Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Liberty University Challenges Obamacare on Religious Liberty Grounds

In 1922, back when the United States was a constitutional republic, the Supreme Court ruled in Bailey v. Drexel Furniture that although child-labor laws have a noble purpose, the means — Congress using taxing power as a penalty — was unconstitutional.

Read the full story at The Washington Times



More health reform information on the Obamacare page.

Tuesday, March 12, 2013

To Protect Your Health Care, Get Informed

Obamacare is a fraudulently conceived, massively destructive scheme that is destined to fail–big time. Please read the pamphlet 'Pull the Plug on Obamacare' available at Amazon.com in
...for an in-depth explanation of why, and what we should be doing instead.

The detailed bibliography and notes are right here on the Obamacare page.

Return to this site frequently for articles and news on this most important front.

Remember: The Sequester, the Fiscal Cliff and the coming bankruptcy of Social Security are nothing compared to what socialized medicine is going to do to our economy and our civilization.


Monday, March 11, 2013

Sally Pipes: Why Are The Democrats Attacking The Only Successful Part Of Medicare?

The president has proposed a multibillion-dollar fee on drug companies by requiring them to issue the federal treasury rebates on prescription drugs consumed by low-income seniors.
Other Democrats want to go even further. They’re calling for the feds to essentially dictate prices for drugs sold through Medicare. They claim that such a move will save even more money.
But neither plan will deliver the savings its backers claim.

Read the full story at
www.PacificResearch.org


More Health care reform resources on the Obamacare page.

Saturday, March 09, 2013

Howard Hyde appears on The Glazov Gang

This week’s Glazov Gang had the honor of being joined by Bob Zeidman, award-winning novelist, Larry Greenfield, Senior Fellow at the American Freedom Alliance and Howard Hyde, author of the new pamphlet, Pull the Plug on Obamacare. The Gang members discussed Why Obama Needs Another Dictator To Replace Chavez. The discussion occurred in Part I and focused on why the Radical-in-Chief only wants to deal with tyrants. Part II highlighted Obama’s Billion-Dollar Giveaway to the Muslim Brotherhood and Resisting ObamaCare.
Watch the program here: FrontPageMag.com: Why Obama Needs Another Dictator To Replace Chavez.
More Health care reform resources on the Obamacare page.

Thursday, March 07, 2013

GOP Governors Cave In to Industry Pressure

The greatest immediate tactical threat to the cause of holding back the destructive effects of Obamacare is the inability of Republican governors to stand up to industry lobbyist pressure.

Read the full article at http://m.washingtonexaminer.com/tim-carney-health-industry-pushes-gop-states-toward-obamacare/article/2523136

More Health care reform resources on the Obamacare page.

How do you solve a problem like Dennis Rodman?

Mr. Rodman goes to Korea del Norte

The recent visit by celebrity basketball cross-dresser Dennis Rodman to the Asian Gulag Kingdom of Kim Jung Un has re-ignited the debate over what degree of normal relations should be accorded to confirmed genocidal maniacs before it merely encourages more genocide. In particular it raises the question of liberty of individuals, in this case rich and famous American citizens, to associate with monsters of their choosing, as implicitly guaranteed by the First Amendment.

The solution, in the spirit of the times, is a tax. There's no problem that can't be solved with the right tax, right? But this would be a special tax. Rather than pay cash to the Treasury, American citizens wishing to hobnob with sworn enemies of the United States would be permitted to do so as long as they agree to spend equal time up front with the family members of at least one victim murdered by the subject regime.

This 'tax' would apply to any individual with an adjusted gross income in excess of $200,000 per year, or $250,000 for a married couple or civil union filing jointly. Moreover in the case where the individual's or couple's income is a multiple of that base number, the visa applicant(s) would have to spend equal time with family members of that many multiple genocide victims (how many would that be for Rodman?).

The Supreme Court should have no trouble upholding this law based on Congress' power to tax, given recent precedent.

For a MUCH more thoughtful article on this subject, see Seven Ways of Looking at Dennis Rodman by Bruce Bawer on FrontPageMag.com.

Tuesday, March 05, 2013

Holman Jenkins: Yes, Hospital Pricing Is Insane, But Why?

