything. But even the unlimited resources of a wretchedly corrupt federal justice system couldn't keep that going without something more than Michael Cohen's taxi medallions (only in America) and a few Russian troll farms, one of whom has amusingly decided to push back in court against Mueller and his showboating cronies.

Mr. Steyn concludes:

Trump Tweeted his way out of the Deep State's grip. I doubt any other Republican president would have proved so wily: It's not difficult to imagine President Jeb deciding to do the right thing and resign for the good of the country - without ever being able to figure what it was he'd done wrong. We have witnessed an extraordinary sustained attempted coup in which senior officials of the "justice" department shoot the breeze about wearing a wire to get the goods on the elected chief executive. If there are no consequences to that, it will happen again.

And the entire article is here. Highly recommended.

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Censorship and the tech companies

This blog has been linking regularly to reports about political correctness, censorship, and the attacks on our First Amendment rights. Ned Ryun at American Greatness reports:

Just over six years ago, I attended Google’s Political Innovation Summit in New York City. Over the course of the day, it dawned on me that, in the not-too-distant future, Google and other social media companies like Facebook and Twitter would have the power to control and manipulate information flow in unforeseen and dramatic ways. That power would give the tech giants the ability to manipulate elections and policy debates and even to re-define what free speech actually means.

That future has arrived.

. . .

Every single decision of these tech companies seems to cut the same way—against a conservative worldview, against religious communities, against anything that doesn’t fit comfortably within their little Silicon Valley bubble.

. . .

To err in any direction but toward the free flow of information is to sow the seeds of our eventual demise. 

Full report is here.

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