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Another piece of the untold story of Obamacare

Another piece of the untold story of Obamacare

So many things had to go wrong for Obamacare to evade a Senate filibuster.  Arlen Specter had to switch parties.  Al Franken had to pull out a slight victory.  And Senator Ted Stevens needed to lose relection just after being convicted of corruption.

If any one of those had not happened, we would not have Obamacare.

In the Stevens case, the conviction was overturned later for prosecutorial misconduct.  But the election results stood.

Now a new report reveals how bad the misconduct was:

The release of a scathing report last week detailing widespread  prosecutorial misconduct that botched the corruption trial of the late  Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) has reignited calls to revisit the rules  requiring government prosecutors to hand over evidence that could help  exonerate criminal defendants.

Though the underlying cause of the derailed prosecution has been  known since April 2009, when Stevens’ conviction was set aside after the  Department of Justice said it had failed to disclose evidence that  would have helped the Senator’s defense team, details of prosecutors’  “willful nondisclosure” in last week’s report stunned legal observers,  who say this is just the latest case that illustrates how badly the  rules need revision.

It truly is amazing how close we came to avoiding the disaster known as Obamacare.  But close was not good enough.

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Comments

… and best of all, the taxpayers get to pay for the defense of these criminal prosecutors.

I recommend two weeks in stocks (i.e. an instrument of torture as well as confinement; the feet, stretched wide apart, were thrust through holes in a wall of wood) on the steps of Congress.

Yep.
And ObamaCare will unravel at somepoint in the future, sadly the quality of care will plummet for the rest of America.

Those that are very rich and very well connected will have the best care, the rest of us, not so much.

Ironically, it will be the middle class who will suffer the most under this awful PO$ law. Just look at NYC, more and more doctors are going to cash only, some charge upwards of $200-300 per visit, these are excellent docs, they accept no insurance, no medicare, no medicaid. Do the idiots in DC really think the middle class in this country will see their care quality increase? No, it will only decrease. It will hurt the very people it was supposed to help.

    retire05 in reply to alex. | March 17, 2012 at 7:58 pm

    A report in the Houston Physicians Journal a couple of years ago stated that 52% of all Texas physicians are refusing to take Medicare/Medicaid patients. That includes my own excellent GP.

    So seniors who move to Texas are finding that they are having a hard time finding doctors to accept their M/M. Sometimes they have to drive miles to the nearest accepting physician, because small town doctors are already servicing more than their fair share of patients, and have closed their practices to any new patients. And when it takes 3-6 months for a doctor to be reimbursed, at reduced rates, from M/M, can any of us stay in business when we don’t get paid for our labor for 3-6 months?

    The trend in dentristy has been to not accept insurance assignments. Dentists require immediate payment, and will have their office staff fill our your insurance claims, but you have to file them and have the insurance company reimburse you. This is gaining popularity with physicians, as well.

    Does anyone think that if shot in the head, you will get the care that Gabby Giffords received as a Congresswoman, being life flighted to a Houston hospital that provides the best care in the nation for her type of wound? How about the treatment Ted Kennedy received? Think you will be eligible for that under Obamacare? You won’t.

    You see, Congress, and those who work for Congress, are exempt from Obamacare.

    Here is how M/M works; a doctor in a small town outside Austin charges $60/office visit. Medicare reimburses him 80% of what is considered R & D (reasonable and customary). Because he is in a small town, his payment is 80% of $48.1l, so he gets $38.49 of his $60 charge and he cannot bill the patient the difference. By accepting M/M, the doctor just took a 35% haircut on his services.

    This is what is going to happen with Obamacare. And doctors, and eventually hospitals, are going to either refuse to accept insurance assignments or go out of business. And the only choice you are going to have is going to a substandard physician who got through med school on lowered standards.

I blame Obamacare on Scott Brown and Michele Bachmann. They really are the reasons it ultimately passed. It’s not their fault because they didn’t intend for it to be passed, but without them it probably wouldn’t have passed.