Time magazine issues a 24,000-word memo on what we already knew.


Big institutions dictating care and assigning prices in ways that make no sense to an outsider—is exactly what you get in a system that insulates consumers from the cost of their health care.

Read the full article at The Wall Street Journal



More Health care reform resources on the Obamacare page.

Monday, March 04, 2013

Front Page Mag: Obamacare: It's Christmas Eve, 1776

Many Americans believe that Obamacare is a done deal and something we just have to accept and learn to live with. Congress passed the law, the Supreme Court upheld it and Obama was re-elected along with a Democratic majority in the Senate. But a massively ambitious piece of legislation, based on mistaken premises, which can never fulfill its advertised promises and which is the crowning threat to the American constitutional civilization and economy since the American Revolution, cannot be surrendered to.
Read the full article at FrontPageMag.com
More Health care reform resources on the Obamacare page.

Sunday, March 03, 2013

Hal Scherz: Healthcare and Politics Do Not Mix

The Medicaid expansion plan at the state level is not about providing healthcare insurance coverage to those who do not currently have it, and it certainly has nothing to do with compassion. It is about control and dependency. It is about expanding the rolls of Americans who rely on government subsidized healthcare. It is about moving forward with the Affordable Care Act which will ultimately touch every American but will be controlled from Washington DC.
Read the full article at http://townhall.com/columnists/halscherz/2013/02/28/healthcare-and-politics-do-not-mix-n1522256
More Health care reform resources on the Obamacare page.

Confessions of an Ex-Liberal- Socialist-Progressive-Democrat from Berkeley

Many of my followers have expressed interest in my transformation from Liberal Socialist Progressive Democrat in Berkeley to Pro-Capitalist Conservative Libertarian Republican.  Here then is my story.
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I was born and raised in Berkeley, California during the famous (or infamous) 1960’s and 70’s.  Although I was never particularly politically active, I was more or less completely immersed in the reigning ideology of the time and place. Sympathetic to communism, I believed that businessmen as a class were greedy, corporations were evil and that capitalism was a system of exploitation of the poor by the rich. I saw America as an imperial power, a danger to the world. I loathed the military and during the 1980’s I hated Ronald Reagan – passionately. If Barack Obama had been elected President thirty years ago, I would have been right at home, as close as family with the administration’s agenda and cast of characters.
Even so, there were seeds of doubt in my world view planted early on that would combine with others to bear fruit many years later. The earliest of these that I remember was nobel laureate Milton Friedman’s 1980 PBS television series Free to Choose. Dr. Friedman presented an amazing explanation of economics, how the price system compels millions of people to collaborate in the production of goods as simple as pencils and as complex as computers, and he had the gall to defended capitalism as a system of voluntary cooperation among free people that results in the greatest prosperity for the greatest number. I was not converted overnight (far from it), but the first significant seed had been planted.
I was philosophically inclined to a socialist worldview, yet I had an open mind and intellectual honesty that I had learned from my father, Earl Hyde, a respected research scientist and administrator at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory; I was willing to apply logic and principles to the analysis of facts.
Paris
In my early twenties, I spent 4 years living as a marginally legal immigrant and bohemian artist/musician in an immigrant (North African Muslim) neighborhood in Paris, France. It was a wonderful cultural experience for a young man and I made many rich friendships. I subscribed to the daily newspaper Liberation, a leftist paper founded by the former students who had almost burned Paris to the ground in 1968.  Echoes of Berkeley; birds of a feather find each other.
Even so, I can safely say today that the French economic model is nothing for us to emulate, whether in Europe or in America. I remember very well waiting on the narrow spiral staircase of a run-down apartment building along with 25 other people, for my chance to see a studio apartment for rent in that rent-controlled city. What we call a crisis in America, with double-digit unemployment, they call ‘business as usual’. The unemployment rate is always double-digits there.  Yes, they have a broad social safety net.  But I have seen enough drunken homelessness and despair in the Metro subway and on the streets to tell you that that net has holes in it. The poorest and most corrupt regions in North America are Louisiana, Quebec and Haiti, all former French colonies.



