Bernie voters? https://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=33D3NOl0-ag
Progressives have never learned competition lowers prices, offers more innovative choices and is good.
A single payer health insurance program will cost more, will not be competitive, will result in less innovation and will turn into a disaster just as has The Veteran's Administration's health program.
Anything free and from the government has proven, always, to be more costly and worse than what the free market and competition produces.
When government builds walls of regulations that impede and restrict free market solutions, as with water, adaptation occurs and eventually adds inefficiencies, reduces the level of successes and consumers are simply being set up for a replacement solution by government. This is the Trojan Horse approach and what Obama and the big government , do it all folks seek.
It does not take a rocket scientist to learn this only one who is willing to know history. (See 1 below.)
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Obama knew what he was getting when he selected Dan Shapiro as our Amb. to Israel - a perfect foil for his plans to downgrade our relationship with the Middle East's only Democracy. (See 2 below.)
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More Obama change is in the air: By the co-founder of Greenpeace.
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lamentably youth is wasted on the young! (See 3 and 3a below.)
Also, when getting an Israeli to U.S per person equivalency, you must multiply by 50.
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1)
Obamacare: 2016 and 2017
Editor's note: This article is adapted from one that ran in Ag Innovation Magazine, a publication of the Farm Equipment Manufacturers Association.
There is no debating that Obamacare contains benefits and costs and that the law continues to sharply divide the country. Its supporters say that it is working, while its opponents argue otherwise and continue pressing to undo the law. In January, Congress sent a bill to the president's desk that would have repealed large swaths of the law, including most of its taxes and much of its spending; as expected, the president vetoed the bill. Let's take a closer look at how Obamacare is working so far.
Obamacare's Impact on Coverage
The numbers have increased: Obamacare supporters primarily and repeatedly cite the decrease in the number of people without health insurance. The Obama administration estimates that 12.6 million people gained insurance coverage from 2010 to 2014. However, several million people became uninsured during the financial crash of 2008-2009. Part of the post-2010 increase simply reflects a return to pre-recession coverage levels as the economy has slowly improved. Using a 2008 starting point reveals that the number of uninsured fell by only 6.7 million people through 2014.
The numbers have increased: Obamacare supporters primarily and repeatedly cite the decrease in the number of people without health insurance. The Obama administration estimates that 12.6 million people gained insurance coverage from 2010 to 2014. However, several million people became uninsured during the financial crash of 2008-2009. Part of the post-2010 increase simply reflects a return to pre-recession coverage levels as the economy has slowly improved. Using a 2008 starting point reveals that the number of uninsured fell by only 6.7 million people through 2014.
Most of the increase is Medicaid: The net gains in health insurance have come mainly through Medicaid and not private insurance, since the number of people covered by employer-sponsored insurance has somewhat declined. Medicaid is a program for lower-income people and is plagued with problems, including poor access to care for enrollees. A recent study found that enrollees receive only 20 to 40 cents of benefit for each dollar that Medicaid spends on their behalf.
Exchanges are doing poorly: Overall enrollments on the Obamacare exchanges are far lower than the government had previously forecast. The only people signing up in large numbers are those who receive large subsidies to reduce their premiums and deductibles.
Importantly, increasing the number of people with insurance cards does not guarantee that those people gain anything in terms of health, as numerous studies have indicated a loose connection between health insurance and health.
Obamacare's Impact on Insurance and Premiums
Premiums soar: President Obama told Americans that Obamacare would reduce family premiums by $2,500. However, since Obamacare was signed into law, family premiums for employer plans have soared — increasing by more than $4,000 since 2009.
Premiums soar: President Obama told Americans that Obamacare would reduce family premiums by $2,500. However, since Obamacare was signed into law, family premiums for employer plans have soared — increasing by more than $4,000 since 2009.
Young and healthy decline to subsidize old and sick: Obamacare requires that health insurers offer a standardized health insurance product to all applicants, and that they charge the same premiums regardless of health status. Insurers are also prohibited from charging near-retirees more than three times the amount charged to twenty-somethings. As a result, Obamacare increased individual-market premiums, with younger and healthier people bearing the largest increases.
In 2014 and 2015, insurers selling exchange plans lost money as the plans attracted older and sicker enrollees than expected. In 2016, most exchange-plan premiums are increasing by double-digits. UnitedHealth, the largest insurer in the country, has announced that it may stop offering exchange plans altogether after 2016 because of market instability.
