Middle Class Get ObamaCare Sticker Shock

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Thousands of Californians are discovering what Obamacare will cost them — and many don’t like what they see. These middle-class consumers are staring at hefty increases on their insurance bills as the overhaul remakes the healthcare market. Their rates are rising in large part to help offset the higher costs of covering sicker, poorer people who have been shut out of the system for years.

Although recent criticism of the healthcare law has focused on website glitches and early enrollment snags, experts say sharp price increases for individual policies have the greatest potential to erode public support for President Obama’s signature legislation.

“This is when the actual sticker shock comes into play for people,” said Gerald Kominski, director of the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. “There are winners and losers under the Affordable Care Act.” Fullerton resident Jennifer Harris thought she had a great deal, paying $98 a month for an individual plan through Health Net Inc. She got a rude surprise this month when the company said it would cancel her policy at the end of this year. Her current plan does not conform with the new federal rules, which require more generous levels of coverage.

Now Harris, a self-employed lawyer, must shop for replacement insurance. The cheapest plan she has found will cost her $238 a month. She and her husband don’t qualify for federal premium subsidies because they earn too much money, about $80,000 a year combined.

“It doesn’t seem right to make the middle class pay so much more in order to give health insurance to everybody else,” said Harris, who is three months pregnant. “This increase is simply not affordable.”

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‘SNL’ Hits Sebelius, HHS for Abysmal Healthcare.gov Launch (+video)

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller On Saturday’s broadcast of NBC’s “Saturday Night Live,” Kate McKinnon played Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius in the show’s cold open and took on this month’s Obamacare rollout, which has been plagued by website troubles since its launch.

“Hi, I’m Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of health under President Obama. Now, a lot of folks have been talking about our new health care enrollment website — how it’s been crashing and freezing and shutting down and stalling and not working and breaking and sucking,” McKinnon’s Sebelius said. “Well, tonight, I have a number of friendly tips to help you deal with those technical problems.

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World’s Anger at Obama Policies Goes Beyond Europe and the NSA

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Photo Credit: CLAUDIA HIMMELREICHWhether miffed over spying revelations or feeling sold out by U.S. moves in the Middle East, some of the United States’ closest allies are so upset that the Obama administration has gone into damage-control mode to ensure the rifts don’t widen and threaten critical partnerships.

The quarrels differ in their causes and degrees of seriousness. As a whole, however, they pose a new foreign policy headache for an administration whose overseas track record is seen in many quarters at home and abroad as reactive and lacking direction.

In Europe and the Middle East, rifts that once would’ve been quietly smoothed over have exploded into headlines and public remonstrations.

The uproar in Europe over revelations from fugitive former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden that the United States spied on as many as 35 government leaders, including Angela Merkel, the chancellor of Germany, has become so great that early Friday 28 European leaders said Merkel and French President Francois Hollande would open negotiations with the United States over a “no-spying agreement.”

In the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, already fed up with U.S. reluctance to get more deeply involved in the Syrian civil war, has become alarmed by Obama’s overtures to the Saudis’ archenemy, Iran, with which the Saudis are locked in a battle for regional supremacy. Reports indicate it is considering breaking over cooperation with the Obama administration on a range of issues, including training for so-called moderate Syrian rebels.

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Right Flanks Join to Push Conservative Goals

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Photo Credit: APThe once private club of House and Senate conservatives is now public — and powerful.

Conservatives have always been vocal about their priorities but have rarely coordinated their efforts across both sides of the Capitol in public. But led by Republican Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Mike Lee of Utah, whose attacks on Obamacare sparked a 16-day government shutdown, a bicameral GOP caucus has emerged as a congressional power bloc increasingly comfortable with trying to seize the driver’s seat of the Republican agenda.

Building on the foundation laid by tea party godfather Jim DeMint, the right flanks of the House and Senate have been getting together for months — or in some cases years — to design an agenda around trimming food stamp benefits, impairing Obamacare, hacking away at spending and other reliable red meat. The informal group is viewed suspiciously by establishment Republicans and those in leadership, but conservatives say there’s nothing to hide.

