Morning Bell: The Obamacare Rationing Threat To Your Mammograms

Last week, the United States Preventive Services Task Force issued new guidelines recommending that women in their 40s no longer have annual mammograms and that women ages 50 to 74 have them only every other year, instead of annually. The recommendations were highly controversial, and by week’s end most health insurers and the federal Medicare program said they would ignore the panel’s recommendation and continue covering annual mammograms. This is as it should be: the federal government collects information and makes recommendations, and Americans are then free to consult their health care providers, ignoring the government if they so choose. The problem is that Obamacare would forever change this relationship.
Both the House and Senate versions of Obamacare create detailed new federal regulations that micromanage all health insurance decisions. Specifically, Section 2713 of the Senate Health Bill would give the recommendations of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force the force of law by requiring all health insurance plans to provide coverage (with no patient co-pays) for “items or services that have in effect a rating of “A” or “B” [recommended] in the current recommendations of the United States Preventive Services Task Force.”

H1N1 Vaccine Not a Killer: WHO

The World Health Organization said on Thursday the H1N1 vaccine had been cleared of blame for 41 deaths which health authorities worldwide had investigated after suspicions they might have been caused by the inoculation.
The U.N. agency reaffirmed that the pandemic vaccine is as safe as the seasonal flu vaccine used for more than 60 years. It also voiced concern that some pregnant women and others at risk were shunning it because of a fear of side-effects.
"No new safety issue has been identified from reports issued to date ... Reporting so far reconfirms that the pandemic flu vaccine is as safe as the seasonal flu vaccine," Marie-Paule Kieny, WHO's top vaccine expert, told a telephone conference.

Morning Bell: The Impending Obama Borrow and Spend Disaster

Speaking at Georgetown University on April 14th, President Barack Obama promised: “We cannot rebuild this economy on the same pile of sand. We must build our house upon a rock. We must lay a new foundation for growth and prosperity — a foundation that will move us from an era of borrow and spend to one where we save and invest.” Nice words. But the Obama administration actions have produced all sand and no rock. From the Wall Street Bailout, to Cash for Clunkers, to Obama’s failed stimulus, this administration has been all about borrowing and spending. And as the New York Times reports today, it will not be long before we begin paying a real price for these policies:
With the national debt now topping $12 trillion, the White House estimates that the government’s tab for servicing the debt will exceed $700 billion a year in 2019, up from $202 billion this year, even if annual budget deficits shrink drastically. Other forecasters say the figure could be much higher.
In concrete terms, an additional $500 billion a year in interest expense would total more than the combined federal budgets this year for education, energy, homeland security and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

House panel wants answers on faulty stimulus data

Members of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee will ask questions Thursday about faulty data on the Obama administration's Recovery.gov Web site.
The site is fixing errors that appeared to show hundreds of millions of stimulus dollars were spent in nonexistent congressional districts, the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board said Wednesday.
The errors, first reported by ABC News, were seen on Recovery.gov summary pages breaking down how many stimulus dollars were received in each state's congressional districts.
Arizona's page, for example, showed the state's 52nd, 15th and 86th congressional districts received hundreds of thousands of dollars in stimulus money, according to CNN affiliate KNXV. However, no such districts exist in Arizona, which has only eight congressional districts.

Obama Tries to Deflect Fort Hood Attention

The Obama administration has a clear agenda here:

1) Stop people from focusing on how his administration permitted the worst domestic terror attack in eight years.

2) Avoid a national airing of how liberal policies, restraints on the intelligence community, political correctness in the armed forces, might have inhibited the military from reining in Hasan.

3) Re-ignite a firestorm on the left and abroad against the aggressive anti-terror policies of the Bush administration.

Making all this particularly important for Obama are his other political needs.

As he likely decides to send more troops to Afghanistan and eyes abandoning the "public option" to secure Senate passage of his health-care plan, Obama has to rebuild his credibility on the left.

