Supreme Court rules against scumbag/liar-
nObama-era provision on Medicare
reimbursements
by Jacqueline Thomsen and Peter Sullivan because officials did not follow the proper notice and comment regulations in implementing the formula. The court ruled 7-1 to vacate the rule, with Justice Neil Gorsuch writing the majority opinion. Justice Stephen Breyer was the sole dissenting member of the court, and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the newest member of the court, was not involved in the case.The highly technical ruling and dispute involves billions of dollars in Medicare payments to hospitals. The court ruled for hospitals that had sued over the 2014 policy, which reduced their payments for serving low-income patients because of a change to the payment formula. “In 2014, the government revealed a new policy on its website that dramatically—and retroactively—reduced payments to hospitals serving low-income patients,” Gorsuch wrote. "Because affected members of the public received no advance warning and no chance to comment first, and because the government has not identified a lawful excuse for neglecting its statutory notice-and-comment obligations, we agree with the court of appeals that the new policy cannot stand,” he continued. Breyer, however, argued that the type of agency action in question did not require going through the full notice and comment process...
https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/446608-supreme-court-rejects-obama-era-rule-change-on-medicare.
Calif. bill gives full healthcare coverage to illegal immigrants. Dems stick it to Trump and taxpayers
by Frieda Powers After months of negotiations, Gov. Gavin Newsom and Democrats in the state legislature delivered a bill Sunday as part of the state’s budget that would run counter to the Trump administration’s immigration efforts by making California the first and only state in the nation to pay for the health care of thousands of illegal immigrants. California’s Medicaid program, known as Medi-Cal, would become available to any low-income California resident between the ages of 19 and 25 beginning in January 2020 under the proposed bill, the Sacramento Bee reported. The plan states it would “extend eligibility for full-scope Medi-Cal benefits to individuals of all ages, if otherwise eligible for those benefits, but for their immigration status, and would delete provisions delaying eligibility and enrollment.” Costing about $98 million per year, the bill which was part of an overall $213 billion budget, will use the “extraordinary” state budget surplus to now cover the health care of thousands living in the state illegally, though it will not include undocumented seniors. “While it’s not all we sought, it will provide a real tangible difference for people, especially for those around and below poverty and for middle income families who don’t get any help under the federal law,” Anthony Wright, executive director of advocacy group Health Access, said. Newsom was reportedly shocked buy the homeless levels in the state and announced he would launch a task force using $1 billion of taxpayer funds to “find solutions,” something Donald Trump Jr. slammed in a tweet recommending Californians reject the so-called leadership of Democrats. “And yet most 2020 Democratic candidates for president want you to believe that President Donald Trump is the problem, and the Democratic policies creating the dystopian nightmare in California should be exported throughout the nation,” Bruce wrote in her op-ed. “Yeah, no.” The latest budget agreement, which would wipe out existing citizenship requirements to receive benefits, must be approved by the full state Legislature where Democrats enjoy a super majority...
The people of Calif will be paying for this. https://www.bizpacreview.com/2019/06/10/california-bill-gives-full-healthcare-coverage-to-illegal-immigrants-dems-stick-it-to-trump-and-taxpayers-763363?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=BPR%20Email&utm_campaign=DMS .
{ americanthinker.com } ~ How often do we hear proponents of renewable energy claiming that wind and solar power are the lowest-cost power sources on offer?... Hardly a day goes by without these ideological zealots offering one or another discredited argument that their favored sources are not only necessary to save the planet from some existential climate catastrophe, but also lower-cost than conventional power sources. These outlandish claims got a major boost when a freshman House of Representatives member unveiled her "Green New Deal," which absurdly claimed that the world would end in 12 years unless the U.S. made a crash effort to radically transform its economy in the next ten years. That transformation would entail, in addition to a lengthy list of inane ideas, complete elimination of beef and dairy cattle, elimination of air travel in favor of high-speed ground transport options, and complete conversion of all power generation to renewable sources like wind and solar power. The contention, born out of economic illiteracy, is that this transformation was not only necessary for planetary survival, but would be so affordable that we would struggle to know what to do with all the newfound prosperity. We don't need to wait around for decades to learn how this program would work in practice. At least some of these wild claims are testable today by examining energy prices in places that have already deployed large measures of renewable energy. Currently, 29 states have enacted laws called Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) requiring certain threshold levels of renewable energy to be used in the generation of electricity. Thus, it's a simple matter to compare the effect of high renewable energy penetration on system prices in those states that have integrated large amounts of renewable energy into their generation portfolios with those of adjacent places that have forgone this option. Let's examine in detail all-sector electricity rate activity in five states with high degrees of renewable penetration i.e., states that have deployed renewable capacity to such a degree that their 2018 renewable generation output represents the highest percentages of total in-state generation output from all sources. Kansas is the U.S. state with the highest degree of renewable energy penetration in 2018. As the chart below shows, the state began deploying wind power at a furious pace beginning in 2008. Note: Kansas first deployed wind power in 2001, but the state saw only token deployments until 2008. At the beginning of 2008, year-to-date all-sector rates were below 73% of the U.S. average. But by the end of 2018, Kansas rates were essentially equivalent to the national average. As the state increased wind capacity by nearly a factor of six, its rates climbed more than 7.8 times faster than the average of the 45 states with the lowest degree of renewable energy penetration. It wasn't an accident. A recent Kansas rate study of several utilities in the state makes clear that a large measure of blame for skyrocketing rates resides with inordinate amounts of fixed investment in power generation i.e., wind farms and transmission lines i.e., the costly integration infrastructure required to connect far-flung wind power turbines to distant consuming regions...