Several years later I would take my first and only formal economics course in the MBA program here at Woodbury University in Burbank.  Very early in the textbook, after the basic principles of Supply and Demand and their intersecting curves were laid out, the author explained, simply and convincingly how government-imposed wage and price controls must inevitably lead to shortages or unsellable surpluses. Rent control makes it difficult or impossible to find an appartment because it makes offering apartments for rent a losing proposition. Minimum wage laws, rather than lifting all boats, aggravate unemployment of the least qualified and most vulnerable workers in the labor market. Milton Friedman and Larry Elder have argued earnestly that minimum wage laws are a racist policy, hurting black youth above all others.  Democrats love to talk about ‘disparate impact’ to justify meddling in free-market transactions such as mortgage lending, whether it’s ‘redlining’ on the one hand or ‘predatory lending’ on the other. Let them apply the disparate impact doctrine to minimum wage laws where there’s clear evidence of it.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. When I left France and came to Los Angeles in 1986 I almost had a heart attack from the culture shock of driving around and seeing all the ‘Apartment for Rent’ signs. “First Month Free!” “No Deposit!” “Move in Today!” I had to fight the urge to pull over immediately and run in to submit my application before the mob of competing renters showed up.  ‘How can they do this?’ I thought. In Paris, apartment rentals were buried in tiny entries in the classified newspaper ads, and in order to have a chance of getting one you had to show up at the indicated address approximately 1 hour BEFORE the paper hit the newsstand. It was insane (and to make matters worse, the ads were written in French)!  

Nevertheless, I settled into my extended bohemian artist-student lifestyle in LA, became a daily listener to KPFK Pacifica Radio (because PBS wasn’t Left enough for me), and occasionally donated portions of my paltry resources to the ACLU.

I was still committed to a leftist worldview learned in Berkeley and was eager to defend my ideas using facts, logic and principles. I studied and read widely, but as much as possible avoided conservative thinkers and publications.
But I wasn’t able to avoid reading Julian Simon’s The Ultimate Resource’, because it was required reading in a geography course at USC, and it blew the lid off of my illusions about environmental crises.
Simon catalogued and debunked over a hundred cases of environmental scare campaigns going back 200 years that all turned out to be just so much global hot air emitted by carbon-spewing leftist political activists with an agenda to grab power and earn frequent-flier miles. Simon systematically explained WHY objectively it must be so that all such scares end up being recognized as hoaxes (not that that ever deters the activists from inventing new ones with every generation, if not season). ‘The Ultimate Resource’ is the core of the nuclear warhead arsenal of the conservative and capitalist movements against radical environmentalist fraud.
Simon named his book ‘The Ultimate Resource’ to make the point that in the final analysis, physical assets like minerals, oil, gas, water, food and a host of others are only as good, as useful and as available as the PEOPLE who design the processes to mine, extract, cultivate, harvest, refine, market and distribute them. It is human ingenuity that takes icky gunk that oozes out of the ground and sickens your cows, and transforms it into black gold and energy. It is the entrepreneurial drive operating in a free market that responds to every shortage of natural resources and invents new ways to extract and produce more, to drill deeper under the ocean floor using only one tower where five were previously required, to design new industrial processes, to multiply crop yields, so that with every generation, in economic terms, these things are more abundant, cheaper and cleaner than ever. The Earth is NOT going to Hell in a handbasket; we are not running out of oil, coal, copper, food or even land, and we never will for as long as we remain a free-market, capitalist nation.
It is human beings living under liberty and the rule of law that are the most precious, scarce, productive and needed resource. In the short run, physical resources are of course finite; but in the long term, they are virtually unlimited, only constrained by human imagination, ingenuity, freedom and hard work.

