Some key elements:

The Great Healthcare Plan calls for codifying the Trump Administration’s Most-Favored-Nation deals to get Americans the same low prices for prescription drugs that people in other countries pay. …

The Great Healthcare Plan makes more verified safe pharmaceutical drugs available for over-the-counter purchase. …

The Great Healthcare Plan stops sending big insurance companies billions in extra taxpayer-funded subsidy payments and instead send that money directly to eligible Americans to allow them to buy the health insurance of their choice.

The Great Healthcare Plan funds a cost-sharing reduction program for healthcare plans which would save taxpayers at least $36 billion and reduce the most common Obamacare plan premiums by over 10% according to the Congressional Budget Office.

The Great Healthcare Plan will end the kickbacks paid by pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) to the large brokerage middlemen that deceptively raise the cost of health insurance.

Would Congress pass this? And would it actually help the situation? I’ve long been pessimistic about solutions to the problem of high health care costs (plus rampant fraud, apparently). But that doesn’t mean a switch from Obamacare couldn’t make things at least somewhat better. I don’t have the economics chops to figure out whether this would help, and at the moment I can’t find an analysis I trust. If you have one, please put a link in the comments.

This Reuters article (a news outlet hardly sympatico with Trump) mentions the following criticism:

Critics say replacing subsidies with direct payments could force lower-income Americans to shift toward less comprehensive plans sold outside of former President Barack Obama’s signature Affordable Care Act. That law sought to put all Americans – both healthy and sick – in one marketplace to keep premiums down.

Yes, that was the stated idea. But premiums haven’t been kept down.

The post Replacing Obamacare: Trump’s health insurance plan appeared first on The New Neo.

For example, here’s Samuels’ description of what David Axelrod – whom the author sees as absolutely central to Obama’s success both in Illinois and on a national level – did to further Obama’s political career:

Permission structures, a term taken from advertising, was Axelrod’s secret sauce, the organizing concept by which he strategized campaigns for his clients. Where most consultants built their campaigns around sets of positive and negative ads that promoted the positive qualities of their clients and highlighted unfavorable aspects of their opponents’ characters and records, Axelrod’s unique area of specialization required a more specific set of tools. To succeed, Axelrod needed to convince white voters to overcome their existing prejudices and vote for candidates whom they might define as “soft on crime” or “lacking competence.” As an excellent 2008 New Republic profile of Axelrod—surprisingly, the only good profile of Axelrod that appears to exist anywhere—put it: “‘David felt there almost had to be a permission structure set up for certain white voters to consider a black candidate,’ explains Ken Snyder, a Democratic consultant and Axelrod protégé.

I find that somewhat peculiar in terms of what I know of Obama’s political course in Chicago. His success actually depended on a number of other things, which I’ve chronicled in many posts. Chief among them were knocking out all his political rivals in the Democratic primary on petition signature challenge technicalities, and Axelrod’s greatest assistance involved releasing embarrassing court records of his opponents’ marital strife. Very old-fashioned stuff, although Axelrod had great allies in the conventional press to rely on to spread the word. Another aspect of Obama’s early career, this time on the national level, was avoiding challenging black incumbents such as Bobby Rush, and running in districts more white.

So no, I don’t think that Axelrod got people who were racists to change their minds and vote for Obama. Axelrod’s tactics helped the very person – Obama – who was uniquely positioned to exploit white voters’ desire to prove their supposedly post-racism beliefs. There was a host of voters who were eager to virtue-signal how incredibly tolerant and open-minded they were, and Barack Obama was the perfect vehicle for demonstrating that they really had overcome anti-black racism. Obama, the “clean and articulate” black person (one of Biden’s more unfortunate phrases but one of his more revealing), was the candidate who appealed to this impulse the most.

And yes, during the Obama and “Biden” administrations, businesses and social media and the MSM parroted whatever the Obama administration promoted. This certainly amplified the message, but I don’t think it convinced people not already disposed in the direction. If that’s what meant by a “permission structure” than I guess the phenomenon did occur, especially with phenomena such as gay marriage. But I think that the most important element was not giving permission but rather making agreement obligatory lest one be called a bigot and ostracized in various ways. So it wasn’t so much giving permission to agree; it was withdrawing permission to disagree.

