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Are You Infuriated Yet?

You should be. I certainly am…
More and more, I’m encountering people who are simply infuriated with how our “leaders” are running (or to put it more accurately, ruining) things right now. And I share that fury.

It’s perfectly normal human response to be infuriated when an outside agent hurts you, especially if the pain seems unnecessary, illogical or random.

Imagine if your neighbor enjoyed setting off loud explosives at all hours of the day and night. Or if he had a habit of tailgating and brake-checking you every time he saw your car on the road. You’d been well within your rights to be infuriated.

Or to use a much more common example from the real world : When your politicians repeatedly pass laws that hurt you in favor of large corporations — that, too, is infuriating. Especially if those actions run directly counter to their campaign promises.

There’s a lot of be infuriated about in the world today, so go ahead and embrace your rage. By doing so, you’ll be in a better mindset to understand things like Brexit, Catalonia, and Trump, each of which is a reflection of the fury of your fellow citizens, who are finally waking up to the fact that they’ve been victims for too long.

An easy prediction to make is that this simmering anger of the populace is going to start boiling over more violently in the coming years. Welcome to the Age of Fury.

‘Over The Top’ Dumb

Do you ever get the sense that, as a society, we’re being dangerously reckless? Perhaps so dumb that we might not recover from the repercussions of our stupidity for many generations, if ever?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Pension Crisis is Global

trudeau-justin

The worldwide pension crisis is the next great notch in the belt of the collapse of socialism. If anyone in the private sector promised workers pensions and did not fund them, they would go to jail and be labelled as a fraud. Yet, this is standard operating procedure for government. Government claims to be some hero for reforming a Ponzi scheme and expects to be hailed by the media whom typically gives them a gold star.

Canadians are now being forced to save more for their retirement, and it does not matter what they want to do personally. As always, the scam involves forcing others to pay more so they can pay today what they promised. Ultimately, what they have done to Canadians is compel changes to benefits from 25% of covered earnings to a third. They also raised the ceiling on covered earnings from what would have been $72,500 in 2025 to $82,700. The bottom-line is rather stark. Some Canadian workers will actually be paying as much as 40% more in CPP contributions by that date.

There is no way they want to revisit this issue again because it created too much kick-back. So the Trudeau government has proclaimed the crisis is over and all is well. These schemes are outright illegal in any private context. This is why Obamacare is also collapsing. He sought to FORCE the youth to buy health insurance that they did not need to pay for others who couldn’t afford it. The scheme is always the same: take from one pocket to pay another.

Dave Janda: Bad Medicine

Dave Janda: Bad Medicine

A doctor’s reasons for quitting the profession

In our ongoing discussion of how our Health Care system (or more aptly-named “Sick Care” system) has been hijacked by those who profit most from it, we interview Dr. Dave Janda this week, who recently and very publicly announced he was walking away from his clinical practice in protest of how poorly the quality-to-cost ratio has dropped in his profession.

Dr. Janda’s perspective is informed not just from his years as a practicing surgeon and researcher, but also through his involvement with health initiatives for the Reagan and Bush I administrations, as well as the National Institute of Health. His overall conclusion is that the health system now exists to serves its corporate and administrative owners, to the detriment of patients and practitioners:

I decided I needed to retire from medicine the clinical practice of medicine because I truly felt that I could no longer take care of people the way I was trained to take care of people in a high quality manner. Now I have been involved 27 years in the clinical practice of medicine. I have battled insurance companies every day of my professional career since I got done with my residency program 27 years ago. The formula that insurance companies use and government uses to cut healthcare costs is the most inhumane and unethical means of cutting costs; and that’s the rationing and denying of care. It’s what I have fought against my entire career. My approach is, if you are really sincere about cutting healthcare costs, quit trying to deny the availability and access to care — which is what insurance companies try to do. If you’re really sincere about cutting healthcare costs prevent healthcare needs. It’s the single greatest bang for the buck.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Worst Case Scenario = 73% Down From Here

WORST CASE SCENARIO = 73% DOWN FROM HERE

As the stock market gyrates higher and lower in a fairly narrow range, the spokesmodels and talking heads on CNBC breathlessly regurgitate the standard bullish mantra designed to keep the muppets in the market. They are employees of a massive corporation whose bottom line and stock price depend upon advertising revenues reaped from Wall Street and K Street. They aren’t journalists. They are propagandists disguised as journalists. Their job is to keep you confused, misinformed, and ignorant of the true facts.

