It Can’t Happen Here, Right?

ObamaCare will be better than anything that has already been tried in other countries because we have the “best and brightest” ever working on it. Right? Sure, Obama has admitted targeting Medicare for “savings” but things will be even better for seniors. Right? Of course, Obama has publicly stated that maybe seniors are better off getting pills rather than expensive surgery since that is the sheer genius that is ObamaCare since it will be so much better than what we have now. Right?

Because ObamaCare will be even better than the British National Health Service!

Right.

Purge of nurses promised after report reveals shocking cruelty suffered by 1m NHS patients

Bad nurses will be purged from the NHS after a report detailed shocking cruelty towards the elderly.
The study by the Patients’ Association said up to a million people had suffered poor care over the past five years.

It gave harrowing examples of ‘cruel’ and ‘demeaning’ treatment, including patients left lying in soiled bedclothes, having personal alarms confiscated and having to go without food or drink.

The Government’s chief nursing officer, Christine Beasley, said nurses who offer very poor levels of care should be struck off the medical register and banned from working in the NHS.

How very, very reassuring it is that nurses who offer “very poor” levels of care will be sent off to find other careers. From the careful wording, nurses who only offer “poor” levels of care are breathing a sigh of relief and will be able to continue abusing seniors for fun and profit.

And the ones providing “appalling” levels of care are laughing. 

It can’t happen here, right? We have the best and brightest working on it and the personal pledge of Obama that this will be the one plan that will cut costs, raise care levels, make everyone happy and give ponies to ever, single American!

Yeah, right.

Meet the future, America.

It can’t happen here.

Right.

Dominoes

The FDIC has reported some truly dismal numbers:

The agency reported that the banking industry lost $3.7 billion in the second quarter amid a surge in bad loans made to home builders, commercial real estate developers and small and midsize businesses. Its deposit insurance fund dropped 20 percent, to $10.4 billion, its lowest level in nearly 16 years. And the number of “problem banks” increased to 416, from 305 in the first quarter, and is expected to remain high….

…The bulk of that decline comes from additional money that the agency has set aside to cover the cost of bank failures, and Ms. Bair said the fund had ample resources to make sure that insured depositors would not lose money. But the levels are so low that F.D.I.C. officials said Thursday that they would consider imposing a special assessment on the banks, on top of elevated insurance fees, toward the end of the third quarter. Through similar actions, it added about $9.1 billion to the fund in the second quarter.

In other words, without the special assessments, the FDIC would be very nearly completely broke right now. Now the government will not let the FDIC fail, so that isn’t anything to worry about. However, any special assessments made against the banks will dry up that much money that could have been loaned out by the banks.

That will continue to hobble the economy far into the future. That is why we are still very much in the woods, economically, right now. We also have not seen the Friday bank failures yet – and I’ll bet there will be some. Which means the FDIC funds will be depleted even further by Monday.

But as more banks fail and more consumer loans go sour and still more banks fail because of souring consumer loans and more credit is withdrawn from the market to shore up funds to support failed banks at some point we are going to hit the wall.

That is what I am worried about right now. There is much, much more in the pipeline. We are not in anything that really looks like a recovery – and will not be for some time to come.

Punishing Poll Numbers

Rasmussen reports that a flat majority of Americans now oppose the health care “reform” efforts. These are dismal numbers for Democrats:

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey show that 43% of voters nationwide favor the plan working its way through Congress while 53% are opposed. Those figures are virtually identical to results from two weeks ago.

As has been true since the debate began, those opposed to the congressional overhaul feel more strongly about the legislation than supporters. Forty-three percent (43%) now Strongly Oppose the legislation while 23% Strongly Favor it. Those figures, too, are similar to results from earlier in August.

While supporters of the reform effort say it is needed to help reduce the cost of health care, 52% of voters believe it will have the opposite effect and lead to higher costs. Just 17% believe the plans now in Congress will reduce costs. This is a critical point at a time when voters see deficit reduction as more important than health care reform.

Additionally, by a 50% to 23% margin, voters believe the proposed reforms would make the quality of care worse rather than better. Voter skepticism of Congress remains high. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer recently penned an article advocating health care reform, but most voters were skeptical about the benefits they claim would result from its passage.

The ugly fact is that the economy is still in trouble – despite the cheerful chirping of the still Obama-infatuated media. Fact: GDP withered again last quarter.  

The pace of economic decline in the second quarter slowed at an annual rate of 1%, according to the government’s revised reading on gross domestic product. It was unchanged from a previous estimate.

Don’t you just love that very clever wording? Bottom line – GDP was contracting. That the train wreck is happening more slowly than it was is hardly a fun bedtime story.

Fact: Unemployment is growing:

There were 570,000 initial jobless claims filed in the week ended Aug. 22, down 10,000 from a revised-up 580,000 the previous week, the Labor Department said in a weekly report…..

….The government said 6,133,000 people filed continuing claims in the week ended Aug. 15, the most recent data available. That’s down 119,000 from the preceding week’s revised 6,252,000 claims.

That is still almost 600,000 people filing for the first time. A 10,000 person drop is negligible. The really bad news is the number who dropped off the rolls. Does anyone really think those 119,000 all went back to work when almost 600,000 filed? The vast majority of those people lost benefits and became unpersons as far as being counted.

Into this mess, Obama and the left want to spend trillions more of money we don’t have on things people most definitely do not want.

Keep calling, keep up the pressure. This has to be stopped before we are utterly ruined.