“If they were secret, we wouldn’t have done it at Tortilla Coast,” said Rep. Matt Salmon (R-Ariz.), referring to a meeting at the Capitol Hill eatery with Cruz and other conservatives two days before a crucial debt ceiling deadline this month. “We were very transparent that we were talking to one another.”

First elected to Congress in the mid-1990s and elected for a second stint in 2012, Salmon remembers the days when the bicameral conservative caucus could have been crammed into a minivan. Now there are sufficient numbers in the House majority to tank House leadership’s best-laid plans if deemed necessary — as they demonstrated repeatedly during the fall fiscal debates when they forced leadership to shelve several plans that were derided for not being conservative enough.

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Cheney: Mideast Allies No Longer Trust The US, Enemies ‘Don’t Fear Us’

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Photo Credit: SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty ImagesDick Cheney said Sunday that Republicans need to look to a new generation of leaders as the party deals with poor approval ratings following the government shutdown.

The former vice president said Republicans have faced challenges before and it’s healthy for the party to work to rebuild.

The GOP “got whipped” in the 2012 presidential campaign, when President Barack Obama won re-election over Mitt Romney, and the party needs to build its base of supporters and find “first-class” candidates and turn to a new generation of leaders, Cheney told ABC’s “This Week.”

“It’s not the first time we have had to go down this road and it’s basically, I think, healthy for the party to be brought up short, say, OK, now it’s time to go to work,” Cheney said.

He predicted that his daughter, Liz Cheney, would win her Senate primary challenge against Republican Sen. Mike Enzi of Wyoming next year. The former vice president said it was “simply not true” that he and Enzi were “fishing buddies,” and asserted that Enzi has received the vast majority of his campaign funds from Washington-based political action committees.

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Killing Obamacare

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Photo Credit: GARY LOCKEThe recent government shutdown illustrated a lot of political truths. For starters, people are unhappy when the government is shut down, and they naturally tend to blame the party of less government. The media instinctively help them conclude that the Republicans are at fault.

But the shutdown also illustrated just how unprepared the Republican party is to deal with the threat of Obamacare. Even though the law is unpopular, Republicans failed to convince the country of how great a threat it poses to the public good. Poll after poll shows that only a minority thinks the law will make them worse off, despite growing evidence that Obamacare’s side effects are serious and far-reaching. “Shutdown theater” did nothing to alter that attitude, which reflects poorly on the Tea Party backbenchers who wanted this fight and the leaders who prosecuted it. And now it appears House Republicans intend to deemphasize Obamacare and focus again on cutting traditional spending.

This is a mistake. The fight against Obamacare cannot be pushed to the sidelines. If the shutdown failed to notch any victory against it, then conservative leaders need to rethink their tactics and try something different. The easiest path to victory against the law, at first glance, is to win total control of the government in the 2016 elections. But a closer look at the law, especially in historical context, indicates grave risks associated with that approach: Obamacare may do much damage by that point, and it may be substantially more difficult to undo four years down the road.

Obamacare is, of course, a liberal law, as all agree. But its place within liberalism is a peculiar one, and worth investigating in some detail. When we think about the modern American left, we often think of the provision of benefits, suggested by Franklin Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms”: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear. It is that third freedom that American liberals have focused on for generations, giving us Social Security, Medicare, aid to education, and so on. Four Freedoms liberalism has been decidedly rights-based.

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Are Smartphones Turning Us Into Bad Samaritans? (+video)

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In late September, on a crowded commuter train in San Francisco, a man shot and killed 20-year-old student Justin Valdez. As security footage shows, before the gunman fired, he waved around his .45 caliber pistol and at one point even pointed it across the aisle. Yet no one on the crowded train noticed because they were so focused on their smartphones and tablets. “These weren’t concealed movements—the gun is very clear,” District Attorney George Gascon later told the Associated Press. “These people are in very close proximity with him, and nobody sees this. They’re just so engrossed, texting and reading and whatnot. They’re completely oblivious of their surroundings.”

Another recent attack, on a blind man walking down the street in broad daylight in Philadelphia, garnered attention because security footage later revealed that many passersby ignored the assault and never called 911. Commenting to a local radio station, Philadelphia’s chief of police Charles Ramsay said that this lack of response was becoming “more and more common” and noted that people are more likely to use their cellphones to record assaults than to call the police.

