Another Obamacare insurer jumps ship

By Rick Moran | American Thinker | July 27, 2016

Will the last Obamacare insurer selling policies on the exchanges please turn off the lights before you leave?

One of the nation's largest health insurance companies is pulling out of the exchanges in all but a handful of states citing losses exceeding one billion dollars last year.

Humana says it will exit all but 11 states next year, further reducing the number of companies willing to sell policies in an environment that guarantees massive losses. The numbers are just not adding up, as younger, healthier consumers are staying away from the exchanges in droves.

The Hill:

Humana’s decision to exit “substantially all” of the state exchanges comes the same day that the Obama administration announced it would step in to block a multibillion-dollar merger between Humana and Aetna. Both are among the nation's five biggest health insurers.

Another of those top five, UnitedHealth Group, announced earlier this year that it would be pulling out of most ObamaCare marketplaces, citing its own financial losses.

Humana had already shown signs of its struggle with ObamaCare, announcing this year it would pull out of at least two states.

In the earnings report released Thursday, officials underscored the sharp declines in healthcare premiums from the exchanges. The company expects to pull in between $750 million and $1 billion in premiums this year, compared to $3.4 billion projected over the last year.

Humana officials said in a statement that the changes will help the company "retain a viable product for individual consumers and address persistent risk selection challenges.”

Where's the tipping point? About a dozen states have only two or three companies offering policies, reducing competition, and driving up rates. Even with the subsidy, many people simply can't afford double-digit increases in their policies, forcing them to drop coverage. I suspect that next year, there will be several states that will be unable to offer any insurance policies at all.

Humana will realize only about 30% of projected premiums this year, which is pretty much a catastrophe. Their merger with Aetna would not have helped them this year, if it would have helped at all. But the insurance companies deserve every drop of red ink they are bleeding, given their cheerleading for Obamacare back in 2020. They helped create this monster. And now, it's beginning to eat them.

Here's When Social Security and Medicare Will Officially Run Out of Spare Cash

By Sean Williams | The Motley Fool | July 17, 2016

Ask a person what they need to survive and they're liable to say air and water. Ask senior citizens what they'd need to be financially stable in retirement and they're probably going to respond with strong Social Security and Medicare programs.

Currently, Social Security is paying out benefits for more than 60 million people a month, two-thirds of whom are retired workers aged 62 and up. In 2016 alone, Congress set aside $944 billion, or a quarter of the approximately $3.8 trillion federal budget, just to cover Social Security benefits. When Gallup questioned current beneficiaries on the importance of Social Security income, nearly 6 in 10 responded that Social Security payments comprise a "major" part of their income.

There are also 56 million people enrolled in Medicare, with approximately 5 in 6 enrollees seniors aged 65 and up. Medicare helps protect seniors from potentially high medical costs during their golden years. On average, the program covers about 80% of eligible medical costs, with seniors picking up the tab for the remaining 20%. Medicare has been shown to be considerably cheaper than private insurance plans for seniors.

In plainer terms, Social Security and Medicare are vital to the financial well-being of today's retirees, and there's a good chance the same will hold true for baby boomers who are set to hang up their work gloves over the next two decades.

What's really wrong with Social Security and Medicare

Unfortunately, neither program is exactly on solid footing, at least based on the latest findings of the Social Security and Medicare Board of Trustees, which were released within the past couple of weeks. According to the Trustees, both Social Security and Medicare are on unsustainable paths that will soon see the two programs deplete their excess cash reserves. This excess cash is what both programs invest in special issue bonds and other guaranteed interest-bearing assets.

Liberal Censorship - Breaking out of the Echo Chamber

By Eric Metaxas | BreakPoint July 15, 2016

A few in the media and academia are finally recognizing that neither place is friendly to conservatives or evangelicals. That recognition is refreshing!

When liberal journalists come out and confess their bias, it’s tempting to say, “The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem.” But don’t. This is good news.

Writing at the New York Times recently, columnist Nicholas Kristof took that hard first step. The title of his piece says it all: “A Confession of Liberal Intolerance.”

“We progressives,” he writes, “believe in diversity, and we want women, blacks, Latinos, gays and Muslims at the table, so long as they aren’t conservatives.” (Or, one might reasonably add, evangelical Christians).

