Why South Carolina Gov Nikki Haley has to go

From US News

From time to time, I like to think back on columns I’ve written or re-ponder theories I’ve come up with as I’ve walked through the last 46 years on this small planet. There have been many and I assume many more to come if the good Lord is willing and the creek doesn’t rise (we say funny things like that down in South Carolina).

Back in December 2013, I was home for the holidays and wrote this blog post on South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley. Some of my conservative friends and family weren’t pleased. Now, none of them disputed a single point I made or even offered to defend her record. I guess they just didn’t like that, as an opinion journalist, I painted a realistic picture of yet another politician saying one thing but doing another. Hypocrisy sends me over the edge. Seriously. I really hate saying one thing and doing another for political convenience or to get re-elected. I also hate people who litter and I really deplore split infinitives. But hypocrisy? It’s the real killer for me.


There’s a little bit of this hypocrisy going on down in South Carolina. Don’t be shocked by this pronouncement. Let’s look specifically at the issues of poverty, Medicaid and Obamacare. Haley has made it clear she will “not expand Medicaid. Ever.” Glad she’s emphatic. However, someone should clue the good governor in to the fact that South Carolina Medicaid roles are already expanding thanks to “Obamacare” aka the Affordable Care Act. Horrors! Shock! She must be outraged by this travesty!
According to South Carolina's Medicaid director, 162,000 more South Carolinians – many of them children – will enroll in Medicaid by the end of June 2015 thanks to the fact that the ACA has made them aware that they are eligible. If the state had accepted the Medicaid expansion, an additional 340,000 would have gotten coverage, but thanks to Haley's refusal, they are out of luck.
Groups like the South Carolina Hospital Association strongly support the expansion. They should, since they’re bearing the costs of fly-by health insurance coverage, also known as emergency room care. If you don’t have insurance, you go to the emergency room. Everyone should really just come out of the closet on this one. It’s a crappy way of taking care of the sick and doing business frankly.
So just yesterday, the Republican Governors Association released this political advertisement against state Sen. Vincent Sheheen, who’s running again against Haley. It accuses Sheheen of supporting Medicaid expansion in South Carolina. Sheheen indeed supports expanding health care to the neediest in our society. That’s not my problem with the RGA ad. My beef with the RGA is that its very own chairman, that would be New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, accepted Medicaid expansion in his state. I applaud him for that. While he may not give a damn about traffic jams in Ft. Lee, he clearly cares about the neediest children in New Jersey, right?
Cue the Sheheen campaign, which just released this video this morning, morphing the embattled Christie’s record and image all over a follow-up political advertisement to the Christie RGA ad. To be clear, I support Christie’s expansion of Medicaid in New Jersey. It helps the neediest in that state and it’s the moral thing to do. The question is, does Nikki Haley?

Her rabid declaration that she’ll never expand Medicaid in South Carolina makes me wonder if she actually gives a damn about anyone in her own state other than her donors? While the RGA was releasing this attack ad on Sheheen, Haley was next door in Georgia again raising money for her re-elect. I don’t begrudge her ability to raise money but I do have a problem with her politicization of that fundraiser at the expense of South Carolina’s ports and people.

And so this is my problem with Nikki Haley: I don’t think she actually has a clue about the impacts her decisions have on her own constituents. She stands by Chris Christie while my home state of South Carolina has a poverty rate of nearly 20 percent and a child poverty rate of nearly 30 percent. In her State of the State address a short time ago, Haley proposed tax cuts while doing nothing to address the biggest problems in the state: health care costs and poverty. It’s time for Haley to visit the poorest of the poorest in South Carolina. She should go to Timmonsville or maybe Allendale where nearly 70 percent of that town’s residents are below the poverty level. Or maybe she should visit Marion County where my family has lived since the 1700s. Bottom line: She doesn’t have a clue who’s hurting and who’s thriving in the state where she’s the chief executive officer.