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Rush to Subvert Electoral College Hits Roadblock
Brian Mark Weber: Ever since the 2017 inauguration, we’ve known leftists would do whatever they could to bring down Donald Trump’s presidency. Indeed, while most of the nation waited breathlessly for Robert Mueller to announce the results of his two-year, $30-million investigation into the now-debunked Trump/Russia collusion conspiracy, Democrats were working on a backup plan to keep future Republican nominees from ever setting foot into the White House.
Their plan is known as the National Popular Vote, an interstate compact that would essentially make the Electoral College null and void. In its early stages, the campaign didn’t garner much attention. But now that we’re facing the real possibility of ending the Electoral College, people seem to be waking up to this sleight-of-hand attempt to undermine the Constitution and ensure one-party rule in perpetuity.
The campaign had been picking up steam. Had. Recently, both Maine and Nevada dealt setbacks to the initiative, with Maine’s state House rejecting it in bipartisan fashion and Nevada Democrat Gov. Steve Sisolak vetoing his state’s measure. He even explained what many Americans already know to be true: The NPV compact would “diminish the role of smaller states like Nevada in national electoral contests and force Nevada’s electors to side with whoever wins the nationwide popular vote, rather than the candidate Nevadans choose.”
Still, as the editors at The Wall Street Journal write, “Fourteen states so far, along with the District of Columbia, have joined a compact to bypass the Electoral College by pledging their presidential electors to whichever candidate wins more ballots nationally.”
In other words, if the candidate your state chooses on Election Day falls short by one vote in the national tally, all of his electoral votes go to his opponent.
Even worse, the system would open up the floodgates to increased voter fraud and would do violence to both the wisdom of the Founders and the “one person, one vote” goal that Democrats talk about ad nauseam.
The initiative is misleading and subversive.
Tara Ross writes at The Daily Signal, “National Popular Vote’s compact would radically change the presidential election system, even as it pretends to leave America’s current state-based Electoral College untouched. National Popular Vote must be laughing all the way to the bank. It relies on the state-based aspects of the system when convenient, but then switches to reliance on a national tally when that’s convenient.”
Ross asks us to “consider what is happening on another front: California legislators are working to prevent President Donald Trump from appearing on their state ballot in 2020. Assuming Trump is the Republican nominee, how could he possibly win the national popular vote when he will be unable to win even a single vote from the largest state in the Union?”
Democrats who pride themselves on defending voting rights are essentially seeking to steal the votes from millions of Americans in order to support the popular-vote winner. And while no system is perfect, the Electoral College ensures that presidents represent the interests of a broad section of the American population, not merely the views of people living in big cities or on the coasts.
Under NPV, future candidates for president would never again set foot in Nevada, Iowa, New Mexico, or any other state between New York and California. After all, why go on the stump in 30 small states when all one needs is California, New York, and a few other big states to siphon the votes away from the rest of the citizenry?
Think about it: Under NPV, a candidate could theoretically lose 39 states and still win the presidency. That’s what founding father James Madison called “the tyranny of the majority.”
Undeterred, Oregon moved one step closer to becoming the 15th state to pass the national popular vote bill by sending it to the Democrat governor for a rubber stamp. This would bring the tally to 196 of the 270 votes needed to put the NPV into effect.
But there’s still a glimmer of hope that we can save the Electoral College. Nathaniel Rakich writes at FiveThirtyEight, “The compact could encounter other obstacles. Republicans could recapture full control of one (or more) of the states in the compact and repeal the National Popular Vote law. And if the compact began to look like it was really going to take effect, opponents would likely sue and claim that it is unconstitutional. So despite its successes in 2019, the National Popular Vote interstate compact remains a highly uncertain proposition in the long term.”
For now, it looks like the Electoral College will remain in place for the 2020 presidential election. After that, all bets are off. Progressives have chipped away at the Constitution for more than a century, but now they’re taking a sledgehammer to its foundation.
If thoughtful legislators don’t rise up to stop NPV from taking effect now, we may never have the means to stop it in the future.
~The Patriot Post
https://patriotpost.us/articles/63498?mailing_id=4320&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4320&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body
by Rita Lowery Gitchell
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