Tag Archives: Barack Obama

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Obama administration retaliates against Texas by cutting funding for medical care

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From Investors Business Daily.

Excerpt:

President Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services has withdrawn $30 million worth of funding from a Texas Medicaid program that provides health care services for low-income women.

It did so because Texas recently passed a law that said its Women’s Health Program could not disperse funds to abortion and contraception providers such as Planned Parenthood.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius personally traveled to Houston to make the announcement that the Obama administration would cut funding of the program and would no longer continue the waiver that Texas had previously been given to continue funding of the program temporarily.

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott has issued an opinion declaring that federal law allows states to exclude abortion providers and their affiliated organizations from Medicaid. In a letter to Obama, Texas Gov. Perry accused the administration of trying to violate states’ rights “by mandating which health providers the state of Texas must use.”

WHP provides health services to 130,000 low-income women. Of the more than 1,000 certified WHP providers across the state, the Texas law excludes fewer than 100 Planned Parenthood providers. Yet the Obama administration is willing to cut off all the other providers and all the women who receive health care through them in pursuit of its ideological agenda.

Texas considers Planned Parenthood, which performs 300,000 abortions a year, a poor allocation of public funds intended to promote women’s health, noting they cannot treat breast cancer and do not have a single mammogram machine in the entire state of Texas. But if you want an abortion or contraceptives, Planned Parenthood provides one-stop shopping for that.

Nor does Planned Parenthood need public funds. As we’ve noted, when the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation announced it was planning to stop giving money to Planned Parenthood, within hours some 6,000 donors pledged a total of $400,000. A family in Dallas offered $250,000, and New York’s Mayor Bloomberg promised to match that.

In other news, Sandra Fluke admitted that she had no idea that she could get birth control from Target for $9 a month.

Related posts on Planned Parenthood

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Obamacare requires virtually all health care plans to cover free sterilizations

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From CNS News.

Excerpt:

The “preventive services” guidelines issued by the HHS, say that new health insurance plans in the United States must “provide coverage without cost-sharing” that includes: “All Food and Drug Administration approved contraceptive methods, sterilization procedures, and patient education and counseling for all women with reproductive capacity.”

On Friday, the department of HHS announced a regulation making clear that this mandate extends to the student health care plans offered at American colleges and universities.

[…]As CNSNews.com has reported, the HHS regulation was announced on Friday, Mar. 16, and will be published in the Federal Register on Mar. 21.

“Under the final rule, students will gain the same protections other people with individual market insurance have, like a prohibition on lifetime limits and coverage of preventive services without cost sharing,” HHS said in a press release put out late Friday afternoon.

In a request for comments on how the student-health-plan mandate will be implemented, HHS spelt out that its “proventive services” included the same items as the overall mandate–including sterilizations.

“As relevant here, the HRSA Guidelines require coverage, without cost sharing, for ‘[a]all Food and Drug Administration [(FDA)] approved contraceptive methods, sterilization procedures, and patient education and counseling for all women with reproductive capacity,’ as prescribed by a provider,” said the HHS request for comments.

In announcing the rule for college-based health plans, HHS said it would follow the same system for enforcing the rule on religious colleges and universities that object to purchasing sterilizations, contraceptives and abortifacients for its students that President Barack Obama has proposed for enforcing the regulation on religious non-profit organizations in the coverage for their employees: The insurer will be forced to provide the sterilizations, contraceptives and abortifacients to the students free of charge.

Do you want to know why you never heard about this requirement that Christian colleges and schools provide free sterilizations to women? Because the mainstream media was not neutral in reporting on Obamacare – they were trying to sway public opinion towards supporting Obamacare. Here is a nice post from Newsbusters that goes over some of the worst examples of pro-Obamacare media bias. Read that post, and think about whether you should be trusting the media to tell you who to vote for in the Republican primary. They like Romney, and that means that Mitt Romney is the weakest candidate.

