Tag Archives: Spending

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Americans finding out the true costs of Obamacare

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The Daily Caller has a sobering article about the true costs of Obamacare.

Excerpt:

Millions of Americans are receiving double-digit premium hikes. For many people under 30, their health insurance premiums are going up much more — by as much as 189 percent. What happened to candidate Barack Obama’s 2008 promise that every family’s health care costs would go down by $2,500 by the end of his first term? (Costs actually went up by $3,000.)

The Congressional Budget Office projects Obamacare will cost tens of billions more over the next decade than the agency projected just three years ago. Those increases were not budgeted for, and will add to massive deficits.

So much for the promise that the law “will not add one dime to the deficit.”

Millions of workers at places like Wendy’s and Olive Garden are now being preemptively reclassified as part-time, and an estimated 7 million to 20 million employees face the loss of workplace health benefits altogether.

So much for the oft-heard promise that “If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan.”

[…]Seniors were assured that the new system wouldn’t affect their benefits, despite Obamacare’s $716 billion in ten-year cuts to Medicare (to help pay for the new entitlement).

That promise was broken recently, when the Medicare agency issued surprise regulations cutting Medicare even more deeply than Congress had directed — cuts that target a popular and very successful part of Medicare, one that actually features consumer choice and competition, namely, Medicare Advantage (MA).

Seniors who opt into MA enjoy greater care coordination, disease management for chronic conditions, and on-call nurses available by phone. Those extra services — which in some cases mean the difference between life and death — are now slated for the chopping-block.

Rosemarie Battaglia will be among the millions of victims of these new regulations, which beginning April 1 will effectively shave MA plan payments by about 2 percentage points. On top of prior cuts enacted in Obamacare, that spells an 8 percent cut next year — a level higher than the profit margins for these plans.

Actuarial experts at the American Action Forum predict the cuts will cause between 2 and 5 million seniors to lose their MA benefits, and that MA recipients face health care cost increases averaging $2,235 a year.

When a President makes promises about economic policy, we shouldn’t believe him unless we have reasons to believe that he understands business and economics. We had no reason to believe that Obama understood economics. And, when given the reins of the economy, he’s proven that. Instead of electing people who sound nice in speeches, we should be electing people who have shown that they know how to solve the problems we’re facing in the economy. A track record of success at creating jobs, reducing the costs of health care, improving health care quality and choice, etc. should have counted for more than rhetoric. We chose the rhetoric and now we’re getting the screws.

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Federal government spends $2.7 million to study lesbians who drink too much

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From CNS News.

Excerpt:

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded $2.7 million to study why lesbians are at a higher “risk for hazardous drinking.”

The University of Illinois has received grants since 2009 for its project, “Cumulative Stress and Hazardous Drinking in a Community of Adult Lesbians,” which aims to develop “culturally sensitive” strategies to prevent lesbians from being drunks.

“Studies using both probability and nonprobability samples provide ample evidence of lesbians’ vulnerability to hazardous drinking,” the grant’s description reads. “However, very little is known about the factors that increase lesbians’ risk for hazardous drinking.”

“We propose to build on and extend our study of sexual identity and drinking… to model effects of cumulative stress on hazardous drinking among lesbians.”

[…]The grant states that there are “chronic stressors unique to sexual minorities, creating cumulative stress that may be compounded in lesbians of color.”

The study is being led by Tonda Hughes, professor at the Department of Health Systems Science at the University of Illinois, an “internationally recognized expert in the area of alcohol use among lesbians,” according tothe University.

[…]The University of Illinois is not alone in receiving federal funds to study “sexual minorities” and their propensity to drink. The University of Washington has been awarded $1,154,445 since 2010 for its project “High Risk Drinking in Emerging Adult at-Risk Women,” which seeks to find out why young lesbians and bisexuals face an “elevated” chance for hazardous drinking.

Old Dominion University in 2012 received $446,056 for its study titled “Minority Stress, Alcohol Use, and Intimate Partner Violence Among Lesbians.”

Last time, we saw that the federal government was spending $1.5 million on studying why so many lesbians are overweight. Never believe the government knows more about how to spend the money they take from you than you do. It’s your money. They are wasting it. Instead of cutting wasteful spending like this, they release illegal immigrants with criminal convictions. You should never vote for bigger government. If you want to help people, use your own money.

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Federal government spends $1.5 million to study overweight lesbians

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Dad sent me this astonishing example of government waste, posted at Fox News.

Excerpt:

The National Institutes of Health awarded a Boston hospital more than $1.5 million to figure out why nearly three-quarters of lesbians are overweight — calling the disparities a significant public health issue.

“It is now well-established that women of minority sexual orientation are disproportionately affected by the obesity epidemic, with nearly three-quarters of adult lesbians overweight or obese, compared to half of heterosexual women,” according to a description of the grant.

The taxpayer money was awarded to Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston to study the relationship between sexual orientation and obesity.

[…]“Obesity is one of the most critical public health issues affecting the U.S. today,” the grant states. “Racial and socioeconomic disparities in obesity are receiving increasing attention; however, one area of disparities that is only beginning to be recognized is the striking interplay of gender and sexual orientation.”

[…]Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, said it is disturbing that tax dollars are being used to fund the study.

“When you look at a nation that’s $17 trillion in debt – there’s a reason. It’s because we do frivolous studies that serve no benefit other than to give a special interest group something to talk about,” he told Fox News. “Why are we issuing grants to study things that have no affect on the well-being of the nation as a whole?”

Oh I have no doubt this is worth studying… but maybe they could use their own money instead of my money, since I need my money for other things – and I actually had to do the work to earn it. Why do people on the left think that they have the right to spend money that I earned? Were they there in my calculus class? Were they there in the labs with me doing assignments? I don’t mind if they want to spend their own money on lesbian obesity, but why are they so convinced that they have a right to spend my money on that?