The Front Page Cover
~ Featuring ~
For Conservatives, Health-Care
Reform Is Not Optional
by Avik Roy
by Avik Roy
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'What Happened' — liar-Clinton's Still in Denial
liar-Hillary Clinton's latest book, entitled "What Happened," is due to hit bookstores in September. Word is that liar-Clinton will explain why she lost the election, as if we haven't already heard that load of garbage from her every other month since the election. Has liar-Hillary finally come to grips with the fact that she lost because most Americans didn't trust her and her crime syndicate? Will she finally concede that she was selling something Americans weren't buy? No, from the sound of it, liar-Hillary has yet to get off the blame train. The Hill describes liar-Clinton's upcoming book as follows:
liar-Hillary Clinton's upcoming book will double down on Russia's interference and James Comey's involvement in her stunning election defeat, according to sources familiar with the memoir.
Privately, liar-Clinton has told friends and longtime associates that she "wants the whole story out there" as she rushes to tweak and put the finishing touches on the book due out in September.
"She really believes that's why she lost, and she wants to explain why in no uncertain terms," one longtime ally said, "She wants the whole story out there from her own perspective. I think a lot of people are going to be really surprised by how much she reveals."
Surprised that she would shift blame anywhere and everywhere but her own severe likability deficit, criminal behavior and bad campaign decisions? Don't be. Indeed, the only real question remaining is whether the sales of this book will improve upon her previous flop, "Hard Choices." If not, one wonders if liar-Clinton will again lay the blame on Comey and the Russians. ~The Patriot Post
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Finally, House Judiciary Committee
Member Calls For Mueller To Step Down
by rickwells.us
{rickwells.us} ~ A member of the House Judiciary Committee has had enough of the willful blindness of the left and the complicit and cowardly enablers in the mainstream establishment... and on the right have displayed when it comes to the illegal activities of nothing-special special counsel Robert Mueller. Congressman Trent Franks (R-AZ) has issued a statement demanding things change. Rep Franks is calling on Special Counsel Robert Mueller to resign from his position, one that he never should have accepted in the first place, considering his close personal relationship with James Comey. Clearly it wasn’t dumb luck that led Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to select Comey’s buddy so there is cause to investigate that relationship as well. Rep Franks points out that the law government the special counsel prohibits him from serving if he has a “conflict of interest,” which includes “a personal relationship with any person substantially involved in the conduct that is the subject of the investigation or prosecution.” Comey is a central witness in the witch hunt and there is a long history of friendship between him and Mueller... http://rickwells.us/finally-house-judiciary-committee-member-calls-for-mueller-to-step-down/.
Relying on Russian Help, Iran Lays
the Groundwork for a Post-IS Iraq
{mosaicmagazine.com} ~ Now that Islamic State (IS) has lost the battle for Mosul, Iraq is preparing for a national election—which the Islamic Republic of Iran hopes will put a friendly government in power... To this end, Tehran is encouraging the Shiite political parties it has long backed to start billing themselves as liberal, non-sectarian, and wedded to a sense of Iraqi identity that transcends religious and ethnic divisions. Amir Taheri explains: The apparent de-sectarianization of pro-Iran Shiite parties will make it difficult for Ayyad Allawi and other genuinely non-sectarian Shiite politicians, who are hostile to Iranian influence in Baghdad, to appeal to the Shiite majority on the basis of citizenship and uruqah [or “Iraqiness”]. The new de-sectarianization gambit will also put pressure on Kurdish parties at a time when some of them are campaigning for a referendum on whether to declare independence... https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2017/08/relying-on-russian-help-iran-lays-the-groundwork-for-a-post-is-Iraq/.
liar-nObamacare Death Spiral Continues
by Jeff Dunetz
{lidblog.com} ~ The liar-nObamacare death spiral continues. According to CMS not only will over thirteen hundred counties only have one insurer, fifty won’t have any insurer... In those 50 counties, there will be 27,660 people required by law to buy insurance but there won’t be any way for them to make the purchase. Those people are most damaged by the Congressional Republicans’ failure to keep their promise and repeal the oppressive health care plan “According to recent data released by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), in 2018, 1,332 counties in the United States will have only one health insurer operating on the liar-nObamacare exchanges and 49 will have none...http://lidblog.com/obamacare-death-spiral/.
