It is “unacceptable that HHS fails to maintain accurate financial records and fails to adhere to federal law designed to protect taxpayer dollars from mismanagement and waste,” Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., and Rep. Charles Boustany, R-La., wrote in a Monday letter to the department’s secretary, Kathleen Sebelius.

(HT:Federal Times)

The USG may not appear to have a very tight wrap on how and where it’s dollars (expropriated or borrowed) get dispersed. This is particularly true when the US Senate has gone over 1,000 days without the benefit of an actual budget resolution instead of a legislative gimmick that relieves them of that responsibility.

However, in the street-level reality inhabited by people who actually handle government funds, tight and exacting regulations do exist. One very important one is The Anti-Deficiancy Act which is described below.

Read More →

It is “unacceptable that HHS fails to maintain accurate financial records and fails to adhere to federal law designed to protect taxpayer dollars from mismanagement and waste,” Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., and Rep. Charles Boustany, R-La., wrote in a Monday letter to the department’s secretary, Kathleen Sebelius.

(HT:Federal Times)

The USG may not appear to have a very tight wrap on how and where it’s dollars (expropriated or borrowed) get dispersed. This is particularly true when the US Senate has gone over 1,000 days without the benefit of an actual budget resolution instead of a legislative gimmick that relieves them of that responsibility.

However, in the street-level reality inhabited by people who actually handle government funds, tight and exacting regulations do exist. One very important one is The Anti-Deficiancy Act which is described below.

Read More →

Almost a full year into the presidential campaign, Romney finally received a full-fledged beatdown for his mendacity over healthcare.  He has the nerve to feign outrage over Obamacare, even while he touts Romneycare – a carbon copy of Obamacare – as a virtuous success, supported by 90% of Massachusetts residents.  Santorum did his homework, and called him out on the hypocrisy.  Romney was never able to answer why the same market intervention and distortions – mandates, subsidies, and Medicaid – which form the bedrock of Obamacare , supposedly worked so well in Massachusetts.  The reason he couldn’t answer the question is because Romneycare was a complete failure.  It is the canary in the coal mine for Obamacare.

The reality is that Romneycare did not merely affect the 8% that were uninsured, as Romney has suggested; it punished everyone with record high premiums.  It is incontrovertibly clear that MassCare has engendered the highest premiums in the nation,while dumping thousands of people onto federally funded Medicaid and disincentivizing people not to earn more money.

In other words, Romneycare, at its core, is exactly like Obamacare.  When Romney could not articulate any fundamental difference between the two pernicious government takeovers, he wandered off into ancillary differences.  He pointed out that Obamacare contains 2600 pages, raises taxes, and cuts Medicare.  However, those are all nebulous differences related to the packaging or funding of the proposal.  At the core, they are the same; mandates, subsidies, and Medicaid.  That core is what Romney recently dubbed as fundamentally a conservative principle.

Read More →

Almost a full year into the presidential campaign, Romney finally received a full-fledged beatdown for his mendacity over healthcare.  He has the nerve to feign outrage over Obamacare, even while he touts Romneycare – a carbon copy of Obamacare – as a virtuous success, supported by 90% of Massachusetts residents.  Santorum did his homework, and called him out on the hypocrisy.  Romney was never able to answer why the same market intervention and distortions – mandates, subsidies, and Medicaid – which form the bedrock of Obamacare , supposedly worked so well in Massachusetts.  The reason he couldn’t answer the question is because Romneycare was a complete failure.  It is the canary in the coal mine for Obamacare.

The reality is that Romneycare did not merely affect the 8% that were uninsured, as Romney has suggested; it punished everyone with record high premiums.  It is incontrovertibly clear that MassCare has engendered the highest premiums in the nation,while dumping thousands of people onto federally funded Medicaid and disincentivizing people not to earn more money.

In other words, Romneycare, at its core, is exactly like Obamacare.  When Romney could not articulate any fundamental difference between the two pernicious government takeovers, he wandered off into ancillary differences.  He pointed out that Obamacare contains 2600 pages, raises taxes, and cuts Medicare.  However, those are all nebulous differences related to the packaging or funding of the proposal.  At the core, they are the same; mandates, subsidies, and Medicaid.  That core is what Romney recently dubbed as fundamentally a conservative principle.

Read More →

Presented without comment:

Center for Health Transformation E-Newsletters

Newt Notes

The most exciting development of the past few weeks is what has been happening up in Massachusetts. The health bill that Governor Romney signed into law this month has tremendous potential to effect major change in the American health system.

