Commentary

Obama lied, health care died: 10 states where Obamacare killed existing health care plans

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From the Daily Caller.

Excerpt:

President Barack Obama famously promised, “If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan.” He later got even more specific.

“If you are among the hundreds of millions of Americans who already have health insurance through your job, or Medicare, or Medicaid, or the VA, nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change the coverage or the doctor you have,” Obama said.

But as Obamacare’s rollout approaches, we have learned this is not true. Here are the ten states where consumers may like their health care plans, but they won’t be able to keep them.

I’ll pick just three of the states:

1) California:58,000 will lose their plans under Obamacare. The first bomb dropped in California with a mass exodus from the most populated state’s Obamacare exchange. Aetna, the country’s third largest insurer, left first in July and was closely followed by UnitedHealth. Anthem Blue Cross pulled out of California’s Obamacare exchange for small businesses as well.

Fifty-four percent of Californians expect to lose their coverage, according to an August poll.

3) Connecticut: Aetna, the third largest insurer in the nation, won’t offer insurance on the Obamacare exchange in its own home state, where it was founded in 1850. The reason? “We believe the modification to the rates filed by Aetna will not allow us to collect enough premiums to cover the cost of the plans and meet the service expectations of our customers,” said Aetna spokesman Susan Millerick.

5) South Carolina:28,000 people were insured by Medical Mutual of Ohio, SC’s second-largest insurance company, until it decided to leave the state entirely in July due to Obamacare’s “vast and quite complex” new regulations. Company spokesman Ed Byers said Medical Mutual’s patients would be switched over to United Healthcare plans instead.

When Obama said that people could keep their health care plans if they liked them, what evidence did we have to believe him? What reason did we have to believe that he actually knew what he was talking about, instead of just reading a teleprompter-assisted speech that someone else wrote for him? Had he been governor of a state where he put in a similar program and people kept their health plans? Did he commission a study that showed that people would be able to keep their health plans? What evidence did we have to believe him?

News

Harry Reid: government-controlled health care is more important than curing cancer

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That’s a video of Democrat Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid at a Democrat press conference. The Republicans in the House have passed a multitude of bills to fund critical areas of government, but the Democrats have rejected them all. This time, a CNN journalist asks about one bill that funds NIH research to cure cancer. Watch the video!

Washington Free Beacon has the transcript for those who can’t see the video: (H/T Letitia)

DANA BASH: You all talked about children with cancer unable to go to clinical trials. The House is presumably going to pass a bill that funds at least the NIH. Given what you’ve said, will you at least pass that? And if not, aren’t you playing the same political games that Republicans are?

HARRY REID: Listen, Sen. Durbin explained that very well, and he did it here, did it on the floor earlier, as did Sen. Schumer. What right did they have to pick and choose what part of government is going to be funded? It’s obvious what’s going on here. You talk about reckless and irresponsible. Wow. What this is all about is Obamacare. They are obsessed. I don’t know what other word I can use. They’re obsessed with this Obamacare. It’s working now and it will continue to work and people will love it more than they do now by far. So they have no right to pick and choose.

BASH: But if you can help one child who has cancer, why wouldn’t you do it?

REID: Why would we want to do that? I have 1,100 people at Nellis Air Force base that are sitting home. They have a few problems of their own. This is — to have someone of your intelligence to suggest such a thing maybe means you’re irresponsible and reckless –

BASH: I’m just asking a question.

So Harry Reid must be in charge of health care, and that it is worth letting children die of cancer. He can’t trust you and I to earn our own money and buy our own health care in a free market – he has to choose how much much we can earn and how much health care we can pay for. And if a few hundred or a few thousand or a few million children have to die in order for him to get that control over our lives, then so be it. It’s a very telling glimpse into the mind of a socialist. How dare you question his authority to control your life? You’re irresponsible and reckless to demand answers from your betters, you peon. You should be grateful for Harry Reid’s wise oversight.

But you know what the government does have money for during a shutdown? $2,163 for a “massage chair”.

Shutdown doesn’t hurt you? Then they’ll make it hurt you

In fact, the Democrats are so worried that none of us will care about their stupid shutdown of government that actually have barricaded off public memorial monuments to keep world war II veterans from visiting them!

Obama barricades war memorial to keep veterans out
Obama barricades open-area war memorial to keep veterans out

Fortunately, Republican legislators like Michele Bachmann and Louie Gohmert intervened to make sure that veterans who had traveled to Washington to visit the monument were allowed in. They smashed the barricades down and let the veterans inside.

Michele Bachmann:

Republican congressman Pete King even distracted police to sneak some of the veterans in.  The “Park Police” explained that they might press charges against the Republican legislators for breaking down the barricades to let the vets in. That all happened on Monday, but on Tuesday, the Democrats decided to pay union members to protest against the world war II veterans for breaking into the memorial area. I wouldn’t believe that this happened, except that there is a video.

News

30% of gorilla genome contradicts Darwinian prediction of human and ape phylogeny

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The latest episode of ID the Future discusses a recent (March 2012) paper about the gorilla genome.

Details:

On this episode of ID The Future, Casey Luskin discusses how the recent complete sequencing of the gorilla genome has challenged conventional thinking about human ancestry and explains what neo-Darwinists are doing to try to minimize the impact of this new information. Says Luskin: “There is not a clear signal of ancestral relationships that is coming out of the gorilla genome once you add it into the mix.” Tune in to hear about this interesting development!

The MP3 file is here.

Rather than summarize this short 10-minute podcast, I wanted to excerpt a post of Evolution News about it.

Excerpt: (links removed)

A whopping 30% of the gorilla genome — amounting to hundreds of millions of base pairs of gorilla DNA — contradicts the standard supposed evolutionary phylogeny of great apes and humans. That’s the big news revealed last week with the publication of the sequence of the full gorilla genome. But there’s a lot more to this story.

Eugenie Scott once taught us that when some evolutionary scientist claims some discovery “sheds light” on some aspect of evolution, we might suspect that’s evolution-speak for ‘this find really messed up our evolutionary theory.’ That seems to be the case here. Aylwyn Scally, the lead author of the gorilla genome report, was quoted saying, “The gorilla genome is important because it sheds light on the time when our ancestors diverged from our closest evolutionary cousins around six to 10 million years ago.” NPR titled its story similarly: “Gorilla Genome Sheds Light On Human Evolution.” What evolutionary hypothesis did the gorilla genome mess up?

The standard evolutionary phylogeny of primates holds that humans and chimps are more closely related to one-another than to other great apes like gorillas. In practice, all that really means is that when we sequence human, chimp, and gorilla genes, human and chimp genes have a DNA sequence that is more similar to one-another’s genes than to the gorilla’s genes. But huge portions of the gorilla genome contradict that nice, neat tidy phylogeny. That’s because these gorilla genes are more similar to the human or chimp version than the human or chimp versions are to one-another. In fact, it seems that some 30% of the gorilla genome contradicts the standard primate phylogeny in this manner.

The Evolution News post then cites New Scientist and Nature’s comments on the study.

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard about a study like this – the last time was about the chimpanzee genome and the paper was published in Nature – the most prestigious peer-reviewed journal.