Liberal Forum

Misty » 17 Mar 2017 9:59 pm » wrote: Where do you get your facts from dick head?

Tell me again how Obama took 'many vacations a year' in Hawaii.

Misty » 17 Mar 2017 9:12 pm » wrote: You first Dildo.
Bend over.

Misty » 17 Mar 2017 9:53 pm » wrote: You lying sack of ****.
He went to his home state of Hawaii where his family lives once a year for the holidays at a cost of about 4.8 million dollars.

Less than two months in and Trump has already taken 5 trips to Florida at 3 million dollars a pop.

That's more than three times what one of Obama's trips to Hawaii cost.
He's on pace to blow every other president's record out of the water.

Watcha gonna say then Dildo?

Misty » 18 Mar 2017 9:45 am » wrote:

Misty » 18 Mar 2017 9:45 am » wrote:

Termin8tor » 17 Mar 2017 11:26 pm » wrote:Oh wow, I'm sure this was a huge scandal that enriched Price by many millions of dollars, just like the Clinton's got from the Russians and other countries and Special Interests.
From your source: Wow, a huge 12%!
Your babbling about this is almost as bad as Rachel Maddow blathering on over Trump's tax return.
Silly freaking twit.

Draining The Swamp? Not With Tom Price As Head Of HHS.
January 17, 2017

In December, the Wall Street Journal reported that Price “traded more than $300,000 in shares of health-related companies" in just four years, “while sponsoring and advocating legislation that potentially could affect those companies’ stocks.”

He did this while serving on powerful, health-related committees in Congress. He serves on the House Committee on Ways and Means (which affects Medicare) and the Congressional Health Care Caucus.

In 2015, Price also became Chair of the House Committee on the Budget.

In August, Price purchased between $50,000 and $100,000 of stock in an Australian biotech company called Innate Immunotherapeutics (ASX: IIL).

The company’s key drug is for multiple sclerosis, known as MIS416, and it is seeking FDA approval.

Price bought shares at a steep discount of just 18 cents a share.

The offering was not public.

The stock price subsequently rose to 90 cents and could go as high as $2.

(A second, larger investor was Rep. Chris Collins (R-NY), who also sits on an important health committee, and whose family now owns 20% of the Australian company.

Collins also sits on the board of Innate Immuno—but hey, there’s nothing to see here.)

The Kaiser Health News Report notes that Innate Immuno is specifically targeting a U.S. market, given that new drugs here can carry a higher price tag—likely $5,000 per month or more.

The 21st Century Cures Act, which Price supported and which passed Congress in December 2016, will be an asset for Innate Immunotherapeutics, as it will weaken safety testing and clinical trials in order to expedite approval of drugs and devices.

Devices also have a much lower threshold for approval by the FDA than do drugs, having had expedited approval under a ruse calling modified devices “substantially equivalent.”

If Price is confirmed as head of HHS, I hate to think what other gifts he will provide pharma and device manufacturers.

Richard Painter, a University of Minnesota law professor who served as President George W. Bush’s chief ethics lawyer, assessed Price’s purchase of Innate Immuno: “There is an appearance problem…to have members of Congress buying and selling stocks that are affected by the work of the committees they sit on… It could be perfectly legal, but it looks terrible and shows lack of judgment.”

As if the WSJ report weren’t damning enough, there have been bits of new information this week on Price’s questionable behavior.

CNN just reported that last year Price bought shares in Zimmer Biomet (NYSE:ZBH), a medical device manufacturer.

Given that Price is a retired orthopedist, this is not surprising—Biomet is a major manufacturer of artificial joints (hips and knees).

What is quite disturbing, however, is that less that a week later, Price introduced the “HIP Act,” a bill that greatly benefited Biomet financially by delaying implementation of certain new Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services regulations.

Zimmer Biomet expressed its appreciation by donating to Price’s reelection campaign.

Price opposed other CMS regulations that would have hurt surgeons and manufacturers.

A few years ago I wrote, “Devices cost $76 billion annually in the United States alone, and the profit margin for devices like defibrillators and prosthetic hips is over 20%.” Yet that isn’t enough to satisfy the industry?

This is not Price’s first such ethical lapse trying to help surgeons.

As a staunch opponent of Medicare, Medicaid and similar safety net programs (see his membership in AAPS), Price proposed a bill that would have greatly benefited surgeons by allowing “balance billing.”