We agree entirely with Governor Romney and Massachusetts legislators that our goal should be 100% insurance coverage for all Americans. Individuals without coverage often do not receive quality medical attention on par with those who do have insurance. We also believe strongly that personal responsibility is vital to creating a 21st Century Intelligent Health System. Individuals who can afford to purchase health insurance and simply choose not to place an unnecessary burden on a system that is on the verge of collapse; these free-riders undermine the entire health system by placing the onus of responsibility on taxpayers.

The Romney plan attempts to bring everyone into the system. The individual mandate requires those who earn enough to afford insurance to purchase coverage, and subsidies will be made available to those individuals who cannot afford insurance on their own. We agree strongly with this principle, but the details are crucial when it comes to the structure of this plan. Under the new bill, Massachusetts residents earning more than 300% of the federal poverty level (approximately $30,000 for an individual) will not be eligible for any subsidies. State House officials had originally promised that there would be new plans available at about $200 a month, but industry experts are now predicting that the cheapest plan will likely cost at least $325 a month. This estimate totals about $4000 per year, or about 1/5 of a $30,000 annual take-home income.

While in theory the plan should be affordable if the whole state contributes to the cost, the reality is that Massachusetts has an exhaustive list of health coverage regulations prohibiting insurers from offering more basic, pared-down policies with higher deductibles. (This is yet another reminder that America must establish a cross-state insurance market that gives individuals the freedom to shop for insurance plans in states other than their own.)

In our estimation, Massachusetts residents earning little more than $30,000 a year are in jeopardy of being priced out of the system. In the event that this occurs, Governor Romney will be in grave danger of repeating the mistakes of his predecessor, Mike Dukakis, whose 1988 health plan was hailed as a save-all but eventually collapsed when poorly-devised payment structures created a malaise of unfulfilled promises. We propose that a more realistic approach might be to limit the mandate to those individuals earning upwards of $54,000 per year.

While the Commonwealth’s plan will naturally endure tremendous scrutiny from those who assert that the law will not work as intended, Massachusetts leaders are to be commended for this bipartisan proposal to tackle the enormous challenge of finding real solutions for creating a sustainable health system. I hope that Massachusetts’ initiative to provide affordable, quality health insurance for all continues to ignite even more debate around the subject of how to best address our nation’s uninsured crisis and the critical problems within the health system at large.

On a different note, I am pleased to report that our work on accelerating the Right-to-Know movement continues to build. Leaders in Washington are now demanding that Medicare disclose its data, and CHT is helping to carry the message to the states. During my recent trip to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, our work on accelerating the Right-to-Know movement played a key role. My host in South Dakota was state senator and majority whip Tom Dempster, who is the recognized leader in South Dakota healthcare policy.

Senator Dempster is responsible for passing legislation in 2005 that requires all hospitals in the state to post the prices of their 25 most commonly-performed procedures. The law takes full effect on July 1, 2006, and will be the first of its kind in the country. The Sioux Falls Argus Leader did a poll last year that found 85 percent of South Dakotans supported this law. Senator Dempster said he looks forward to working with CHT to develop transformational ideas relating to Medicaid, health insurance, and their state employee health plan.

Also, last month the Center held a two-day Pandemic Influenza Strategic Simulation with our partner and CHT member, Booz Allen Hamilton. The exercise, hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce at their Washington headquarters, was sponsored by MedImmune and Securitas. We were honored to be joined by 150 leaders of pandemic influenza preparedness planning drawn from federal, state, and international government organizations, as well as by business and health sector leaders.

Thanks both to Booz Allen’s excellent facilitation of the event and the insights shared by all who attended, participants have told us that they regarded the event as a great success. We expect to release a report of strategic simulation’s results and findings by the close of this month. (For more information, please contact Robert Egge, the director of CHT’s Health Preparedness and Homeland Security Project, at 202-375-2001 orregge@gingrichgroup.com.)

Finally, I want to take a moment here to challenge the Congress to put forth genuine effort to fix major faults compromising the quality of our health system. The House absolutely must pass a health IT bill this year. Hurricane season is fast approaching – how many lives will be lost this year to our disconnected, paper-based health system?

Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20060822061158/http:/www.healthtransformation.net/News/E_newsletters/index.cfm?newsletterid=20

The most effective proposal for dealing with the debt ceiling vote that has the backing of conservatives is the Cut, Cap, and Balance plan brought forth by the RSC.  Accordingly, virtually every major conservative organization has coalesced around a pledge forcing all members of Congress to support the plan as a condition to raising the debt ceiling.  The presidential candidates are also being recruited to sign the pledge, with Jim DeMint promising to support only those who sign to it.

Yesterday, Mitt Romney announced his support for the pledge, joining every other announced Republican candidate except Jon Huntsman and ….Michele Bachmann?

While Bachmann is a strong supporter of the RSC plan, she is still tepid about signing the pledge.  CNN is reporting that Bachmann told DeMint she is still contemplating her support for the pledge because she wants it “to go a little further.”  Bachmann said at a town hall in South Carolina that she would like to add the defunding of Obamacare to the pledge as another precondition to raising the debt ceiling.

While it is probably a good idea for Bachmann to sign the pledge despite her reservation, she should be applauded for refocusing attention on Obamacare.  We all agree that our long-term budget crisis, including reform of the existing entitlements, should be our paramount concern.  However, we must not lose focus of the urgent need to defund the newest entitlement, Obamacare, precluding it from being enshrined as the entitlement to end all entitlements.

Read More →

The most effective proposal for dealing with the debt ceiling vote that has the backing of conservatives is the Cut, Cap, and Balance plan brought forth by the RSC.  Accordingly, virtually every major conservative organization has coalesced around a pledge forcing all members of Congress to support the plan as a condition to raising the debt ceiling.  The presidential candidates are also being recruited to sign the pledge, with Jim DeMint promising to support only those who sign to it.

Yesterday, Mitt Romney announced his support for the pledge, joining every other announced Republican candidate except Jon Huntsman and ….Michele Bachmann?

While Bachmann is a strong supporter of the RSC plan, she is still tepid about signing the pledge.  CNN is reporting that Bachmann told DeMint she is still contemplating her support for the pledge because she wants it “to go a little further.”  Bachmann said at a town hall in South Carolina that she would like to add the defunding of Obamacare to the pledge as another precondition to raising the debt ceiling.

While it is probably a good idea for Bachmann to sign the pledge despite her reservation, she should be applauded for refocusing attention on Obamacare.  We all agree that our long-term budget crisis, including reform of the existing entitlements, should be our paramount concern.  However, we must not lose focus of the urgent need to defund the newest entitlement, Obamacare, precluding it from being enshrined as the entitlement to end all entitlements.

Read More →

“If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a small chance of survival. There may even be a worse case: you may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.”

— Winston Churchill

The Founding Fathers created a Republic, but 60 Senators are poised to take it away. With the pending disaster of the passage in the Senate of a bill nationalizing one sixth of the U.S. economy and our entire healthcare system at a cost of over $2.5 trillion, we are faced with a crucial question: are the Republican senators using every means at their disposal to stop this looming, tyrannical abuse of power? Unfortunately, the answer appears to be “no.”

The Senate, unlike the House of Representatives, has parliamentary rules and procedures that give the minority the ability to stall legislation. In fact, unlike the House, the minority have the ability to virtually paralyze the Senate. Doing so is not something we would want or expect for every bad bill that comes through Congress, but the proposed healthcare legislation is probably the worst piece of legislation ever considered by the United States Congress. It is the most intrusive, most damaging, most costly, most dangerous bill to the economic and personal freedom and liberty of individual Americans that Congress has ever considered. If there is any bill that deserves being stopped by shutting down the Senate, it is this one.

There are a whole series of parliamentary maneuvers that could be used by Republican senators to stop this bill. There is a hard backstop to the current process (Christmas). The Republicans’ goal should be to prevent Reid from passing the bill before that time. If he goes past Christmas and is forced to adjourn or recess, the momentum will shift in favor of those opposing the bill.

How could this be done?

To start with, they should stop constantly agreeing to “unanimous consent” requests from the Democrats. Senate Republicans, to date, have allowed Democrats, by unanimous consent, to process 10 amendments. The amendments that have been accepted – Democrat amendments – did not make the over 2000-page atrocity any better. The Republican strategy of trying to pass their own “message” amendments carries no message unless you consider “no strategy to kill the bill” a message. There are no amendments that could possibly make this bill a palatable piece of legislation – and any amendments the Republicans get passed that supposedly make the bill “better” may just make it easier for the Democrats to get final passage. If the Republicans want the news media to cover what they are doing to educate the American people even further about the atrociousness of this bill, they have to create drama on the floor of the Senate. And the only way to do that is through an all-out fight with no holds barred. They need to look like Braveheart, fighting to the end to save freedom. Because, in fact, it is our very freedom and liberty that is at stake.

