Posts Tagged ‘ObamaCare’

Dear Texas State Congressional District 114 Voters: Please Retire Jason Villalba

Sunday, February 28th, 2016

Remember state Rep. Jason Villalba, the supergenius who tried to make it illegal for bloggers and gun owners to photograph the police? There’s just enough news on him to warrant a separate post (and plea to his Republican constituents that he be replaced).

  • First there’s the fact that Villalba opposes police pension reform. Because California is such a great model to follow there.
  • A group associated with State Sen. Don Huffines has laid down a whole bunch of attack mailers over Villalba’s enthusiasm over Texas expanding ObamaCare. Because Villalba evidently had a brain freeze and forgot he was supposed to pretend he was a Republican.
  • No wonder Villalba received an F rating on fiscal responsibility.
  • Language, Villalba, language! (Hat tip: Push Junction.)

  • Villalba has a primary challenger in Dan Morenoff, a Federalist Society member who would be a vast improvement over Jason Villalba. Then again, “X would be a better state representative than Jason Villalba” is an exceptionally target-rich environment…

    Trump ♥ ObamaCare

    Saturday, February 20th, 2016

    Turns out that Trump loves the ObamaCare mandate. Then he said Obama lied making all those promises about ObamaCare…right after making similar promises about his nebulous, pie-in-thes-sky “much better than ObamaCare, less expensive than Obamacare” health care plan that he fails to elucidate.

    So he likes ObamaCare’s unrealistic promises, and the ObamaCare mandate, but hates the name “ObamaCare.”

    Presumably TrumpCare is paid for by taxing unicorns.

    And this is the same Trump that slammed Ted Cruz for supporting (before he became a Senator) John Roberts, who ruled the mandate, that Trump says he likes, as unconstitutional. It’s enough to make your head spin, if it weren’t already spinning from all of Trump’s previous spin.

    “I’m angry, so I’m going to vote for a reality TV star with no core conservative principles who makes unrealistic promises!” seems a rather self-defeating strategy for Republican voters.

    More on the subject.

    LinkSwarm for February 17, 2016

    Wednesday, February 17th, 2016

    Early voting started in Texas Monday, which means I’m way behind on covering state and local races. Oh well, maybe later this week…

  • Hillary Clinton didn’t do as badly as expected in New Hampshire. She did worse.

    Sanders’s margin of victory — 60 percent to 39 percent — was the largest ever by a Democrat who wasn’t a sitting president. It was a come-from-behind win: Eight months ago, Sanders was at 9 percent and Clinton held a 46-point advantage. And Sanders overperformed the polls. Only 1 of the last 15 polls had him above 60 percent; the Real Clear Politics average in New Hampshire had him at 54.5 percent going into the vote.

    Then there are the crosstabs. The exit polling for Clinton was brutal. Sanders won men by 35 points; he won women by 11. He won voters under the age of 30 by 67 points. People expect that of Sanders and his children’s crusade. Clinton took home senior citizens, 54 percent to 45 percent. People expect that of Clinton’s boomers. But in the big band of middle-aged Democrats, ages 45 to 64 (who made up 42 percent of the electorate), Sanders beat Clinton 54 percent to 45 percent. He beat her among Democrats with a high school diploma or less; he beat her among Democrats with postgraduate degrees. Among people who’d voted in a Democratic primary before, Sanders won by 16 points; among first-time voters, he won by 57. He won self-identified “moderate” voters by 20 points.

    Clinton made gun control a substantial part of her pitch in New Hampshire. Sanders won voters who own guns by 40 points. But he won voters who don’t own guns by 14. He even won voters who said that terrorism was their number one concern.

    The biggest problem for Clinton, however, came in the candidate-perception categories. The second-most important quality voters said they wanted in a candidate was someone who “cares.” Sanders won these voters by 65 points. The most important quality people said they wanted was “honesty.” Sanders took those people home 92 to 6. Look at that again. When asked “Is Clinton honest and trustworthy?” 53 percent of all voters — not just Sanders voters, but everyone casting a Democratic ballot — said “no.”

