Tag Archives: Transparency

News

Bobby Jindal explains the right way to lower health care costs

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Bobby and Supriya Jindal
Bobby and Supriya Jindal

Governor Bobby Jindal is a wizard with health care policy!

Here he is writing in the Wall Street Journal about how to cut health care costs without rationing care:

Consumer choice guided by transparency. We need a system where individuals choose an integrated plan that adopts the best disease-management practices, as opposed to fragmented care. Pricing and outcomes data for all tests, treatments and procedures should be posted on the Internet. Portable electronic health-care records can reduce paperwork, duplication and errors, while also empowering consumers to seek the provider that best meets their needs.

Aligned consumer interests. Consumers should be financially invested in better health decisions through health-savings accounts, lower premiums and reduced cost sharing. If they seek care in cost-effective settings, comply with medical regimens, preventative care, and lifestyles that reduce the likelihood of chronic disease, they should share in the savings.

Medical lawsuit reform. The practice of defensive medicine costs an estimated $100 billion-plus each year, according to the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, which used a study by economists Daniel P. Kessler and Mark B. McClellan. No health reform is serious about reducing costs unless it reduces the costs of frivolous lawsuits.

Insurance reform. Congress should establish simple guidelines to make policies more portable, with more coverage for pre-existing conditions. Reinsurance, high-risk pools, and other mechanisms can reduce the dangers of adverse risk selection and the incentive to avoid covering the sick. Individuals should also be able to keep insurance as they change jobs or states.

Pooling for small businesses, the self-employed, and others. All consumers should have equal opportunity to buy the lowest-cost, highest-quality insurance available. Individuals should benefit from the economies of scale currently available to those working for large employers. They should be free to purchase their health coverage without tax penalty through their employer, church, union, etc.

Pay for performance, not activity. Roughly 75% of health-care spending is for the care of chronic conditions such as heart disease, cancer and diabetes—and there is little coordination of this care. We can save money and improve outcomes by using integrated networks of care with rigorous, transparent outcome measures emphasizing prevention and disease management.

Refundable tax credits. Low-income working Americans without health insurance should get help in buying private coverage through a refundable tax credit. This is preferable to building a separate, government-run health-care plan.

These are conservative solutions – they will preserve out liberty and prosperity.

Bobby Jindal is my pick for Secretary of Health and Human Services in 2012, if he isn’t elected President. So remember his name!

News

How Obama rewards his most prolific fundraisers with crony appointments

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Story from the Washington Times. (H/T Verum Serum)

Morgen at Verum Serum writes:

These top fundraisers are known as “bundlers”. Since campaign finance laws restrict any one individual from donating more than $2400 to a single candidate, these bundlers achieve prominence within a campaign by soliciting for and then – you guessed it – bundling up individual donations received via their extended network of friends, family, business contacts, etc. While exact figures are not available, the top bundlers within the Obama campaign each delivered in excess of $1 million in campaign contributions, and there were nearly 50 bundlers who were responsible for at least $500K in donations.

As the Times notes, it’s somewhat of a Washington tradition for an incoming President to appoint choice ambassadorships to key political donors and allies. While this may be the case, for a President who declared a “new era” of accountability, and who championed ethics reform while in the Senate, a look at the appointments made to date reveals what I think is a surprising level of cronyism on the part of this Administration. And notably, many of these appointments extend outside the relatively ceremonial realm of diplomatic posts.

What sort of positions are they talking about? Just harmless ambassadorships?

Special Counsel to the President
Chairman, FCC
General Counsel, Dept. of Energy
Deputy Asst. Attorney General
Associate Attorney General
Under-Secy. for International Trade
Chairman, Corp. for Nat’l & Community Service
Asst. Attorney General, Civil Div.

By my calculation, nearly half of the top level of Obama campaign bundlers have been rewarded with some sort of role within the government.

And it gets worse:

Robert Wolf is the Chairman/CEO of investment bank UBS and given his influence on Wall Street may in fact be the largest bundler of them all. Significantly, Wolf’s firm seems to be mired in several tax-related scandals; and they were also a key counter-party recipient of  funds from AIG, courtesy of the U.S. tax payer. However, apparently all this was not enough to deter the President from naming Wolf to his Economic Advisory Council.