Based on the never ending happy talk and buy now gibberish spouted by the pundit lackeys, you would think we are experiencing a bull market of epic proportions and anyone who hasn’t been in the market has missed out on tremendous gains. There’s one little problem with that bit of propaganda. It’s completely false. The Fed turned off the QE spigot at the end of October 2014 and the market has gone nowhere ever since.

QE1 began in September 2008, taking the Fed balance sheet from $900 billion to $2.3 trillion by June 2010. This helped halt the stock market crash and drove the S&P 500 up by 50% from its March 2009 lows. QE2 was implemented in November 2010 and increased the Fed balance sheet to $2.9 trillion by the end of 2011. This resulted in an unacceptable 10% increase in the S&P 500, so the Fed cranked up their printing presses to hyper-speed and launched the mother of all quantitative easings, with QE3 pushing their balance sheet to $4.5 trillion by October 2014, when they ceased their “Save a Wall Street Banker” campaign.

As Main Street dies, Wall Street has been paved in gold. The S&P 500 soared to all-time highs, with 40% gains from the September 2012 QE3 launch until its cessation in October 2014. Like a heroine addict, Wall Street has experienced withdrawal symptoms ever since, and begs for more monetary easing injections.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Fourth Turning–Social & Cultural Distress Dividing the Nation

FOURTH TURNING – SOCIAL & CULTURAL DISTRESS DIVIDING THE NATION

I wrote the first three parts of this article back in September and planned to finish it in early October, but life intervened and truthfully I don’t think I was ready to confront how bad things will likely get as this Fourth Turning moves into the violent, chaotic war stage just over the horizon. The developments in the Middle East, Europe, U.S., China and across the globe in the last months have confirmed my belief war drums are beating louder, global war beckons, and much bloodshed will be the result. Fourth Turnings proceed at their own pace within the 20 to 25 year crisis framework, but there is one guarantee – they never de-intensify as they progress. Just as Winter gets colder, stormier and more bitter as you proceed from December through February, Fourth Turnings get nastier, grimmer, more perilous, with our way of life hanging in the balance.

In Part 1 of this article I discussed the catalyst spark which ignited this Fourth Turning and the seemingly delayed regeneracy. In Part 2 I pondered possible Grey Champion prophet generation leaders who could arise during the regeneracy. In Part 3 I focused on the economic channel of distress which is likely to be the primary driving force in the next phase of this Crisis. In Part 4 I will assess the social and cultural channels of distress dividing the nation, Part 5 the technological, ecological, political, military channels of distress likely to burst forth with the molten ingredients of this Fourth Turning, and finally in Part 6 our rendezvous with destiny, with potential climaxes to this Winter of our discontent.

The road ahead will be distressful for everyone living in the U.S., as we experience the horrors of war, economic collapse, civil chaos, political upheaval, and the tearing of society’s social fabric. The pain and suffering being experienced across the globe today will not bypass the people of the United States.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

Ignore the Media Bullsh*t–Retail Implosion Proves We Are In Recession

Ignore the Media Bullsh*t–Retail Implosion Proves We Are In Recession

Here we go again. The dying legacy media will continue to support the status quo, who provide their dwindling advertising revenue, by papering over the truth with platitudes, lies, and misinformation. I have been detailing the long slow death of retail in America for the last few years. The data and facts are unequivocal. Therefore, the establishment and their media mouthpieces need to suppress the truth.

They spin every terrible report in the most positive way possible. They blame lousy retail results on the weather. They blame them on calendar effects. They blame them on gasoline sales plunging. That one is funny, because we heard for months that retail spending would surge because people had more money in their pockets from the huge decline in gasoline prices.

September retail sales were grudgingly reported by the Census Bureau this morning and they were absolutely dreadful. This followed an atrocious August report. The MSM couldn’t blame it on snow, cold, flooding, drought, or even swarms of locusts. So they just buried the story in their small print headlines. The propaganda media machine had nothing. They continue to spew the drivel about a 5.1% unemployment rate as a reflection of a booming jobs market. If we really have a booming jobs market, we would have a booming retail sector. The stagnant retail market reveals the jobs data to be fraudulent. The 94 million people supposedly not in the job market can’t buy shit with their good looks.

Despite the storyline about consumer austerity being the reason for sluggish spending, the facts prove otherwise. Consumer spending accounted for 68% of GDP in 2008 at the peak. Seven years later it still represents 68% of GDP. The difference is the spending has shifted dramatically towards services since the Wall Street created financial crisis. Spending on services has grown by 31% versus 20% for goods since 2008. Guess what has caused that surge?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

THE GREAT TPP DEATHTRAP FOR INDIA, CHINA & 10 OTHER MEMBER-NATIONS

The Great TPP Deathtrap for India, China & 10 Other Member-Nations

The Terms of Destruction. The Clues are all there in Obamatrade and Obamacare.

