Residents of states that refuse to set up health insurance exchanges under Obamacare are set to be hit with higher premiums under new rules announced by the Health and Human Services Department.

Insurance companies will be charged 3.5 percent of any premiums they sell through the federal exchanges, the department announced Friday.

And insurers are likely to pass that surcharge on to clients, leaading to higher premiums.

The only states to be affected are those that refuse to set up their own exchanges because of opposition to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. They are almost certain to be those under Republican control. In those states, HHS will set up the exchanges

GOP governors are taking a hard line against implementing any part of the healthcare law, which will mean insurers in their states will need to pay the monthly fee, The Hill reports.

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer announced this week that her state will not set up an exchange, calling the proposal “too expensive and too risky.” Her decision brings the total of states refusing to comply with the act’s provisions up to 17.

The exchanges were supposed to be up and running in all states by 2014. HHS plans to charge insurers 3.5 percent of the premiums for each plan they sell through the federal exchange.

There are still some states that haven’t yet decided whether to set up their own exchanges or use the federal exchange option, so it’s not yet known how much money the HHS will collect from insurance companies. In addition, HHS said it might change the user fees later on as more people enroll through the exchanges.

But exchanges that don’t attract enough insurers may make the companies carry larger percentages of unhealthy and thus expensive, patients, making them appeal even less to customers.

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Time to Boycott the RNC ?

From Texas Fred -

I would be interested in your thoughts on the matter of cutting off ALL donations to the GOP and RNC.

READ HERE

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Senate Votes 94-0 to Override Obama on Iran Sanctions

The Senate approved new economic sanctions on Iran on Friday, overriding objections from the White House that the legislation could undercut existing efforts to rein in Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

The Senate voted 94-0 to impose additional U.S. financial penalties on foreign businesses and banks involved in Iran’s energy, ports, shipping and shipbuilding sectors, and impose sanctions on metals trade with Iran.

Sens. Bob Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, and Mark Kirk, an Illinois Republican, the architects of a year-old law that has curtailed Iran’s oil exports and revenues, said the new measure would go further toward squeezing Iran’s economy and increase the pressure on the Islamic Republic to negotiate on its disputed nuclear program.

White House officials told Senate Democratic leaders in a late-night email on Nov. 29 that the administration didn’t think more sanctions are needed yet and asked them to hold off until next year. The new provisions were confusing and inconsistent in applying sanctions, according to the email, and the ambiguities “would hamper implementation” of sanctions.

“We believe additional authorities now threaten to undercut” existing sanctions, National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor said yesterday in a statement. “We also have concerns with some of the formulations as currently drafted in the text and want to work through them with our congressional partners to make the law more effective and consistent with the current sanctions law to ensure we don’t undercut our success to date.”

The new package is an amendment to the annual defense authorization bill that awaits a vote that may come as soon as Dec 3. The measure would still have to be reconciled with a House of Representatives’ version, and already faces a potential veto by Obama over provisions unrelated to Iran sanctions.

While almost all trade with Iran by any U.S. business or individual has long been banned, the amendment approved yesterday would impose penalties on other nations’ trade with the nation, a step closer to a trade embargo on Iran.

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Winston Churchill predicted the future — many times

November 30, 1874 is the birthdate of the greatest statesman in history. Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Reagan deemed him so. Just his indomitable leadership in World War II rallying a beleaguered Britain to triumph over Nazi tyranny would alone earn him this unique distinction.

But the world is not aware that Churchill was a modern Nostradamus in his prophetic wisdom. Among other things, he predicted two World Wars and the Cold War. Even today’s headlines are the stuff of predictions he made close to a century ago. In 1905, he foresaw the creation of the Israeli State. Churchill was the first non-Jewish Zionist. Twelve years before the Balfour Declaration, in 1917, Churchill called for a Jewish State. It was not as if he represented New York’s Lower East Side or Miami populated by Jews.

Then in 1921, in a speech to the House of Commons, he spoke of a militant Islam sect, the Wahabis, more violent than any in history, which would kill their own sisters for wearing the wrong attire. These fierce zealots would terrorize the West with bomb-carrying Jihadists who would burn embassies and destroy buildings by their passion to sacrifice their lives for guarantee of Islam heaven. Winston Churchill II would read his grandfather’s speech to President George W. Bush in the White House in 2007. If Churchill didn’t exactly predict 9/11, he described its radical extremist perpetrators.

President Nixon once told me that Churchill was the only leader who seemed to have a crystal ball. He had “the mind of an historian and courage of a soldier.” A scholar of history, he could see patterns replicating themselves. Like a soldier, Churchill would risk political death by telling the people what they didn’t want to hear. Spineless politicians or cover-your-ass bureaucrats will never state the ugly truths. Churchill, however, didn’t worry about repercussions. He didn’t talk in euphemisms or evasions. He delivered the unvarnished facts.

The English did not want to hear, after the decimation of a whole generation in World War I, the need to arm for another war threat by the Germans in the 1930’s.

A decade later, Americans and British turned deaf ears to Churchill’s warning that their recent ally, the Soviet Union threatened the democracies of Europe. Even The Wall Street Journal—no left-wing newspaper—denounced Churchill’s Iron Curtain Address. Eleanor Roosevelt called Churchill a “war monger.”

In that same year, 1946, Churchill told Europeans gathering in an assembly in Zurich that Germany, whose armies had only recently devastated their countries, had to be welcomed back into its community for the future prosperity of Europe. Boos accompanied his unwelcome message. The Europeans were appalled that their World War II hero would suggest such an idea.

For those who ask what relevance Churchill’s predictions have to today’s world, they should keep in mind that he predicted the Energy Crisis in 1929. He warned that the West needed new sources of fuel to escape from being beholden to the oil oligarchies of the Middle East. And then in 1957, this writer heard Churchill state that the U.N. was a feckless organization, maimed by a congenital deformity—the Soviet veto— and that it was increasingly dominated by one-party autocratic states. One only has to note President Calderon who stuffs ballot boxes and jails dissidents in Columbia while his country serves on the U.N. Human Rights Commission; or even worse, President Assad of Syria who is slaughtering thousands of his citizens while his country joins Columbia on that Human Rights Commission that is attacking the U.S. for, among other things, using capital punishment and the many African-Americans serving in prison.

On his 138th birthday, the world should not only recognize Churchill’s championship of freedom, but also study his many predictions that still endanger our liberties and freedoms.

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