This allows physicians to charge more and have the patient be responsible for the difference from what Medicare reimburses.

Unlike PEOTUS, Price has cooperated with the Office of Government Ethics in submitting information about his financial holdings and has promised to divest from holdings within 90 days of confirmation.

But will he? Why would Secretary Price be able to maintain higher financial ethics than Congressman Price?

Even if he doesn’t immediately benefit, will he continue to make decisions that benefit him and his cronies, rather than the public—people who bear not only the financial burden of decisions, but who will be hurt, with little recourse, by faulty devices?

Political contributions.

Last fall, at the Medtrade conference on medical devices, Price pledged to oppose Medicare cuts that would hurt them, and was rewarded with an advocacy award and $100-per-person fundraiser in his honor, according to Kaiser Health News.

They further note, “Providers of home medical equipment have ranked as key Price backers, contributing $52,600 to his campaign since 2013.” Home health companies contributed an additional $24,000.

Unsurprisingly, four out of five of Price’s largest contributors last election were health organizations.

In assessing Price’s congressional dealings, Ross Baker, a political science professor at Rutgers University who specializes in Congress, concluded, “It looks like he’s somebody who could throw the store open to a lot of niche special interests …

These are things that fly under the radar. If you take a meat axe to Medicare, for example, everybody would know about it. But this kind of stuff is done in the dark of night.”

There are so many lapses of judgment and ethics demonstrated by this Cabinet nominee, Tom Price, over the years.

Even if he divests himself of these stocks, he is so mired with conflicts of interest from close ties to industry groups and has such a deep-seated antipathy toward Medicare and government-sponsored health insurance (ACA) that it is impossible to see him as head of HHS in any other capacity than to wield a wrecking ball.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/judystone/ ... 1cc4d87e37

Misty » 18 Mar 2017 9:56 am » wrote: So Clem ignores most of the article and defends a member of Congress who made money off of health stocks at the same time he was voting on health care legislation that drove up the price of those stocks, and got a privileged offer to buy a biomedical stock at a discount, then lied about it under oath.

But the Clintons......

Misty » 18 Mar 2017 9:45 am » wrote:

Sgt Bilko » 18 Mar 2017 10:01 am » wrote:
FOX not knowing doesn't mean it didn't happen. Cesspool Misty thinks that is proof positive that Trump is wrong. But then cesspool Misty with her very biased hatred of Trump thinks that is proof!!

roadkill » 18 Mar 2017 9:56 am » wrote:Barry has access to the best intelligence in the world. And chooses to rely on CNN, MSNBC, etc. Funny when Barry claims "I just heard about it from the press just like everybody else".

roadkill » 18 Mar 2017 9:56 am » wrote:Obama passes the leaks to the NYT on wiretap evidence.

roadkill » 18 Mar 2017 9:56 am » wrote:CNN, MSNBC, etc. pump the dems' claims of Russian collusion with zero evidence.

roadkill » 18 Mar 2017 9:56 am » wrote:Misty knows of no reason why she shouldn't be a Fox News fan............today.
But Misty can't think of any reason why she should be a Fox News fan...tomorrow.

Obamacare Is Not in a Death Spiral

"Death spiral” is an actual technical term in the insurance industry, used by actuaries to describe a rare sequence of events that leave a once profitable insurance product a heap of smoldering metal.

Whenever I heard it brought up, it was done so in a hushed voice, because once a product went into a real death spiral, all that was left was to lead it out into the woods, tie it to a tree, and shoot it in the head.

Paul Ryan likes to talk about death spirals when he talks about Obamacare, not because he is actually describing one but because “death spiral” sounds real scary, maybe even to him.

Death spirals are very rare insurance events that require something to happen that causes relatively well people to withdraw from an insurance plan, leaving most of the truly sick behind.

The spiral comes when the insurance company raises prices in order to pay for this greater proportion of sick people, and this price pressure causes even more of the healthier people to leave the plan, which then causes another sharp price increase, followed by more attrition, and on and on until it’s time to lead old Rover out into the woods for that last walk.

This is simply not happening with Obamacare.

There is no attrition of healthier people going someplace else.

There is no increase in the proportion of the sick in the covered population as a whole.