But I don’t recall the public being in favor of Obamacare prior to its passage (see the early years in this chart). As for the Iran deal, also discussed at length in Samuels’ article, I don’t think the public ever bought into it. Only the party most faithful accepted any rationale for the Iran deal – and of course the ever-compliant MSM. So Obama didn’t enter into those things by convincing the public, whatever the media said and however the media helped. He accomplished them through Congressional machinations with the help of confederates such as Pelosi, and in the case of the Iran deal by ignoring any requirement that Congress approve it.

Biden was simply not as adept at any of this, even if he’d been in full possession of his faculties (which he was not). And although Obama was pulling strings behind the scenes, it was no longer working. Much of the public had found in Trump a spokesperson who was remarkably plainspoken and in the position of being an adult who functioned much as the child in the Emperor’s New Clothes story: Trump said what he actually saw and for much of the public it was what they saw, too, and felt relief at finally hearing someone say it loud and clear and in a non-mealy-mouthed manner. Plus, by 2024, the public had seen the left in all its manipulative power-mad glory, and increasing numbers of the public didn’t like it.

The American people have gotten mugged by reality, and that’s a pretty powerful experience.

The post Obama’s “permission structures” seem to have gone awry appeared first on The New Neo.

(1) The left loves the worst who are full of passionate intensity, as long as that passionate intensity has been aroused by leftist causes.

(2) The left has always had a special jones for young leftists who are violent and deemed attractive, such as Che.

(3) There’s also a contagion effect spread through social media.

(4) The left hates capitalism and especially American capitalism, and doesn’t think health insurance should be a business at all. Therefore, health insurance companies are evil. Brian Thompson was a successful capitalist who was CEO of a health insurance company. Therefore, evil.

(5) The left believes it must use violence because it knows it can’t ordinarily get its way trough the ballot box. Since the left believes that it is virtuous and its causes are just, violence is okay to get its way. They believe fear and intimidation are great tools – and those are the goals of Thompson’s murder.

(6) The left believes that health care is an entitlement, and that no claim should ever be denied. They also believe for the most part that government should be running the provision of health care, although people who believe this ignore the bitter complaints of those in Canada and Great Britain who are regularly denied health care that most people can get here. Perhaps the left believes that stinginess in health care is just fine as long as it’s government being stingy and not private businesses. The left also ignores the huge amount of government control of health care reimbursement that exist today. Obamacare, anyone?

(7) A smaller segment of the right applauds Mangione as well, but for slightly different reasons. I’m not 100% sure of their reasons, but I’ve seen such people on comment boards on the right and I don’t think they’re trolls. Some people on the right also believe health insurance companies and executives make obscene profits at people’s expense. Facts and figures don’t necessarily matter to them any more than they matter to the leftists. It seems visceral to me.

And this is late-night TV’s idea of a funny bit:

Kimmel describes how his producers are in love with the UnitedHealth murderer: “I would visit him in prison! And bake him cookies, maybe. Perhaps more …“

“I’m about to be a jailhouse bride” pic.twitter.com/lCW2jgDHp0

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) December 11, 2024

The post More on the left’s big slobbering love affair with Luigi Mangione appeared first on The New Neo.

The man — who sources said is being eyed for the coldblooded, targeted execution in front of a Manhattan hotel last week — allegedly had a manifesto on him when he was taken into custody by cops in Altoona, Pa.

He also had a gun, silencer, four fake IDs and other items “consistent” with what authorities were looking for in the case, sources said.

If all of that is true – and early reports are sometimes erroneous – he certainly sounds highly suspicious. Four fake IDs is a lot of fake IDs. And as far as I know, most people who carry guns don’t also ordinarily carry silencers for them. If this really is the guy, I’m surprised he hadn’t ditched the gun somewhere along the way, unless he was planning further murders to great internet acclaim from the left.

