Rembering Newtown with Some Words from the NRA, How to Make Obamacare Work and Carbon Monoxide

How to Save Obamacare

The first step is to make it clear what "Obamacare" is all about.  Many misconceptions about the Affordable Care Act still exist, so right now, let's talk about them.

First of all, the government is not going into the health care business.  Health insurance under the plan is provided by the same private insurance companies which have been selling it for years  (Aetna, Prudential, Cigna, Metropolitan, Blue Cross, Blue Shield, etc. etc.)  The aim of the Act is to make sure patients are protected from policies which are grossly inadequate and that a variety of affordable health care policy choices are available to all.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the President thereby making it the law of the land) establishes certain criteria which health insurance policies have to meet such as not turning people down who have pre-existing conditions and not having a lifetime cap on how much can be paid out.  These are good things!  As has always been the case with health insurance policies, their premiums vary based on the amount of up-front deductibles and the size of co-payments for services. There are lower cost policies and more expensive ones, but all of them are high quality vehicles for paying medical bills.  The Act takes a lot of junky, worthless policies off of the market.

 

The Act also tries to attempt to get as many Americans as possible covered. Although seniors are already covered by Medicare, and many workers already have group health insurance plans through their employer, and many low income people are covered by state Medicaid plans, there still are many millions of people in this country who have no health insurance whatsoever.  This puts them in danger of bankruptcy and losing all they own if serious illness strikes, and puts the burden of paying for their health care on everyone else’s insurance premiums.  This is not a good thing!

Health insurance companies base their plans and their premiums on getting large numbers of individuals of all ages and health conditions to purchase their policies. The Act attempts to make this happen by encouraging the uninsured to purchase policies and imposing tax penalties on those who do not choose to do so.  The Supreme Court has said this is okay.  The Act also has provisions to subsidize those who cannot afford to purchase policies, and finally, in an effort to keep the costs down for the insurance companies, it also requires that hospitals and other providers attempt to control the costs of providing health care.   

What is so terrible about all of this?  Why are the Republican Party and Fox News so against it?  Can their "sore loser" opposition to President Obama be so vicious that they put it ahead of the general good of the American people?

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Now, let's get down to the vexing problem of getting people to apply for health insurance policies.  I've mentioned this before on this blog, but it still bears repeating.   The enrollment difficulties which the Affordable Care Act is experiencing stem from its dependence on the ultimate recipients of health care, the prospective health insurance policy holders, doing the following:
(1) going on line,  
(2) providing identification and financial information, 
(3) looking over the available plans from different companies, 
(4) seeing if they qualify for government help in paying for the plans 
(5) and then, applying for and paying for the plan they have chosen. 
I repeat, all of this is supposedly to be done on line.  Hah!

 

Are you, as you read this, sufficiently skilled in working with your computer, to do all of this?  Fortunately, I am on Medicare and do not have to go through this, but if I were not, I am not confident that I would be able to take advantage of the ACA by sitting down in front of my computer and going to the ACA web site.  That is the reason that the Affordable Care Act is experiencing difficulties, and will continue to do so, even when www.healthcare.gov and the associated insurance company web sites are 100% effective.  The government has been sold a bill of goods by the technology community which grossly overestimates the computer literacy of the American people.

Individuals must sit down with a representative of an insurance company (not the very best choice because that limits plan choices to those of that company) or better still, a broker who handles many companies, and discuss all of these things and apply through that licensed individual.


Independent agents or insurance companies can help enrollment for the ACA

That agent will be able to deal with the web site and the individual insurers far better than an individual on their own.

Recently, when I switched my Medicare Supplement Insurance (all such plans are identical but their cost varies by company) and my Part D Prescription coverage, I found a comprehensive and informative web site which led me to an individual to whom I spoke on the phone and through whom I made my purchase.  That’s how I did it with my automobile insurance as well.

That is the way the Affordable Care Act must work.  So long as the Act provides coverage through private insurance companies, supposedly neutral “navigators” or government employees will not be able to provide the service that licensed representatives of those companies can.  Of course, such representatives will make a commission on the purchase, but even if coverage is purchased entirely  “on line” through the exchanges the Act provides for, commissions will be paid somewhere along the way.  Of course, since only sixteen states have set up such exchanges, on line purchases will be more difficult, depending on Federally established exchanges in the other states instead.

