Archives for December 2013

Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review are impressed by polls in several states that show Obamacare as an albatross for Democratic incumbents and hopefuls.  They also react to a new study showing the top forty percent of Americans pay more than 100 percent of income taxes and the bottom forty percent get more money from the government than they pay.  And they discuss a National Journal column suggesting Obama’s second term was largely derailed by the Sandy Hook murders.

President Obama regularly asserts that Republicans oppose his health law but won’t offer a plan of their own, but one GOP congressman has been pushing his alternative for several years, accuses the president of lying to the public about it and demands that his own leaders allow a vote on a market-based alternative.

Georgia Rep. Tom Price is a longtime physician and is now advocating for his Empowering Patients First Act for the third consecutive Congress.

His legislation calls for allowing Americans to shop for health insurance across state lines to drive up competition and drive down costs.  He also urges tax credits that make buying health insurance affordable for everyone and improving insurance portability for those who change or lose their jobs.

In recent days, Price received a fiscal shot in the arm for his bill.  Former Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin completed a study showing Price’s bill would save taxpayers $2.34 trillion over the next decade.  He says that would happen because of four simple reasons.

“One is the repeal of Obamacare and all of its taxes and costs that it has.  Two is the significant increase in choices for patients.  Once you give greater choices for patients then you actually decrease the cost of health care because people select what is right for them, not what the government forces them to buy,” said Price.

“Third is some significant lawsuit abuse reform which we think will save much more than the estimates, but it’s estimated to save billions of dollars.  Fourth and finally is a limitation on the deductibility of health coverage for those at the upper end of the economic spectrum,” said Price.

Is President Obama simply unaware that this plan and at least one other formal GOP bill are in the pipeline or he simply keeping the truth from the public?

“It’s so sad and I get so frustrated with it because he continues to put forth this tripe about Republicans not having a plan.  It’s absolutely deceitful for the chief executive officer of this country to tell the American people something that patently is not true.  He’s done it over and over and over and in this instance it just increases the cynicism of the American people,” said Price.

Just last week, Price used a committee hearing to point out that Republicans do have a bill and even gave his phone number out on television for President Obama to call for further discussion about the plan.  Thus far, Price has not heard from the White House.

Price’s bill was largely ignored by the Democratic majority in 2009-2010, but GOP leaders have also failed to bring his a conservative plan to the floor over the past three years.  Why not?

“It’s a great question.  It hasn’t come to a vote.  It’s one that we’ve been pushing for.  It doesn’t necessarily have to be my plan.  We’ve been pushing for a vote on a plan from our our side of the aisle for a long, long time.  I think you’ve got to have positive solutions and you’ve got to stand up with principle for what you believe in,” said Price.

The relentless push seems to be yielding some movement towards a vote.  Price says House GOP leaders have asked him and others to work with them on bringing an official GOP reform bill to the floor in the first few months of 2014.

In addition to his work on health care, Rep. Price is also one of the negotiators tasked with hammering out a budget agreement before the next scheduled government shutdown in January.  House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan and Senate Budget Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray are reportedly close to an agreement.  Price is cautiously bullish that a deal can be struck but says there are some very prominent people who want the effort to fail for political reasons.

“I am hopefully optimistic about the possibility of having an agreement before the end of the week.  If it doesn’t happen, I promise you it’s because of either House Democrats or Harry Reid or the president don’t want an agreement,” said Price, who says he wants a deal, but he has some important priorities that need to be part of the final package.

“We’ve talked endlessly with the Senate Democrat colleagues to try to fashion an agreement that would allow us to make sure that there’s greater certainty out there for budgeting needs and that we continue to have the savings that were gained during the Budget Control Act sequester agreement,” he said.

Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review are pleased to see President Obama admit government agencies aren’t very efficient in running things.  They also react to an Obamacare architect saying you can probably keep your doctor if you’re willing to pay a lot more.  And they discuss MSNBC’s Rachel Harris Perry contending that “Obamacare” is a term meant to demean and belittle the president and likens it to the N-word.