The manifesto is reported to have been “critical of the health insurance industry.” Another thought occurs to me – perhaps the guy was contemplating suicide, and leaving the manifesto as his message to the world?

And now I see that the suspect has been ID’d as Luigi Mangione: he is 26 years old, from Maryland, and “is an anti-capitalist Ivy League grad who liked online quotes from ‘Unabomber’ Ted Kaczynski — and apparently hated the medical community because of how it treated his sick relative, law-enforcement sources told The Post on Monday.”

That’s a lot to digest. Come to think of it, admiration for the Unabomber would make sense for this killer’s profile, as would a generally leftist orientation:

Mangione was valedictorian of his 2016 high school graduating class at the Gilman School in Baltimore, where he played soccer, according to online sites. High school tuition at the all-boys school is nearly $40,000 a year.

He said at the time of graduation that he planned to seek a degree in artificial intelligence, focused on the areas of computer science and cognitive science at the University of Pennsylvania, according to an interview with the Baltimore Fishbowl.

He says in online posts that he graduated from the prestigious school with a master’s of science in engineering and a bachelor’s degree in the same field.

His LinkedIn suggests he is a data engineer at a car company based in California, although he lists his current home as Honolulu in Hawaii.

He’s also very into gaming. Interesting, in the sense that it occurred to me yesterday, on thinking about some of his online supporters, that they sounded as though they regarded Thompson’s murder as a move in a game, in which the shooter was the animated hero against the forces of evil.

The police were alerted to Mangione’s presence by a MacDonald’s customer recognizing his resemblance to a photo released from a surveillance video.

The post Person of interest detained in killing of United Healthcare executive appeared first on The New Neo.

A star.

That is, until he gave commonsense suggestions regarding COVID masking and lockdowns – suggestions that ran against the official line.:

He is a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, a proposal arguing for an alternative public health approach to dealing with COVID-19, through “focused protection” of the people most at risk. In it, Bhattacharya and the two other researchers called on governments to overturn their coronavirus strategies and to allow young and healthy people to return to normal life while protecting the most vulnerable. This would let the virus spread in low-risk groups, with the aim of achieving “herd immunity”, which would result in enough of the population becoming resistant to the virus to quell the pandemic. The authors conceded that it was hard to protect older people in the community, but suggested individuals could shield themselves and that efforts to keep infections low “merely dragged matters out”.

It seems reasonable now – and it seemed reasonable then. But it was heavily criticized.

Then, in March of 2021, he wrote that the lockdowns were the “biggest public health mistake we’ve ever made.” I wrote this post at the time about what he’d said. An excerpt:

In the US – the country I know best – I believe that initially it really was a public health decision, borne of fear, the unknown, and the desire to be as safe as possible and buy time to prepare. But not long after, the lockdown took on another life and was propelled by much more than the public health considerations, as people in charge saw the crisis as a golden opportunity to accomplish a host of things they might otherwise have difficulty achieving.

First and foremost was to harm Donald Trump’s presidency and chances of re-election. Mission accomplished. Next was the sheer exercise of power over the little people. That can be very intoxicating, particularly for the left, and they learned a lot from it. One of the things they learned is that fear can encourage Americans to part with a very significant amount of liberty. What useful information that is to the left! Not only is power intoxicating and even contagious for those in charge, but fear is apparently contagious to much of the public, and the habit of fear is hard to break.

Another possible motive in this country was to harm the non-elite and reward the elite. …

Voices of warning were drowned out almost from the start. I recall writing a post one year ago, almost to the day, that mentioned that the amount of fear seemed way out of proportion to the actual risk involved with COVID. I wasn’t the only one saying this, but we were in the minority.

Well, Bhattacharya was really in the minority, and as a result his voice was stifled:

According to a December 2022 release of the Twitter Files, Bhattacharya was placed on a Twitter “Trends blacklist” in August 2021 that prevented his tweets from showing up in trending topics searches. It appeared to coincide with his first tweet on the service, which advocated for the Great Barrington Declaration’s herd immunity proposal.

