Tag Archives: politics

Disingenuousness in Health Coverage

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David Merritt, of the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, demonstrates some in his Wall Street Journal Letters letter. He wrote to dispute the WSJ‘s opinion piece that Obamacare tax credits help those who don’t need help.

Consider a family of four that earns $64,000 a year. If the tax credit expires in December, it will see its premiums rise by more than $2,500 in 2026.

Merritt chooses not to say why his, or any other, health coverage company charges such high premiums in the first place. Neither does he specify to which of the several policies on offer in the Obamacare exchanges for this family this premium “spike” would apply.

You add that “making these plans ‘free’ has allowed insurers to get paid for people who may not even know they’re enrolled. Some 40% of those in fully subsidized plans had zero claims in 2024.” But the presence of enrollees with few or no medical claims is the sign of a healthy market. It is common in all insurance markets to find young adults who use less healthcare and therefore file fewer claims.

This is a cynical deflection from the fact that health coverage providers make their money off those unused (by the policy holder) premiums, which the providers invest in order to both make their profit and to fund their payouts. None of that is illegal; it’s even a smart use of those premiums. Merritt’s deflection is real, nonetheless.

Thanks to targeted efforts by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, enrollment integrity has never been stronger.

Except that, under the Biden administration, far too many illegal aliens have access to taxpayer-funded health coverage. More, those hard-working families of which Merritt pretends to be worried, are untouched by letting the subsidies expire. The only families whose coverage might be imperiled are those who are able to work but make no effort to do so.

Whose Shutdown Is It?

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The Progressive-Democrats in the Senate—nearly all of them, led by Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY)—have closed the Federal government over their demands to get their minority party way entirely. Senator Tim Kaine (D, VA), as cited by The Wall Street Journal,

said he could vote for a spending bill with a promise to extend the ACA subsidies later, provided that he could get a commitment from the White House to impose a moratorium on firings and spending cuts.

So much for Party’s blather about demanding negotiations on the subsidies as a condition of reopening the government. Now, it’s Party demanding an outright guarantee of the extension, no negotiation at all.

So much, too, for any possibility of the Progressive-Democratic Party ever being interested in cutting spending, only constant increases.

Senator Angus King (I, ME) made even more explicit who is responsible for closing the government:

the vote’s result (Friday’s Senate vote on the House-passed clean CR) “demonstrated that a vague promise about conversations about the ACA isn’t going to be enough to induce my colleagues to end the shutdown.”

This is King’s acknowledgment that it’s Party that has shut the government, and it’s Party that insists on keeping the government shut. With their determined closure, it’s Party that’s harming ordinary Americans with their cutoff of project funding that leads to private sector jobs being HIAed, even as Party bleats that it’s Republicans who are responsible.

Party ignores the fact that the Republicans in the House, despite Party’s best efforts, passed a clean Continuing Resolution—no pork for either party, just funding for seven weeks of government operations—and sent it to the Senate. It’s Party in the Senate that is demanding a Christmas tree worth of Party pork be added to the CR or they’ll leave the government closed, those projects unfunded, and those jobs HIAed.

This Isn’t Just Political Mischief

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Nor is it merely divisiveness.

Jay Jones, Progressive-Democratic Party candidate for Virginia Attorney General, has threatened a political opponent, Todd Gilbert, at the time the Republican Speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates, with murder, with implied threats against his wife and children, as well. This was as recently as August 2022. What he texted another delegate, a Republican:

Three people, two bullets. Gilbert, Hitler and Pol Pot. Gilbert gets two bullets to the head.

Here’s Jones’ full sequence:

From inflicting metaphorical violence on us average Americans with their government shutdown to threatening physical violence in the form of murder threats by a candidate for State Attorney General(!)—this is, mind you, against years of assaults like Bernie Sanders smearing Republicans as Nazis, followed shortly by a mass murder attempt against Republican Congressmen at a baseball practice; Chuck Schumer threatening by name two Supreme Court Justices, followed shortly by a murder attempt against one of them; Party politicians in drumbeat cadence calling Donald Trump Nazi, Hitlerian, a threat to democracy, followed shortly by two murder attempts—this is the Progressive-Democratic Party’s view of how to deal with their political opponents. If they don’t get their way, they will attack American citizens as a whole and seek to murder their political opponents.

And just to drive home Party’s point, Jones is refusing to withdraw his candidacy for State AG, and no one in Party is pushing him to withdraw. To a man and woman, Party politicians are downplaying Jones’ threats, pretending he was joking.

This is the Party that wants to seize control of our Congress in 2026 and seize the White House in 2028.

State Auspices

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Louisiana’s Republican Governor, Jeff Landry, has acknowledged that his State has a crime problem for all that the State has made laudable progress against crime (that’s how bad it had been). It would be good if Progressive-Democrat Governors had the same integrity, introspection, and insight for their States, but they are what they are.

Where I disagree with Landry, though, is this:

Louisiana GOP Governor Jeff Landry has asked Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth deploy as many as 1,000 state National Guardsmen to help curb crime.

Landry doesn’t need SecDef to Federalize the National Guard to do this. He can call up his State’s 1,000 Guardsmen for the purpose himself. If he needs the Guard, he needs to stop injecting delays and get it done.

“We cannot normalize”

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ICE and CBP are patrolling downtown Chicago and arresting criminals along the way. DHS noted that (with accompanying images)

11 violent rioters were arrested last night in Chicago outside the ICE detention facility: these are two guns that were taken off rioters in Chicago right against the fence at our ICE detention facility. An investigation is underway into what appears to be some sort of explosive device found last night near the ICE Chicago detention facility.

Progressive-Democrat Illinois Governor JB Pritzker is dismayed, and he’s hyping the fact that ICE and CBP agents are armed in a dangerous city while they go about their intrinsically dangerous job of law enforcement. He said this, too:

We cannot normalize militarizing American cities and suburbs. Make sure you know your rights and stay alert.

Neither can we normalize violent lawlessness, even in Chicago. We do know our rights, we are staying alert, and so do—and are—those law enforcement personnel. Pritzker, though, would rather protect the criminals rampant in one of his State’s major cities than protect the residents of that city.