People forget that the Democrats in the House were fighting amongst themselves for months about Obamacare. Nancy Pelosi had to twist every arm and dole out every bribe she could just to get a bill that had a chance of passing the House even with the Dems super majority. That bill barely passed in November. The Senate then gutted that bill, bribed Nelson for the 60th vote on Christmas Eve and it went back to the house. The House might have fought over it for another year except for two things:

Scott Brown won “Ted Kennedy’s seat” and the Tea Party came to Washington. Michele Bachmann meant well, but like most conservatives she just didn’t understand that all those speeches and rallies just made the Democrats dig in their heels even more. Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama would get Obamacare passed if they had to ram it down the throats of every single person they met. Oh, now they were pissed. They never believed Teddy would die much less that a stupid idiot Republican could possibly win his seat. And the Tea Party? Oh, just a convenient target to demonize until this moron Congresswoman from fly over country started with her speeches and interviews. Who the HELL did she think she was, anyway? We’ll show her and them. And they did. They broke every rule and made up more and no matter what they were going to pass that bill and rub it in everyone’s face while they did it. And so they did.

Until conservatives understand, really understand, how liberals think they will never win.

    “Michele Bachmann meant well, but like most conservatives she just didn’t understand that all those speeches and rallies just made the Democrats dig in their heels even more.”

    So you’re suggesting that opposing them was what made them do what they did? Therefore, if everyone had just shut up and pretended nothing was happening, nothing would have happened?

    You are completely insane.

    alex in reply to Jaynie59. | March 17, 2012 at 9:20 pm

    I say this as a recovering liberal, it was in fact people like Michelle Bachmann who made me understand the major downfalls of RationCare.

    I was a Hillary supporter in 2008 and campaigned for universal healthcare, having no idea what that meant and how it was detrimental to the quality of care for the average american. People like Bachmann and Corburn who made me understand how to have alternate policies for better more afforable care.
    Sorry, but liberals don’t think, they are drones.

Not much is being reported on Holders efforts to enforce new Medicare rules and regulations to curb waste, fraud and abuse.
Waste, fraud and abuse is a bad thing, its accentuated in the news but fraud is such a very small part of total picture…

Well more to the point, when reforms fail send in the enforcers and a lot of good docs are being put through the wringer of burdensome government bureaucracy.

In other words this is just another avenue leftists are using to bringing private sector economy to ruin, how many docs will just retire or go out of business.

    Browndog in reply to OcTEApi. | March 17, 2012 at 6:24 pm

    No worries.

    Obama/Holder have it covered.

    Which is why “minority” mandates, lowering of admission standards for Med schools was included in ObamaCare.

    We need the best..er…most talented…er..most passionate…

    ..er….

    We just need more of a certain skin color-

    Yea, that’ll do the trick.

    (Boy, Google does not want me to find the “minority mandate” for med schools in Obamacare)

      OcTEApi in reply to Browndog. | March 17, 2012 at 6:38 pm

      Well the intention is to put private practice medicare service providers (docs) out of business, in order to force more patients into hospital provided medicare services.

      That’s where Obama is blowing all the loot, to benefit his lobbyist hospital conglomerates, it shouldn’t be a surprise that that docs have run from them because its the worst run operation in healthcare.

      find the worst run operations and pour taxpayer loot into it, crush the private sector and “choice” to make it profitable.

      OcTEApi in reply to Browndog. | March 17, 2012 at 7:06 pm

      “Boy, Google does not want me to find the…”

      Last week I noticed while doing some research on a topic that I had 35 tabs open…
      At first I was pleased that my system optimization was providing optimal performance.
      Then I realized that why I couldn’t find what I was looking for, the faulty search results:
      progressive this dot com
      progressive that dot com
      Huffpo
      Firedoglake
      Talking Points Memo
      Media Matters
      Salon
      White House dot gov

      I though Google’s new privacy policy… consumer spying was to provide more results automatically tailored based on that information.
      They’re just not paying attention if they can’t see I’m usually a few days ahead and a couple clicks to the right of Rush.

        scooterjay in reply to OcTEApi. | March 18, 2012 at 10:07 am

        I, too, have noticed the “info takeover” by Google…….scary, isn’t it? That is why I was careful to bookmark thousands of search results prior to the Google info takeover.