And yesterday, Trump named him as the prospective head of NIH. Seems like a really good pick to me. He’s got the credentials – including a specialization in the economics of health care. In my opinion, he’s earned the post.

The post Jay Bhattacharya: once thwarted, now nominated for NIH director appeared first on The New Neo.

The rules are not the rules. The only rule is does a majority of both Houses want something. All else is distraction. Let’s learn the lesson so we can make effective changes.

I don’t think that’s something most of us didn’t already know. It seems to me that it’s acknowledged that a majority can change the rules if it so desires.

The issues right now – and perhaps always – are whether such changes will be made, when, by whom, in what manner, to what purpose, and what the result will be.

For many years the 60-vote Senate threshold rule remained intact, despite the fact that a majority could have changed it. Some of the reasons for this:

(1) each party recognized, when it was in power, that it might need to respect the 60-vote majority rule because soon it might be out of power (2) both parties wanted some sort of bipartisanship on major transformative legislation, or at least the approval of a strong majority of the public. Of course, if that party already held over 60 Senate seats and therefore was filibuster-proof as long as all its members voted to end cloture, then it was understood that a large majority of the public was already on their side.

What it really boiled down to was that both parties felt vulnerable to voters’ opinions for the next election, and therefore didn’t want to rile too many voters with extremely partisan transformative legislation and risk their seats next time. There are other factors, too – for example, the parties really used to be at least somewhat less polarized in their goals.

However, at present HR1 is the entire ball of wax for the Democrats, who have moved much further to the left than ever before in my lifetime and perhaps in American history. That’s what makes it different and that’s what makes them more even more determined than usual (and they usually are very determined indeed) to pass this legislation, because they believe it will give them permanent power. Permanent power includes the power to do more things that will solidify that power, including making new states out of DC and Puerto Rico. Then they would never have to worry about the likes of Sinema and Manchin. To be blunt, HR1 gives them a much greater opportunity to win elections through fraud, and if so then they also would never have to worry about the pesky voters’ rejection, either.

Whether anything will stop them is anyone’s guess. But they will not stop trying to pass this bill any way they can (and that includes some sort of executive action if the legislative action fails, and lawfare as well).

That’s why the latest approach to passing HR1 surprises me not in the least, and it should surprise no one:

Democrats have figured out a way to sneak their “voting reform” bill into the House and then on to the Senate. It involves hollowing out a bill that has to do with NASA, and replacing the text with the text of their voting bill…

…Politico reports:

“‘The Senate will finally debate voting rights legislation, and then every senator will be faced with a choice of whether or not to pass the legislation to protect our democracy,’ Schumer wrote in a memo, obtained by POLITICO, to Senate Democrats.

That “hollowing out a bill” approach rang a bell, and that bell was Obamacare. I’m not keen on relating all the Byzantine details of the passage of that legislation, but the main relevant points are the following:

(a) The United States Constitution requires all revenue-related bills to originate in the House. To formally comply with this requirement, the Senate repurposed H.R. 3590, a bill regarding housing tax changes for service members. It had been passed by the House as a revenue-related modification to the Internal Revenue Code. The bill became the Senate’s vehicle for its healthcare reform proposal, discarding the bill’s original content.

(b) The House passed it with only a narrow margin (220-215). Only one Republican voted for it, and 35 Democrats voted against it. Therefore, except for that one vote, support was not bipartisan but opposition was.

(c) The Senate passed its own bill with a 60-vote margin. You may remember some of the hurdles that were overcome to get to that magic number of 60:

At the start of the 111th Congress, Democrats had 58 votes. The Minnesota Senate election was ultimately won by Democrat Al Franken, making 59. Arlen Specter switched to the Democratic party in April 2009, giving them 60 seats, enough to end a filibuster.

The vote to end cloture was passed by 60 votes, as was the bill itself. No Republicans voted for it and all Democrats plus two Independents voted for it, thus making it a completely partisan affair. But at least it was a partisan affair passed by a strong majority rather than a very narrow one.