  • Bernie Sanders has more than ten times the number of staffers on the ground in South Carolina than Clinton does.
  • Lefty at The Nation: “Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Deserve the Black Vote.”
  • The topic is the Clintons, so it’s time for another glimpse of Good Maureen Dowd: “It turned out that female voters seem to be looking at Hillary as a candidate rather than as a historical imperative. And she’s coming up drastically short on trustworthiness.”
  • Ted Cruz is very electable. “Cruz is electable because he’s the real thing.” (Hat tip: Conservatives 4 Ted Cruz.)
  • People who were actually paying attention during the Gang of 8 fight scoff at Marco Rubio’s assertion Cruz favored amnesty. (Hat tip: Conservatives 4 Ted Cruz.)
  • Only top Obama Administration officials with high security clearances knew about Hillary’s secret email server. And LinkedIn.
  • The NRA is saying gun-indifferent Sanders beat hoplophobe Hillary. Hmmm…
  • Remember how the Obama Administration swore up and down ObamaCare wouldn’t go to illegal aliens? Guess what?
  • I think this is quite an effective Donald Trump ad, targeting how black Americans have been hurt by illegal alien crime. Rick Perry did quite well with an ad highlighting an illegal alien who murdered a Houston police officer in his race against Bill White in 2010. Too bad too many gutless Republicans have been hesitant about running such ads for fear of being branded racists, xenophobes, etc. by the media.
  • Muslim immigrants are killing Sweden.
  • Germany to take in a half million more Islamic “refugees” in 2016. It’s like Merkel wants to destroy her own party… (Hat tip: JihadWatch.)
  • Police in the UK arrest man for criticizing Syrian “refugees” in a Facebook post. (Hat tip: JihadWatch.)
  • Boom! Headshot! (Hat tip: Moe Lane.)
  • Current law prohibits transferring prisoners from Guantanamo Bay to the U.S., and the military won’t do so until the law is changed, no matter what Obama may want.
  • “Scalia was not only finest writer ever to sit on the Court, he was one of the best rhetoricians in history.”
  • Dear naive young voters: socialism sucks in real life.
  • Behold the ideal government worker under socialism! Every bureaucrat his own Wally….
  • A look at China’s new stealth fighters.
  • China is also deploying missiles on a disputed island in the South China Sea.
  • Huge explosion at a military barracks in Turkey. Just occurred before I posted this, so details are scant.
  • The ACLU continues its long retreat from defending free speech. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Talk like Reagan.
  • Venezuela’s socialist government appears to have authorized the military to form an oil company.
  • Notes on the collapse of a tech startup. More than a grain of truth here. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
  • The Coen Brothers aren’t fans of cramming diversity for the sake of diversity into individual movies. “Not in the least!” Ethan answered. “It’s important to tell the story you’re telling in the right way, which might involve black people or people of whatever heritage or ethnicity—or it might not.”
  • Science fiction writer has book rejected by Harper Voyager because robot characters dared to voice non-PC thoughts.
  • Because driving I-35 just didn’t suck enough already, enjoy being attacked by thrown rocks.
  • LinkSwarm for February 5, 2016

    Friday, February 5th, 2016

    Presidential elections, Islamic terrorism, gun rights, crooked locksmiths: Something for (almost) everyone in your Friday LinkSwarm:

  • So why did Hillary Clinton take $675,000 for three speeches to Goldman Sachs? “That’s what they offered.” I actually like the refreshing honesty about that answer, since we already know Granny Crooked McCankles is all about the benjamins. But Hillary saying she hadn’t decided to run for President yet when she took the money? That’s just pissing on our leg and calling it rain…
  • Why is the Republican establishment willing to consider one heresy to their worldview (subsidizing the working poor) but not another (actually enforcing immigration law and securing the borders)?
  • An inside look at Boko Haram.
  • According to Donald Trump, Ted Cruz gave us ObamaCare. By voting to confirm John Roberts. Before Cruz was even in the senate. Hey, why should Ted Cruz even bother to run for President if he’s capable of time travel?
  • Remembering the genocide Muslim Turkey committed against Christian Armenians.
  • The gun rights movement continues to win victories around the country:

    To recap: Gun-control activists declared Virginia their proving ground and poured unbelievable amounts of money into a state-senate election; then they lost that election; then they bet big on executive actions instituting new gun control; they watched as those actions were not only reversed but gun rights were expanded.

    If we take Virginia as the bellwether that the gun-control activists envisioned, then gun control is dead as a 2016 issue.

