Democrats’ Health Care Plan Would ‘Totally Obliterate Medicare,’ Trump Says

Charles McLaughlin, a 71-year-old Marine veteran of the Vietnam War, recalls how useful Medicare and Medicare Advantage were when he was fighting another battle, this one with cancer.

“I know a lot about Medicare and the supplement. I used it for breathing tubes, feeding tubes, stitches, staples, MRIs, CAT scans, blood tests, hydration shots, chemo treatments, radiation treatments,” the Lighthouse Point, Florida, resident said during a rally with President Donald Trump on Thursday in The Villages, Florida, a retirement community near Orlando.

Trump invited him to the stage to speak at an event that culminated in the president signing an executive order to strengthen Medicare and Medicare Advantage, the health care program for people 65 and older, at a time when many Democrats support a “Medicare for All” plan to expand the program to everyone.

“I also want to say: My family, financially, would have been destroyed without Medicare,” the retired Marine said, adding:

The politicians on the left are pushing Medicare for All. I say, the result would be no Medicare at all. It will collapse under the load of the system. It will overload it. The lines would be incredible.

Who knows, I probably wouldn’t be here. There’s no such thing as “free,” period.

Trump said, “They like you.” McLaughlin answered, “What’s not to like?”

Declaring Medicare “under siege,” Trump signed an executive order after an hourlong speech.

“We are making your Medicare even better, and we are not letting anyone take it away from you,” Trump said. “These people on the other side are totally crazy. They want to take it away and give you lousy health care.”

He added: “Medicare is under threat like never before.”  “Almost every major Democrat in Washington has backed a massive government health care takeover that would totally obliterate Medicare,” the president said. 

The executive order aims to model traditional Medicare’s fee-for-service program in line with the payments for Medicare Advantage. Under traditional Medicare, the government pays for medical care. Private companies offer Medicare Advantage plans, which the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services approves. About 24 million people, or more than one-third of Medicare recipients, have Medicare Advantage plans.

The Medicare for All proposal would do away with Medicare Advantage plans by eliminating private health care plans.

Trump also invited Socorra “Corey” Spangler, of Summerfield, Florida, to speak. She noted her family came from Mexico to the United States legally when she was 5-years-old. At age 65, she began having heart problems.

“I went to the doctor. They scheduled me with a cardiologist. He scheduled me for a stress test. I failed that test. So, he scheduled me for a heart test the next day. I failed that,” Spangler recalled, adding:

The following Monday, I was in surgery with my five bypasses, and I went home the following Friday. This would never happen with Medicare for All.

I love my Medicare Advantage plan because I can choose the doctor when I need it and get the care I need in a [quick] manner. It wouldn’t happen with Medicare for All.

Thank you, Mr. President, for saving my health care.

Over the past two years of his presidency, Trump said, 1,200 more Medicare Advantage plans have been created. He added that premiums have plummeted by 28% and are at their lowest level in more than a decade.

That’s in sharp contrast to the average of 54% rise in premiums for Obamacare plans since 2014, said Robert Moffit, a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation. 

“The president wants to build on the success they have had managing Medicare Advantage,” Moffit told The Daily Signal. “They have used the administrative authority to increase the plans for chronically ill people, such as people with congestive heart failure or diabetes.”

The executive order also further promotes using medical telehealth services to be delivered by telephone or online. That would, in theory, reduce expensive emergency room visits for minor or easily treatable ailments.

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Rashida Tlaib Comes Out for Jim Crow-Style Laws, Arrests of Her Political Foes

Typical Muslim authoritarianism

Wait long enough, and everything comes around again. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), one of the wokest womyn in the world, has this week blazed bold new trails by calling for the revival of not one, but two tried-and-true practices that have inexplicably fallen into neglect in American politics: Jim Crow segregation laws and the arrest of one’s political opponents.

This brave leader said in a Detroit speech that if Trump Cabinet members failed to comply with congressional subpoenas, “they’re trying to figure out, no joke, is it the D.C. police that goes and gets them? We don’t know. Where do we hold them?” Tlaib added: “This is the first time we've ever had a situation like this,” and that consequently, she and other Democrat leaders were “trying to tread carefully” into this “uncharted territory.” She volunteered her own district for this noble undertaking: “I will tell them they can hold all those people right here in Detroit.”

