Senator Leahy (D-Vt.) has introduced a new version of the USA FREEDOM Act that would limit the NSA’s power to spy on innocent Americans. This bill is a good step in the right direction to restore our 4th amendment rights and it’s an improved version from the weakened bill passed by the House.
You may remember the House debate over the USA FREEDOM Act a few weeks ago. A number of pro civil liberties groups, including FreedomWorks, endorsed the original version of the USA FREEDOM Act. We felt that it was the best bill introduced to increase government transparency and limit the bulk collection of records on Americans. Read more here...
2. Ten Reasons the IRS Shouldn't Be in Charge of ObamaCare
The IRS has been in the news a lot lately, but with all the hubbub of corruption and scandal, it’s easy to forget that they are also the agency in charge of enforcing and implementing the Affordable Care Act, colloquially known as ObamaCare. Here are the top ten reasons why the IRS should keep its hands off your healthcare choices.
1. The IRS is prone to political corruption Ever since the news broke that the IRS has been selectively targeting conservative organizations, the fiction of the organization’s non-partisanship has been exposed to the harsh light of day. We now know that the IRS can be, and is being, used as a political tool to advance a particular agenda and penalize those who dare dissent. It is troubling enough that this happened in the midst of a major presidential election, but in the case of health care, when lives are literally at stake, the potential for abuse is so great as to be positively chilling. ** 2. The IRS either can’t or won’t keep track of its own records** During the investigation of Lois Lerner, the IRS claimed to have lost emails belonging first to her, then to six of her colleagues and now to an unspecified number of people “less than 20.” This is in violation of laws that require the IRS to keep records of all official emails. Either the agency is incapable of maintaining records, or they have deliberately destroyed them in violation of the law. Either way, these are not the people you want handling your health care data. Read more here...
3. Real Talk with Julie Borowski: Get the Government Out of Your Emails
The government can legally access and read your emails that are older than 180 days. No joke. Online privacy laws were written in ...1986. Uhh, anyone think it's time for an update? Watch here...
4. ObamaCare is Bailing Out Insurance Companies - On Your Dime
A basic concept of health insurance is that payments to patients come from a common pool of money – meaning that every customer pays in. When too many people in the pool need payouts, everyone’s premium goes up to compensate. While crafting their health care takeover, the ObamaCare team realized that if insurers were to go along with being forced to cover millions of new, less-healthy patients, their response would be to increase premiums across the board to compensate. Thus, they built several components into the law which are intended to keep insurers from taking “undue losses”: reinsurance, risk adjustment, and risk corridors.
In particular, the “risk corridors” program in ObamaCare (section 1342 of the law) protects insurers from severe losses by taking money from providers who pay out less than a set target amount and distributing that money to providers whose plans pay out more than that target amount. That way, if the people who are more expensive to cover disproportionately choose certain insurers, those companies are not placed at a disadvantage. Read more here...
5. What Would You Do With a Billion Dollars
One of the most egregious features of ObamaCare are its so-called risk corridors, a fancy name for a large scale bailout of big insurance companies expected to cost taxpayers at least $1 billion.
When dealing with government spending figures, it’s sometimes easy to lose perspective. For example, here is what a billion dollars actually looks like:
See more here...
6. The Dangers of Deficits to Our Economy
Recently the White House Office of Management and Budget released its Midsession Review, an update and review of the budget that President Obama submitted to Congress. The document extols the virtues of the administration's economic policies, noting that a combination of economic growth, discretionary budget cuts and the reversal of the Bush tax cuts has halved the federal deficit. Moving forward, the administration hopes to further the economic recovery through additional budgetary savings from health-care reforms, closing tax loopholes for the wealthy and sensible immigration reform. What the Mid-Session Review does not discuss, however, is the mounting federal debt - and the dangers it poses to the economy.
The Congressional Budget Office's 2014 Long-Term Budget Outlook provides a more accurate picture of the challenges facing the economy. While the deficit may have fallen in recent years, CBO identifies a triple threat to long-term economic growth: an aging population, increased per capita federal spending on health care, and expanding federal health-care programs. Together, these trends ensure the return of higher deficits and increasing federal debt. According to the CBO, by the year 2039, federal debt will be greater than the nation's output, reaching 106 percent of GDP. This level of debt has not been seen since World War II. Prior to the 2008 economic crisis, federal debt was 39 percent of GDP, but the structural imbalance between revenues collected and federal spending is steadily pushing the federal debt to unsustainable levels. Read more here...
In Liberty,
Jackie Bodnar
Director of Communications, FreedomWorks
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