The truth emerges out of the shadows of secrecy…

Let’s start here. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a trade treaty, coming down the homestretch toward ratification, involving 12 nations which account for a staggering 40% of the world’s GDP. The TPP encompasses 775 million consumers.

Waiting in the wings is something much larger. It is the intention, up the road, to fold India and China into the treaty.

China is the most populous nation in the world. 1.4 billion people. India is the second most populous. 1.28 billion people. India is projected to overtake and pass China by 2025.

During his seven years in office, the most publicly recognizable PR man in the world, Barack Obama, has sweated and hammered on two policies. Just two. He is now in a panic over forcing one of those: the TPP. The other one was Obamacare. That’s it. Everything else was a Sunday picnic in the park.

Obamacare, the US national health insurance plan, when you strip it down to basics, was about one thing: bowing to drug companies.

It brought huge numbers of new people, previously uninsured, into the game. Meaning those people would be able to take the drugs—and the prices for those drugs would remain high.

So it is with the TPP, as it turns out. One of the major priorities is forcing member countries to accept higher pricing on medical drugs. Which was exactly the deal in Obamacare. Big Pharma backed Obamacare for the express purpose of cutting out debates about lowering costs on drugs.

In that respect, Obamacare and the TPP are mirror images of each other.

One other vital detail: the TPP will also allow pharmaceutical companies to push drugs and force them into markets where, ordinarily, they could be rejected as unsafe.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

Big Pharma Revealed As Puppetmaster Behind TPP Secrecy

Big Pharma Revealed As Puppetmaster Behind TPP Secrecy

It is no secret that US healthcare corporations have been among, if not the biggest beneficiaries of Obamacare: by “socializing” costs and spreading the reimbursement pool over the entire population in the form of a tax, pharmaceutical companies have been able to boost medical product and service costs to unprecedented levels with the help of complicit insurance companies who have subsequently passed through these costs to the consumer, in the process sending the price of biotech and pharma stocks to levels not seen since the dot com bubble.

But when it came to the highly confidential TPP, it was unclear just which corporations were dominant in pulling the strings.

Now thanks to more documents published by Wikileaks, and analyzed by the NYT, it appears that “big pharma” is once again pulling the strings, this time of the Trans Pacific Partnership, which if passed will “empower big pharmaceutical firms to command higher reimbursement rates in the United States and abroad, at the expense of consumers” according to “public health professionals, generic-drug makers and activists opposed to the trade deal.”

In other words, just like the narrowly-passed Obamacare was a gift for big Pharma, so America’s legal drug dealers are now trying to go for another price boosting catalyst, one which however will involve not just the US but some 12 countries in the Asia-Pacific region. Worst of all, the negotiations for the next price increase is taking place in utmost secrecy where “American negotiators are still pressing participating governments to open the process that sets reimbursement rates for drugs and medical devices.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

 

Magic Growth Numbers — Paul Craig Roberts – PaulCraigRoberts.org

Magic Growth Numbers — Paul Craig Roberts – PaulCraigRoberts.org.

Everyone wants good news, so the government makes it up. The latest fiction is that US real GDP grew 4.6% in the second quarter and 5% in the third.

Where did this growth come from?

Not from rising real consumer incomes.

Not from rising consumer credit.

Not from rising real retail sales.

Not from the housing sector.

Not from a trade surplus.

The growth came from a Bureau of Economic Analysis survey of consumer spending on services. The BEA found that spending on Obamacare drove the US real GDP growth to 5% in the third quarter. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-12-23/here-reason-surge-q3-gdp

In America, unlike in other countries, a huge chunk of medical spending goes to insurance company profits, not to health care. Another big chunk goes to paperwork, which has a variety of purposes such as collecting personal information on patients and combating fraud (probably the paperwork costs more than fraud). Another chunk goes for tests and procedures in order to justify further procedures. For example, if a doctor thinks a patient’s diagnosis requires a MRI, he must often first order an x-ray to establish that a cheaper procedure does not suffice. If a cancerous skin growth needs to come off, first a biopsy must be done to establish that it is a cancer so that a needless removal is not performed. And, of course, medical practicians must order unnecessary tests in order to protect themselves from the liability of relying on their medical judgment.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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