TightyRighty.net

Headline at CNBC:

Many US Employers to Drop Health Benefits: McKinsey

A McKinsey survey of about 1300 businesses has found 30% will definitely or probably stop offering health care coverage for their employees and drop them into the government exchanges.

Can you say “Single Payer”?  Can you say “If you like your current insurance, you WON”T be able to keep it?”

My guess is that this will be a higher % because once significant momentum for dumping employees into the gov’t exchanges is achieved, that will be considered the norm for an employee benefits package and the negative stigma will be removed, thereby hastening the process for other companies to follow suit.  This, in turn, will force the insurance companies to raise rates due to customer losses, forcing more companies into the exchanges.

Key point : “The numbers compare to a Congressional Budget Office estimate that only about 7 percent of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans will have to switch to subsidized-exchange policies in 2014, McKinsey said.”  I assume that means that Obamacare will save the U.S. Gov’t even more money!!

Very Nice!

Headline at The Hill:

Daily economic briefings disappear from Obama’s White House schedule

I guess when you are dealing with something of which you have no practical knowledge, nothing your try works, and all your staff are quitting, its better to stick your head in the sand and try to ignore bad news.

Let me start with this – Mitt Romney is not my top candidate for the GOP presidential nod.  He is not as ideologically pure as I would prefer (can you say RomneyCare?).  However, if he is able to swallow his pride and admit that Romneycare was a mistake, which he has been loathe to do so far, then I would be willing to forgo the ideological purity for the candidate with the best chance to defeat President Obama.

Unfortunately, our Country is standing at the precipice, looking into a death spiral which culminates in a wimpified, social democratic United States of America if Obama is re-elected and Obamacare, massive debt spending, continued anti-business regulation, etc. are not stopped dead in their tracks.  I do think that Romney would bring a much more conservative business-like approach to the Presidency and pull us back from the brink.

I do like Michele Bachmann a lot, but I am not convinced she is ready for prime-time yet.  But I do believe she could provide the ticket with conservative street cred and energize the Tea Party in a way that Mitt would not.   But who knows where we will be in 522 days from now?  A lot can/will happen between now and then.

What are your thoughts?

A couple of very insightful posts regarding the State of Texas by Michael Barone are located here and here.  Closing arguments:

The lesson of the previous decade seems clear: if you take a previously prosperous and creative state and subject it to high taxes and intrusive regulations, it loses 5% of its private sector jobs; if you take a previously somewhat less prosperous and creative state and govern it with low taxes and light regulation, it gains 9% more jobs, even as the nation’s economy is suffering.

Here’s another set of numbers about our second and third largest states that tells a story about what has happened over a longer period of time. In 1970 New York had 18 million people. In 2010 New York had 19 million people. In 1970 Texas had 11 million people. In 2010 Texas had 25 million people.

Don’t tell me public policy doesn’t account for much of the difference.

Preach it, Mr. Barone!

Medicare is in big trouble. No news here. However, the Medicare Trustees (including Timothy F. Geithner, Secretary of the Treasury, Hilda L. Solis, Secretary of Labor, Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, and Donald M. Berwick, M.D., Administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services) issued their annual report last week, and here are a couple of interesting points:

… the HI trust fund is now estimated to be exhausted in 2024, 5 years earlier than was shown in last year’s report, and the fund is not adequately financed over the next 10 years. HI taxable earnings in 2010 were lower than previously estimated, and the rate of growth in these earnings is projected to accelerate and to exceed last year’s growth assumptions in 2011-2019. HI expenditures in 2010 were close to the previous estimate, but the projected level grows more rapidly than shown in last year’s report because of the projected faster growth in earnings. HI expenditures have exceeded income annually since 2008 and are projected to continue doing so through the short-range period until the fund becomes exhausted in 2024. In 2010, $32.3 billion in trust fund assets were redeemed to cover the shortfall of income relative to expenditures. The assets were $272 billion at the beginning of 2011, and the asset balance will fall below the Trustees’ recommended minimum level early in 2011 under the intermediate assumptions, 1 year earlier than estimated in last year’s report. The HI trust fund has not met the Trustees’ formal test of short-range financial adequacy since 2003.

and

In this report, the various cost-reduction measures—most importantly the reductions in the payment rate updates for most categories of Medicare providers by the growth in economy-wide multifactor productivity—are assumed to occur in all future years, as required by the Affordable Care Act. In addition, an almost 30 percent reduction in Medicare payment rates for physician services is assumed to be implemented in 2012 as required under current law, despite the virtual certainty that Congress will override this reduction.

In view of the factors described above, it is important to note that the actual future costs for Medicare are likely to exceed those shown by the current-law projections in this report.

So Medicare will be broke by 2024 under rosy projections.

Paul Ryan has proposed a plan which would not impact Americans 55 years old and older.  Folks under 55 (myself included) would be transitioned to a plan which provides premium support to Medicare enrollees, assisting them to purchase a health care plan of their choice. As Heritage’s Robert Moffit and Kathryn Nix write, it’s modeled after the plan that federal workers and employees enjoy, and it would introduce intense competition in a consumer-driven market, which has historically slowed the growth of health care costs and increased patient satisfaction.

It may not be perfect, but it is a starting point for the discussion necessary to save Medicare.

What has President Obama proposed?  Nada, nothing, zip, zero, other than to demagogue Congressman Ryan’s proposal.

When this country desperately needs leadership, what is our President doing?  Campaigning to keep the job! Quit campaigning and do your job Mr. President!!

ps  Perhaps this is why the President would rather campaign than govern – Obama budget receives zero votes in Senate

Sorry Newt – Charles Krauthammer is right on the mark.  Your previously tenuous candidacy is over, almost as quickly as it started.

Raising taxes on the rich lowers the government’s revenues by Thomas Sowell

and

Understanding liberals and how they think by Walter Williams

Found this over at Jim Geraghty’s blog at the NRO Campaign Spot.

Perfect!!!

Everyone is (rightfully) very uptight about oil prices. The average price of gas is now at $3.95 per gallon, compared to $1.79 when President Obama took office. That means it’s increased over 100% since he took office. Do you think it may be because the President and his administration have severely restricted the issuance of oil drilling permits? Or perhaps because the President’s irresponsible spending, in conjunction with the Fed’s QE2 program, have caused our currency to be significantly devalued and thereby make oil more expensive?

Absolutely not!!  It is those darn Speculators and Oil Company Gougers that the President and Attorney General Eric Holder are searching for.

This is what happens when we put an attorney from academia who has no clue about how business works in charge of the economy – he appoints other attorneys who have never run a business either and they look for the evil, greedy corporations behind every price increase rather than looking at market forces which drive commodity prices and recognizing their own actions are contributing significantly to the problem.  Let’s hope we do not repeat this mistake in 2012.

Osama Bin Laden is dead!! Thank God and thank our Military personnel who executed this daring raid (within 100 yards of a Pakistani military base) and the Intelligence personnel who gathered the information to make this possible. Job Very Well Done!

Thanks also to our Presidents Obama and Bush, for relentlessly pursuing this terrorist who very much deserved the bullet he rec’d in his head yesterday. Kudos to President Obama for deciding to raid the compound rather than bomb it so we could have the evidence and proof OBL is dead.

Job Very Well Done!!