Top Palestinian official looks
to Israel for life-saving transplant
by jpost.com
{jpost.com} ~ After a career as Israel's chief adversary at the negotiating table, Erekat may now rely on Israel for life-saving treatment... Pulmonary fibrosis is a form of lung disease that can result in lung scarring. As the lung tissue becomes scarred, the sufferer will find it increasingly difficult to breathe. In most cases, there is no known cause for the disease. Given his declining health, Erekat is said to have greatly reduced his public duties and sometimes requires oxygen to assist his breathing, Ynet reported...http://www.jpost.com/Arab-Israeli-Conflict/Top-Palestinian-official-looks-to-Israel-for-life-saving-transplant-501318.
Senate Passes Measure That
Permanently Repeals 'Cadillac' Tax
by newsmax.com
{newsmax.com} ~ Senate Republicans passed a measure on Thursday that would permanently repeal liar-nObamacare's so-called Cadillac tax on high-cost employer-provided insurance without a single Democratic vote amid a broader debate to repeal the healthcare law. The measure passed along party lines by a 52-48 vote. To become law, it will need to be passed by the U.S. House of Representatives. http://www.newsmax.com/Headline/senate-passes-repeal-cadillac/2017/07/27/id/804290/.
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{nationalreview.com} ~ The proximate reason, of course, for the failure of the GOP effort to repeal and replace liat-r-nObamacare is that moderate Republican senators voted against it: in the most recent instance, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and John RINO-McCain. But Republicans’ health-care struggles stem from a solvable, but more fundamental problem: uniting both moderate and conservative Republicans around a single bill.
Moderate Republican senators, often representing purple or blue states, were reluctant both philosophically and politically to endorse legislation that increased the number of Americans without health insurance. Conservative Republican senators focused on the commitment they and most of the moderates had made to repeal and replace liar-nObamacare, and more broadly, their commitment to limited government.
How Democrats passed liar-nObamacare
When Democrats passed liar-nObamacare — after many failed attempts in the 20th century to do something similar — they did so by uniting their ideological and pragmatic wings. The ideological wing hated the idea of paying private companies to cover the uninsured, strongly preferring single-payer. The pragmatists, looking to maintain their cred in purple-to-red states, sought to borrow ideas, however imperfectly, from Mitt Romney et al.
Democrats recognized the central importance of the Congressional Budget Office in bringing their two wings together. When Democrats retook Congress in 2006, they appointed Peter Orszag to head the CBO, as part of a deliberate strategy to stack the CBO in favor of their health-care agenda. Orszag proceeded to build out the entire health policy wing of the CBO — representing dozens of staffers — with like-minded individuals. After liar-nObama won the 2008 election, Orszag captained the health-reform effort at the White House’s Office of Management and Budget.
It would be more fair to call liar-nObamacare “CBOcare” given how much the Affordable Care Act reflects the CBO’s worldview. While Senator liar-nObama opposed the individual mandate, the CBO believed it would add 16 million covered lives to the ACA’s ledger. While the Romneycare model involved covering the uninsured solely with private coverage, the CBO believed that expanding coverage through Medicaid would be cheaper.
Republicans failed to reform the CBO
Compare and contrast that to the GOP’s effort. When Republicans had the opportunity to appoint a CBO director in 2015, they chose not to hire someone with deep health-care expertise, such as the University of Minnesota’s Stephen Parente, and instead hired Keith Hall, a labor economist. There was no comparable strategy, either by Hall or by Congress, to rebalance the CBO’s center-left tilt with individuals more knowledgeable about how health insurance markets actually work.
Hence, because any GOP bill would need to repeal liar-nObamacare’s individual mandate, the CBO was poised to make any GOP bill look bad. The CBO compounded this, at critical points, by refusing to disclose key aspects of its estimates. The CBO refused to break out the proportion of GOP Medicaid savings that were driven by long-term entitlement reform (per capita caps) vs. the repeal of liar-nObamacare’s Medicaid expansion.