Plans are becoming stingier: Premiums would be even higher, but insurers designed exchange plans with very narrow provider networks and high deductibles and cost-sharing amounts. Many are discovering that their treatments are “covered” under their plans, but not actually paid for by their plans.
Obamacare's Impact on Businesses and Workers
Employer mandate arrives in full force: After two years of delay, the employer mandate takes full effect in 2016. The employer mandate requires that employers with at least 50 full-time workers offer acceptable coverage to their workers or pay tax penalties. These penalties can equal $2,000 per worker or $3,000 per worker receiving insurance subsidies on the exchanges. The mandate incentivizes employers to trim hours below 30 per week so workers are not considered full-time and reduce full-time workers (plus full-time equivalents) below 50.
Employer mandate arrives in full force: After two years of delay, the employer mandate takes full effect in 2016. The employer mandate requires that employers with at least 50 full-time workers offer acceptable coverage to their workers or pay tax penalties. These penalties can equal $2,000 per worker or $3,000 per worker receiving insurance subsidies on the exchanges. The mandate incentivizes employers to trim hours below 30 per week so workers are not considered full-time and reduce full-time workers (plus full-time equivalents) below 50.
Paperwork will become heavy: The IRS has created seven new forms for Obamacare. In particular, complying with the employer mandate will be a major paperwork burden for businesses. Businesses will have to report on their health-insurance offering as well as the monthly take-up rate for their workforce.
SHOP exchanges are mostly failing: The Small Business Health Option Program exchanges were designed to provide small businesses the ability to offer their workers more health-insurance options and lower overall premiums. Thus far, the SHOP exchanges have been a failure, enrolling only a small fraction of the number of people projected.
Co-ops have failed: All of the co-ops — state-based insurers established by the law through large federal startup loans — are underwater. More than half have already closed.
Fewer jobs: The Congressional Budget Office estimates that Obamacare will reduce the amount of full-time work in the economy by about 2 million jobs, decreasing American economic output by about half of 1 percent. This is largely the result of lower-wage workers' working less because additional work would reduce or eliminate subsidies.
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2)
Land for peace in the Middle East?
By Yoram Ettinger “Israel Hayom”,
US Ambassador to Israel, Dan Shapiro believes in “Land for Peace” and echoes the US Administration pressure on Israel to retreat to the pre-1967 ceasefire lines: an 8-15 mile sliver along the Mediterranean, towered over by the mountain ridges of Judea & Samaria. Thus, the US Administration – unlike the US public and Congress - ignores the centrality of Judea & Samaria in Jewish history, religion, culture and nationalism, and provides another victory to wishful-thinking over the 1,400-year-old reality of inherent Mideast/Arab violence, unpredictability, tyranny, doublespeak and hate-education.
If Israel would have caved under US pressure to retreat from the Golan Heights – a site of Jewish battles against the Roman Empire - ISIS and other terrorists would be there, overlooking the Sea of Galilee, traumatizing northern Israel and beyond.
Israel’s former, dovish, Foreign Minister, Abba Eban stated (Der Spiegel, Nov. 5, 1969): “The map will never be the same as on June 4, 1967… [which is] for us something of a memory of Auschwitz….”
Mideast peace agreements are as durable as are Arab regimes, policies and
accords, which have been - since the 7th century - the globe’s most shifty, intolerant, violent, volatile and treacherous, as currently reflected by the Arab Tsunami (gullibly known as the Arab Spring). The latter yielded abrupt power and ideological shifts in Egypt and Tunisia, transformed Libya, Syria, Iraq and Yemen into chaotic terror platforms, and lethally threatens all moderate Arab regimes. A regime change in Jordan would transform Israel’s most peaceful – to the most threatening - border.
Pressuring Israel to accept “Land for Peace” assumes that an Israeli withdrawal from Judea & Samaria would convince Arabs to accord the “infidel” Jew that which Muslim “believers” have denied one another for 1,400 years: peaceful coexistence and systematic compliance with agreements.
“Land for Peace" urges Israel to concede land in return for peace, while not allowing Israel to retrieve land after if/when peace is violated in the violent, non-compliant Mideast.
