“…doctors who have been receiving the enhanced payments will see their fees for primary care cut by 43 percent, on average”

As Medicaid Rolls Swell, Cuts in Payments to Doctors Threaten Access to Care

WASHINGTON — Just as millions of people are gaining insurance through Medicaid, the program is poised to make deep cuts in payments to many doctors, prompting some physicians and consumer advocates to warn that the reductions could make it more difficult for Medicaid patients to obtain care. The Affordable Care Act provided a big increase in Medicaid payments for primary care in 2013 and 2014. But the increase expires on Thursday — just weeks after the Obama administration told the Supreme Court that doctors and other providers had no legal right to challenge the adequacy of payments they received from Medicaid.

They NEVER said anything about this when passing Obama’s Medicaid Expansion here in NH, did they?  Now with having shoved 20,000 new people

Read more

“Former Police Chief David Seastrand has cost the town of New London, New Hampshire a $70,000.00 dollar settlement of a civil suit, after he tried to get a Colby-Sawyer College coed to let him take nude pictures of her in exchange for dropping criminal charges he probably made up in the first place.

The Democrat NH AG’s office says (Union Leader) “that the only law applicable to the case was the abuse of power statute, under which a public official is guilty of a misdemeanor if her or she knowingly commits an unauthorized act ‘which purports to be an act of his or her office‘ or ‘knowingly refrains from performing a duty imposed on him by law or clearly inherent in the nature of the office.’ ”  (Seastrand was not charged by the NH AG.)

Two Questions. First, are there laws if someone who is not a police officer does this? Second, where were the feminazi’s and war-on-women campus-rape rhetoric junkies from the professional left?

Read more

By the end of the month, I will have cut a cord that has been in my entire (almost 6 decade) life – a landline phone.  And I can thank the striking FairPoint Unions for giving me the impetus for having done so for shoddy service.  If the service your company provides fails to meet expectations (or even worse, fail to deliver even the BASIC level of service), don’t be surprised that when consumers have alternative choices, they take them. And so I have.

When those that strike at a company because they believe they have been hurt, what they often fail to take in consideration is that those that REALLY get hurt are their customers.  You know, the folks that actually pay for their salaries and bennies.  In a monopoly situation, they have no recourse – they have to suck it up, sit in silence, and just steam while the strikers strike; customers be damned as they just become part of the process.  Even better, in some cases, as the “wronged” customers would be bringing heat to the company – another club, indirectly, wielded by customers on the part of the strikers.

That is if the company / strikers have no competition.  When there is, there are options.  And so I did.

Read more

Thoughts on Democrat appointed Speaker Jasper on CloseUp this morning:

• Overall, he seemed to be, right from the start, to have Bill O’Brien under his skin and the majority of Republicans that didn’t vote for him (and lest you have forgotten, it was the Democrats that appointed him Speaker).  Not a single word about the ENTIRE Democrat caucus voting for him and a tiny minority of Republicans voting for him.  And certainly the HRA & NHLA scores don’t show him being a “solid” conservative.  Rather dismissive (and/or clueless) as to how his committee appointments have gone over.  Nice to see that he’s calling a large number of Republicans in the House “fringe”.  That won’t go over well going forward.
• He threw Right To Work right under the bus, didn’t he?  Nice to see that he took “the way of McConnell” – we’re only a small part of the Government without stating his union support – or that not a small number of his Republican supporters are also anti-RTW union type folks as well  (last heard up to 60-70 unionists casting themselves as Rs simply for this issue).
• On Medicaid Expansion:

Read more

After all, Michelle Obama’s federalization of our school cafeterias has turned out so DANDY, hasn’t it?  Pictures and pictures of more and more kids literally trashing their lunches and waging a #WarOnMichelle for the absolutely disgusting meals they had to buy.  No competition – Progressive Michelle also went after the vending machines and bake sales traditional for raising funds “for the children”.  Really, Michelle “hates the children”?  Or just another Progressive ideological agenda item in federalizing the “one-size-fits-all-in-everything”?  After all, doesn’t “intent” trump “results”, especially bad ones?  And never having to apologize for being wrong?

So what spurred this post?  From Rand Simberg at PJ Media:  The Nutritional Junk Science of Our Government Nannies.  Yup, pretty much:

Read more

Copied in its entirety (reformatted, emphasis mine):

ACHIEVER OF THE YEAR: Sarah Palin?

For all her detractors’ cries of “irrelevance” and “she’s just a reality show entertainer” (those two being among the nicer epithets), Palin goes on, election cycle after election cycle, populating Congress with her endorsed candidates in a cost-effective manner, and in such numbers that the likes of Karl Rove with his 1% success rate can surely view only with hidden admiration, if not downright envy.  In what is perhaps the most interesting aspect of Palin’s year of achievement, in instance after instance where Palin was ridiculed for a straightforward statement (e.g., “death panels” or the true history of Paul Revere), her most strident critics have agreed, in whole or in part, with her views. But 2014 saw the most impressive of this historical revisionism.

