By Floyd and Mary Beth Brown

Costs are about to TRIPLE under Obamacare

First, we learned that a $500 billion cut in Medicare will dramatically affect the quality and quantity of healthcare available to America’s senior citizens.

Grandma’s access is being slashed to add illegal immigrants and twenty-somethings into the insurance system. However, this revelation pales in relation to what we heard this week.

Here’s the latest shock: Average current health insurance premiums with likely triple under Obamacare.

The new data comes from a well regarded, state-by-state study conducted for WellPoint, Inc. The most dramatic premium boosts will hit young people. These are the actual individuals that often opt out of insurance plans now.

Reaction from the Obama White House was swift and harsh. Linda Douglass, Obama’s healthcare spokesperson, had the audacity to compare the health insurance firm with tobacco companies. Since the White House refuses to argue the facts, they instead turned to using one of their favorite tactics, which is demonizing any voices of dissent.

The reason for the dramatic insurance premium increases is the result of Obamacare regulations. First cause is the mandate that insurance companies take any customer. Insurance traditionally is an actuarial business that rates different customers based on risk factors. This is the reason a driver aged 19 with two speeding tickets pays more for auto insurance than a customer aged 35 with no speeding tickets. Nineteen-year-olds have more accidents. Therefore they pose more risk.

Traditionally, health insurance companies charged customers with risk factors and chronic illness more than young, healthy 19-year-olds. Obamacare stands the concept of insurance on its head. Since an insurance company will be forced to sell to any sick patient, the incentive to buy insurance when you are healthy decreases. Why not wait until you are sick; get cancer, diabetes or some other severe illness before you buy? To circumvent this problem, Obama is riddling the program with police-state mandates on healthy, younger citizens. Perverted, negative incentives such as threats of large fines and even prison time will hang over young people’s heads to force them to join and stay enrolled in Obama’s healthcare scheme. Does this sound like America to you?

Democratic leaders in Congress are seeing support slip through their fingers because Americans are learning that they will end up paying more for less-adequate care. The beneficiaries of this plan are still lobbying hard. Big business will likely dump most of their current employee-based plans and pay the less expensive tax. Big unions are facing the reality that they are going to be bankrupted by their generous membership health plans. Many want to dump their responsibilities on the new government option recently revived by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. AARP is salivating at the money they will make selling new, bigger Medicare-gap plans after the current program is gutted.

These powerful lobbies are the driving force for change. Individual family finances will pay the higher costs and see no benefit.

There is still time to kill this wrongheaded plan and replace it with reforms that will truly work. Selling insurance across state lines will increase competition and lower prices. Tort reform that eliminates outrageous judgments in malpractice cases will get lawyers out of medicine; this will result in eliminating billions currently being spent in the name of defensive medicine.

Insurance can work, but the costly mandates and regulations already choking the healthcare system are a big barrier to cutting costs.

Free markets deliver to Americans consumer goods, groceries, veterinary services, and even plastic surgery at affordable prices with little government meddling.

Let the free market price and correct the distortions currently in the health care system.

Government has bankrupted Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Social Security, Medicare and the U.S. Postal Service. Let’s not let the politicians destroy the greatest healthcare delivery system in the world.

By Eve Zibel, Fox News

Obama touts solar plant that costs $1.5 million to power 3,000 homes

President Obama visited the small town of Arcadia, Florida today, population 6, 671, to tout solar energy and efforts of the Economic Recovery Act to bring jobs to Florida, but Republicans on the hill say the President’s proposals for energy and in particular solar energy, won’t do enough for the 11.2% unemployed people in Florida.

The President visited DeSoto Next Generation Solar Energy center, billed as the largest solar photovoltaic center in the country. The company’s 90,500 solar panels are able to generate about 42,000 megawatt hours each year, but the project cost $150 million to build and only provides power to 3000 homes, prompting critics to say the administration doesn’t have an overall energy strategy.

