Tag Archives: Rise

News

Connecticut approves health insurance hikes caused by Obamacare

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From the Hartford Courant. (H/T Hot Air)

Excerpt:

Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield in Connecticut requested a wide range of premium increases, which will take effect Oct. 1, to cover the costs of new benefits required by federal health reform. Higher prices mostly affect new members shopping for a health plan on the individual market rather than people who have group plans through an employer or some other organization.

The Connecticut Department of Insurance approved Anthem’s request without changes, including a boost of as much as 22.9 percent just to comply with one provision: eliminating annual spending limits per customer. But it’s unclear how much more customers will pay because of the variety of plans and the complexity of other factors, such as a person’s age.

New provisions mandated by federal law to start Thursday include allowing young adults to stay on their parents’ plan until they turn 26, eliminating annual and lifetime limits on the amount of money an insurer spends per customer and mandating that insurers cover the full cost of preventive services, such as mammograms and colonoscopies.

The looming question is how much those new mandated benefits, along with rising medical costs, will raise prices for health insurance next year. Insurers will submit a new batch of rate requests in October and November to take effect in 2011.

Hans Bader reminds us of what else has happened:

Employers like AT&T, Caterpillar, John Deere, and Verizon have already reported major cost increases due to the new health care law.

As noted earlier, the health care law raises taxes on the middle-class and investors in future years. Obamacare will cause many harms, such as reducing life-saving medical innovation and increasing state budget deficits. It is based on accounting gimmicks that will increase the federal deficit, as even some Obama supporters have admitted — like David Brooks, who in a moment of candor called arguments for the bill ““unbelievable” and “insane.””

This is what talking about “hope” and “change” amounted to.

Podcasts

Audio debate: Did Jesus rise from the dead?

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Sometimes, they do debate serious questions on Unbelievable? radio show. But they feature clearly insane people like Steven Carr. Note that debates on the Unbelievable radio show start at about 15 minutes into the podcast. The Christian debater and callers are woefully uninformed in this debate, so I would recommend listening to something with William Lane Craig instead.

Unbelievable? 11 Apr 2009 – “Did Jesus Rise from the dead?” An atheist perspective

Steven Carr has a prolific presence on the internet as an atheist blogger and debater. He contends that the early Christians did not believe in Jesus’ resurrection and that the Biblical views of resurrection are contradictory.

Canon Michael Cole is a veteran defender of Christian faith and responds to Steven’s criticisms of the resurrection.

For Steven Carr see http://stevencarrwork.blogspot.com/

For Canon Michael Cole see http://www.nationwidechristiantrust.com

I’m trying to give my audience something different here. I prefer formal academic debates, but maybe I need to post things like this for some of the more crazy atheists who leave me weird comments. I don’t know. Maybe my Christian readers will enjoy hearing an unqualified loon rant and rave like a lunatic at the full moon. Your call.

UPDATE: I am, of course, kidding about Steve Carr and I think he did a good job in his debate, whereas his opponent and the callers were not nearly as prepared. I wanted to see how fast he would descend on my blog, and if you read the comments, you’ll see that I wasn’t mean to him at all. But I wanted to engage him in a discussion and I thought this was the best way to get his attention. I apologize for my sneaky tricks, but they worked!

My response to Carr would be two-fold:

1) That word you keep using. Resurrection. I do not think it means what you think it means.

2) How do you square the empty tomb with your idea of a non-physical resurrection? We have multiple early sources for the empty tomb, and piles of evidence for it from those early sources, not the least of which is the testimony of the women followers of Jesus.