 

Further complicating the purchase of health insurance through the Affordable Care Act is the fact that insurance companies are regulated by states and not the Federal government.  Hence, coverage available in one state may not be available in other states.  Also, in some states where the legislature, governor or insurance commissioner are politically opposed to the Act, there may be additional obstacles to securing coverage.  This is all the more reason to deal with a local representative.

 

To make the Affordable Care Act work, the President must tell all of the citizens whom he expects to benefit from the Act to pick up the phone and call whomever they purchased their automobile insurance, homeowners or renters insurance from.  That person should be able to guide them through the process better than any web site.  Of course, if they actually made those purchases entirely on line, they might be able to handle www.healthcare.gov, but I doubt that many such purchases were made that way.   How did you purchase your existing insurance?  Be honest!

Unless this course of action is followed by the Administration, the goals of the Affordable Care Act, particularly in signing up those otherwise uninsured healthy younger people who give health insurance a low priority in their spending choices, will not be met.  This might result, ultimately, in the abandonment of the Affordable Care Act and its replacement by a single payer plan, similar to Medicare, where (aside from Supplementary plans) the United States Government becomes the insurance company.  Neither Republicans nor Democrats want this to happen, so it behooves all to support the approach outlined above.  

Jack Lippman

                                                           

Gun Control  ...  Why Nothing Gets Done

  Children leaving Sandy Hook School a year ago
 

Memorializing the massacre at the Sandy Hill School in Newtown one year ago, I include an article from the April 2013 issue of American Rifleman magazine, the official organ of the National Rifle Association, written just four months after the tragedy and reproduced in its entirity.  Rather than enumerate all of the reasons why this country needs more restrictions on weapons, particularly the kind that were used in mass shootings such as that at Sandy Hill, I ask you to digest the following article to see for yourself the ideas that permeate this underbelly of American culture.  You will then better understand what gun control advocates are up against.    Then make up your own mind.  

The web site of American Rifleman is www.americanrifleman.org.  A visit to it can prove very enlightening.  In dealing with those with whom you might disagree, it helps to understand where they are coming from.  That is why I urge you to go to the web site and to read the following article.  Let no one accuse this blog of not included material with which I disagree.

                          

 

This was the April, 2013 cover of American Rifleman, the official organ of the NRA.  The lead article, entitled “Fighting Against Obama King Pinocchio – Why America’s Gun Owners Must Stand And Fight With Their Words” was written by Wayne LaPierre, NRA Executive Vice President.  The text of the article comes from the American Rifleman magazine and can be found at http://www.nrapublications.org/index.php/15316/why-americas-gun-owners-must-stand-and-fight.  Read it and make up your own mind.
JL

Wayne LaPierre

Why America’s Gun Owners Must Stand And Fight

You and your freedom are in danger of being buried by a blizzard of lies.  President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, the gun-ban lobby and anti-gun politicians across America are using distortions, deception and flat-out lies to try to deceive the American public, frighten families, poison public opinion, silence gun owners and hammer the Obama-Biden Gun-Ban Plan into law.  And the gun-hating national media is helping them every step of the way.  That is why I need you to take action right now.  Stand And Fight Now to Stop the Obama-Biden Gun-Ban Plan.

 
Three people Mr. LaPierre mentions as advocates of gun control are President Obama, Vice President Biden and Senator Schumer (NY), all of whom he attacks in this article.

In my 35 years with the NRA, never have I seen such a calculated, coordinated, collective assault on your firearms, your freedom and your Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. And there is simply no substitute for your immediate action now. Here’s why:

In his 2013 State of the Union address, Obama displayed a level of public deception that cannot be ignored.

For proof, just look at all the false statements in that speech. To push the Obama-Biden Gun-Ban Plan, the president talked about “weapons of war”—yet the guns he wants to ban are not “weapons of war.”

He talked about “massive ammunition magazines”—yet the magazines he wants to ban are not“massive.” Since when is an 11-round magazine “massive”?

Obama used outrage and compassion for the victims of Newtown, Conn., to push laws that he promises will make schools and children safer—yet not one of his legislative proposals would make any child in any school safer.  You and I know that.

But among Obama’s target audience—the millions of Americans who don’t own firearms and don’t understand them—the president’s false statements, and the media’s relentless repetition of them, could give the Obama-Biden Gun-Ban Plan the momentum of a wrecking ball.

So let’s look at some of Obama’s falsehoods in detail and remind him that, as one of his political heroes, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, warned, “Repetition does not transform a lie into the truth.”