Verum Serum has the full list of donors, the total funds raised by each one, and the appointments.

What do you expect from the affirmative action President, whose private-school education was paid for by his rich grandmother?

News

Democrats use TARP money to shore up personal fortunes

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Story from the Washington Post. Senator Daniel Inouye (DEMOCRAT) intercedes to have TARP funds redirected to the floundering “Central Pacific” bank, which he owns.

But I prefer Hot Air’s summary.

In other words, Inouye interceded to get TARP funds to secure his personal assets.  He used his political clout on Capitol Hill to get Treasury to approve a “marginal” application that had already been rejected once, in order to save his own bank from collapse.  Central Pacific had already been in trouble with the FDIC even before the collapse in the lending and financial sector, thanks to bad management practices and undercapitalization.  The FDIC had required a change in management and $40 million more in capitalization, which is why Treasury was reluctant to give CP a bailout check in the first place.

Inouye isn’t the first member of Congress to have used TARP to rescue personal fortunes.  Maxine Waters did the same thing with OneUnited of Massachusetts, where she and her husband had significant investments.  In that case, Waters arranged a meeting between OneUnited and regulators, while Barney Frank wrote legislation that required Treasury to grant special consideration to OneUnited’s TARP application.

A second Hot Air piece about the corruption in the cap-and-trade bill.

Remember that last-minute, 300-page amendment to the cap-and-trade bill that hit the House just hours before the vote approving it?  The one that Democrats insisted on putting up for a vote before anyone had the chance to read it?  When one reads the contents of it, as the Washington Times’ Edward Felker did, it becomes apparent why Henry Waxman and Edward Markey pushed it through so quickly.  It was a payoff for Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-OH) to turn her back on coal-producing Ohio and vote to kill the economy in her state, and she wasn’t alone…

…The amendment itself got published in the wee hours of Friday morning.  By the time the House came to order and began debate, it hadn’t yet been noted by the media.

In essence, Waxman and Markey bought Kaptur with our money. They spent $3.5 billion for a single vote in Congress, and Kaptur had willingly put herself up for sale.  Never mind that Ohio will get [hit] hard by caps on the use of coal.  Ohioans will lose jobs, their energy bills will skyrocket, and that will have an inflationary effect on all goods and services as the jobless rate escalates.

More Democrat corruption in Michigan

But this is not the only corruption going on with those sneaky Democrats.

Michigan Democrats are involved in yet another corruption scandal. I wonder if these Democrats keep their piles of cash in freezers like the Louisiana Democrats do.

Here’s the story from the BlogProf. This blog has been tracking the story from its inception.

Excerpt:

Ever since Monica Conyers became a convicted felon, a big chunk of the the most powerful Michigan Democrats have been somehow connected to the growing scandal. Husband John Conyers somehow wrote a letter to the EPA to open toxic deep wells that he vehemently opposed, which was a boost to Jim Pappas who was bribing Monica for the favor. In the middle was Monica Conyers advisor Sam Riddle. In addition, Pappas hired U.S. Sen Debbie Stabenow’s husband, Tom Athens, to illegally lobby for the same deal, all the while Stabenow publicly came out against Canadian trash imports, including those that we to be injected into said wells.

Since the conviction of Monica, Riddle has been talking. What he said today raised many eyebrows throughout the state, now ensnaring the Michigan Democrat Party, Jennifer Granholm, Mark Brewer chairman of the Michigan Democratic Party, and Bernard Kilpatrick father of disgraced felon ex-mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. From The Detroit News: Riddle: FBI probed $50K deal with Dems.

People who trash the free exercise of religion, traditional morality, the rule of law and family should not be expected to act honestly. Morality requires certain metaphysical beliefs, which Democrats, being secular socialists, just don’t have grounded by their worldview.

We can’t elect people who believe that it’s OK to kill defenseless unborn children for convenience and then expect them to have integrity. It’s not rational for someone like that to act morally. If they are willing break the big moral laws, they’ll have no trouble breaking the small ones, too.