Obamacare has been expensive, but then what would one expect if one starts to suddenly insure millions of people who had not had insurance (and treatment) for years or decades?

And while the price of Obamacare policies did increase, a lot, over the course of several years for a number of reasons, the main one was that the original policies were not priced high enough to begin with, because no one had any way of knowing how sick these people would prove to be.

That anyone would still be breathless in astonishment about any of this, that sick people used doctors and hospitals and this turned out not to be free, is rather astonishing behavior for adults.

So the technical requirements of a death spiral are not there for the ACA.

But the current Republican plan to defund Obamacare will definitely lead to one.

And when it does, we can then blame Ryan and his pals for making it happen.

READ MORE AT LINK IN TITLE

Death Spiral, Debunked: Facts Undercut Major Argument for GOP Healthcare Plan

Republicans have spun a lot of stories in their desperate attempt to sell the repeal of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), or Obamacare—and among their favorites is the narrative that the law is "imploding," in a "death spiral," or otherwise doomed to fail.

There are two problems with that argument.

First of all, Obamacare is not, in fact, "collapsing."

And secondly, to the extent the ACA is experiencing problems, much of the blame can be placed directly at the feet of Republicans and the insurance companies to whom they are beholden.

roadkill » 18 Mar 2017 10:01 am » wrote: Hillary just sells uranium to the Russians for $145 Million in kickbacks to the Clinton Foundation. That's perfectly OK.

Misty » 18 Mar 2017 11:37 am » wrote:The scary 'death spiral' talking point.

Death Spiral (Insurance)

Misty » 18 Mar 2017 11:37 am » wrote:

Termin8tor » 18 Mar 2017 11:44 am » wrote: .

.

Biden's and Dems' budgets will bring literal national bankruptcy.

What kind of utter wackjob thinks that's a good value?

Termin8tor » 18 Mar 2017 11:43 am » wrote:Health insurance companies are losing so much money, they're pulling out one by one.

Health insurance industry rakes in billions while blaming Obamacare for losses.

11-01-16

Major insurance companies are enjoying record profits but claim they are losing money under the Affordable Care Act.

UnitedHealth announced record-breaking profits in 2015, followed by an even better year this year. In July 2016, UnitedHealth celebrated revenues that quarter totalling $46.5 billion, an increase of $10 billion since the same time last year.

Aetna, whose CEO Mark Bertolini reported to the Securities and Exchange Commission a $27.9 million compensation in 2015, has similarly celebrated sky-high profits. “In 2015, we reported annual operating revenue of over $60.3 billion, a record for the Company,” Aetna recently told investors.

https://www.consumeraffairs.com/news/he ... 10116.html

NSA official: Claims that UK spied on Trump 'nonsense'

The deputy director of the National Security Agency on Saturday called allegations that former President Obama used a British spy agency to surveil President Trump's election campaign "arrant nonsense."

"It belies a complete lack of understanding of how the relationship works between the intel community agencies, it completely ignores the political reality of 'would the UK government agree to do that?' " Richard Ledgett said in an interview with the BBC.

Ledgett said Britain would have no motivation to participate in such a risky act, saying that to do so would be "epically stupid."

Fox News analyst Andrew Napolitano stirred controversy on Tuesday during an appearance on "Fox & Friends" when he claimed without providing evidence that the BCHQ, Britain's top spy agency, had spied on Trump's campaign at the command of the Obama administration.

The allegation drew more backlash on Thursday, after White House press secretary Sean Spicer repeated the claim during his daily press briefing, reportedly angering British government officials.

Trump addressed the accusation himself at a news conference on Friday, saying he was not responsible for Napolitano's claim and telling reporters that they "should be talking to Fox."

“That was a statement made by a very talented lawyer on Fox," he said. "So you should not be talking to me. You should be talking to Fox.”

Spicer also said Friday that he had no reason to apologize, because he was repeating Napolitano's claim and not endorsing it.

Former Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort wanted for questioning in Ukraine corruption case.

Ukrainian prosecutors want to question Paul Manafort in connection with a corruption investigation and have made repeated requests for assistance from US authorities, CNN has learned.

Prosecutors in Kiev said they have made seven separate appeals over the past two years for help in questioning President Donald Trump's former campaign manager, including letters to FBI Director James Comey and US Justice Department officials.

Ukrainian officials said the US has not responded to those requests.