“Land for Peace” enhances security when the parties display long term adherence to agreements, which is a Mideast rarity. However, it undermines the security of the land-conceding party, once agreements are violated. For example, the 1993 (Oslo Accord) and 2005 (uprooting all Jews from Gaza) “Land for Peace” agreements were summarily violated, intensifying terrorism dramatically.
“Land for Peace” would usher the Arab Tsunami into Judea & Samaria, which towers over 80% of Israel’s population and infrastructure, including Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Israel’s only international airport. It also overlooks the Jordan Valley, Israel’s longest border.
The width of pre-1967 Israel (8-15 miles) is equal to the length of DFW Airport in Texas, the distance between JFK and La GuardiaAirports, Wall Street and Columbia University, the Kennedy Center and RFK Stadium, less than the distance between downtown London and Heathrow Airport. The area of Israel (0.2% of the Arab World) is smaller than the gunnery range at Nellis Air Force Base, NV. While pressuring Israel to retreat to an 8-15 mile “straight jacket”, the US declared a 15 mile radius area in Bosnia, as a "killing zone," in order to ensure the safety of its soldiers.
Israel’s vulnerable dimensions, in the endemically unstable, unreliable, violent Mideast, provide Israel with a minimal margin of error, requiring a uniquely high threshold of security in the face of reality-driven worst case scenarios.
Former Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, the late General Earl Wheeler told President Lyndon Johnson: “The minimum requirements for Israel's defense include most of the West Bank, the whole of Gaza and the Golan Heights.” 100 retired US Generals and Admirals cautioned Israel against withdrawing from Judea & Samaria, stating that is would be impossible to demilitarize the area effectively. The late Admiral Bud Nance:” The eastern mountain ridge of the West Bank is one of the world's best tank barriers…. The western mountain ridge constitutes a dream platform of invasion to Israel's narrow [8-15 miles] coastal plain. Control of the West Bank provides Israel the time [50 hours] to mobilize reservists [75% of Israel’s military], which are critical to Israel’s survival during a surprise Arab attack.” Most reservists reside in the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv-Haifa area, which is dominated by the Judea & Samaria mountain ridge.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, ground barriers are critical in the era of sophisticated missiles. According to the US Army Institute of Land Warfare: "Land force [is] the cornerstone of deterrence.... Ground units can both destroy and occupy.... During the Afghan campaign of 2002, precision air strikes were critical, but they neither annihilated opposition nor finished the enemy....” General (ret.) Al Gray, former Commandant, US Marine Corps: “Military success requires more than a few hundred missiles. To defeat Israel would require the Arabs to deploy armor, infantry and artillery into Israel and destroy the IDF on the ground.”
In 1973, the Sinai, the Golan and Judea & Samaria were the cushion, which enabled Israel to overcome technological, intelligence and operational fallibility, sparing Israel from oblivion. Military high tech today will be low tech tomorrow, but high ground always remains high ground. Moreover, any technology can be jammed, but one cannot jam the mountainous topography of Judea & Samaria.
Should the Sinai concession to Egypt apply to Judea & Samaria? The Sinai borders the Negev, which is topographically similar to the Sinai, sparsely populated, a platform for much of Israel’s military. In contrast, Judea & Samaria borders topographically inferior, densely populated and most vulnerable coastal plain. 50 hours are required to violate Sinai’s demilitarization (22,000 sq mi), only 10 hours in Judea & Samaria (2,200 sq mi). The Sinai concession was a calculated risk; a Judea & Samaria concession would be a lethal gamble. The geographic depth of Judea & Samaria, the Golan Heights and the Sinai enabled Israel to survive the 1973 surprise Arab offensive.
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3)
Robbins: Ex-Soviet dissident tackles moral indifference
The sweet faces of the two young Israeli women hacked to death by Palestinians last month pain Israelis deeply, and the indifference to these murders and so many others confounds them. Dafna Meir, a 38-year-old mother of 6, was stabbed to death in her home on Jan. 17; Shlomit Krigman, slaughtered Jan. 26 near her local grocery, was 23.
Dafna and Shlomit are among the 30 Israelis killed and 200 wounded by Palestinians since October alone. Their killers were egged on by popular songs like “Lovers of Stabbing” and “Stab The Zionist” that blare from Palestinian radio stations. Palestinian leaders, spurning the offer of an independent state living in peace with Israel, have chosen instead to turn their society into just another Mideast variant of Murder, Incorporated — encouraging the killings of Israelis and glorifying them, knowing that when it comes to the killing of Jews, much of the world will remain blase.