(d) The next step was to unite the House bill with the Senate bill and pass a single bill. This is where the election of Republican Scott Brown of Massachusetts (to replace the deceased Ted Kennedy) came in. That election let the Democrats know how opposed the public was to the passage of this bill – if even liberal Massachusetts seemed to want to stop it – but they didn’t care. It was thought that Brown could stop the Democrats from getting 60 votes to invoke cloture on the new bill that would unify the two previous ones, but the Democrats got around that little problem by having the House merely approve the previous Senate bill as written (with a few budgetary changes), which meant Democrats did not face a new cloture vote at all and the bill could now be passed in the Senate by a simple majority.

From that Wiki page:

Since any bill that emerged from conference that differed from the Senate bill would have to pass the Senate over another Republican filibuster, most House Democrats agreed to pass the Senate bill on condition that it be amended by a subsequent bill. They drafted the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act, which could be passed by the reconciliation process.

Per the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, reconciliation cannot be subject to a filibuster. But reconciliation is limited to budget changes, which is why the procedure was not used to pass ACA in the first place; the bill had inherently non-budgetary regulations. Although the already-passed Senate bill could not have been passed by reconciliation, most of House Democrats’ demands were budgetary…

The House passed the Senate bill with a 219–212 vote on March 21, 2010, with 34 Democrats and all 178 Republicans voting against it. It passed the second bill, by 220–211, the same day (with the Senate passing this bill via reconciliation by 56-43 a few days later).

Note again the bipartisan nature of the opposition rather than of the support.

Coming back to HR1, the approach has some similarities and some differences. The hollowed-out bill is the same approach, but that wouldn’t be of concern if HR1 itself had strong bipartisan support. Not only does it not have that support, but the Democrats now don’t have the kind of majority they did back when Obamacare was passed. There is no way they could reach that 60-vote threshold that was initially reached for the Senate to pass Obamacare. That’s why there’s all this talk about ending the filibuster. It’s because the Democrats have only the slimmest of margins, and even that margin is iffy (Sinema has indicated she would vote for HR1 but not to end the filibuster, and I’m not sure what Manchin’s position is right now on the bill, but in the past he opposed it).

Obamacare was very important to the Democrats, but its importance pales in comparison to the importance of HR1. As I’ve stated many times, HR1 is the entire ballgame to them, their entree into permanent power. That’s not only the reason they are so grimly determined to pass it no matter what, but it’s also the reason it is a profoundly dangerous and pernicious bill. With its Orwellian “For the People” title, it purports to secure voting “rights.” In actuality, it provides the mechanism to subvert them.

The post HR1, Obamacare, the filibuster, and political power appeared first on The New Neo.

Offering few specifics, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear said his administration is committed to ensuring that 100% of the state’s black residents have health insurance.

State statistics released Monday indicate black Kentuckians account for 16.5% of Kentucky’s coronavirus deaths but make up just 8.4% of the state’s population, according to Census data.

“Every single individual in our African-American communities is to have a form of health-care coverage,” Beshear (D) said. “We’re going to put money into it, we’re going to put people into it, we’re going to make sure the community anchors are part of it.”

This guy is not only a governor, he’s also a lawyer and was the Attorney General of Kentucky for a while. So he’s not ignorant of what he’s saying here, and how illegal it is.

More:

Beshear didn’t immediately comment on how he would provide coverage to people who don’t currently qualify for expanded Medicaid and don’t have insurance through their employer.

He also didn’t comment on how the state would defend against a lawsuit should someone allege the action is illegal race-based discrimination.

Does he really intend to try to do this? Or is it just BS to placate the masses? I say it’s the latter, a shameless pandering from someone who’s quite aware of what he’s saying.

The post Governor Beshear of Kentucky makes a healthcare proposal appeared first on The New Neo.

She sighed in frustration and said that Medicare makes the doctors jump through a lot of hoops. And then added (even though she knows nothing of my politics), “If this Medicare-for-All thing passes, all the doctors are going to quit.”

