Franciscan University appears to be the first casualty of the new Obama HHS mandate that requires Catholic colleges, groups and businesses to pay for drugs that may cause abortions and birth control for their employees.
Although President Barack Obama declared “If you like your health care coverage you can keep it,” when it came to passing Obamacare, a Catholic college in Ohio has determined it will no longer offer a student health insurance plan.
“The Obama Administration has mandated that all health insurance plans must cover “women’s health services” including contraception, sterilization, and abortion-causing medications as part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA),” the university says in a new post on its website. “Up to this time, Franciscan University has specifically excluded these services and products from its student health insurance policy, and we will not participate in a plan that requires us to violate the consistent teachings of the Catholic Church on the sacredness of human life.”
“Additionally, the PPACA increased the mandated maximum coverage amount for student policies to $100,000 for the 2012-13 school year, which would effectively double your premium cost for the policy in fall 2012, with the expectation of further increases in the future,” FUS continues.
“Due to these changes in regulation by the federal government, beginning with the 2012-13 school year, the University 1) will no longer require that all full-time undergraduate students carry health insurance, 2) will no longer offer a student health insurance plan, and 3) will no longer bill those not covered under a parent/guardian plan or personal plan for student health insurance,” the college said.
Franciscan University says the current student health insurance plan will expire on August 15.
More HERE
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Will Homosexual Marriage Force Black Churches to Reconsider Democratic Party?
President Obama's affirmation of gay marriage threatens to undermine the near-monolithic black support Obama enjoyed in 2008. Several members of the black clergy now say they intend to sit out the presidential election. One poll from last November found black opposition to gay marriage at 58 percent, higher than the rest of the country, which is about evenly split.
The real question is this: What took black church leaders so long to reconsider their near blind support for the Democratic Party?
The historical strength of black churches has been that of a moral and spiritual refuge in a once-hostile country of legalized slavery and Jim Crow. This explains why so many civil rights leaders came out of the church. The moral cause was just and clear: Equal rights mean equal rights -- for everyone.
But equal rights and equal results are two very different things. The modern civil rights movement lost its way by failing to appreciate the difference. To achieve "equal results," the Democratic Party, among other things, demands redistribution of wealth, a government response to the "gap" between the rich and poor, higher minimum wages and higher taxes on the so-called rich.
The Democratic Party opposes education vouchers, despite polls showing that black and Hispanic inner-city parents want them. The Democratic Party is the party of race-based preferences and also opposes privatization of Social Security.
The Democratic Party is the party of the welfare state -- a neutron bomb dropped on the intact nuclear family. Author/editor/professor Marvin Olasky, in his book "The Tragedy of American Compassion," traces the growth of welfare. During a mere three-year period in the 1960s, welfare rolls increased nearly 110 percent. President Johnson established "neighborhood centers" whose workers went door-to-door, apprising people of their welfare "rights and benefits."
Until the so-called "War on Poverty," the poverty rate declined steadily. At the turn of the century, nearly 70 percent of Americans were poor. But by the time of the "War on Poverty," the rate stood at approximately 13 or 14 percent. What happened? Welfare created dependency and decreased the incentive of the welfare recipient.
The Heritage Foundation compared families on welfare versus families eligible for welfare but that, for one reason or another, refused to take it. The results were startling. Heritage reported: "Young women raised in families dependent on welfare are two to three times more likely to drop out and fail to graduate from high school than are young women of similar race and socioeconomic background not raised on welfare. Similarly, single mothers raised as children in families receiving welfare remain on AFDC longer as adult parents than do single mothers not raised in welfare families, even when all other social and economic variables are held constant."
The Democratic Party is the party of Roe v. Wade, even though blacks are more pro-life than whites. Former President Jimmy Carter, a religious man who called himself "twice born," thought the Democratic Party made a tactical and moral error by embracing abortion-on-demand as a federal right guaranteed by the Constitution: "I never have believed that Jesus Christ would approve of abortions, and that was one of the problems I had when I was president, having to uphold Roe v. Wade. ... But except for the times when a mother's life is in danger or when a pregnancy is caused by rape or incest, I would certainly not and never have approved any abortions. ... My position on abortion ... is to minimize the need or requirement for abortion and limit it only to women whose (lives) are in danger or who are pregnant as a result of rape or incest. I think if the Democratic Party would adopt that policy, that would be acceptable to a lot of people who are now estranged from our party because of the abortion issue."
The Democratic Party is the party of tax-the-rich. Never mind that Democratic Party icon President John Kennedy sounded downright trickle-downish when he said: "It is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low -- and the soundest way to raise revenues in the long run is to cut rates now. The experience of a number of European countries has borne this out. This country's own experience with tax reductions in 1954 has borne this out, and the reason is that only full employment can balance the budget -- and tax reduction can pave the way to full employment. The purpose of cutting taxes now is not to incur a budgetary deficit, but to achieve the more prosperous expanding economy which will bring a budgetary surplus."
The Democratic Party is the party of minimum wage. Nobel Laureate economist Milton Friedman said, "We regard the minimum wage as one of the most, if not the most, anti-black laws on the statute books."
For all these reasons, having nothing to do with gay marriage, black churches should have broken with the Democratic Party long ago. Better late than never
SOURCE
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The War Against Doctors
Imagine completing college, then 4 years of graduate school and finally working as a trainee for three to ten years while earning 3-4 times the Federal Poverty level. Then you are permitted to work on your own and go into business, but are unable to set the rates that you will charge your customers. You are required by the federal and state government to pay for the privilege of working, and have to comply with intrusive regulations making it more costly to conduct business with no ability to pass these costs along to your customers. You have almost a 100% chance of being sued during your career and in many cases cannot get insurance to protect you. Your job requires 60-80 hours per week and weekends and nights no longer belong to you. Your business is being threatened by individuals who have not gone down your path and want to get into your business “through the back door”, because they believe that they can do an equivalent job without all of the sacrifice that you have made. And they are getting this opportunity.