  • And according to this legal paper by Instapundit Glenn Reynolds, lower courts are scrutinizing even modest post-Heller gun rights restrictions.
  • West Virginia is on the brink of becoming a right-to-work state.
  • Who knew New Hampshire had such a serious drug problem? Or that they were the hardest-drinking state in the union? (Hat tip: Jim Geraghty via his Morning Jolt.)
  • Old and Busted: “The solution to misguided speech is more speech.” The New Hotness: “Your non-liberal speech is toxic. Goodbye comments!”
  • Debunking the “BernieBro” myth social justice warrior types are trying to gin up.
  • Rick Santorum stops pretending to run for President.
  • Male yahoo employee claims illegal sex discrimination in Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s ranking system.
  • Feminists freak out over people daring to point out how just how unlikable Hillary Clinton is. Then again, when are feminists ever not freaking out?
  • How fake locksmiths are gaming Google maps to rip you off. It’s an eye-opening piece, and another reason you should join Angie’s List
  • LinkSwarm for February 1, 2016

    Monday, February 1st, 2016

    The Iowa Caucuses are today! Why they’re Monday rather than the usual Tuesday, I couldn’t tell you. (And speaking of elections, today is your last day to register to vote in the March 1 Texas primary.)

    Here’s a LinkSwarm with more than a dollop of presidential election news:

  • ObamaCare is an exercise in moving goalposts:

    Back in 2015 the CBO estimated 21 million Obamacare enrollees in 2016. They are now estimating 13 million will sign up this year. How many will actually sign up is not going to be known for another year or so, but I wouldn’t particularly bet on it being more than 21 million, and I wouldn’t particularly counsel against thinking that it’ll be less than 13 million.

    Oh, the news gets better. The original claim that 11 million people signed up for Obamacare in 2015 has likewise been revised by this report, which now apparently reports 9.5 million. And here’s something that will really reassure folks worried about our deficits: the original assumption was that there would be 15 million subsidized plans and 6 million unsubsidized ones in 2015, or 71%/29%. The actual totals were 11 million subsidized, 2 million unsubsidized, or 85%/15%. Let me put it a different way: the Obama administration has managed to somehow simultaneously drastically miss their signup goals AND do so in a way where there won’t even a commensurate savings for taxpayers.

  • “The Clintons have made careers of defying our assumptions about how low they can go.”
  • Hillary’s emails disqualify her from the presidency. “There is near certainty that at least the Russians and the Chinese but also the Iranians and North Koreans were reading all incoming and outgoing email to Hillary in real time from almost the moment she hooked up her ‘home brew’ server.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • More on the subject by Guy Benson at Townhall.
  • Bernie Sanders: The bum who wants your money. “Despite a prestigious degree, however, Sanders failed to earn a living, even as an adult. It took him 40 years to collect his first steady paycheck — and it was a government check.”
  • Republicans are more engaged in Iowa than Democrats.
  • Jim Geraghty offers up a forest of links why each of Ted Cruz, Donald Trump and Marco Rubio can win or lose tonight.
  • Ace of Spades is shocked, shocked that the Republican establishment is trying to take out Ted Cruz to help Marco Rubio.
  • Financial heavy hitter Sheldon Adelson is backing Cruz. (Hat tip: Conservatives4TedCruz.)
  • Watch Cruz turn around an Iowa farmer hostile over ethanol subsidies.
  • “If there is anyone with a chance of underperforming his 28 percent of the electorate (again, the new Register number), it is Trump. And if Trump does underperform, the question will be whether he falls enough for Cruz to catch him.” (Hat tip: Conservatives4TedCruz.)
  • Trump does poorly among Republicans with college degrees, but well among those with less education. “He is continually the candidate not only with the highest very favorable rating, but the highest very unfavorable rating. He is utterly unacceptable to a very significant portion of the Republican electorate.”
  • “Why there are so many things with titles like ‘Why I still believe Donald Trump will never be president.'”
  • “Jeb Bush kicks off 3 state farewell tour.”
  • Enivironmentalist predictions from 1970: “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • EU goes out of the way to insist that widespread sexual assault by Islamic men in Cologne had nothing to do with Islamic ‘refugees.’
  • Another day, another 100 Nigerians killed by Boko Haram.
  • Finland farked.
  • Tips for non-western immigrants to America. “Perhaps this little rhyme can help: To live here in the West, God willing, just say no to honor killing.”
  • A whole lot of hedge funds are shorting the Yuan.
  • Larry Correia reports from the SHOT show.
  • The last gunsmith. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Remembering Marvin Minsky, and how he cited Hayek in some of his work.
  • “Muslim Uber driver attacks pregnant woman’s service dog.”
  • LinkSwarm for January 22, 2016