Indeed, YouTube features hundreds of such videos—outbreaks of violence on sidewalks, in shopping malls and at restaurants. Many of these brawls, such as the one that broke out between two women during a victory parade for the New York Giants in 2012, feature crowds of people gathered around, cameras aloft and filming the spectacle.

Our use of technology has fundamentally changed not just our awareness in public spaces but our sense of duty to others. Engaged with the glowing screens in front of us rather than with the people around us, we often honestly don’t notice what is going on. Adding to the problem is the ease with which we can record and send images, which encourages those of us who are paying attention to document emergencies rather than deal with them. The fascination with capturing images of violence is nothing new, as anyone who has perused Weegee’s photographs of bloody crime scenes from the early 20th century can attest. But the ubiquity of camera-enabled cellphones has shifted the boundaries of acceptable behavior in these situations. We are all Weegee now.

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America’s Oil Surge Leaving Alaska in the Dust; U.S. Producing More Crude Than Imports

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Photo Credit: Fox News America’s oil boom has the Texas tea flowing, whole new towns being built in North Dakota and, for the first time in decades, the U.S. producing more crude than it imports. But Alaska, a state known for its vast oil resources and pro-drilling politics, is being left in the dust of this new oil surge.

The state, with its 800-mile pipeline running from the North Slope to Valdez, has fallen to fourth among oil-producing states, now trailing Texas, North Dakota and California. It’s not sitting well with many there.

“There’s definitely a hit to the state pride,” said Alaska Department of Natural Resources Commissioner Joe Balash. “There’s a certain amount of embarrassment that a place as over-regulated and over-taxed as California is eclipsing Alaska.”

Production in Alaska peaked in 1988 when companies sent 2.1 million barrels of oil per day down the pipeline. Declining ever since, last year production hit a low of 526,000 barrels per day.

Everyone agrees that part of the decline is due to the natural cycle of oil field drilling. Prudhoe Bay, on Alaska’s North Slope, is still the largest oil field ever discovered in the U.S. But nearly 40 years of drilling has diminished the supply of easy-to-get oil.

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Reagan’s Daughter: Why Am I Losing My Health Insurance?

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Photo Credit: New England SecessionFormer President Ronald Reagan’s liberal activist daughter Patti Davis is asking just what many other people across the United States want to know — why she’s losing her insurance.

“Could the president please explain why I and others are losing our health ins. plans? Wasn’t supposed to happen!” Davis posted on Twitter Friday afternoon.

Davis, of course, isn’t the first to want to know what’s happening to her insurance in the wake of Obamacare. Others have been dropped as large employers such as IBM and others opt to have their employees get their coverage through state marketplaces rather than to keep up their coverage.

Davis also has been speaking about her disappointment with Obama in recent weeks, particularly when it comes to the government shutdown.

“We all remember your campaign tag of “no drama Obama,” she wrote in an open letter to the president on her website on Oct. 13. “Interesting that there has been one drama after another in your presidency, this last one really tipping the scales.”

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A Black Box in Your Car? Some See a Source of Tax Revenue

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Photo Credit: Mark Boster/LA Times As America’s road planners struggle to find the cash to mend a crumbling highway system, many are beginning to see a solution in a little black box that fits neatly by the dashboard of your car.

The devices, which track every mile a motorist drives and transmit that information to bureaucrats, are at the center of a controversial attempt in Washington and state planning offices to overhaul the outdated system for funding America’s major roads.

The usually dull arena of highway planning has suddenly spawned intense debate and colorful alliances. Libertarians have joined environmental groups in lobbying to allow government to use the little boxes to keep track of the miles you drive, and possibly where you drive them — then use the information to draw up a tax bill.

The tea party is aghast. The American Civil Liberties Union is deeply concerned, too, raising a variety of privacy issues.

And while Congress can’t agree on whether to proceed, several states are not waiting. They are exploring how, over the next decade, they can move to a system in which drivers pay per mile of road they roll over. Thousands of motorists have already taken the black boxes, some of which have GPS monitoring, for a test drive.

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