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Mitt Romney raised taxes by $740 million while he was governor of Massachusetts

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Deroy Murdock explains in this Scripps Howard News Service article.

Excerpt:

Hot on the heels of his eight-vote Iowa-caucus landslide, Willard Mitt Romney is crisscrossing New Hampshire before Tuesday’s key primary. Romney is masquerading as a limited-government, free-market executive from next-door Massachusetts. From the Golden Gate to the Granite State, voters should greet Romney’s impersonation with a quarry full of skepticism.

In fact, Romney increased taxes by $309 million, mainly on corporations. These tax hikes, described by Romney apologists as “loophole closures,” totaled $128 million in 2003, $95.5 in 2004, and $85 million in 2005. That final year, Romney proposed $170 million in higher business taxes, the Boston Globe reports. However, the Bay State’s liberal, Democratic legislature balked and only approved an $85 million increase.

“Tax rates on many corporations almost doubled because of legislation supported by Romney,” Boston Science Corporation chairman Peter Nicholas explained in the January 6, 2008 Boston Herald. Also, Romney raised the tax on subchapter S corporations owned by business trusts from 5.3 percent to 9.9 percent — an 85 percent hike.

“Romney went further than any other governor in trying to wring money out of corporations,” the Council on State Taxation’s Joseph Crosby complained.

Romney also created or increased fees by $432 million. He was not dragooned into this by greedy Democratic lawmakers; Romney himself proposed these items. In 2003 alone, Romney concocted or boosted 88 fees. Romney charged more for marriage licenses (from $6 to $12), gun registrations (from $25 to $75), a used-car sales tax ($10 million), gasoline deliveries ($60 million), real-estate transfers ($175 million), and more. Particularly obnoxious was Romney’s $10 fee per Certificate of Blindness. Romney also billed blind people $15 each for discount-travel ID cards.

While Romney can take credit for a $275 million capital-gains tax rebate, property-tax relief for seniors, and a two-day, tax-free shopping holiday, he also must take responsibility for signing $740.5 million in higher taxes, plus that $85 million in business taxes that he requested and legislators rejected.

“Romney did not even fight higher death-tax rates,” notes former California State Assembly Minority Whip Steve Baldwin, a Romney critic. “When the (Massachusetts) legislature considered this issue, Romney’s official position was ‘no position.’ This echoed Barack Obama’s ‘present’ votes in the Illinois State Senate.”

As Romney drained his constituents’ pockets, the Public Policy Institute of New York’s Cost of Doing Business Index rated Massachusetts in 2006 as America’s fourth costliest state in which to practice free enterprise. The Tax Foundation dropped Massachusetts from America’s 29th most business-friendly state to No. 36. The Tax Foundation also calculated that, under Romney, Massachusetts’ per-capita tax burden increased from 9.3 percent to 9.9 percent. In real dollars, the Romney-era per-capita tax burden grew by $1,175.71.

As if impoverishing his own taxpayers were not bad enough, Romney’s March 5, 2003 signature raised taxes on non-residents retroactive to that January 1. Perpetrating taxation without representation, Romney’s law declared that, “gross income derived from… any trade or business, including any employment,” would be taxable, “regardless of the taxpayer’s residence or domicile in the year it is received.”

Consequently, according to data furnished by the Massachusetts Department of Revenue, between 2002 and 2006, New Hampshire residents who work or do business in the Bay State shipped Massachusetts $95 million above what they paid when Romney arrived. The average tax paid by New Hampshirities to Massachusetts grew by 19.1 percent, from $2,392 in 2002 to $2,850 in 2006.

Romney has a pro-abortion record and pro-gay-marriage record. Not only did he pass Romneycare in Massachusetts, but now we know that he also raised taxes. Why is he running as a Republican? I don’t see anything in his record that would cause me to believe that he is a Republican.

You can see Mitt Romney explaining all of his liberal views in his own words in these videos.