Oh, but this territory is amply charted. Tlaib’s vision for America’s future apparently looks a great deal like the past – and present – of authoritarian regimes the world over. The new diverse, inclusive America of Tlaib and her colleagues apparently includes the 2 a.m. pounding on the door and the hustling of a bewildered, pajama-clad conservative by jackbooted stormtroopers into a waiting police van. Then they get hustled off to Detroit, the name of which will take on an air of menace and foreboding, like “Treblinka” and “Kolyma.” And why not? We already have telescreens all over airports and other public spaces pumping CNN propaganda into an unwitting populace 24/7 now; arrests and, presumably, camps for dissenters is the logical next step. After all, that’s what happened in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and still happens in North Korea and Communist China. The wise Tlaib knows that our future is their past.

Nor is that all. Tlaib Tuesday toured Detroit’s Public Safety Headquarters and told Detroit police Chief James Craig that facial recognition analysts “need to be African Americans, not people that are not. I think non-African Americans think African Americans all look the same.”

That meant, of course, that Tlaib herself, since she is not African American, thinks all African Americans look the same, but she can be forgiven for being so overwhelmed by her passion for justice that she got a bit confused. Here again, the visionary Tlaib knows that William Faulkner, despite being a white male Southerner and hence obviously racist and manifestly evil, was actually right when he said, “The past isn’t dead. It is not even past.” The old Jim Crow laws of the South in Faulkner’s time are Tlaib’s new vision for America: if she gets her way, you won’t be judged by the content of your character, but by the color of your skin.

This is already happening, of course. Back in the old South, some light-skinned blacks tried to pass for white in an attempt to avoid the discrimination, harassment, and ostracism that came to blacks all too often in those days. Nowadays, our society is so post-racial that it’s racial again: Elizabeth Warren, as white a white person as you’ll ever find, for years passed as Native American for social approval and career advancement. She was even hailed as the first “woman of color” on Harvard’s faculty. What color? A light peach, apparently.

Warren is just a more sophisticated version of Rachel Dolezal, the former NAACP official who famously turned out not to be a person of color at all, and Shaun King, aka Talcum X, who strenuously insists that he isn’t white despite photographic evidence of his being a light-haired white child before he was woke. Muslim “feminist” activist Linda Sarsour is also passing: in a Vox video published in January 2017, she revealed: “When I wasn’t wearing hijab I was just some ordinary white girl from New York City.” But in an April 2017 interview, Sarsour referred to “people of color like me.” All it took was a hijab to enable Sarsour to change races. Maybe Warren should try that.

Warren, Dolezal, King, and Sarsour are the vanguard of the society Tlaib envisions, one in which being white carries so much of a social stigma that it results in job discrimination and more, and those who are clever and audacious enough to pull it off avoid this opprobrium by passing as being a “person of color.” Meanwhile, those who dare to disagree with Tlaib’s political agenda will find themselves arrested and incarcerated in Detroit, where all-black facial recognition teams will map their every move. Meet the future: it’s the same as the past.

SOURCE 

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Sen. Rand Paul: Experience is the best teacher -- But that's not how I want my kids to learn about socialism

What is it about socialism that casts such a spell that people refuse to acknowledge history? Time and time again socialism leads to the impoverishment of nations. Perhaps it is the allure of equality or fairness. Surveys in America alarmingly show about half of today’s youth have a favorable opinion of socialism.

When I was researching my forthcoming book, “The Case Against Socialism,” I was horrified to discover a Gallup poll finding that only 45 percent of young American adults (age 18–29) have a positive view of capitalism, while 51 percent of this same group see socialism positively. These surveys link approval of socialism to a corresponding desire among young Americans to live in a “fair” world. Blasi and Kruse of Rutgers University write that “today’s youth reject capitalism; what they really want is fairness.”

They cite a “2016 Harvard University survey that found that 51 percent of American youth age 18 to 29 no longer support capitalism,” and another 2015 poll by “conservative-leaning Reason-Rupe, [which] found that young adults age 18 to 24 have a slightly more favorable view of socialism than capitalism.”

When asked to explain their answers in the Harvard Study, participants in a focus group reported feeling that “capitalism was unfair and left people out despite their hard work.”

The mantra of fairness is one that is inculcated from a young age. The assumption is that in order for one person to become rich someone else must suffer. Leftists preach that the economy is a zero-sum game where the rich enrich themselves on the backs of the poor, a claim that is revealed to be false when you examine the facts.

