This line says it perfectly: “The President’s Proposal,” as the 11-page White House document is headlined, is in one sense a notable achievement: It manages to take the worst of both the House and Senate bills and combine them into something more destructive. A mere three days before President Obama’s supposedly bipartisan health-care summit, the White House yesterday released a new blueprint that Democrats say they will ram through Congress with or without Republican support. So after election defeats in Virginia, New Jersey and even Massachusetts, and amid overwhelming public opposition, Democrats have decided to give the voters what they don’t want anyway. |
Ah, the glory of “progressive” governance and democratic consent. |
The bill’s one new inspiration is a powerful federal board that would regulate premiums in the individual insurance market. In all 50 states, insurers are already required to justify premium increases to insurance commissioners, who generally have the power to give a regulatory go-ahead, or not. But their primary concern is actuarial soundness and capital standards, making sure that companies have enough cash to pay claims. Read more at online.wsj.com |
The American people continue to beg the White House and Democrats to give up their plan for a government takeover of the health care system, but it appears the pleas are falling on deaf ears. WASHINGTON—President Barack Obama’s health-care proposal is a victory for those in the White House who want to press ahead with ambitious legislation over those who counseled scaling it back. |
The proposal, unveiled Monday, reaffirmed Mr. Obama’s support for the policy’s sweeping objectives: expanding health-care coverage to some 30 million Americans, new efforts to control health spending and new rules for health insurers. |
Continued pursuit of a comprehensive health-care overhaul had been uncertain following the victory last month of Republican Scott Brown in the Massachusetts U.S. Senate election. Mr. Brown won partly by campaigning against the health bill, which was proving increasingly unpopular with voters. |
Congressional Republicans on Monday flatly rejected President Barack Obama’s $950 billion health care package, all but ensuring that the president’s summit on the issue scheduled for later this week will fail to end the partisan stalemate over reform. |
The GOP’s position is not surprising given the party has been cool to the Democratic proposals so far, and no Republican voted in favor of the Senate-passed health care bill that Obama’s proposal was modeled after. What’s more, the Obama plan is $79 billion more expensive than the $871 billion Senate plan. Republicans, however, say they plan to attend Obama’s nationally televised health care forum Thursday at the Blair House. Read more at www.rollcall.com |
This is starting to sound more and more like a made for TV event, instead of a real bipartisan negotiating session. | When he jousts with Congressional Republicans over health care policy during a televised meeting on Thursday, President Obama will seek to portray his adversaries as sharing many of the broad goals of his legislation and also strive to unify Congressional Democrats to press ahead and adopt a bill, senior White House officials and leading Democrats say. |
But Mr. Obama, top White House advisers and Congressional leaders of both parties are under no illusion that the meeting will resolve more than a half-century of disagreements over health care policy. Instead, Democrats say, they hope the event will create a climate that helps revive their legislation in Congress and prove to the American public that they are willing to hear out Republicans and even adopt their ideas. |
| Republican leaders have not yet committed to attending the session and have said they doubt the sincerity of Mr. Obama’s bipartisan overtures, given his refusal to discard the Democrats’ legislation and start over. Read more at www.nytimes.com |
I thought the goal of Thursday’s Health Care Summit was to come up with a bipartisan plan…that is tough to do when one side comes to the negotiating table with its mind already made up. President Obama made it clear Monday morning that he intends to make a final push for a comprehensive overhaul of the nation’s health care and insurance system, offering a new health care plan that largely embraces the approach already taken by the U.S. Senate. |
The plan, which went live on the White House Web site at 10 a.m., rejects repeated calls from Republicans to scrap Democratic efforts from last year and start over. Instead, it attempts to merge the Senate legislation with its counterpart in the House in ways that would address some of the most controversial provisions in the stalled bill. |
Among the changes Obama seeks is a delay of the tax on high-end insurance plans until 2018, an end to the special Medicaid deal that negotiators had cut for Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson (D) and new federal authority over health care insurance rate increases. The plan does not call for a public option health plan despite pressure from progressives in Obama’s Democratic party to do so. Read more at www.washingtonpost.com |
I agree with the Minority Leader…I am stadning up against the Democrats’ liberal health care and energy policies because my constituents and I agree - they are bad for our nation. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell on Sunday dismissed the emerging “Washington is broken” mantra being used by Democratic lawmakers, strategists and pundits to cast Republicans as obstructionists to progress. |
“Look, in terms of whether or not we’re at a gridlock, I would like to quote the president of the United States himself, who said just a couple of months ago, ‘If we stop today’ - this is the president - ‘If we stop today, this legislative session would have been one of the most productive in a generation,” Mr. McConnell said on Fox News. |
“They are trying to spin the notion that we are stymieing everything they’re doing. It is simply not true, based on the president’s own words,” he said. |
But the Kentucky Republican said his party, along with a sizable majority of Americans, oppose Mr. Obama’s trillion-dollar health care reform proposal and new global warming legislation, and that Republican senators have a duty to their constituents. Read more at washingtontimes.com |
Reporting from Washington - Although “tea party” activists and other conservatives claim kinship with the founding fathers and the Spirit of ‘76, their emerging strategy for the November elections has more in common with the Spirit of ‘94 — the year Republicans ended 40 years of Democratic dominance on Capitol Hill.
Conservative strategists centered the 1994 Republican campaign on a “Contract with America.” This year, GOP leaders in the House have pledged to issue their own, updated version of that agenda, which is widely credited with having helped Republicans focus their message and win a historic victory.
But this time, the declaration of principles that House Minority Leader John A. Boehner of Ohio has promised will have to play in a crowded field.Read more at www.latimes.com |
An informative column by George Will that points out many of the flaws in so called “settled” global warming science. Science, many scientists say, has been restored to her rightful throne because progressives have regained power. Progressives, say progressives, emulate the cool detachment of scientific discourse. So hear the calm, collected voice of a scientist lavishly honored by progressives, Rajendra Pachauri. |
He is chairman of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which shared the 2007 version of the increasingly weird Nobel Peace Prize. Denouncing persons skeptical about the shrill certitudes of those who say global warming poses an imminent threat to the planet, he says: |
You’ve probably never heard of either hydraulic fracturing or Steve Heare, but odds are good that you will soon be hearing a lot in the Mainstream Media about both of them. Hydraulic fracturing - aka “hydro fracking” - is an old technology used for six decades in places like Oklahoma and Texas to get to oil and natural gas deposits that would otherwise be unreachable by injecting water into adjoining rock formations. Hydraulic fracturing is also now being used extensively in New York and Pennsylvania to tap into one of the world’s largest natural gas deposits, the Marcellus Shale. Read more at www.washingtonexaminer.com |
I am also meeting with Tea party activists in Texas and joining them at rallies. We have a lot in common and together can change the direction of this country. Amid a euphoria unimaginable just a year ago, activists Thursday at the largest conservative gathering in the country plotted how to ride the “tea party” wave to sweeping Republican victories in this year’s elections - and to force the GOP to govern as conservatives after the vote. |
But on the opening day of the biggest-ever Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the tenuous relationship among conservatives, tea party activists and the Republican Party establishment was also repeatedly on display. Tea party backers vowed not to be taken for granted and insisted that Republicans prove they have learned the lessons of their past support for big government. |
“Let’s not leave them to their own devices,” said Dick Armey, former House majority leader and now chairman of FreedomWorks, a prime mover of the tea party phenomenon. Republicans “must come to us and show us they’re worthy of our loyalty. We don’t owe them.” Read more at washingtontimes.com |
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