It was Julian Simon’s thesis that pried open my brain to consider the positive power of the free market to solving human problems, including poverty, inequality and even racism.
After encountering Julian Simon I was open to consider more challenges to my received wisdom. And the challenges came. The Clarence Thomas supreme court confirmation hearings in 1991 opened my eyes to the fact that it was possible, even reasonable for a black man (indeed many black men, for there were several who testified on Thomas’ behalf) to be conservative, pro-capitalist, and Republican. Such a thought had been inconceivable to me before, in spite of the fact that Martin Luther King Jr. had been a Republican.  The Democratic party has been very successful in painting Republicans as the second coming of the Ku Klux Klan, in complete contradiction to historical fact.
I started reading the Wall Street Journal editorial page. Charles Murray’s book Losing Ground demonstrated the failures of LBJ’s Great Society welfare state in aggravating rather than improving poverty. I read George Guilder’s Wealth and Poverty, the classic The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith from 1776, and The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek, the Austrian economist and Nobel laureate.
These thinkers – plus eventually three attempts to open and operate a small business of my own – transformed my worldview. By 1991, I was open to consider the views of Rush Limbaugh, Dennis Prager, and Larry Elder. In November 1988 I had voted the Democratic Ticket, with Michael Dukakis (Tank-Commander-in-Chief) at the top. In November 1992, I voted straight Republican and haven’t looked back, in spite of losing most of my former friends and being the subject of a good deal of tension within my extended family.
-----------------------
Republicans aren’t saints, they aren’t all alike, and they aren’t all principled or disciplined in their thinking. Some of them are unnecessarily hateful; others are too eager simply to be more competent managers of the bloated welfare state. But the Democratic party has gone over a harcore leftist cliff in the past generation, and they are hell-bent to take the country down with them. This must not stand.
Therefore my mission is to move the Republican party in a principled, libertarian direction. I have been disappointed and alarmed to hear some Republicans speak as reflexively as Democrats of, for example the need to raise taxes (or of the irresponsibility of cutting rates). This tells me that  among other things there’s a need to review the Laffer curve:
My opinion is that if the Republican Party is to stand for anything, it must first be limited, constitutional government that places individual liberty above the state and the treasury. The trouble with our economy is not that the government doesn’t have enough money. The problem is that the government takes too much of it from the people, flushes too much of it down the toilet, and engages in a host of other fraudulent tricks that would get you and me and Bernie Madoff incarcerated if we tried them.
George H. W. Bush never completely bought in to Reagan’s fiscal vision, which he had derided during the 1980 primary election season as ‘Voodoo economics’. As a result, this most honorable World War II veteran and hero surrendered to the Democrats Speaker of the House Tom Foley and Senate Majority Leader George Mitchel under pressure of no crisis, broke his ‘read my lips, no new taxes’ pledge, got no credit for his magnanimous bipartisan gesture and lost his 1992 re-election bid to Bill Clinton – in spite of enjoying MY vote, the first I ever cast for a Republican. Two more decorated and celebrated veterans would follow in Bush the Elder’s non-path to the White House: Bob Dole in 1996 and John McCain. With respect, these honorable men didn’t get it. To put it more bluntly, quoting Rush Limbaugh during the 2008 presidential campaign: “You idiot! Get someone on your team who understands economics!”

Two men who understand economics better than most mortals are Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institution, student of Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago, and Ludwig von Mises, Austrian-American mentor and colleague of the nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek.  These men and their thought matter to you. Sowell’s book, Basic Economics, written in plain English, will innoculate you against all manner of stupidity and fashionable but bogus economic ideas. Understand what’s in this book and you will be light years ahead of the majority of our politicial leaders.
If I were empowered to dictate just one law, it would be that all public officials – legislators, mayors, governors, and presidents – should be required to read this book and pass a factual examination on its contents, whether they agree with its conclusions or not, as a condition of their serving.

More Health care reform resources on the Obamacare page.

Grace-Marie Turner: Affordable Care Act will impose new burdens on consumers, businesses

With unemployment stubbornly high and economic growth shrinking, it is clear the economy is headed in the wrong direction. And the Affordable Care Act is a major cause. The president said his law would reduce the average cost of a family policy by $2,500 by the end of his first term. Instead, family health costs have increased by $3,065 over that time.
Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2013/03/01/4093874/affordable-care-act-will-impose.html
Grace-Marie Turner is president of the Galen Institute, a free-market organization funded in part by the medical industry. Readers may write to her at 128 South Royal Street, Alexandria, Va. 22314; email: galen@galen.org.
More Health care reform resources on the Obamacare page.