A public circus that focuses on waterboarding and interrogations could be just what he wants and needs.

Morning Bell: Doc Fix Digs Debt Deeper

Yesterday at 3:00 p.m. ET, the Treasury Department updated its calculation of the U.S. National Debt to: $12,031,299,186,290.07. That $12 trillion record high comes just eight months after it hit $11 trillion and is only expected to rise faster considering the federal deficit for 2009 was over $1.4 trillion. And what is the leftist majority of Congress going to do tomorrow about these skyrocketing deficits? They are going to pile on the spending faster.
The issue at hand is the congressionally created formula for annually updating the payments doctors receive for treating Medicare patients. The centrally planned price fixing formula was designed to control health care costs by tying doctor payments to the overall growth rate of the economy. Problem is the realities of supply and demand in the health care sector have pushed doctor’s fees higher than the formula allows for. So instead of going back and fixing the formula (or heaven forbid introducing some market based reforms into Medicare), every year Congress passes short-term fixes rescinding the scheduled rate cuts.
Fixing the problem permanently has long been the top legislative priority for the American Medical Association, and in exchange for their endorsement of Obamacare, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) promised them she would do so. Problem is Pelosi and co. could not figure out how to game the Congressional Budget Office’s numbers to show that Obamacare was deficit neutral and pay for the so called “doc fix” at the same time. So they solved the problem by pretending the “doc fix” was not health care reform. But to keep the AMA happy they took the unusual step of combining the debate rules for Obamacare and the doc fix.
As a result, Congress is set to debate the bill tomorrow for just one hour, and no amendments will be allowed. In other words, even if conservative Democrats or Republicans wanted to propose an amendment that would pay for the doctor’s higher payments, they are prevented from doing so. According to the CBO, just the ten year cost of the legislation will be $210 billion, but the damage does not end there. Medicare is a never ending entitlement program, so the real pain caused by the left’s free spending will be felt for decades to come. According to the latest report from the Medicare Trustees, the 75-year cost of allowing doctor payments to match the percentage change in the medical economic index is $1.9 trillion in more debt.

440 Phantom Congressional Districts Get $6.4 Billion According to Recovery.gov

The government’s Web site that is supposed to tell taxpayers how their stimulus dollars are being spent, and which spends $84 million per year to do so, shows that $6.4 billion of the stimulus has been spent in 440 congressional districts that don’t exist, according to a report by the Franklin Center, as reported by Watchdog.org.
The site, Recovery.gov, reports, for instance, that North Dakota’s 99th Congressional District has received $2 million in stimulus funding. But North Dakota has only one congressional district. The nation’s capital now contains 35 congressional districts, according to Recovery.gov.
For those keeping score at home, there are really only 435 congressional districts, so adding 440 new ones effectively doubles the size of the House of Representatives. By the way, Recovery.gov also reports that the $6.4 billion spent in those districts has created 30,000 jobs, which works out to almost $225,000 per job created. Various news reports, however, show that many of the estimates of “jobs created or saved” are bogus, so that number, too is in doubt.

Morning Bell: The Fake Jobs of Obama’s Failed Stimulus

Forget everything bad you’ve ever heard about President Barack Obama’s $787 economic stimulus. Combing through the data on the $18 million Recovery.gov website you’ll find tons of Obama stimulus success stories from across the country. In Minnesota’s 57th Congressional District, 35 jobs have been saved or created using $404,340 in stimulus funds. In New Mexico’s 22nd Congressional District, 25 jobs have been saved or created using $61,000 in stimulus cash. And in Arizona’s fighting 15th Congressional District, 30 jobs have been saved or created with just $761,420 in federal stimulus spending.
The it-would-be-funny-if-it-weren’t-our-tax-dollars-at-stake punch line here is that none of the above Congressional Districts actually exist. Yet those jobs “created or saved” claims still sit on the Obama administration’s official “transparency and accountability” website Recovery.gov. As the Washington Examiner’s David Freddoso points out, it would have been nearly costless for the Recovery.gov site designers to limit the input fields so that non-existent Congressional Districts never made it into the public domain, but for whatever reason the Obama administration chose otherwise. Defending the fake data on his website, Recovery.gov Communications Director Ed Pound told ABC News: “We report what the recipients submit to us. Some recipients clearly don’t know what congressional district they live in, so they appear to be just throwing in any number. We expected all along that recipients would make mistakes on their congressional districts, on job numbers, on award amounts, and so on. Human beings make mistakes.”

