Bill Hagerty 2024 is a pathetic excuse for a senator, can't show up for critical votes, might as well be 2010 Nancy Pelosi saying we have to pass Obamacare to find out what's in it

 

Sen. Hagerty: "Thank God Elon Musk Bought Twitter, That's The Only Way We'd Even Know What's In This Bill"

American whiners generally rate their own healthcare positively but not the country's

 Gallup, here.

People are in a bad mood about it since 2020 because of what happened during the pandemic with lock-downs, quarantines, and mask and vaccine mandates, and because the expanded emergency coverage from that year has expired with the expiration of the emergency in 2023.

But 71% still think their own healthcare quality is pretty good, compared with 44% saying the same thing about the quality for the country as a whole.

There's always been that disconnect.

And generally speaking, it is difficult to draw any conclusions from this about pre-Obamacare and post-Obamacare experiences because of it. But 62% rated the quality of healthcare in the country highly in both 2012 and 2010, the year Obamacare was passed. That's now down 18 points to 44%. 71% now rate the quality of their own healthcare highly, down 11 points since 2012 from 82%.

I suspect we'll be living with the after effects of the pandemic debacle for a while longer.

 

Trump's mission against the Swamp is far more grandiose than his mission to repeal Obamacare, but it will end up the same way

 

 And Roger Kimball should know better.

Kimball completely underestimates the role that will be played by the federal government employee unions in opposing Trump's efforts to axe them. And it's downright preposterous to think that the Leviathan State is going to be unraveled by July 4, 2026 when it took literally decades to erect it.

Trump will fail to drain the swamp, and it will consume all the valuable energy of his victory, too, keeping him from succeeding on the agenda items which are within his reach. His actions might even strengthen those unions. His own new Labor Secretary actually advocates for that!

Democrats should be encouraged by this.

They are going to have a field day litigating everything Musk and Ramaswamy try to shut down, which will drag everything out interminably. Liberals funded the hapless Kamala Harris to the tune of $1 billion, so I'm confident the Marc Eliases of the Democrat Party will shift the Resistance to this effort with a similar level of support because it has a high likelihood of hamstringing Trump in the same way Russia Russia Russia did.

It's disappointing that Republicans don't understand that Trump is a deeply divisive transitional figure, not a transformational one, but Democrats made the same mistake with Joe Biden, until it was too late, on whom they turned as on a dime.

Trump’s Mission To Dismantle the Administrative State

Roger Kimball, Am. Greatness

 

POLITICO correspondent surprised DNC convention is just like Pelosi saying you have to pass Obamacare to find out what's in it

 

CNBC shills for price-gouging "worst offender" McDonalds, NYPost tells the truth

 CNBC May 10th: McDonald’s is working to introduce a $5 value meal

But the next to last paragraph indicates they ain't got one yet lol:

An initial proposal by McDonald’s for the $5 value meal did not clear necessary hurdles.

Yeah, no kidding. That's cause your $5 value meal was ten years ago.

The New York Post April 3rd: McDonald’s menu prices have increased by over 100% during the last decade: study 

McDonald’s has jacked up its menu prices by more than 100% over the course of the last decade — more than three times the rate of US inflation, according to a research report. ... Now, a Quarter Pounder with Cheese meal goes for $11.99 — more than double the $5.39 it cost in 2014, according to a study by FinanceBuzz, which cited average prices nationwide. ...

The analysis by FinanceBuzz found that McDonald’s was one of 13 restaurants that have raised menu prices in the last decade by 60% on average between 2014 and 2024 — or nearly double the cumulative national rate of inflation of 31% over that period.

While McDonald’s was the worst offender — tripling the rate of inflation, according to FinanceBuzz — Popeyes, Taco Bell, Chipotle and Jimmy John’s raised the prices of their menu items at more than double the actual inflation rate, the study found.     

It's like Obamacare.

Insurance companies got rich because of Obamacare rules, now electric utilities are poised to get rich because of Biden climate rules

 Utilities are shutting down "dirty" capacity without adequately replacing it. The law of supply and demand means only one thing: higher prices. OK, two: blackouts.

Meanwhile, tax credits under Biden's phony Inflation Reduction Act are masking the true costs of renewables.

From a Wall Street Journal op-ed "The Coming Electricity Crisis: Artificial-intelligence data centers and climate rules are pushing the power grid to what could become a breaking point" here :

Obama Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz last week predicted that utilities will ultimately have to rely more on gas, coal and nuclear plants to support surging demand. “We’re not going to build 100 gigawatts of new renewables in a few years,” he said. No kidding.