Saturday, March 02, 2013

Pull the Plug on Obamacare Kindle edition released

The Kindle edition of 'Pull the Plug on Obamacare' is now available.
Click here: http://www.amazon.com/Pull-Plug-Obamacare-ebook/dp/B00BNXX4F6
More Health care reform resources on the Obamacare page.

Friday, March 01, 2013

Betsy McCaughey: Rick Scott is Wrong

(...and so are Ohio and Arizona Governors John Kasich and Jan Brewer.)
"If the Florida legislature agrees to expand Medicaid, it will doom Florida to bankruptcy and Floridians to enormous state tax hikes in the coming years. The expansion will add 42% to the state’s Medicaid enrollment."
Read the full article at http://betsymccaughey.com/rick-scott-is-wrong
More Health care reform resources on the Obamacare page.

Thursday, February 28, 2013

Now on Amazon.com

The 100-page pamphlet 'Pull the Plug on Obamacare' by Howard Hyde is now available from Amazon.com. ...or go to Amazon.com and search 'Obamacare Hyde'.
Please buy 1,000 copies for your closest friends and write glowing customer reviews. Or write hateful and venomous ones if you prefer; just spell my name and the title correctly please.

More Health care reform resources on the Obamacare page.

Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Why the big push against Obama care?

A dear friend and colleague of mine, an independent computer consultant, writes “So, why the big push against Obama care? It is far from perfect but anything that begins to dissociate healthcare with employers is a step in the right direction in my opinion.”
Dear D,
We agree that the current system of privileges for employer-sponsored plans is flawed.  Individuals who shop for health coverage independently of their employer should not be handicapped by a 70 year-old wage-control evasion scheme. See page 67 of Pull the Plug on Obamacare: ‘Level the Playing Field Because World War II is Over and We Thought We Won’.
So then isn’t Obamacare a step in the right direction? It would be if it were expanding the choices people have and resulting in lower costs. But it’s doing the opposite. Corporations, small businesses, universities and even unions are already finding that the cost of compliance with the law’s mandates (like guessing whether their plan will qualify for approval of the department of Health and Human Services – HHS – according to rules that have been announced but are yet to be written; and collecting information on how much their employees’ spouses earn) are making it difficult or impossible to continue to offer health coverage to their members. At the margin, they are shutting down more than expanding.
Employers’ incentives under Obamacare are increasingly to cut back on hiring (especially if they are near the 50-employee threshold), cut back hours to part-time status or substitute offshore contracts or machines that don’t talk back or take sick days. This is not ludditism; there is a place for automation and free trade in a capitalist economy. But making employing American workers more expensive than it needs to be by force is not a free-market virtue.
Moreover physicians, traditionally self-employed, are being herded into large hospital corporations as employees. By 2014, the majority of those that haven’t taken early retirement (80% are contemplating it) will be employees of increasingly large health maintenance organizations (HMOs) or accountable care organizations (ACOs). This trend should be alarming to an independent  businessman like yourself who is one of the admirable few computer consultants who has managed to keep out of captivity in spite of the overregulation that discourages corporations from contracting with entrepreneurs on pain of IRS wrath.
To the rescue: the state-run health insurance exchanges, the free-lunch bazaars. These are not markets; if they were then the only role for government would be as referee to enforce contracts, support private property rights and prevent and punish murder, robbery, theft, fraud, rape, persecution and conspiracy. Rather, the exchanges are regulatory sandboxes for the czars of the HHS and IPAB (Independent Payment Advisory Board) to play in, making decisions for patients, families and caregivers, spending taxpayer money and taking control over our lives.
A ‘step’ in the right direction? Obamacare is not a ‘step’.  It is the most ambitious social program ever attempted in the USA, bigger than Medicare and Social Security combined, and those are already on track to Greek-style bankruptcy, having blown all original cost estimates by orders of magnitude (see ‘A History of Cost Overruns’ on pages 48-50). There is nothing to lend confidence to the idea that the most massive program of all will be immune to a similar fate.
The ACA is far more than ‘far from perfect’. Unfortunately it is fraudulently conceived, destructive and doomed to failure. If you don’t believe me, please read Sally Pipes’ The Truth About Obamare or Betsy McCaughey’s Beating Obamacare.


More Health care reform resources on the Obamacare page.

Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Pull the Plug on Obamacare now available

The 100-page pamphlet 'Pull the Plug on Obamacare' by Howard Hyde is now available: Click here.

See also the companion web page at www.hhcapitalism.com/p/obamacare.html.

Sunday, February 24, 2013

Washington Examiner: Florida Gov. Rick Scott's craven retreat on Obamacare

Florida Governor Rick Scott, a one time activist opponent of Obamacare, reversed himself on February 20, 2013 and now is callling for an expansion of Medicaid to Florida residents under the federal Affordable Care Act.

Read the full article in the Washington Examiner.


More Health care reform resources on the Obamacare page.

Thursday, February 21, 2013

Let this Patient Die

Some people want to ‘reform’ Obamacare, not repeal it. Now that we know what’s in it, can’t we remove what we don’t like and keep the good parts?
A plan so deeply rooted in misperception, centralized planning, misinformation, mono-partisanship and political bullying, passed in the Senate in the wee hours of Christmas Eve 2009, is not salvageable. Medicare and RomneyCare at least had the virtue of being bipartisan efforts. But Obamacare was passed without a single Republican vote. 83% of physicians in the U.S. are opposed to it, to the point of retreating from their practices, opting out of Medicare, decreasing office hours or even quitting while they are ahead. The general public began to have buyer’s remorse almost immediately after passage, and that sentiment has only grown stronger since. As of the end of 2012, 54% of Americans were opposed to universal coverage, the idea that it is the government’s job to ensure that all Americans have healthcare coverage. The law is so unpopular that the department of Health and Human Services (HHS) withheld publishing its rules for how states and doctors will be required to comply with the law (13,000 pages and counting) until after the 2012 election was safely over. If the law is so warm and fuzzy, why did Louisiana and other states have to file a Freedom of Information Act request just to ‘find out what’s in it’? Former supporters of the bill are openly expressing astonishment at the destruction they see happening around them, like the physician who writes “Medicare made the rules and now punishes doctors for following them”.
To fix what’s wrong with medical care in America, we need REAL health insurance along with liberty, voluntary cooperation, free markets, the price system and the virtues of the free people of America. A true health insurance market thriving under free-market competition will provide the greatest range of choices possible to all of us, including today’s uninsured. Such a market needs freedom and competition; not over-regulation, rationing and penalties; not a government takeover. Individuals, families and physicians should be the ones in charge; not the federal Department of Health and Human Services and committees that can’t be recalled by voters.
The Hippocratic oath, taken by physicians for over two thousand years, pledges: “First, do no harm”. America needs reform, but not just any reform. We cannot rush into top-down, government-directed economics out of an irresistible urge just to ‘do something’, convinced that “it can’t possibly get any worse”. It can always get worse. It is worse in almost every other country and is already getting worse here under Obamacare. Constructive reform has to be based on an accurate assessment of the circumstances and on sound economic principles.
Reversing Obamacare won’t be easy this late in the game. The Administration and die-hard supporters of the law aren’t standing down for a gentleman-general’s winter camp; to the contrary, they are armed with virtually unlimited resources and mobilized to put down any trace of rebellion. The element of surprise won’t be found in a frontal attack on an A.C.A. stronghold, like (metaphorically) George Washington’s ambush of the Hessians at Trenton. It will come, rather, from all of the former and fair-weather supporters who never expected that the rising costs, rationing, shortages, loss of liberty, restriction of choices and deteriorating quality would fall so heavily upon them personally.
But reverse it we must, because living under this law’s regime will be much dearer still than the cost of fighting it to the bitter end. The death panel rationing committee of the American citizenry has determined that this patient’s life is not worth the cost of prolonging. It’s time to pull the plug on Obamacare.

This article was adapted from the forthcoming book 'Pull the Plug on Obamacare', coming March 1 2013. Visit the Obamacare page for more information.




More Health care reform resources on the Obamacare page.

Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Support for Principles of Obamacare Continues to Sink

Most Americans -- 54% -- now oppose Universal Coverage, the idea that it is the federal government's job to ensure health care for all. Obamacare is NOT a done deal.
Read the full article at

More Health care reform resources on the Obamacare page.