This is the reality for US physicians.
SD is a plastic surgeon who needed to leave her state and move across the country because it became impossible to meet overhead and to earn a salary. MB is a urologist in the southeast who could not afford her overhead because insurance companies slashed her reimbursements, so she had to move into an 1100 square foot office. RA is a surgeon in the north who faces the possibility of losing his entire referral base which the local hospital now controls, unless he cooperates with them. JS, an ophthalmologist and her husband, a surgeon, could not make ends meet in California because insurance reimbursement is so low and had to leave to provide for their family of 4.
At a time when it is trendy to invoke the term “war” against various groups, such as the contrived, GOP “war against women” or “war against seniors”, it may appear trite to say that there is a war against doctors; but there is. This has been going on for decades and cannot be blamed on President Obama or the Affordable Care Act (ACA), but sadly, both have facilitated an escalation of this war.
One might ask- is there a war against doctors? The simple answer is yes and it is all about money and control. There is no healthcare without doctors, who happen to be at the center of the myriad of healthcare events under their daily control. Healthcare is a $2.3 Trillion annual economy accounting for approximately 16% of our gross domestic product. There is tremendous incentive to control doctors and hence, the flow of huge dollars. Entities have unsuccessfully tried to do so in the past. Insurance companies in the 1980s tried doing so using capitated HMOs. Publicly traded Wall St. firms in the 1990s made a futile attempt to buy medical practices to squeeze out profits by controlling physician behavior.
The lessons of the past were not lost on the architects of the ACA, but it required a group assault on physicians, coming at them from different directions. The cabal of the hospital and the insurance industries, along with the federal government posed an almost insurmountable challenge. In exchange for the support of the American Hospital Association, the federal government gave hospitals a tremendous advantage, by outlawing physicians from opening their own hospitals, which would naturally compete against existing hospitals. Furthermore, the ACA promotes Accountable Care Organizations as a preferred reimbursement model for healthcare. This arrangement is like capitated HMOs, but on steroids. The third party payer issues a single payment for a hospitalization and leaves it to the ACO to divide the payment fairly (not likely). In anticipation of this change in reimbursement, hospitals are purchasing physician practices in an attempt to control healthcare market share. The likely outcome will be fewer doctors who are self-employed, as reported in the Wall St. Journal, and ultimately, the demise of the private practice of medicine.
The war against physicians is being waged on many fronts. Trial attorneys are fighting to preserve the status quo of the medical malpractice system, where they are the primary beneficiaries. It is coming from non-physician healthcare providers such as nurse practitioners or optometrists. They hire aggressive political lobbyists and spread around hundreds of millions of dollars to influence politicians who then create laws that confer physician status upon these allied healthcare professionals.
Public awareness of this war on their doctors is essential in order to understand the antipathy of doctors for Obamacare, and the concern that they have regarding the future of medicine in the US. It warrants a strong public outcry because when the doctors no longer work for their patients, but instead for some other entity, then heaven help our patients.
SOURCE
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New York Times Jumps the Shark With Anti-Capitalist Propaganda
We’ve come to a fork in the road: either we return to capitalism (i.e., voluntary exchanges based on mutual best interest) or we plunge the rest of the way into socialism (an economy based entirely on bureaucratic coercion, i.e., slavery). History has shown repeatedly that the former leads to wealth and dignity, the latter to poverty and tyranny. Here’s where the New York Times — official mouthpiece of the liberal ruling class — comes down on the issue:
A recent study found that 10 percent of people who work on Wall Street are “clinical psychopaths,” exhibiting a lack of interest in and empathy for others and an “unparalleled capacity for lying, fabrication, and manipulation.” (The proportion at large is 1 percent.) Another study concluded that the rich are more likely to lie, cheat and break the law.
The only thing that puzzles me about these claims is that anyone would find them surprising. Wall Street is capitalism in its purest form, and capitalism is predicated on bad behavior. …
I always found the notion of a business school amusing. What kinds of courses do they offer? Robbing Widows and Orphans? Grinding the Faces of the Poor? Having It Both Ways? Feeding at the Public Trough? There was a documentary several years ago called “The Corporation” that accepted the premise that corporations are persons and then asked what kind of people they are. The answer was, precisely, psychopaths: indifferent to others, incapable of guilt, exclusively devoted to their own interests.
Demagoguery demonizing economic freedom couldn’t have gone any further over the top in the darkest days of Stalinist Russia. At least the mask is off, so that we know what we are up against. Liberal = communist.
SOURCE
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ELSEWHERE
Obama’s campaign slop to women: "Barack Obama is buying votes. The Paycheck Fairness Act (PFA) is a blatant sop thrown to a voting block on which his next presidency may depend: women, specifically, liberal women. Obama also hopes it will weaken Mitt Romney, who is trying to woo women himself and, yet, cannot endorse the PFA without alienating conservatives."
Uncle Sam or Uncle Sugar? "It seems that no matter which party is in power, the government always grows. Why is this? The answer is relatively straightforward. Politicians get attention -- and applause -- for doing things. When things are going poorly, people never call their congressman and scream, 'Don't just do something, sit there!'"
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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena
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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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