The Capitol Steps take us inside Secretary of State John Kerry’s approach to the recent nuclear agreement with Iran.  Our guest is Steps co-founder and star Elaina Newport.

The end of November also closed the 2013 Atlantic Hurricane Season, which is easily one of the quietest on record, a fact climate change skeptics admit is not proof they are correct but is part of a mountain of evidence showing climate change to be cyclical, natural and unaffected by human activity.

“One hurricane season doesn’t mean anything but an alleged increase in hurricanes was at one time asserted as the best indicator of the clear and present danger of global warming.  Yet, all of that was built not just around one year but really around one hurricane, Hurricane Katrina,” said journalist and attorney Michael Fumento, who formerly wrote for Reason magazine, The Washington Times and the Hudson Institute.

“If they can build this huge case around this single hurricane, then they should be the first to admit that one of the quietest hurricane seasons on record must go against their position,” he said.

Fumento says the Hurricane Katrina argument often fails to remind people that the storm had dissipated strongly before reaching shore and only became a humanitarian disaster because of where it struck.

“It’s just incredible.  It’s like the case for global warming was built around problems with the New Orleans levee system.  It’s that absurd,” said Fumento.

“The logical thing was to look at the entire hurricane record, going as far back as there were data.  And depending on what you mean as data, it goes back 150 years to see if in fact there was any kind of a year-to-year or decade-to-decade increase.  The answer quite flatly was no, no increase whatsoever.  It was a dead issue from the very beginning,” said Fumento.

According to Fumento, there’s much more evidence that our climate is not in crisis and not even warming as so many scientists had predicted.  In a Dec. 5 New York Post column, Fumento says, “Arctic ice increased by almost a third this past year, while that at the South Pole was thicker and wider than it’s been in 35 years.”

Even more significant, he says, is the quiet admission from the climate change activists that there has been no increase in the planet’s temperature for over a decade, a fact he says is very significant.

“Even warmists admit in the last 15 years there has been no warming whatsoever.  Fifteen years of warming and yet greenhouse gas emissions are pouring out at the highest rate ever and they’re at the highest level ever.  How can that be?  The only explanation, which they admit, is there’s something natural preventing this connection right now.  But if that’s true, couldn’t warming have entirely been natural the whole time?  And the answer of course is yes,” said Fumento.

Most climate change activists contend the 15 year cooling trend is merely a “pause” in the warming of the earth that will result in major ecological problems if industrialized nations do not take significant steps to reduce emissions.

Fumento says scientists simply looked at concurrent acts over a limited period of time.

“There has in fact been global warming.  It’s been tracked very carefully since 1951.  There has in fact been a tremendous increase in emissions and ambient levels of so-called greenhouse gases, the most important of which is carbon dioxide.  So the global warming people put two and two together and they came up with seventeen,” he said, noting the climate has always gone through major warming and cooling cycles.

“Nobody would have ever heard of the Vikings but for a 400-year warming period that allowed them to escape their fjords and go almost literally all over the world.  That was a 400-year warming period just a little before carbon dioxide and things like that became a big issue,” said Fumento, who noted in his column that the warming period ended around the year 1300.

Nonetheless, President Obama is forging ahead with administrative action to advance his climate change agenda.  In his New York Post column, Fumento reports Obama “signed an executive order establishing a Council on Climate Preparedness and Resilience that could dramatically expand government bureaucrats’ ability to restrict Americans’ use of their property, water and energy to reduce so-called ‘greenhouse gas emissions.'”

“There’s always people out there who say that doing the right thing environmentally can be free or even pay for itself.  It’s never, ever true.  These things all cost money.  It’s just a matter of how much because you’re telling a business or individual to do something that they wouldn’t otherwise be doing.  Why?  Because it costs money.  We don’t know how much money these things might cost, but they definitely will cost money,” said Fumento.  “The last thing the American public needs is more money spent on chasing what appears entirely to be phantom.”

