What Changed?

On December 26th, Byron York posted an article at The Washington Examiner about building a border wall (or border fence).

The article reports:

In 2006 Congress passed the Secure Fence Act, which mandated the construction of multilayer pedestrian fencing along about 600 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border. It passed with big, bipartisan majorities: 283 votes in the House and 80 in the Senate. Some top Democrats who are still in the Senate today supported the fence: Chuck Schumer, Dianne Feinstein, Ron Wyden, Debbie Stabenow, and Sherrod Brown.

Just the next year, Congress made clear it didn’t really mean what it said. The new law was amended to make fence building optional.

In 2013, Congress got back into the fence game. The Gang of Eight comprehensive immigration reform bill included something called the “Southern Border Fencing Strategy.” It called for 700 miles of at least single-layer pedestrian fencing along the border. It wasn’t a standalone measure; the fence was to be part of a broader package of border security measures alongside provisions that would create a process by which the nation’s 11 million illegal immigrants would ultimately gain a path to citizenship.

I wonder if the Democrats would be so anxious to provide a path to citizenship for illegals if the illegals who were granted citizenship were not allowed to vote for ten years or so.

The article lists the Senators who voted for the Southern Border Fencing Strategy:

With citizenship in the deal — even citizenship that would take a decade to achieve in some cases — Democrats were fully on board for a border barrier. The Gang of Eight bill passed in the Senate with 68 votes, including unanimous Democratic support. Name any Democrat who is in the Senate today who was there for that 2013 vote — Schumer, Durbin, Murray, Baldwin, Bennet, Blumenthal, Brown, Cantwell, Cardin, Casey, Coons, Feinstein, Gillibrand, Hirono, Kaine, Klobuchar, Leahy, Manchin, Menendez, Merkley, Murphy, Reed, Sanders, Shaheen, Stabenow, Tester, Warner, Warren, Whitehouse, Wyden — name any, and they voted for the bill that included the Southern Border Fencing Strategy.

Now the government is 1/4 shut down (not necessarily a bad thing) because those same Senators oppose building a border wall (which they can call a fence if they like). What changed?

Score One For Consumers

On Wednesday The Western Journal posted an article with the following heading, “Trump Signs Law To Lower Drug Prices, Ends Gag Orders Against Pharmacists.”

The article reports:

Currently, insurers and pharmacy benefit managers use the gag clauses to “forbid pharmacists from proactively telling consumers if their prescription would cost less if they paid for it out-of-pocket rather than using their insurance plan,” according to a press release from Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins, the bill’s sponsor.

Trump also signed Democratic Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow’s Know the Lowest Price Act, which “prohibits Medicare drug plans from putting a gag clause on a pharmacy in their contracts,” according to CNN.

The Patients’ Right To Know Drug Prices Act would lead to “a slight decrease in federal revenues,” according to the Congressional Budget Office.

That decrease could be offset by another provision in the bill, reported Politico.

Collins’s bill also targets “pay-for-delay,” a tactic where a brand drug company pays a generic manufacturer to withhold a product that would compete with the brand drug for market share.

Closing this loophole could save consumers and taxpayers money, according to the Federal Trade Commission.

“Who would think that using your debit card to buy your [prescription] drugs could be less expensive than using your insurance card? It’s counterintuitive. Americans have the right to know which payment method provides the most savings when purchasing their prescription drugs,” Collins tweeted Wednesday after Trump signed the bill.

If consumers pay for drugs out of their pockets because it is cheaper rather than relying on the insurance companies to pay for these drugs, eventually the insurance companies will be able to charge less for their drug policies, saving consumers money.

I can give you a personal example of this. When living in another state, I was prescribed a maintenance drug that my husband’s medical insurance covered at the time. My co-pay was $50 a month. When I moved to North Carolina, my health insurance did not cover the drug. My out-of-pocket cost was $50. Hmmm.

We need across-the-board reform in the area of medical insurance. The first thing to do might be to get the government as far away from that area of the economy as possible. There are fairly simple ways to make sure that everyone has access to healthcare (everyone has access by law to emergency rooms regardless of their ability to pay). It is time to tell the government to find something else to do.

Stuck On Stupid

Brietbart reported last week that one of the changes made in the tax bill when it went to the Senate was to continue to allow non-citizens to collect tax money from the government.

The article reports:

Rep. Luke Messer (R-IN) made sure that a fix to this long-standing discrepancy was included in the House version of the tax bill. When the bill came out of chairman Kevin Brady’s (R-TX) House Ways and Means Committee, it included the language Messer originally inserted, demanding a credit claimant include “the taxpayer’s Social Security number on the return of tax for such taxable year.” This language would have blocked illegal aliens, who lack real SSNs, from claiming the lucrative benefit.

Yet when the Senate marked up the bill, the language was tweaked to allow some illegals to continue to claim the benefit. The text of the version the Senate eventually passed reads, “No credit shall be allowed under this section to a taxpayer with respect to any qualifying child unless the taxpayer includes the name and Social Security number of such qualifying child on the return of tax for the taxable year” (emphasis added).