I’m reminded of that line from Oliver Twist that sums this all up so well: “There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.” If she keeps this up, Nikki Haley might well go down as the modern day Mr. Bumble of South Carolina, a reference to the Dickens character of whom Oliver Twist asks “Please, sir, I want some more.”

Just no “more” hypocrisy please, Governor Haley. No more hypocrisy.

Nikki was also endorsed by the brawler Sarah Palin back in 2010.

Obamacare has saved Americans $2B so far!

From Think Progress

Millions of Americans can expect to get a refund from their insurance companies this year, at an average of about $80 dollars per family, thanks to a little-known Obamacare provision that’s helping people save money on their premiums. According to a new report released by the Health and Human Services Department on Thursday, Americans across the country have received a total of $1.9 billion dollars in rebates since this provision first took effect in 2011.

Obamacare’s medical loss ratio provision — which is also frequently referred to as the “80/20 rule” — requires insurers to spend at least 80 percent of every American’s premium costs on their medical care, rather than on the company’s own profits or administrative overhead. If insurance companies don’t hit the right balance, they have to issue a refund check to their customers to make up for it.
According to HHS’s calculations, 6.8 million Americans will save $330 million in refunds this year because of the 80/20 rule. Insurance companies are required to provide those reimbursements by no later than the beginning of August. Not everyone will actually receive a physical check in the mail; insurers are allowed to apply the reimbursements to future premiums, so the savings could show up that way.

In a press release announcing the new data, HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell said that the health reform law is giving Americans a “better value for their premium dollars.” The whole point of the 80/20 rule is to encourage insurance companies to operate more efficiently and cut down on their overhead — and it’s slowly working. The portion of premium dollars allocated to insurers’ profits and administrative costs dropped from 15.3 percent in 2011 to 11.7 percent in 2013.

HHS estimates that if insurers weren’t making those type of changes, Americans would have likely paid about $3.8 billion in additional premiums in 2013. Altogether, since the medical loss ratio took effect three years ago, the administration calculates that it’s averted $9 billion dollars worth of unnecessarily high insurance premiums.

The 80/20 rule isn’t the only Obamacare provision that seeks to keep premium costs affordable. The health law also extends federal subsidies to help Americans purchase plans on the individual market in the new state-level insurance exchanges, something that allows millions of people to buy health care for less than $100 each month. However, under a lawsuit against the health law that could make its way up to the Supreme Court, those subsidies could be put into jeopardy in the majority of states in the country. If that happens, insurance premiums could increase by about 75 percent.

If the Republicans keep the House, take the Senate this year and the White House in 2016, you can kiss those savings goodbye.  Vote Democrat!

Sarah Palin is a terrorist just like Al-Qaeda and Bill Ayers

From Politico

Sarah Palin wants to switch the national conversation back to death panels and to “bomb Obamacare.”
The former governor of Alaska and vice presidential candidate posted a new video from SarahPAC, her PAC, to her YouTube, Twitter and Facebook accounts on Monday called “Just Sayin.’” The two-minute video cycles through clips of the media talking about Palin’s warning of “death panels” in Obamacare, starting with criticism before transitioning to clips that Palin was right all along.

Palin posted the video with the message, “Enough of this foreign fiasco distraction. Get back to work. It is time to bomb Obamacare.”

Sarah supports violence and guns, so she supports terrorism.

Bill Ayers has been in the news recently.  He has written his autobiography: Public Enemy: Confessions of an American Dissident.  He discusses the 2008 campaign and how Sarah Palin tried to link Barack Obama to him, which made him "road kill".  Bill may be repentant, but I myself have no use for him due to his extreme leftism.  Extreme left is no better than extreme right.

To link President Obama to Bill Ayers is disgusting.  Obama was living in Indonesia and was eight years old when Bill went on his terror spree.  The only connections between them was that they both taught at the University of Chicago and served on boards related to the U of C.  Would anyone say that Joe Flacco palls around with murderers due to the fact that Ray Lewis also played for the Baltimore Ravens?  Of course not.

The ACA law will now go into effect

You can read more about it here