Excuse me while I get this off my chest-

BART. $%#@*!. STUPAK.

Disagree. If they had needed a Republican vote, they could have bought it. Lots of RINO’s for sale.

1. From the link (boldface mine):

It’s a really sad story, very disturbing and upsetting. … There are no winners,” said Peter Zeidenberg, a partner at DLA Piper. “But I think the problem is, frankly, larger. It’s a systemic, global problem in that the way discovery is currently provided in these white-collar cases is problematic.”

Well, silly me. I thought the winner was Mark Begich who took Stevens’ seat in deep red Alaska. (Stevens was predicted to lose if found guilty; to win if exonerated.) And I thought other winners were the Democrat power brokers who used the loss of Stevens’ seat to ram through Obamacare.

2. Speaking of Peter Zeidenberg, the really smart guy who gave that nuanced analysis of complex systemic issues—we’d better not hear any simplismay out of you, you knuckle-dragging bitter clingers—, a very quick look turned up these political donations. Take a wild guess before clicking…

3. Afaic the rogue prosecutors belong in jail with sentences that reflect the serious consequences of their misconduct. I’d at least like to know that they aren’t being taken care of in the leftist ecosystem, but I have little confidence about that. Perhaps an assignment for an enterprising conservative reporter?

4. Obama’ horrendous performance makes it easy to forget how bad Bush was.

The “investigation” and “trial” of Stevens occurred during the Bush administration. It is one thing to have an apolitical Justice Department. It is quite another to sit around while the senior Senator of your own party—and a crucial vote—is railroaded on trumped-up charges.

Heckuva job, George. Again.

But close was not good enough.

As a long-time friend always says:

Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades!

Prof, this is nonsense, they were going to pass it no matter what if they majorities in the house and senate. When they rammed it through reconciliation it was against the rules, but they didn’t care. If needed try would have gone truely nuclearover it. Nationalized health care is the holy grail for democrats, the first black president, yes we can, change nonsense with dem control made it happen. The war was lost when McCain won the nod. That’s it, the rest was theatre.

    OcTEApi in reply to imfine. | March 17, 2012 at 7:15 pm

    “We’ll go through the gate. If the gate’s closed, we’ll go over the fence. If the fence is too high, we’ll pole vault in. If that doesn’t work, we’ll parachute in but we’re going to get health care reform passed… House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

      scooterjay in reply to OcTEApi. | March 18, 2012 at 10:08 am

      It is sadly less about healthcare and more about control. the Affordable Healthcare Act is the day America bowed to communism. We lost.

heres another piece of this “untold” story.
free sterilizations.
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/free-sterilizations-must-be-offered-all-college-women-says-hhs

I am pissed..

Thankfully, repeal of Obamacare should be easier than many people believe.

Not all, but most of Obamacare was passed using what our betters in Congress call, “reconciliation.” It’s a procedure used for budget matters and the Democrats thought they had really outsmarted Republicans (never difficult to do) since by this little trick the House version did not have to go to a full Senate vote requiring 60 votes to avoid a filibuster. Scott Brown was in the Senate by then and had promised to be the 41st vote to sustain a filibuster which would have stopped Obamacare in its tracks.

But what passes with reconciliation can be repealed by reconciliation. [See, The Reconciliation Option by James Capretta] Thus, if the Republicans get even a slim majority in the Senate, keep the House, and if we have a President willing to support it and sign the bill, Obamacare, or most of it, can be repealed by a simple majority in the Senate. If the Republicans fail in this they should lose every future election.

S