The most powerful words in the Senate are “I object.” Senate Republicans should have been shouting those two words on the Senate floor early and often from the moment this bill was considered, instead of the complete silence we have heard – other than to constantly agree to conduct business through unanimous consent. Here are just a few ways those words can (and should) be used in a very effective way:

Read More →

“If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a small chance of survival. There may even be a worse case: you may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.”

— Winston Churchill

The Founding Fathers created a Republic, but 60 Senators are poised to take it away. With the pending disaster of the passage in the Senate of a bill nationalizing one sixth of the U.S. economy and our entire healthcare system at a cost of over $2.5 trillion, we are faced with a crucial question: are the Republican senators using every means at their disposal to stop this looming, tyrannical abuse of power? Unfortunately, the answer appears to be “no.”

The Senate, unlike the House of Representatives, has parliamentary rules and procedures that give the minority the ability to stall legislation. In fact, unlike the House, the minority have the ability to virtually paralyze the Senate. Doing so is not something we would want or expect for every bad bill that comes through Congress, but the proposed healthcare legislation is probably the worst piece of legislation ever considered by the United States Congress. It is the most intrusive, most damaging, most costly, most dangerous bill to the economic and personal freedom and liberty of individual Americans that Congress has ever considered. If there is any bill that deserves being stopped by shutting down the Senate, it is this one.

There are a whole series of parliamentary maneuvers that could be used by Republican senators to stop this bill. There is a hard backstop to the current process (Christmas). The Republicans’ goal should be to prevent Reid from passing the bill before that time. If he goes past Christmas and is forced to adjourn or recess, the momentum will shift in favor of those opposing the bill.

How could this be done?

To start with, they should stop constantly agreeing to “unanimous consent” requests from the Democrats. Senate Republicans, to date, have allowed Democrats, by unanimous consent, to process 10 amendments. The amendments that have been accepted – Democrat amendments – did not make the over 2000-page atrocity any better. The Republican strategy of trying to pass their own “message” amendments carries no message unless you consider “no strategy to kill the bill” a message. There are no amendments that could possibly make this bill a palatable piece of legislation – and any amendments the Republicans get passed that supposedly make the bill “better” may just make it easier for the Democrats to get final passage. If the Republicans want the news media to cover what they are doing to educate the American people even further about the atrociousness of this bill, they have to create drama on the floor of the Senate. And the only way to do that is through an all-out fight with no holds barred. They need to look like Braveheart, fighting to the end to save freedom. Because, in fact, it is our very freedom and liberty that is at stake.

The most powerful words in the Senate are “I object.” Senate Republicans should have been shouting those two words on the Senate floor early and often from the moment this bill was considered, instead of the complete silence we have heard – other than to constantly agree to conduct business through unanimous consent. Here are just a few ways those words can (and should) be used in a very effective way:

Read More →

Right now in America, the people of this great nation are staring down the loaded barrel of government-run healthcare. If this bill passes, it is no less than the end of America as we know it. You know it. Most Americans knows it.

Yet the people most in a position to do anything about it right now – Senate Republicans – are doing absolutely nothing. If anything, they actually are HELPING Democrats by offering amendments to “highlight problems in the bill,” giving the Democrats the opportunity to produce “cover votes.”

Consider the comments of the number two Senate Republican, Jon Kyl, yesterday on Bill Bennett’s radio show, being hosted by Rick Santorum (hat tip to mayhem in comments of one of Erick’s post, here). In response to the question, “what is your strategy, to the extent you can share it,” Kyl said, “actually, I think we can be fairly upfront about it. Our strategy is not actually to delay and not take votes.” He added, “our strategy is to have a lot of good amendments and highlight the problems in the bill,” and “it is not our strategy to somehow slow things down.”

This is what happens when Senators sit around their offices with overpaid, but largely incompetent staff in fancy rooms scattered about the Capitol – and they listen to pollsters and political strategists talking about how unpopular this bill is, but stressing that Republicans “need to be for something.”

Senator Kyl continued, spending several minutes detailing the GOP strategy to improve the bill with amendments. But, then, the Jon Kyl that we usually applaud conceded that it was simply not possible to improve a bill that at its core allows a government takeover of health care.

Read More →