In Boston last week, one of the world’s symbols of courage, Natan Sharansky, marked Holocaust Remembrance Day with a talk at the Edward M. Kennedy Institute. Sharansky’s life has served as a vivid rebuke to moral indifference. A Jewish dissident in the Soviet Union, he was denied an exit visa to Israel and was jailed for nine years by the Soviets for his beliefs. Half of that time was spent in solitary confinement, and for over 400 days the KGB kept him in the very harshest confinement it had at its disposal, a “punishment cell.”
Sharansky refused to bend, let alone buckle, and in 1986 — thanks to an international campaign on his behalf led by his wife Avital — he was released and permitted to join her in Israel. Sharansky says he was eager to visit the Kennedy Institute “to thank Ted Kennedy for all he did during those years.” Kennedy was the first American politician to meet with Jewish “refuseniks” in the Soviet Union, defying authorities by visiting Sharansky and others during his 1974 trip to Moscow.
During Sharansky’s incarceration, Kennedy met often with Avital. “His office was a war room for my wife,” Sharansky recalls. “He showed the way for many other American politicians by presenting our demands as his own.”
Diminutive in size, enormous in stature, Sharansky downplays what he was forced to endure as a price for insisting on his freedom. Asked what he remembers thinking about while imprisoned, he says he recalls thinking: “There is nothing more that I can do to contribute. It was a very easy way to be part of something big.”
Sharansky now devotes himself to another cause he regards as something big: encouraging college students to stand up against a campaign of intimidation leveled against supporters of Israel that is intended to bully them into remaining silent. “The problem of anti-Israel propaganda, of anti-Semitic propaganda, on campuses is huge,” he says.
A mathematician, Sharansky strains to understand the logic of some of the criticism directed Israel’s way. The Swedish Foreign Minister’s head-spinning characterization of the deaths of Palestinian stabbers while they were attacking Israelis as “extrajudicial killings,” for example, leaves him perplexed. Trying to stop murderers from murdering, he says with understatement, is “[t]he minimal self-protection that any free country can take.” He notes that to its north, Israel faces a dictatorship sworn to its destruction with chemical weapons, a terrorist enterprise with 100,000 missiles aimed at it and an assortment of jihadist groups, while on the West Bank the question is who will take over: “Hamas, Hezbollah or ISIS?”
Against the freshly painful backdrop of the stabbings of Dafna Meir and Shlomit Krigman, the humble Sharansky’s unspoken message is itself humbling. The times may be challenging, Sharansky conveys by his very presence before college audiences less than one third his age. But it is no time to give up, or to back down.
Jeff Robbins, a former U.S. delegate to the U.N. Human Rights Commission under President Clinton, is a Boston attorney.
:3a) Natan Sharansky Faces Off with BDS at Brown University
By IRA STOLL
PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Anyone who doubts the gravity of the threat to Israel and Jewish students on American college campuses could have stopped by the Brown University campus here on Thursday night.
Students and community members attempting to listen to a conversation about Jewish identity between actor Michael Douglas and Soviet dissident turned Israeli political figure Natan Sharansky had their event intruded on by loud chants of “free, free, Palestine” from protesters outside.
Don’t blame Brown. The event was crawling with university and city police, along with Mr. Sharansky’s formidable security detail. The protesters have as much right to speak on campus as Mr. Sharansky, 68, and Mr. Douglas, 71, do. Though they do not necessarily have the right to speak so loudly and closely as to drown out the Jewish identity event, or to distribute inside the lecture hall, as they did, a slickly worded handout accusing Israel of “ethnic cleansing” and libeling Mr. Sharansky as “an infamous anti-African racist” while falsely representing the flier as a “program addition.”
The protesters failed to stop Mr. Sharansky from delivering his message, though the noise they generated outside could be heard inside the lecture hall for what seemed like a long while.
But it’s nonetheless a sad moment for American higher education, for Israel, and for world Jewry when a campus conversation between an American actor with a Jewish identity and a human rights hero known for surviving nine years in the Soviet gulag is greeted — before it even happens — by an op-ed in the student newspaper summoning a rally “to speak out against this justification of Israeli crimes.” It’s a measure of the movement’s virulence that it targeted not an appearance by an Israeli general or a foreign policy talk but rather a discussion about Jewish identity.