So will a lack of ongoing evidence of global warming trigger a major reverse in public opinion in this debate or will the entrenched conventional wisdom win the day?  Fumento is not optimistic.

“It’s definitely got momentum because so many people have reputations involved, whether it’s politicians, whether it’s scientists, whether it’s ex-politicians,” said Fumento.  “So many people may have a stake so that the science may not matter at all.”

He says his work in the 1980s and 1990s debunking the threat of AIDS to heterosexuals was proven true, but that hasn’t really changed government policy.

“I’m famous for debunking this ‘Everybody’s Going to Die of AIDS’ thing.  I began in 1987.  In 2013, the federal government spends more on AIDS than all other diseases combined.  The science did not matter.  The science may not matter here either,” said Fumento.

Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review are thrilled to see Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu say she would back Obamacare again and thinks the only problems are the technical issues.  They also react to the GOP offering briefings on how candidates should address women.  And they discuss the Colorado Obamacare CEO asking for a raise to her already hefty salary.

Gross incompetence led to the problems with the federal health care exchange, the government deserves more blame than the contractors and no one should feel safe entering personal information on the site, according to a well-respected information technology expert.

The Obama administration is touting healthcare.gov as working fine for the “vast majority” of Americans, although there are still accounts of the site malfunctioning and many more stories emerging about information being transmitted inaccurately to insurance companies and the mechanism for customers to pay for their coverage still does not exist.

Reports are also emerging that data security is even worse than before on the site and some experts believe there’s no coherent security in place at all.

“Yeah, that’s pretty scary,” said Chris Witt, CEO of the respected IT firm Wake Technology Services, Inc.

“Since we are talking about patient health data, there’s already laws on the books, specifically HIPAA and HITECH, that regulate security and privacy of projected health information.  So it’s a little surprising that they would even have these types of problems.  If it was you or me that were doing this on a private basis, we’d probably be locked up because we’d be breaking all kinds of different laws,” said Witt.

“It seems like the folks who have done a little more of the security auditing did not find too much difficulty in breaking into the system and accessing users’ data,” he said.

But with the individual mandate looming and just days left for many to enroll if they want their coverage to start on January 1, should Americans roll the dice and go on healthcare.gov?

“Oh, I wouldn’t.  No, not from what the experts have been saying.  These people do not have an ax to grind.  They have come in very apolitical and raised some very serious red flags.  What’s even more problematic is more than one have stated that this is not a fixable problem in its current state, which would concern me greatly,” said Witt.

As for the problems at the “back end” of healthcare.gov such as patient information transfers and payment challenges, Witt says things are only getting worse.

“What we’ve only seen is the very superficial layer and that’s the people trying to access and put their data in and go through the process,” said Witt.  “So we’ve got some front end superficial problems.  We’ve got security issues, which you never want to understate, and you’ve got some back end interfacing or connectivity problems.  So as they fix layers, it’s going to shine a light on layers further down or deeper into the application that are flawed.”

So how did this get so badly bungled?  Witt says it appears there was very poor communication among the various project managers, but is skeptical that no one knew about all the problems before the site launched October 1.

“Throughout the process, it was surprising that certain things came to light after the website was rolled out.  I find it hard to believe that was really the case,” he said.

He also believes the government did not delegate enough to the contractors.  Witt cites congressional testimony from government contractors that strongly suggests they were not responsible for the testing.

“They probably did some levels of unit testing, some integrated testing but not complete end-to-end testing, which would also include load testing,” said Witt, referring to tests to see what kind of web traffic the site could handle before it crashed.

“It seemed like the government was supposed to be doing the load testing, so the contractor did all of their testing up to a certain point,” he said, noting that he would not normally expect to handle load testing and we would have already heard the administration cry foul if that work should have been done by the contractors.

So what is the lesson learned through the technical side of the exchange?

