'Obamacare' shreds social safety net
By FRANK DONATELLI | 1/26/12 10:26 PM EST | Via:politico.com.
Coming soon to a polling place near you: "Republicans are undermining Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Vote Democratic to stop them." This has become a staple of liberal Democratic campaigns. Count on the Obama 'reelection express' to pound this message home.
President Barack Obama continues to score political points in the battle over extending the payroll tax cut. Yet this fight underlines a key part of his legacy: He has weakened, perhaps fatally, the "social safety net" of entitlement programs, to which liberals claim such devotion and routinely attack conservatives for wanting to undermine.
It's a Democratic campaign staple to attack Republicans for wanting to "destroy" Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, but Obama has done a better job of that than anyone. Syrupy rhetoric is no antidote for his terrible economic policies.
Start with Medicare. The trustees who run the program have been telling us for some time that the current benefit and financing system is unsustainable. Indeed, its 2010 report notes that the Medicare "trust fund" will be exhausted five years sooner than previous estimates.
The passage of "Obamacare" has made this deplorable situation worse. This law does increase various Medicare taxes and includes some cost-containment features. However, as Medicare's own actuary has pointed out, "Obamacare" uses the savings not to strengthen Medicare but to start another unfunded entitlement. The changes - a $500 billion cut in the program - do nothing to shore up the existing Medicare trust fund.
Worse, "Obamacare" radically cuts federal support and seniors' access to Medicare Advantage plans. This popular program offers subsidized insurance so seniors can design plans more suited to individual needs. As usual, Obama harshly attacks the program as a subsidy for the insurance industry. But it is undeniable that these plans will very likely be unavailable to millions of seniors in the coming years, forcing more reliance on Medicare's fee-for-service core program - where costs are growing most rapidly.
House Republicans, led by Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), courageously proposed a long-term shift from fee for service to a "premium support" program, emphasizing private insurance options as a way to slow Medicare's growth while saving the program. Obama derides the plan as "ending Medicare as we know it." He apparently prefers rationing health care - which is where his policies are leading us.
That's not all. "Obamacare" also dramatically increased eligibility for Medicaid, the state-federal program that provides medical care for the poor. Neither the hard-pressed states nor the virtually bankrupt federal government has a long-term funding source in place. So this program is destined to deteriorate financially even more in the future.
The easy way for future savings is to further cut payments to doctors and hospitals, thus limiting even more the number of medical providers likely to participate in the program. This can only be described as health care rationing - resulting in longer wait times and poorer quality care. Exactly the result the administration envisions for Medicare.
Obama's Google Plus hangout: Send me the resume
By JENNIFER EPSTEIN | 1/30/12 7:57 PM EST Updated: 1/30/12 9:05 PM EST | Via:politico.com.
President Barack Obama on Monday made his first foray into Google Plus, trying to stay on message during the social media session as he faced an unexpected twist from a woman with an out-of-work engineer husband.
Obama began answering a jobs question from Jennifer Wedel, of Fort Worth, Texas, with a stock answer, telling her, "I don't know your husband's specialty, but there's a huge demand around the country for engineers," especially in high-tech fields. But Wedel persisted, telling Obama that her husband is a semi-conductor engineer.
"I meant what I said, if you send me your husband's resume, I'd be interested in finding out exactly what's happening right there," Obama responded, saying it seems to him based on industry reports that Wedel's husband "should be able to find something right away."
"I'll have to take you up on that," Wedel said of the president's offer.
The Republican National Committee quickly seized on Obama's response, sending multiple email messages about the incident to its mailing lists, including one with a note from communications director Kirsten Kukowski: "a little out of touch?"
During the 45-minute interactive video session, Obama also fielded questions from a homeless veteran skeptical of foreign aid and an Obama impersonator curious to know what the president thinks of the parodies of him.
Though Obama described Google Plus - the medium he used to chat while viewers watched on the White House website and YouTube - as "some newfangled thing," this was not his first foray into online question-and-answer sessions. In 2011, he participated in conversations with users of Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
Obama also took questions via YouTube for post-State of the Union interviews in 2010 and 2011, but the difference this time is the extra interactivity that comes with the Google Plus platform. Some questions he got were culled from the more than 130,000 posted on YouTube, voted on by users and selected by Google staff. But others were spur-of-the-moment queries from the five people chosen to be part of the "Hangout," Google's term for the chat room where the video discussion took place.
"Participants in this have a chance to talk about what they want," said Macon Phillips, the White House director of new media. "We need to be able to give people a chance to speak."
Obama was adamant in defending foreign aid, even after a homeless veteran asked how the United States could justify sending money abroad to countries such as Pakistan while people who have served this country live on the streets. The president also pushed back against a question about a report that drones are upsetting Iraqi leaders, saying the program is "kept on a very tight leash" to root out terrorists trying to attack U.S. targets.
Steve Grove, head of community partnerships at Google Plus, said that the five people selected for "Hangout" were chosen from among the top question vote-getters, and selected with an eye toward diversity in geography and questions asked.
Though most of the questions fit into predictable categories such as jobs, the economy and education, a few strayed into other areas. The issues that the president didn't address in his State of the Union but did have users abuzz "give you a sense of what people are thinking about and talking about," Grove said. Obama got two questions on the Stop Online Piracy Act and one asking him to dance and, when he demurred, to sing.
"In some future Google Plus I may sing another tune," Obama said, referring to his performance of Al Green's "Let's Stay Together" at the Apollo Theater in New York earlier this month.
Other Electronics News:
inspiron 1420 battery , inspiron 1750 battery , vgp-bps2b , hp 530 battery , vgp-bps8 , vgp-bpl2c , etc.
留言列表