The “Weapons of War” Lie
On Feb. 4, 2013, speaking to law enforcement officials in Minneapolis, Obama said, “We should restore the ban on military style assault weapons and a 10-round limit for magazines … because weapons of war have no place on our streets …”

Semi-automatic technology has been around for more than 125 years. The firearms Obama seeks to ban—countless conventional semi-automatic firearms that are currently owned by millions of Americans—are not “weapons of war.” They are not standard-issue guns in the military.They’re not “machine guns.” They can’t “spray bullets.” They’re no “more powerful” or “more lethal” than other guns. In fact, most of the guns Obama would outlaw with his gun ban are less powerful than most deer rifles.

Despite their appearances, they don’t function any differently from other guns.  They fire once—and only once—each time the trigger is pressed, no matter how long it is held down.

And the dirty secret is that they’re not the “weapons of choice” of criminals. According to the most recent FBI statistics, less than 2.6 percent of all murders are committed with rifles of any kind—so murders committed with so-called “assault rifles” are likely less than 1 percent. For the sake of comparison, according to the FBI, in 2011 more than twice as many Americans were murdered with “fists and feet” as with rifles of any kind. And nearly five times as many were murdered with knives.

Vice President Biden even admitted, “Nothing we’re going to do is going to fundamentally alter or eliminate the possibility of another mass shooting or guarantee that we will bring gun deaths down to a thousand a year from what it is now.”  In other words, they consider the whole thing a charade! 

So why are they pushing a gun ban that they don’t think will work? Simple: Because some people think these firearms look scary, Obama and his allies think their ban is achievable and—when it inevitably fails—the first step toward banning more and more guns.  That’s the rationale behind their demands for so-called “universal background checks.”

You and I know that background checks will never be “universal” when criminals ignore them and the mentally ill are not reported to the background-check database. Only law-abiding people will suffer when they have to wait in lines to fill out forms to pay fees to fund a massive federal bureaucracy that will have no other purpose or function than to impose universal registration of gun owners like you and every gun you own.

In fact, on the same night that Obama delivered his State of the Union address, Sen. Charles Schumer—who hosted Obama’s inauguration—admitted to MSNBC that the goal is “universal registration” of guns and gun owners.

As we saw this winter in Schumer’s own New York, registries of gun owners are ripe for abuse by antagonistic governments, not to mention hackers and thieves. And as we’ve seen from New York to California, from England to Ireland and from Jamaica to Australia, gun registration means gun confiscation.

A Strategy of Deception to Turn a Lie Into a Law
What that means is that their strategy amounts to a weapon of mass deception. It’s a lie that uses emotion to trump reason, feelings to overrule facts, and fear to frighten the public into supporting the Obama-Biden Gun-Ban Plan. And the gun-ban lobby admits it!

As the head of the gun-ban lobby’s Violence Policy Center, Josh Sugarmann admitted in 1988: “Assault weapons’ menacing looks, coupled with the public’s confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons—anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun—can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons.”

That’s why too many in the national media try to deceive viewers—even after we’ve corrected them countless times—by showing machine guns in news segments discussing semi-automatics.

It’s why anti-gun mayors and their politically appointed police chiefs blur the distinction between legal semi-automatics and machine guns, which have been virtually banned since 1934. It’s just one of the many lies behind the Obama-Biden Gun-Ban Plan.

Here’s another: On Jan. 16, Barack Obama said, “As many as 40 percent of all gun purchases are conducted without a background check,” and “nearly 40 percent of all gun sales are made by private sellers who are exempt from this requirement.”  If the president’s calculated qualifiers—“as many as” and “nearly”—raised red flags for you when you heard them, you’re not alone.  The Washington Post gave Obama’s claim the sniff test, and as much as said it stunk to high heaven. 

Why? Because the gun “sales” weren’t necessarily sales, and the “purchases” weren’t necessarily purchases. They were merely “acquisitions” and “transactions”—including gifts and barter—from a tiny survey that was almost 20 years old.  After hearing from both sides of the question, The Washington Post wrote, “We can understand why the president might want to use a word like ‘purchases’ rather than ‘transactions’ … But that is no excuse for the president’s language …”  And in the end, the same newspaper that fawns over Obama and seems to support every anti-gun scheme ever proposed, awarded the president with two “Pinocchios”—its distinction for politicians who don’t tell the truth.

“Expanding Gun Rights”—by Excising the Second Amendment?
On March 13, 2011, the Arizona Star published an opinion piece in which Obama proclaimed, “My administration has not curtailed the rights of gun owners, it has expanded them …”

“Expanded gun rights”? How?