Morning Bell: Big Labor Is Bankrupting Our Country

Last month when the White House released its visitor log for the first six months of the Obama presidency, one name appeared far more often than any other: Service Employee International Union (SEIU) President Andrew Stern. Stern has every right to expect to be welcome in the Obama White House. He has repeatedly bragged about the fact that under his leadership, the SEIU spent $60.7 million to elect Barack Obama president. Stern and Obama collectively support ever expanding federal government programs and state government bailouts which are rapidly bankrupting our country.
Unlike his predecessor, John Sweeney, who came up the ranks after starting with the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, Stern entered the labor movement when the SEIU organized his shop when he was working as a welfare case worker for the State of Pennsylvania. Stern’s public sector entrance into labor is by no means an anomaly. In fact, for the first time ever in American history, preliminary estimates of union membership for 2009 show that most union members now work for either the local, state, or federal government.

Chanos: Huge China Crash Coming

To the growing number of China bears, add Kynikos hedge fund manager Jim Chanos, who is reportedly shorting the entire Chinese economy.

Chanos, among the first to see through Enron’s web of accounting tricks, told Politico.com he sees a similar situation evolving in China — starting with the fact that the $4.3 trillion Chinese economy is under-performing despite a $900 billion stimulus program.

Also, China seems to be cooking its books, making claims such as a huge surge in car sales while gasoline sales stay flat.

Finally, there’s a concern that China may have too much capacity to produce too many goods for too few buyers, notes financial journalist Ed Conway.

“China has grown to its current size, as do most ‘young’ economies, by exporting cheap goods to richer countries. . . (resulting in) the biggest trade surplus in history,” Conway writes in the UK Telegraph.

Chinese leaders, Conway points out, are doing whatever they can to keep the value of their currency low.

“Such a policy made sense when China had an economy that was relatively underdeveloped, and was trying to shield nascent exporters from volatility; but now, by keeping assets artificially cheap, it serves to exacerbate the bubble that is building up as a result of those low US interest rates,” Conway writes.

This, combined with trying to pump up the economy further by channeling cheap credit to companies, “could hardly be a more reliable recipe for an asset bubble,” Conway says.

Neighbor: Fort Hood suspect emptied his apartment

An Army psychiatrist suspected of opening fire on fellow soldiers at Fort Hood cleaned out his apartment in the days before the rampage that left 13 people dead, a neighbor said Friday.
The neighbor, Patricia Villa, said Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan came over to her apartment Wednesday and Thursday and offered her some items, including a new Quran, saying he was going to be deployed on Friday. She wasn't sure if he was going to Iraq or Afghanistan.

Soldiers who witnessed the rampage reported that the gunman shouted "Allahu Akbar!" — an Arabic phrase for "God is great!" — before opening fire, said Lt. Gen. Robert Cone, the base commander. He said officials had not yet confirmed that Hasan made the comment before the shooting spree.

US unemployment hits 10pc for first time since Ronald Reagan was in power

Worse-than-expected data from the Bureau of Labour Statistics showed that the unemployment rate touched 10.2pc at the end of October, higher than the 9.8pc rate at the end of September, and greater than the 9.9pc rate economists had been expecting.
It is the first time since April 1983 that unemployment has surpassed the politically-sensitive 10pc threshold, a threshold that makes it even more likely that the Federal Reserve will hold interest rates at current record lows for some time.