In remarks after a tour of the plant, the President blasted his opponents on energy reform, saying, "The closer we get to this new energy future, the harder the opposition’s going to fight. The more we’re going to hear from special interests and lobbyists in Washington whose interests are contrary to the interests of the American people, " Obama said. "There are those who are also going to suggest that moving toward a clean energy future is going to somehow harm the economy or lead to fewer jobs. And they’re going to argue that we should do nothing, stand pat, do less or delay action yet again. I just want to point out, we’ve heard such arguments before. We’ve engaged in this same type of debate a lot of times through our history. People don’t like change, and they get nervous about it."

But, Washington Representative Doc Hastings, the Ranking Member on the House Natural Resources committee said it’s not nerves that are causing pause on Capitol Hill. It’s the plan itself, and the taxes it will impose on Americans that are the real problem. “Another day, another empty promise from the President to support ‘comprehensive’ energy development," Hastings said in a statement to Fox News.

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By Floyd and Mary Beth Brown

Obama’s new bundle of regulations will only increase costs

How much is this going to cost? This is a simple and reasonable question to ask before signing a document stating that you are responsible and will pay any amount not covered by your medical insurance when having a procedure done. Try asking it the next time you have an x-ray (or any other procedure.) A family member of ours did recently when he was experiencing back pain, and when registering, asked the woman working at the radiology company how much an x-ray of the back cost. The x-ray was ordered by his doctor. The woman said she couldn’t tell him the price because it varied and the rate was going to be worked out later with his insurance company. “Can’t you give me a rough idea how much an x-ray of the back costs?” he said. “Isn’t there a set rate for each procedure that I can see?” “No,” she said, “there is no way of knowing the price right now. I’m sorry.”

Just imagine having any other service or purchasing a product and being told you couldn’t know the cost beforehand, although you are required to blindly sign a legally binding contract saying you will pay whatever they later decide to charge you. That’s unethical and ridiculous you’d say. Well, welcome to the American health care system.

Not letting a consumer know the price before a service is performed would not be allowed in any other business except health care. This is a major reason the system and its escalating costs are out of control and so high. Medicare patients are charged one amount, Medicaid another and each private insurance company and individual policies are charged yet another rate for the very same procedure.

As an expert in antitrust and healthcare, Professor Clark Havighurst of Duke University Law School often speaks of restoring the “price tags” to health care. In The Wall Street Journal, Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. wrote regarding Havighurst’s theory: “Now that’s a concept that the public could actually make sense of.”

“The public is not as dumb as it’s made out to be,” says Jenkins. After the public options died in the Senate Finance Committee, Jenkins claims, “What’s left is a package of ‘reforms’ that are mere trite extensions of what we’ve been doing for decades… piling up mandates on private insurers and then lying that this somehow isn’t driving up the cost of health insurance,” and “piling up subsidies for health consumption and then lying that this isn’t responsible for runaway health-care spending.”

The proposal to amend the anti-trust McCarran-Fergusson Act, Professor Havighurst says, leads to no improvement because at the end of bill, it “declares that state regulators would retain authority to engage in ‘information gathering and rate setting.’” It boils down to simple common sense. Havighurst wrote in a 2006 Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, “[F]ew things are more foreseeable that that a trade or profession empowered to regulate itself will produce anticompetitive regulations.”

Let’s just follow common sense. Allow health care to act according to the free market, like most other businesses.

Obama should been forthright in sharing with Americans how resources would be allocated if not by price. The left’s single-payer system still won’t allow consumers to have pricing information so some other mechanism with be used to ration care. A common sense approach would require all healthcare providers to post charges in the waiting room. But instead of putting the price tags on health care so consumers could decide instead, Obamacare complicates and adds new layers to an overly complex and monopolistic system. Obama has botched an opportunity for real progress.

President Obama, don’t under estimate the American public. We’re not dummies; we like to use common sense in making decisions for ourselves. Free the marketplace — don’t increase regulations.