The article explains:

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996 (PRWOA) expressly provides that illegal aliens are “not eligible for any Federal public benefit.” But as Jan Ting of the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) has explained at length, this benefit has continued to be available to illegals because the IRS has interpreted the ambiguity of the language of the current tax code to make no distinction between U.S. citizens and legal residents and claimants who have no right to be in the United States. A 2011 Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration report suggests credits like these are putting billions of dollars in the hands of illegals. It was this situation that led to Messer and others attempting to fix the loophole.

CIS’s Ting, a law professor, sounded the alarm Monday that the Senate version had stepped drastically away from the House intent to keep the child tax credit from illegal aliens. Asked by Breitbart News if there was any plausible motive in the Senate’s change in language other than to benefit illegal aliens, Ting replied, “It’s a mystery to me. Why should we funnel taxpayer dollars to illegal aliens?”

Notably, even the Senate version’s language is an improvement to the existing law in keeping federal benefits from illegals. Under the altered version, at least illegal aliens with illegal alien children who are not covered by DACA will be unable to claim the child tax credit.

In 2015, I posted the following from the DC Clothesline:

Sen. Jeff Sessions proposed an amendment, which would prevent illegal aliens from receiving the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC)  and child credit.

…In the last year with complete records, 2010, the amount of fraudulent payments hit 4.2 billion dollars and all tax credits combined cost about 7.6 billion last year.

Democrats who voted against the amendment were:  Bernie Sanders, Debbie Stabenow,  Sens. Patty Murray, Ron Wyden, Sheldon Whitehouse, Jeff Merkley, Mark Warner, Tammy Baldwin, Tim Kaine and Angus King.

…Debbie Stabenow, who is one of many democratic women with IQs in single digits said she doesn’t believe illegal aliens are collecting federal benefits even though the idea came from the Treasury Inspector General who stated unequivocally that illegals are collecting benefits was right in front of her.

The amendment failed with unanimous support of the republicans on the committee.

Is the Senate trying to bankrupt the country? Why are we giving this money to people who are here illegally while our veterans are living on the streets?

Let’s Give Away More Of Taxpayers’ Money

Sometimes you wonder if Congress were spending their own money, would they be a little more careful with it?

On Saturday, The DC Clothesline reported that the Democrats on the Senate Budget Committee voted unanimously to allow illegal immigrants to receive Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and child credit. Note the words “illegal immigrants.”

The article reports:

Sen. Jeff Sessions proposed an amendment, which would prevent illegal aliens from receiving the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC)  and child credit.

…In the last year with complete records, 2010, the amount of fraudulent payments hit 4.2 billion dollars and all tax credits combined cost about 7.6 billion last year.

Democrats who voted against the amendment were:  Bernie Sanders, Debbie Stabenow,  Sens. Patty Murray, Ron Wyden, Sheldon Whitehouse, Jeff Merkley, Mark Warner, Tammy Baldwin, Tim Kaine and Angus King.

…Debbie Stabenow, who is one of many democratic women with IQs in single digits said she doesn’t believe illegal aliens are collecting federal benefits even though the idea came from the Treasury Inspector General who stated unequivocally that illegals are collecting benefits was right in front of her.

The amendment failed with unanimous support of the republicans on the committee.

Why don’t we either return illegal aliens to their home countries or take steps to prevent them from taking money out of the pockets of Americans. I don’t mind giving someone a hand-up when needed, but we have reached the point where illegal aliens are committing fraud to take money from Americans. That has got to stop.

It Would Have Been Nice If They Had Read The Bill Before They Passed It

Breitbart.com reported yesterday that many of the Democrats who formerly supported ObamaCare are now working to undo some of its major parts.

The article reports:

With some of their most influential constituent groups facing onerous tax increases that are slated to help fund the law’s mandates and regulations, Senators like Al Franken (D-MN), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Charles Schumer (D-NY), Patty Murray (D-WA), John Kerry (D-MA), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), and others — all of whom voted in favor of the law — are aiming to delay or outright repeal parts of ObamaCare.

The araticle concludes:

…Threatened by these cost-containment provisions, these members of the health care industry are now intent on eliminating this panel, again using “Republican” terminology, like, “The AMA will work to stop the IPAB from causing this type of double-jeopardy situation for physicians and compromising access to care for seniors and baby-boomers.”

It appears many of the groups that originally supported ObamaCare want to be able to have their cake and eat it, too, and Senate Democrats seem poised to allow them to do just that. The question is, without these sources of funding for all the ObamaCare mandates, and without cost-containment, as intrinsically horrific as mechanisms like the IPAB may be, how will the law be implemented at all?

Couldn’t this have all been avoided by reading and studying the bill in the first place?

When Sarah Palin talked about death panels, she was ridiculed. Now some Democrats have realized the danger to senior citizens that death panels in ObamaCare represent. What ObamaCare has essentially done is take money away from Medicare and put it in Medicaid. What this does is simply take away care from senior citizens and add money to poverty programs. I am not opposed to poverty programs, but it seems as if many of them have morphed into alternative career choices for people who do not want to work. It is time to re-evaluate how and where American tax dollars are being spent. Government spending has become a giant hole into which American workers are expected to put their earnings. We need to examine where that money is going and what impact it is having on our culture and society.

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