Read more

Anti-Police Protesters Make Weary Travelers’ Lives More Difficult with a New Kind of Demonstration

Out of the many protests we have seen against police officers since November, there have been various approaches taken. Protesters in Seattle disrupted a tree lighting ceremony and made children cry, for example. Now protesters in St. Louis are trying a new tactic, one commonly seen in the late 1960s, staging “die-ins” at the local airport on the busiest travel days of the year.

According to Fox 2 St. Louis, protesters came to Lambert St. Louis International Airport to spread their message to travelers:

On one of the busiest travel days of the year, Ferguson demonstrators marched inside Lambert St. Louis International Airport Friday afternoon. They stage a so-called “die-in”, lying down on the floor of the airport’s concourse to spread their message: African American lives must be protected and racial profiling by police must end.

The protests began around 5:00pm and the demonstrators left the airport peacefully around 5:30pm. They arrived and left using Metrolink.

Here’s a video of the “die-in” and travelers just stepping over them and ignoring them.

…regret that I had not worn my heavy weight steel shod backpacking boots as

Read more

As I mentioned here, Michelle Obama’s signature act as co-Progressive President is swirling the waste can – and now, more schools (in Wyoming) are dumping her program into the hopper as well (reformatted, emphasis mine):

Seven Wyoming schools have decided to go it alone when it comes to serving their kids lunch, saying “goodbye” to the federal Healthy Hunger Free Kids Act. After Sheridan County One scrapped the program, the number of students who chose to buy school lunch went up twenty percent.  Jeremy Smith, the district’s business manager, said, “Universally, it was, ‘We are starving. We are hungry. This isn’t enough food for us.’ But we couldn’t blame them, because I looked at that school lunch and said, ‘I wouldn’t eat it either.’”

Wyoming Public Media reports:

Read more

Do the “Black Lives Matter” protest leaders and supporters actually care about saving or improving black lives or are they just pretending?  Do they promote obeying the law and complying with police orders?  No.  Do they try to stop the thousands of annual black on black murders?  No.  Do they help blacks to escape poverty?  No.

All lives, including black lives, matter to TEA Partiers because we know that policies that hurt some Americans can be re-directed at others, and right now we are hated by Washington leaders and special interests everywhere.  We work for things that enable all Americans to be free, safe, and successful; things like school choice, stable families, increasing economic freedom to create good jobs, opportunities, and wealth, the rule of law applied equally to all, and the limited government defined by the US Constitution which exists to protect the rights of the American people.

Where do the “Black Lives Matter” protest leaders, President Obama, most “progressive” politicians, Al Sharpton, Jessie Jackson, etc. stand on issues that would make blacks (and all Americans) safer, freer, and more successful?

Read more

In his op-ed on December 9, 2014 in the Laconia Daily Sun (laconiadailysun.com) E. Scott Cracraft says one correct and important thing, “a “right” ends where the rights of others begin”.  Nevertheless, most of the rest of his op-ed, e.g., the stuff about snake handlers, attempts to convince readers that it is OK for Obamacare to violate employer Religious rights by forcing employers to pay for abortion inducing drugs.  Fortunately the Supreme Court did not agree.

Obamacare doesn’t require employers to provide health insurance except under certain conditions.  And, employers meeting those conditions can choose to pay a fine/tax instead.  The fine, however, significantly increases the cost of lower wage employees which encourages automation and/or job consolidation to eliminate jobs, e.g., McDonalds is investigating self-service kiosks to eliminate jobs.

Many businesses cannot absorb the large increase in health insurance cost caused by Obamacare even by raising the prices of their goods or services, so they are forced to take actions that hurt workers (thus Obamacare actually rewards businesses that take steps that hurt workers).  

Read more

Eugene Volokh recently remarked on the Twitter musings of progressive narrative mule Neil deGrasse Tyson.  Tyson wondered if a 12-fingered people would have proposed twelve amendments instead of ten.  Volokh countered that the ten-fingered peoples in the first congress did propose twelve, something Neil, the elite luminary expert, clearly did not know.

“there actually were 12 amendments originally proposed by the First Congress; it’s just that the first two weren’t ratified right away (one never was, and the other was ratified only 200 years later, and became the Twenty-Seventh Amendment)”

Read more

Wednesday I had some fun with the NH DMV over their giving advance notice to Portsmouth business owner David Adams about his BEERBUS vanity plate.  The DMV told him it would not be renewed because it promotes intoxicants, but NH has giant signs all over the state promoting state liquor stores.

Well it looks like the policy will be reviewed in January…

(Seacoast online) When the JLCAR meets in January, Adams said, it is expected to consider changing the language in the rules governing vanity plates to instead ban all references to “illegal intoxicants.” In the meantime, he’s been told, he still can’t get new license plates that say anything about beer and the BEERBUS plate he already has would be denied for renewal.

Read more

Ed Comeau has his eye on the Country delegation in Carroll County, and its commissioners.  Skip recently explored Ed’s Right To Know suit and the refusal of two Carroll County Commissioners to be seated if they are not protected from Right to Know Lawsuits.

Democrat Denny Miller, and Republican David Babson, are seeking a taxpayer backed financial safety net should they be sued as county commissioners for failing or refusing to provide public documents required under New Hampshire’s 91-A.

So this statement David Babson made back in 2012 about holding elected officials to a higher standard with regards to public information  had a shelf life?

Read more