Starting Jan. 1, 2012, Form 1099s will become a means of reporting to the Internal Revenue Service the purchases of all goods and services by small businesses and self-employed people that exceed $600 during a calendar year. Precious metals such as coins and bullion fall into this category and coin dealers have been among those most rankled by the change.This provision, intended to mine what the IRS deems a vast reservoir of uncollected income tax, was included in the health care legislation ostensibly as a way to pay for it. The tax code tweak is expected to raise $17 billion over the next 10 years, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation.
via Gold Coin Dealers Decry New Tax Law – ABC News.
President Obama intends to bypass Congress and appoint Dr. Donald Berwick to head Medicare and Medicaid, the White House announced Tuesday — filling the job while Congress is in recess to get around Republican opposition that threatened to derail Berwick’s confirmation.
Berwick’s supporters say he is the right man in the right place at the right time. But his opponents have lined up against him. They say that while he may be a the highly respected doctor, he is also an outspoken proponent of the British health care system, which they say is all wrong for Americans.
via FOXNews.com – Obama to Fill Medicare and Medicaid Post Without Senate Approval.
Although Obama appears to have ordered a media blackout of the Gulf disaster, a relative few shocking photos have leaked out thanks to enterprising area residents. You won’t be seeing these in your local paper, that’s for sure.
via The Greenroom » Top 20 Photos From the Gulf that Obama Doesn’t Want You to See.
After Obama waited more than 70 (yes, seventy..) days to allow other countries to help clean up the oil in the water, Scientists are now confronting growing evidence that BP‘s ruptured well in the Gulf of Mexico is creating oxygen-depleted “dead zones” where fish and other marine life cannot survive.
In two separate research voyages, independent scientists have detected what were described as “astonishingly high” levels of methane, or natural gas, bubbling from the well site, setting off a chain of reactions that suck the oxygen out of the water. In some cases, methane concentrations are 100,000 times normal levels.
via Biologists find ‘dead zones’ around BP oil spill in Gulf | Environment | The Guardian.
If this keeps up this might really start to affect Obama’s partying, golfing and vacationing.
It is still shocking, however, to discover that the White House has tampered with scientific findings.
The political official in charge of defending the partial-birth abortion act in federal court during the Bush administration, Shannen Coffin, described for National Review his discovery of documents released by the Clinton White House that show the apparent manipulation of a scientific report on partial-birth abortion by Elena Kagan, the nominee for the Supreme Court who is undergoing confirmation hearings this week.
via Townhall – Peer-Reviewed Science is Politically-Revised.
How will our government do when they administer medical care to everyone except themselves and the unions?…
California Medi-Cal officials paid $273,000 to health providers who claimed to have rendered care to 35 dead people, raising questions about the agency’s accounting and potential health provider fraud.
via State paid for medical care to the dead | California Watch.
Michael Cannon, Director of Health Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, says that flawed policies are used to fix other flawed policies. For example, for price controls to work, an individual mandate is required; but for a mandate to work, more taxpayer subsidies are necessary. But what happens when the central planners’ calibrations are off? Younger and poorer adults who stay in the health insurance market will be cross-subsidizing the premiums of older and wealthier Americans not yet eligible for Medicare. From the “have nots” to the “haves”—a new social policy.
via Welcome to the Real World: Grim Prospects for Young Adults under Obamacare | The Foundry: Conservative Policy News..
President Obama‘s nomination of Donald Berwick M.D. to head HHS’s Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services CMS eliminates any lingering doubt he seeks to impose state-run medicine and a European style health care system on America.
via Why Donald Berwick is Dangerous to Your Health.
PRESIDENT BARACK Obama was adamant: His health care overhaul would not put Americans on the road to British-style, government-run medicine. Speaking to the American Medical Association last June, the president dismissed as “scare tactics and fear-mongering’’ all talk of “socialized medicine and government takeovers; long lines and rationed care; decisions made by bureaucrats and not doctors.’’ A few weeks later he reiterated the message: “I don’t believe that government can or should run health care.’
But if Obama is as opposed to a government-ruled health sector as he claims, why has he nominated Dr. Donald Berwick as director of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services — far and away the nation’s largest health-insurance programs, at a cost of nearly $1 trillion — a man who openly adores Britain’s socialized health care?
“I am romantic about the National Health Service,’’ Berwick told a British audience in 2008. “I love it.’’ He not only loves the National Health Service, he extols it as “an example for the whole world — an example . . . that the United States needs now.’’
via Dangerous to our health – The Boston Globe.
For the rule regarding whether people can keep their health plans – known as “grandfathering” in bureacratise – the Department of Health and Human Services ruled that for union-negotiated health plans, companies can change insurance providers but keep their essential plan details intact, or grandfathered. For non-union-negotiated plans, companies can’t change providers – they must stay with their same insurance provider.
Without the ability to choose another company, small businesses would have little leverage to negotiate their rates, probably leading to higher costs, critics say. The alternative is to get a new plan which meets the strict new regulations of the Obama health-care law, which will probably cost more, too.
It also hits at a core pledge President Obama made repeatedly in pushing for the law – that people happy with their current health plans could keep them. In fact, the Obama administration now estimates that as many as 51 percent of businesses (and 66 percent of small businesses) will need new health-care plans by 2013 because of the law.
via Five more ways Obama’s health-care law boosts unions | The Daily Caller – Breaking News, Opinion, Research, and Entertainment.