The CBO’s deliberate opacity allowed journalists at the New York Times, the Washington Post, and every Democrat to dishonestly claim that per capita caps would “cut $800 billion from Medicaid,” even though nearly all of the Medicaid savings were from repealing and replacing the liar-nObamacare expansion.
Similarly, the CBO refused to break out — until the very end, after it had leaked — the fact that nearly three-fourths of the “coverage losses” under the GOP bill would come from people voluntarily choosing to forgo coverage due to the repeal of the individual mandate.
Uniting moderate and conservative Republicans
The failure to reform the CBO put Republicans at a huge disadvantage when it came to uniting moderate and conservative senators. Moderates wanted a bill that preserved coverage for the uninsured. On the flip side, many conservatives wanted a bill that repealed liar-nObamacare, full stop, with relatively less interest in the replacement part.
These poles were always going to be difficult to reconcile, but there was and still is a policy path forward.
It involves uniting moderates and conservatives around Ronald Reagan’s principle that “no one in this country should be denied medical care for lack of funds.” There are ways to substantially reduce the government’s role in health care while expanding the number of people with health insurance.
Key to achieving this synthesis is a combination of reforming the CBO and repealing liar-nObamacare’s individual mandate. So long as the individual mandate is on the books, and the CBO has the point of view it has, no Republican bill will be scored by the CBO as competitive with liar-nObamacare on coverage. Repealing the mandate would reset the CBO’s baseline such that the broader GOP repeal-and-replace effort could fare much better. That’s why the failure of the so-called “skinny bill” was such a huge strategic defeat for conservative health reform.
But it also requires a reorientation of conservative rhetoric. Conservatives must morally and rhetorically embrace the cause, as Reagan did, of ensuring that no American is denied medical care for lack of funds. The emergency room only encompasses a narrow range of medical care.
While conservatives and Republicans often said the right things in public, too many of them believe deep down that the only way to cover the uninsured is through more government. That’s not true. Government intervention is the reason that American health care is uniquely expensive, and a full-throated agenda to make health care more affordable could win much broader public support.
Democrats failed many times before they passed liar-nObamacare. In that context, this initial Republican failure is not surprising — indeed, it’s actually impressive that they came within one vote of conservative progress.
But the GOP cannot simply “move on” and give up on health care. Health care is the biggest driver of our debt and deficit, the biggest driver of growth in government, and one of the biggest drivers of economic insecurity for those in the middle class and below.
Take some time to reflect, yes. Come up with a better strategy, yes. But to give up on health-care reform is to give up on everything conservatives stand for.
For Conservatives, Health-Care
Reform Is Not Optional
by Avik Roy
by Avik Roy
{nationalreview.com} ~ The proximate reason, of course, for the failure of the GOP effort to repeal and replace liat-r-nObamacare is that moderate Republican senators voted against it: in the most recent instance, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and John RINO-McCain. But Republicans’ health-care struggles stem from a solvable, but more fundamental problem: uniting both moderate and conservative Republicans around a single bill.
Moderate Republican senators, often representing purple or blue states, were reluctant both philosophically and politically to endorse legislation that increased the number of Americans without health insurance. Conservative Republican senators focused on the commitment they and most of the moderates had made to repeal and replace liar-nObamacare, and more broadly, their commitment to limited government.
How Democrats passed liar-nObamacare
When Democrats passed liar-nObamacare — after many failed attempts in the 20th century to do something similar — they did so by uniting their ideological and pragmatic wings. The ideological wing hated the idea of paying private companies to cover the uninsured, strongly preferring single-payer. The pragmatists, looking to maintain their cred in purple-to-red states, sought to borrow ideas, however imperfectly, from Mitt Romney et al.