I was surprised not so much by what she said as that she said it to me at all. I sort of chuckled and nodded, and then the visit was over. But where I live I just about never – and I mean never – hear anyone these days make an anti-leftist comment without prior knowledge that they’re talking to someone who already agrees with them. What’s more, this doctor is quite young; I’d say in her 30s. And yet she didn’t hesitate to say it.

I take that as a good sign.

The post My gynecologist on the topic of “Medicare for All” appeared first on The New Neo.

It won’t be happening before the November election, though.

The post SCOTUS will be hearing another Obamacare challenge appeared first on The New Neo.

Elizabeth Warren has come up with a plan to pay for her “Medicare For All” proposal, which has a price tag in the tens of trillions of dollars. Part of the plan is a “wealth tax,” which means taxing unrealized capital gains at ordinary income rates. Combined with other elements of her plan, this implies that unrealized capital gains will be taxed at more than 50%. …

I’ll tell you this, though: lawyers are a core constituency of the Democratic Party, and nearly every lawyer in the U.S. (along with many others, of course) tolerates paying 50% marginal tax rates on his or her income only because a chunk of that income is sheltered in 401(k)s. The 401(k) and the house are where the vast majority of high income earners accumulate wealth. Warren’s proposal essentially destroys the ability to build wealth via retirement savings. This may be OK with those who are already rich, like Elizabeth Warren, but it will be anathema to younger people who are trying to become wealthy.

That applies to a lot of people, but let’s stay with lawyers for now, the group I know best. Assessing a “wealth tax” that invades previously tax-free 401(k)s at a 50%+ rate will destroy Warren’s support in what has been, in recent years, a core Democratic Party constituency. “Wall Street,” i.e. the financial industry, has already warned that if Warren is the Democrats’ nominee, it will not support her. That in itself is seismic; no industry has ever supported a politician to the extent that Wall Street supported Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. But the loss of support from America’s lawyers might be even more deadly to the Democratic Party.

More here:

Economist Jonathan Gruber famously attributed the passage of Obamacare to “the stupidity of the American voter.” The MIT professor’s assessment of the electorate’s collective intelligence is clearly shared by Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren if she expects us to take her “Medicare for All” funding plan seriously. She wants us to believe that she can expand a program already verging on bankruptcy — Medicare for the elderly will go broke in 2026 according to the most recent Trustees report — to cover every American without raising middle-class taxes…

You are by now anxious to know where the extra $20.5 trillion is going to come from. Warren’s answer to that question may cause your BS detector to go off. Her plan repeatedly claims that this stupendous amount of money includes “not one penny in middle-class tax increases.” There will, of course, be taxes on the Left’s designated villains, including “the financial sector, large corporations and the top 1 percent of individuals.” There will be additional taxes paid by “ultra-millionaires and billionaires,” as well as an additional employer tax the plan styles a “new Employer Medicare Contribution.” It goes without saying, of course, that there will be a substantial cut in what she calls the “military slush fund.”

Part of the $20.5 trillion will allegedly come from “savings.” The savings scheme that will get your attention involves the loss of your employer health insurance. It’s going away whether you like it or not. How will that save money? “As the experts I asked to evaluate my plan noted, private insurers had administrative costs of 12% of premiums collected in 2017, while Medicare kept its administrative costs down to 2.3%.” This is fiction. Medicare’s overhead costs aren’t lower. They are just hidden in the budgets of other agencies such as the IRS, the Social Security Administration, and HHS. The Warren plan also double-counts certain savings, as Charles Blahous of the Manhattan Institute writes:

These proposals are always complex, and evaluating them takes a level of tax and financial knowledge most people lack (I certainly lack it). Warren relies on this, and on the fact that she can easily locate some experts to parrot the pro-Warren line. But some things are clear and reflect what used to be known as “common sense” because it used to be quite common: health care is expensive, there is no free lunch, and there is a finite amount of money you can squeeze from the very wealthy.

[ADDENDUM: I have previously discussed the problem of valuing unrealized gains here.]

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