The problem is that utilities are rapidly retiring fossil-fuel and nuclear plants. “We are subtracting dispatchable [fossil fuel] resources at a pace that’s not sustainable, and we can’t build dispatchable resources to replace the dispatchable resources we’re shutting down,” Federal Energy Regulatory Commissioner Mark Christie warned this month.

About 20 gigawatts of fossil-fuel power are scheduled to retire over the next two years—enough to power 15 million homes—including a large natural-gas plant in Massachusetts that serves as a crucial source of electricity in cold snaps. PJM’s external market monitor last week warned that up to 30% of the region’s installed capacity is at risk of retiring by 2030.

Some plants are nearing the end of their useful life-spans, but an onslaught of costly regulation is the bigger cause. A soon-to-be-finalized Environmental Protection Agency rule would require natural-gas plants to install expensive and unproven carbon capture technology.

The PJM report cites “the role of states and the federal government in subsidizing resources and in environmental regulation.” It added: “The simple fact is that the sources of new capacity that could fully replace the retiring capacity have not been clearly identified.”

Meantime, the Inflation Reduction Act’s huge renewable subsidies make it harder for fossil-fuel and nuclear plants to compete in wholesale power markets. The cost of producing power from solar and wind is roughly the same as from natural gas. But IRA tax credits can offset up to 50% of the cost of renewable operators. 

Baseload plants can’t turn a profit operating only when needed to back up renewables, so they are closing. This was the main culprit for Texas’s week-long power outage in February 2021 and the eastern U.S.’s rolling blackouts during Christmas 2022.

As much as I sympathize with this guy's tale of Obamacare woe, his timeline is pure fantasy

 The story is here:

My insurance was $185/month with a $1,000 deductible. That was for a family of 5. So I voted for Obama-Biden in 2008 based on Obamacare. ...  the cheapest insurance I could find to replace that one was $1,200 a month with a $6,000 deductible.

The guy had a great plan before Obama!

But Obamacare as he now thinks he knows it didn't even exist in 2008 for him to base his vote on it.

Obama was for something else, the public option, a government-funded health insurance plan designed to compete with private health insurance. That was also Nancy Pelosi's preference, and the preference of the US House Democrat left at the time.

The great fear was the public option would crowd out private insurance and defeat it because it would be more attractive to women and the chronically ill.

The House public option plan put forward in 2009 competed with the Senate plan, and the two proposals were at an impasse by the end of 2009. Eventually the Senate version prevailed in March of 2010.

The Senate plan was actually worse, what we now call Obamacare.

It dictated the much more expensive nature and new shape of all existing private insurance plans instead of providing a separate public option to compete with those already existing private insurance plans. It cost more to provide because it eliminated pre-existing condition exclusions, and treated men and women equally even though women's care is more costly.

It was fascism pure and simple, government dictating to the private sector what will be, and what will not be.

That's how you lost your old plan, your old doctor, and your money: Because Obama bowed to the Senate plan, instead of fighting for what he said he believed in.

If you were too poor, though, to qualify for Obamacare, you just got stuck with Medicaid, health insurance for the poor, and, failing that, with nothing at all.

The once heralded public option for everyone defaulted to Medicaid. Nearly 86 million are now stuck with that, and most are unaware of its clawback provisions.

Today only 21 million can afford Obamacare, and about 25 million non-elderly adults have bupkis, like the poor fella in the story had for ten years.

Meanwhile, 158 million have employer-provided health insurance, the cost of which climbs relentlessly. The average worker had to pay $549 a month in premiums for it in 2023.

Medicare provides coverage to about 66 million aged 65+, and costs nearly $175 a month in 2024.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

 

 

 

New Hampshire primary exit polling on the illegal alien invasion shows Nikki Haley's vote came overwhelmingly from Democrat voters

New Hampshire primary exit polling shows Nikki Haley's vote is overwhelmingly in the bag for the new crazy asylum gimmick for illegal aliens flooding the border under Biden, which means her voters were mostly from Democrats. 

 . . . two-thirds of Haley voters said that undocumented immigrants should be given the chance to apply for legal status.

More.

The gimcrack redefinition of the asylum system under Joe Biden is simply the latest Democrat m/o at work about everything: Find a work-around around the law when you don't have the votes to change the law.

That explains the National Popular Vote Compact, Obamacare, student loan bailouts, et cetera. Redefining millions of illegal aliens as asylum seekers is simply the latest example.