    Friday, January 22nd, 2016

    Been a trying week. Have a Friday LinkSwarm, on me…

  • Mark Steyn reiterates his central thesis. Namely secular welfare state = low birth rates = import of Muslim immigrants = extinction of the west. “It’s Still the Demography, Stupid.”
  • Welcome to the ObamaCare gaming death spiral.
  • Krauthammer: Hillary’s email scandal is now now worse than what Snowden did, because she exposed information that was far more sensitive.
  • Mark Rich may be dead, but the Clintons are still raking in dough from his associates thanks to Clinton’s pardon of him.
  • Democrat-controlled Flint, Michigan knowingly poisons its citizens with unsafe drinking water.
  • Myth: Ted Cruz is unpopular outside the GOP: Fact: He has higher favorable ratings than Donald Trump or Jeb Bush.
  • “In today’s atmosphere there can be no greater reason to support Ted Cruz than the fact that so many entrenched Washington insiders hate him.”
  • National Review takes a short break from their Trump-bashing to look at how the mainstream media has made him such a big deal through saturation coverage. “The media that so thoroughly built up Trump as a contrast to his boring, predictable, consistently conservative GOP rivals might not find him so easy to tear down.”
  • “Are the Global Warmistas Simply Juicing Up the Latest Years’ Temperatures With ‘Adjustments’ While Reducing the Temperatures of Previous Years, To Always Make the Current Year ‘The Hottest’? Sure seems that way.”
  • Global Warming advocates latest excuse: stupid lying satellites.
  • Anti-GMO scientific papers may have manipulated data.
  • Female Muslim scholar says it’s just fine and dandy to rape non-Muslim women to humiliate them.
  • “Western Europe’s elites have pretended that importing millions of Muslims from countries ranging from Morocco to Afghanistan raises no issues and creates no problems. That this is untrue has been obvious for a long time.”
  • Warning: Pretty much every aspect of this story is horrifying and disgusting.
  • Law enforcement on Open Carry in Texas: “We have no concerns and we have had no problems.” (Hat tip: Push Junction.)
  • Slashdot: California Assemblyman Jim Cooper wants to add crypto-backdoors to your phone. Wanna guess which political party Cooper is a member of? Go ahead. Guess.
  • Remembering Sergei Korolev, the legendary “chief designer” of the Soviet space program. (Hat tip: Gregory Benford’s Facebook page.)
  • Science Fiction editor David Hartwell has died. He was a hugely important figure in the field…
  • LinkSwarm for December 28, 2015

    Monday, December 28th, 2015

    I hope everyone had a merrier Christmas than I did. (My father recently went on hospice care after a two year fight with cancer, so I was back home helping my mother care for him.) Here’s a LinkSwarm to start your week with.

  • Inside Obama’s pity party.
  • Remember, Obama’s policies never fail, and all opposition to him is because his opponents are bitter clinging racists.
  • We live in a nation founded by geniuses but run by idiots.
  • “Many Obamacare customers pay more than 10 percent of their incomes toward coverage (and some paying considerably more).”
  • What would Democrats do to defeat the Islamic State? Not a damn thing.
  • Iraqi government forces retake Ramadi, the Anbar province city the Islamic State took in May.
  • “Two weather occurrences – the Arctic Oscillation and El Niño – are combining to shake up temperatures from coast to coast in the U.S., bringing springlike conditions to the Northeast for much of this month and leaving parts of the West colder and wetter than usual.”
  • 2015: The year Europe reached the breaking point:

    Adjusting for inflation, the gross domestic product of the 19 countries now sharing Europe’s common currency, the euro, was less in 2014 than it was in 2007. Widespread joblessness and diminishing opportunities confront an entire generation of young Europeans, especially in Spain, Italy, France and Greece. The economic malaise tinges everything: Young people resist marriage for lack of economic opportunity. Poorer European countries are experiencing brain drains as many of their best young professionals and college graduates move abroad. Numerous Greek doctors, for instance, now work in more prosperous Germany while Greece’s health system is in crisis.