The mantra of fairness is one that is inculcated from a young age. The assumption is that in order for one person to become rich someone else must suffer. Leftists preach that the economy is a zero-sum game where the rich enrich themselves on the backs of the poor, a claim that is revealed to be false when you examine the facts.

The great industrialists of the nineteenth century are often tagged as robber barons. Yet as Andrew Carnegie’s wealth grew so did the economy. According to Our World in Data, a group of researchers based at the University of Oxford, poverty declined from over 90 percent of people living in extreme poverty worldwide in 1820 to around 75 percent of people living in extreme poverty in 1910. By the time the industrial revolution was in full swing, wages were rising and the standard of living known previously only to kings was becoming far more accessible.

From the time of Carnegie’s death in 1919 until the present, the number of people living in extreme poverty declined to less than 10 percent.11 As much of the world embraced capitalism in the twentieth century, childhood mortality plummeted from nearly a third of children dying before the age of five to less than 1 percent in wealthy countries and 4.3 percent worldwide.

And still, American youth mistakenly are attracted to socialism.

We must be teaching history in all the wrong ways.

Blasi and Kruse warn us that “the share of the overall population that questions capitalism’s core precepts is around the highest in at least 80 years of polling on the topic.” Gallup, in a 2016 poll, records 55 percent of millennials as favoring socialism. Yet, when millennials say they are for socialism, do they have any idea what socialism is in a historical sense? How many of them are even aware of the famines under Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot? Reason Foundation asked millennials to define socialism and discovered that only 16 percent could identify socialism as government ownership of the means of production.

The only good news about these surveys of young people is that they were overwhelmingly canceled out by the views of older people.

A study published in sciencemag.org concluded that although “children start off like Karl Marx, . . . they eventually become more like a member of the International Olympic Committee. The study ‘finds that children’s views on fairness change from egalitarian to merit-based as they grow older.’

The question is—will this next generation follow the path of previous generations? Will today’s youth, when they leave their parents’ basements and begin to earn a living, discover that their success depends on their merit and hard work, or will they succumb like Venezuela to the allure of something for nothing?

The future of our nation depends on the answer.

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The desperate idiocy of the modern Left

This is from a few years back but is well worth recalling

Recovering Leftie, Ron Rosenbaum, is appalled at the words of a Leftist film-reviewer:

Reviewer
"Still, if "Road to Perdition" ultimately fails as entertainment, it offers rich material for allegory. Maybe it was because I attended a screening on Sept. 11, but I couldn't help seeing Hanks as an American everyman, a pure-hearted killer who will commit no end of mayhem to ensure a better life for his children. Imagine Willie Loman with a tommy gun, and you'll see what I mean. 'You dirty rats! Attention must be paid.'"

Rosenbaum
But of course! What a BRILLIANT point he's making in the course of preening his anti-Americanism before his audience of U.K. intellectuals. What does Sept. 11 remind him of? The way AMERICANS are killers. Sept. 11 becomes, in his lovely leap of logic, really about Americans being pure-hearted killers capable of "no end of mayhem," infinite evil deeds. Doesn't EVERYBODY think that way? (Everybody in his little circle, I imagine). Sept. 11 reminds them that Americans are first and foremost murderers, so let's not spend a moment acknowledging that little matter of Sept. 11 being a day on which 3,000 AMERICANS were murdered by the "pure-hearted killers" of Al Qaeda. Who, when not committing mass murder, stone women as punishment, torture gays, crush free thought by executing dissidents. No, THEY get a pass (and the 3,000 become non-persons). Because they hate America.

SOURCE 

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IN BRIEF

FACEBOOK LEGAL BLOW: "Facebook on Wednesday was dealt a major blow in the EU's top court, which ruled that national courts in Europe can order online platforms to remove defamatory content worldwide." (Agence France-Presse)

MIGRANT TSUNAMI: More than 500,000 Central Americans illegally enter Mexico in first half of 2019 on their way to the U.S. (The Daily Caller)

FRANCE JIHAD: Paris knife attacker who killed four law-enforcement colleagues converted to Islam 18 months ago (National Review)

NARRATIVE BUSTER: North Carolina energy company finds solar power actually increases pollution (The Federalist)

VEGAS SETTLEMENT: Las Vegas massacre shooting victims, family members to get up to $800 million to settle lawsuits (Fox News)

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here 

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