“There’s always a question of what’s the place of the government in large initiatives like this.  The government’s not always in the best position to oversee and implement this type of technology solution.  I think they would have been better off putting the complete implementation of it out to contract to a large, U.S.-based developer who could have done it in a much quicker timeline and that would meet all the requirements,” said Witt.

Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review are skeptical of Arkansas Sen. Mark Pryor’s ad in which he admits mistakes while discussing his faith in God but never explains what mistakes he made as senator.  They also groan as House Republican leaders keep talking about passing immigration reform.  And they react to Martin Bashir’s departure from MSNBC in the wake of horrible comments about Sarah Palin.

Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review cheer a new poll showing millenials souring big time on President Obama.  They also wince as Obama’s political arm tries to turn the anniversary of the Sandy Hook school killings into events to push gun control legislation.  And they react to reports that insurance companies will have to estimate how much the government owes them in Obamacare subsidies because that part of healthcare.gov hasn’t even been built yet.

Liberty University is shocked the U.S. Supreme Court rejected it’s multifaceted challenge to the new health care laws but vows to keep resisting components that its leaders claim violate their conscience.

Without comment, the justices announced they would not be hearing the school’s appeal of a lower court rejection of its suit, Liberty University v. Lew.  The case challenged the constitutionality of the employer and individual mandates as well as the government’s ability to force employers to pay for insurance policies that fund abortions and abortion-causing drugs.

“We were very surprised and disappointed to hear of the court’s decision because our case would have provided the most comprehensive challenge to Obamacare and it would have been the perfect vehicle for the Supreme Court to once again examine the entire law,” said Harry Mihet, senior litigation counsel at Liberty Counsel, which is affiliated with Liberty University and representing the school in court.

He is particularly surprised that the Supreme Court rejected the university’s appeal of an appellate court ruling since the justices agreed just days ago to hear more limited appeals of the contraception mandate from business leaders at Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood Specialties.

So did those cases contribute to Liberty’s appeal being rejected?

Mihet says that is possible but contends that if the court only took one case, it should have been Liberty’s because as troubling as the contraception mandate is to his client, there is much more to be worried about.

“That is certainly a huge problem constitutionally speaking with this law, but that is by no means the only problem with this law.  When the Supreme Court indicated last week that it would look again at Obamacare we thought that it would be inclined to look at the whole law, but alas, we now find out that they want to do it piece by piece,” said Mihet.

The high court has yet to speak on the employer mandate, but Mihet says there’s little doubt it’s unconstitutional.

“Whether it’s under the Commerce Clause or the Tax and Spend Clause, we argue that the Constitution simply does not permit that kind of a power grab by the federal government because that is a power reserved for the states,” said Mihet.

The Supreme Court ruled in June 2012 that the individual mandate was constitutional only because the penalty for not purchasing health insurance could be considered a tax and that power is granted to Congress.  However, Mihet says that makes the mandate unconstitutional for other reasons, namely that all tax and spending legislation must originate in the House but the final health care bill originated in the Senate.  Leaders completely gutted the original House bill, replaced it with the Senate version and the House then approved that measure in March 2010 to pass the law.

The rejection of the Liberty University case is seen by some as a death blow to the lawsuit, but Mihet says the fight still goes on.

“It is by no means the end.  We have not even begun to fight.  We do not ever, ever give up, particularly when such precious constitutional rights are at stake,” said Mihet.  “Whether in this litigation or some other new litigation, these issues are not going to go away.  We’re going to continue to bring them to the forefront until someone looks at them and decides them on the merits.”

In the meantime, Mihet says we can expect civil disobedience from Liberty University.

“Liberty University, like Hobby Lobby and the Conestoga family, has made it clear that it will not participate in the abortion industry and it will not fund the abortion industry with its dollars.  We have drawn a line in the sand and have said that the government is powerless to compel Liberty University to ignore its conscience and to ignore God’s law in favor of man’s law,” said Mihet.