  • Sweden tries to force a cash-free society on its citizens. Wait, did I say “citizens?” I meant “vassals.”
  • Spain continues to be screwed.
  • Democrat Jim Webb contemplating an independent run for President.
  • Pennsylvania’s insane, disgraced Democratic Attorney General Kathleen Kane accused of suborning perjury.
  • Democrats in congress have proposed a sweeping gun control bill. Because that’s always such a big electoral winner. It just kills liberals that free citizens are allowed to remain armed…
  • The left eat their own.
  • Black teenagers riot, shut down mall in Kentucky.
  • Another entry in the annals of criminal SUPERgenius. (Hat tip: Moe Lane.)
  • Database Leak Exposes 3.3 Million Hello Kitty Fans.” This is a real headline from the real world we live in…
  • Here’s a swell Christmas story from Dwight.
  • LinkSwarm for March 27, 2015

    Friday, November 27th, 2015

    Here’s a Black Friday LinkSwarm you can while away your time with while waiting 5 hours in line to save 78¢ off a turkey baster:

  • Obama’s greatest legacy: downsizing the Democratic Party:

    In January, Republicans will occupy 32 of the nation’s governorships, 10 more than they did in 2009. Democratic losses in state legislatures under Mr. Obama rank among the worst in the last 115 years, with 816 Democratic lawmakers losing their jobs and Republican control of legislatures doubling since the president took office — more seats lost than under any president since Dwight D. Eisenhower.

    “Republicans have more chambers today than they have ever had in the history of the party,” said Tim Storey, an analyst at the National Conference of State Legislatures. “So they are in a dominant and historic position of strength in the states.”

  • Which of the GOP’s candidates beat Hillary? All of them.
  • Cruz is surging,
  • No, Ted Cruz did not support illegal alien amnesty (unlike Marco Rubio).
  • Ted Cruz’s plausible path to the Presidency.
  • More ObamaCare rate hikes coming down the pike. Houston has zero PPO plans through ObamaCare, and Dallas is suffering the largest rate hikes.
  • This month’s victims getting specially reamed by ObamaCare are (rolls dice)…graduate students, who by law can no longer be covered by university insurance programs. Oh, the irony…
  • Crimea power grid knocked offline.
  • Russia to seek economic revenge against Turkey over downed jet. Ukraine says “Cry me a river.”
  • The Antarctic has been cooling the last six years.
  • Black America’s addiction to conspiracy theories.
  • Spy Jonathan Pollard released. His supporters want Obama to rescind the conditions of his parole so he can move to Israel. It’s a tough case for Obama: He loves letting traitors off easy, but he hates Israel…
  • Hillary Clinton may be soft on terrorism, but she’s tough on the real threats to our nation: comedians making fun of her:

    In what appears to be a first for a serious presidential contender, Hillary Clinton’s campaign is going after five comedians who made fun of the former Secretary of State in standup skits at a popular Hollywood comedy club.

    A video of the short performance, which is less than three minutes, is posted on the website of the renowned club, Laugh Factory, and the Clinton campaign has tried to censor it. Besides demanding that the video be taken down, the Clinton campaign has demanded the personal contact information of the performers that appear in the recording. This is no laughing matter for club owner Jamie Masada, a comedy guru who opened Laugh Factory more than three decades ago and has been instrumental in launching the careers of many famous comics. “They threatened me,” Masada told Judicial Watch. “I have received complains before but never a call like this, threatening to put me out of business if I don’t cut the video.”