By appointing two anti-gun justices to the U.S. Supreme Court, one of them, Sonia Sotomayor, who claimed she considered it “settled law” that the Second Amendment guaranteed an individual right—but then turned around and voted to deny that right?

By sidestepping Congress to impose an illegal order requiring registration of semi-automatic rifle sales in four Southwestern states?

By trying to gut the armed pilots program that protects airline travelers from terrorist hijackers?

By allowing his Department of Justice to smuggle guns from the U.S. to Mexican drug cartels who used them to murder a U.S. Border Patrol officer—and then using his “executive privilege” to stonewall investigators?

How, exactly, do any of these actions by Obama expand the rights of gun owners?

And how does trying to outlaw 125-year-old firearm technology—and standard-capacity ammunition magazines—“not curtail the rights of gun owners”?  In that same Arizona Star article, Obama wrote, “First, we should begin by enforcing laws that are already on the books …”

Yet Obama would rather pass new laws that only punish lawful gun owners like you, than enforce existing laws against armed, violent criminals the police have already caught.  In fact, Syracuse University, which tracks enforcement of federal gun laws, reported that under Obama, “weapons prosecutions declined to [the] lowest level in a decade.”  Out of more than 76,000 firearm purchases denied by the federal instant check system and sent on for further investigation in 2010, only 62 were referred for prosecution, and only 13 resulted in convictions. That’s less than two one-hundredths of one percent!  Think about what all this means.

Help Us Defend Your Firearms and Freedoms with the Truth
What kind of politician claims, as Obama did on Sept. 9, 2008, “I will not take your shotgun away. I will not take your rifle away. I won’t take your handgun away… I am not going to take your guns away”—but then pushes legislation to ban millions of guns?

What kind of commander-in-chief doesn’t understand the difference between the machine guns his armed forces use, and the semi-automatic firearms millions of Americans use?

Why can the elites not understand that honest, law-abiding, peaceable people want semi-automatic firearms and standard-capacity magazines for the exact same reasons that the rich, the powerful, the politically connected and the police want them? To protect themselves!

If you limit the access of law-abiding people to these technologies—especially when criminals will not be limited in any way—you limit the ability of good people to survive.

It’s as if the president and the gun-ban crowd can say whatever they want—even if it’s not true.

In 2000, after President Bill Clinton said that the reason other countries have “a lower gun death rate” is “because they don’t have an NRA in their country,” NRA President Charlton Heston called Clinton to account.

Appearing in TV spots from coast to coast, the Oscar-winning actor corrected Clinton’s false statements and said, “Mr. Clinton, when what you say is wrong, that’s a mistake. When you know it’s wrong, that’s a lie.”

Today, you and I face an even more aggressive, coordinated cultural war against our firearms and our freedoms—a war waged with distortions and deception that only the truth can combat.

We can’t match the power over public opinion wielded by MSNBC, CNN, CBS, NBC, ABC, The New York Times, The Washington Post and the rest of the anti-gun media who endlessly repeat the lies behind the Obama-Biden Gun-Ban Plan.  But with your immediate help, we can and must Stand and Fight now.

Make no mistake: This will be the fight of our lives for firearm freedom. But it’s winnable.

If you’re not an NRA member, please join us. If you are a member, please renew or upgrade your membership, or make a contribution. Whenever you hear someone repeat the distortions and lies behind this plan, do whatever you can to correct them with the truth. Remember: The Constitution is on our side. The Bill of Rights is on our side. We stand shoulder to shoulder with the Founding Fathers and the Framers of the Constitution.
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Now that you've read this, read a little more by checking out that fun magazine, the American Rifleman at www.americanrifleman.org


                                                       

 
Carbon Monoxide Detector Alert

If your garage is part of the structure of your dwelling, you should have a carbon monoxide detector in your home.  With the advent of cars which do not require an ignition key, but just have a "start/shut off" button, it is easier to leave an engine running, with possible FATAL results.  If you do not have a carbon monoxide detector in your home, purchase one today!  They are inexpensive and simple to install.   This one can be purchased for under $20 on line or from any hardware store.  I got mine at Home Depot.

If you already have a carbon monoxide detector, do you know what it sounds like when it goes off or might you mistake it for something else such as a smoke detector's battery warning beep?   Can you hear it throughout your house, particularly in the bedrooms?  If you cannot, consider purchasing additional ones.  

 JL


                                                                                

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Jack Lippman