Democrats recognized the central importance of the Congressional Budget Office in bringing their two wings together. When Democrats retook Congress in 2006, they appointed Peter Orszag to head the CBO, as part of a deliberate strategy to stack the CBO in favor of their health-care agenda. Orszag proceeded to build out the entire health policy wing of the CBO — representing dozens of staffers — with like-minded individuals. After liar-nObama won the 2008 election, Orszag captained the health-reform effort at the White House’s Office of Management and Budget.
It would be more fair to call liar-nObamacare “CBOcare” given how much the Affordable Care Act reflects the CBO’s worldview. While Senator liar-nObama opposed the individual mandate, the CBO believed it would add 16 million covered lives to the ACA’s ledger. While the Romneycare model involved covering the uninsured solely with private coverage, the CBO believed that expanding coverage through Medicaid would be cheaper.
Republicans failed to reform the CBO
Compare and contrast that to the GOP’s effort. When Republicans had the opportunity to appoint a CBO director in 2015, they chose not to hire someone with deep health-care expertise, such as the University of Minnesota’s Stephen Parente, and instead hired Keith Hall, a labor economist. There was no comparable strategy, either by Hall or by Congress, to rebalance the CBO’s center-left tilt with individuals more knowledgeable about how health insurance markets actually work.
Hence, because any GOP bill would need to repeal liar-nObamacare’s individual mandate, the CBO was poised to make any GOP bill look bad. The CBO compounded this, at critical points, by refusing to disclose key aspects of its estimates. The CBO refused to break out the proportion of GOP Medicaid savings that were driven by long-term entitlement reform (per capita caps) vs. the repeal of liar-nObamacare’s Medicaid expansion.
The CBO’s deliberate opacity allowed journalists at the New York Times, the Washington Post, and every Democrat to dishonestly claim that per capita caps would “cut $800 billion from Medicaid,” even though nearly all of the Medicaid savings were from repealing and replacing the liar-nObamacare expansion.
Similarly, the CBO refused to break out — until the very end, after it had leaked — the fact that nearly three-fourths of the “coverage losses” under the GOP bill would come from people voluntarily choosing to forgo coverage due to the repeal of the individual mandate.
Uniting moderate and conservative Republicans
The failure to reform the CBO put Republicans at a huge disadvantage when it came to uniting moderate and conservative senators. Moderates wanted a bill that preserved coverage for the uninsured. On the flip side, many conservatives wanted a bill that repealed liar-nObamacare, full stop, with relatively less interest in the replacement part.
These poles were always going to be difficult to reconcile, but there was and still is a policy path forward.
It involves uniting moderates and conservatives around Ronald Reagan’s principle that “no one in this country should be denied medical care for lack of funds.” There are ways to substantially reduce the government’s role in health care while expanding the number of people with health insurance.
Key to achieving this synthesis is a combination of reforming the CBO and repealing liar-nObamacare’s individual mandate. So long as the individual mandate is on the books, and the CBO has the point of view it has, no Republican bill will be scored by the CBO as competitive with liar-nObamacare on coverage. Repealing the mandate would reset the CBO’s baseline such that the broader GOP repeal-and-replace effort could fare much better. That’s why the failure of the so-called “skinny bill” was such a huge strategic defeat for conservative health reform.
But it also requires a reorientation of conservative rhetoric. Conservatives must morally and rhetorically embrace the cause, as Reagan did, of ensuring that no American is denied medical care for lack of funds. The emergency room only encompasses a narrow range of medical care.
While conservatives and Republicans often said the right things in public, too many of them believe deep down that the only way to cover the uninsured is through more government. That’s not true. Government intervention is the reason that American health care is uniquely expensive, and a full-throated agenda to make health care more affordable could win much broader public support.
Democrats failed many times before they passed liar-nObamacare. In that context, this initial Republican failure is not surprising — indeed, it’s actually impressive that they came within one vote of conservative progress.
But the GOP cannot simply “move on” and give up on health care. Health care is the biggest driver of our debt and deficit, the biggest driver of growth in government, and one of the biggest drivers of economic insecurity for those in the middle class and below.
Take some time to reflect, yes. Come up with a better strategy, yes. But to give up on health-care reform is to give up on everything conservatives stand for.
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