  • Crew member on radical feminist “campus rape epidemic” film The Hunting Ground alters Wikipedia to conform to film’s skewed view of events, in violation of Wikipedia policy.
  • Eric S. Raymond examines a recent police shooting a lot of people are talking about: “I would have said this was what cops call a ‘good shoot’ if it had stopped at the first two bullets. It didn’t. I don’t think this was murder one, but it was at least criminally negligent homicide and those who covered it up should be prosecuted along with Van Dyke.” Unlike, he points out, the fully justified Michael Brown shooting. Also this: “And that racial spin? Plain bullshit. Those cops were facing an angel-dusted thug brandishing a weapon; that was pretty much bound to end badly whether the thug was black, white, or purple polka-dotted.”
  • The “red mercury” scam is back. And the Islamic State is the latest patsy to fall for it. Plus some loony local embellishments:

    ‘‘Red mercury has a red color, and there is mercury that has the color of dark blood,’’ he said. ‘‘And there is green mercury, which is used for sexual enhancement, and silver mercury is used for medical purposes. The most expensive type is called Blood of the Slaves, which is the darkest type. Magicians use it to summon jinni.’’

  • Andre Glucksmann dies.
  • What War on Christmas?

  • Winners and Losers from Houston’s election (better late than never).
  • Refugio Mayor Joey Heard arrested on drug charges. Refugio is a town between Victoria and Corpus,
  • Texas Democratic State Ron Rep. Reynolds convicted of barratry.
  • Annals of criminal genius: Trying to assault someone while in the courtroom for your third attempted murder trial. “At some point in time, you’ve got to stop shooting people.”
  • The Bring Back Mystery Science Theater 3000 kickstarter not only hit their goal, the just passed $3 million and are bringing on Felicia Day as the next mad scientist.
  • I laughed.
  • LinkSwarm for November 13, 2015

    Friday, November 13th, 2015

    The big story this week has been the Children of the Corn running amok in Missouri. I hope to have a longer piece on that by and by. In the meantime, enjoy your Friday LinkSwarm:

  • ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion is blowing holes in state budgets across the nation.
  • How the Clinton Foundation money-laundering machine works.
  • Maryland’s “bullet fingerprint” database cost $5 million to set up and maintain. Number of criminals caught by it? Zero. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • How much money each state is sending to the Presidential race. Texas is number one in SuperPAC money, and number two (behind California) in hard money.
  • Kurdish Pesh Merga forces retake Sinjar from the Islamic State.
  • China makes tiny under-reporting error on coal usage. Any by “tiny,” I mean “equal to entire U.S. coal use.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades.)
  • Sell books critical of the Chinese government in Hong Kong? Prepare to be disappeared.
  • Secret Service agent arrested in child sex sting. The country is in the best of hands. (Hat tip: AceofSpadesHQ.)
  • Kafkatrap vs. Honeytrap. “If you are any kind of open-source leader or senior figure who is male, do not be alone with any female, ever, at a technical conference.”
  • Woman starts making documentary about Men’s Rights Movement. Funny things happens: When she starts making an actual, even-handed documentary, the funders who wanted a feminist hit piece drop her like a hot potato, but Kickstarter backers step up to the plate after a plug from Milo Yiannopoulos.
  • UT academic critics of open carry should step out of their ivory tower and take a look at the real world.
  • Dear Formula 1: If your race requires subsidies to survive in Austin, I’m happy to see you fold.
  • An inside-baseball look at the Ted Cruz super PAC ad buy that wasn’t.
  • ObamaCare to Houston Cancer Patients: Drop Dead!

    Thursday, November 5th, 2015

    The latest ObamaCare exchange plans are out, and if you’re a cancer patient in Houston, you’re screwed:

    The healthcare marketplace is open once again, but if you look closely at the offered insurance plans you might find something lacking: coverage for specialized treatments.

    Preferred Provider Plans, or PPOs, often do cover specialized treatment like care for cancer patients.The loss of individual-market plan PPOs will affect tens of thousands of people who buy their insurance privately rather than through an employer. Before the Affordable Care Act, it was the way most people who did not have employer insurance got coverage.

    Jenny Deam, with the Houston Chronicle, investigates the disappearance of these plans. She says there will no longer be any plans, by any carrier on the federal exchange for the Houston area, that cover treatment at the MD Anderson Cancer Center.

    If you’re unfamiliar with MD Anderson, they’re one of the best cancer treatment centers in the world. For many cancer patients, the difference between MD Anderson and another cancer treatment center is quite literally between life and death.

    Remember “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor”?

    Not so much.

    The media mocked Sarah Palin for using the phrase “death panels,” but in the name of cost controls, they’re already implementing them at the provider level.

    (Hat tip: ColorMeRed’s Twitter feed.)