Mr. Sharansky spoke about the anti-Israel protesters and the boycott, divest, sanction movement they represent. “The moment you move to a logical debate, they have nothing to say....They are only shouting,” he said. “Behind it there is a desire to destroy Israel. It is not about human rights. The question is, how to destroy Israel. My fear is they are discouraging so many young Jews from being connected to their people and to the state of Israel.”
In his comments at the Brown event, Mr. Sharansky encouraged students to explore and claim their Jewish identity. “First of all, always remember from where you came,” he said. “If you want to make the world a better place...you have to be strongly connected to your roots and your identity. This is your source of power to change the world.”
Some student questioners pressed Mr. Sharansky about what they described as Israeli settlements and occupation, with Mr. Douglas describing the West Bank settlements as “the one issue that has alienated more of Israel’s friends than any other.” Other audience members and questioners were supportive.
Mr. Sharansky engaged on the substance. “I feel very strongly the fact that we are controlling the lives of other people is very bad for us,” he said. He recalled resigning from the government of Prime Minister Sharon when Sharon decided to withdraw unilaterally from Gaza. “I wrote then that the missiles from Gaza will reach us,” Mr. Sharansky said, recommending an alternative strategy: “the right way is to strengthen Palestinian civil society.”
“Who will gain if Israel will go back to the borders of ’67 and Hezbollah and ISIS will control the West Bank?” Mr. Sharansky asked. He said he wanted the Palestinians ‘”to be an independent state as soon as possible,” but said it needs to be done without creating a terrorist state.
On the settlement issue, Mr. Sharansky said the Jewish Agency for Israel, which he chairs, leaves it up to individual immigrants to make a personal decision. “It’s their choice...wherever they choose to live,” he said. “We don’t have a policy of supporting settlements, we don’t have a policy of fighting against the settlements.”
More and more immigrants will be in the position to make such a decision; Mr. Sharansky said half of the 300,000 Jews in France have already decided that their children should not live there. Last year, 31,000 Jews moved to Israel, up from 20,000 two years ago, Mr. Sharansky said. Eight thousand of the new immigrants came from France, and Mr. Sharansky said that number could double in the year ahead if Israel solves some problems. “I told the prime minister, this year we could have 15,000 or 20,000 Jews from France,” he said.
Mr. Douglas, the son of a Jewish father — the actor Kirk Douglas — and an Anglican mother, described how his own Jewish identity had been awakened by his son who wanted a bar mitzvah. He also spoke of his early career. “My father was a big movie star, and I questioned whether I could be the man that my father was,” Mr. Douglas said. “I suffered from stage fright. I used to get violently ill before I’d go on stage. It did not come easy.”
Mr. Sharansky asked Mr. Douglas to consider having his own adult bar mitzvah. Mr. Sharansky, denied one as a youth in the Soviet Union, finally had one at age 65. “All the sweets that they throw at you, my grandchildren collect,” he said. Mr. Sharansky noted that the Torah portion for his birthday and bar mitzvah describes the Exodus from Egypt, an appropriate passage for someone with his life story.
Mr. Douglas said he might give it a try at age 83, when some seniors do a second bar mitzvah.
It was a sweet moment, a reminder both of progress and of room for more. The Soviet Union that once denied Jewish youths the possibility of having bar mitzvahs has been defeated, in part because of the courage of Mr. Sharansky and those like him. Yet when Mr. Sharansky comes to an American college campus to encourage others to celebrate bar mitzvahs or to otherwise embrace their Jewish heritage, he is greeted with protesters aiming to drown out his remarks and destroy the Jewish state.
A dispatch in the Brown Daily Herald, which had a reporter outside with the protesters, reported that they numbered about 30 — far fewer than the hundreds gathered to hear Mr. Sharansky and Mr. Douglas — and that among their slogans was “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” The Herald also reported that, “Throughout the demonstration, Ashley Ferranti, assistant dean of student support services, reminded students of the University’s guidelines for staging protests. She also offered to provide further support for students who had missed class to be involved in activism or who were upset by the evening’s events.” The student newspaper said the protesters were able to gain entry to the lobby of the Sharansky-Douglas lecture “because they had booked a room” in the building where it was held.
Said Mr. Sharansky: “When our enemies are shouting very loudly...we can’t shout like them. It is not our strength. But we are strong enough to be free inside.”
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