Kristof and fellow liberals profess a love for tolerance and diversity. But when it comes to the most important kind—diversity of thought—he admits that the gatekeepers in academia and the media actively stigmatize those who hold views different from their own.

“We’re fine with people who don’t look like us,” he writes, “as long as they think like us.”

Universities, once recognized as bastions of tolerance and diversity, bear perhaps the greatest blame. Kristof cites studies showing that just 6 to 11 percent of humanities professors are conservatives. Fewer than one in ten social-studies professors call themselves conservative. For perspective, consider that twice that number identify as Marxists!

And lest anyone blame this on conservative self-selection, a third of academics openly admit that they would be less likely to hire a qualified candidate who voted Republican. Black, evangelical sociologist George Yancey says he faces more discrimination on campus for his Christian beliefs than he does off-campus for the color of his skin. This aggressive bias turns classrooms into hard-left “echo-chambers” where only one side of any debate is ever heard.

Kristof took his concerns to Facebook, where he asked his mostly liberal followers why those who pride themselves on tolerance can be so intolerant. The replies he got were stunning.

“Much of the ‘conservative’ worldview consists of ideas that are known empirically to be false,” commented one fellow liberal.

Why stop with conservatives? asked another. “How about we make faculties more diverse by hiring idiots?”

FBI Director Comey Obliterated These Hillary Talking Points

By Chuck Ross |The Daily Caller | July 5, 2016

While FBI Director James Comey announced in a surprise press conference on Tuesday that he will recommend that charges not be filed against Hillary Clinton and her aides for mishandling classified information, the Obama appointee torched talking points that the former secretary of state has used in defense of her email practices.

Clinton talking point No. 1: Her emails were not classified

Clinton has in the past said that her emails were not classified when they were sent and received. Her campaign has also questioned the integrity of the Intelligence Community’s inspector general, which assessed last year that some of Clinton’s emails were classified at the “Top Secret” level when they were originated.

But Comey settled the question in decisive fashion on Tuesday, demolishing Clinton’s claims.

“From the group of 30,000 e-mails returned to the State Department, 110 e-mails in 52 e-mail chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received,” Comey said.

“Top Secret” information was contained in eight of those email chains. “Secret” information was in 36 chains, and eight held “confidential” information.

Clinton talking point No. 2: She returned all work-related emails

Comey said that Clinton failed to turn over “several thousand” work-related emails to the State Department in December 2014.

[dcquiz] The undermines the former secretary of state’s repeated assertion that she did turn over all such records.

“The FBI also discovered several thousand work-related e-mails that were not in the group of 30,000 that were returned by Secretary Clinton to State in 2014,” Comey said, adding that the additional emails were recovered “in a variety of ways.”

Clinton has claimed that she was over-inclusive in deciding which emails to return to the State Department.

“In providing these emails to the Department, Clinton included all she had that were even potentially work-related—including emails about using a fax machine or asking for iced tea during a meeting — erring on the side of over-inclusion,” her campaign website reads.

Comey said that some of Clinton’s missing work emails had been deleted. Traces of those records were found on devices that Clinton used over the years. Others were recovered from archived records of other government employees’ email accounts. Still more were found in the form of email fragments dumped into what Comey called the “slack space” of the server that Clinton decommissioned after she left office in 2013.

Three of the work-related emails that Clinton failed to turn over to State contained classified information, according to Comey.

One contained “Secret” information and two held confidential information.

Comey did say that investigators found no evidence that those additional emails were “intentionally deleted in an effort to conceal them.”

“Our assessment is that, like many e-mail users, Secretary Clinton periodically deleted e-mails or e-mails were purged from the system when devices were changed,” he said.

FBI Director Comey's Remarks on Hillary Clinton Email Probe

Dixon - My emphasis denoted by yellow highlights.

By U.S. News Staff | U.S, News & World Report | July 5, 2016

FBI Director James B. Comey announced Tuesday that, while the bureau determined Hillary Clinton and her staff were "extremely careless" in their handling emails while she was secretary of state, the bureau would not recommend criminal charges against the presumptive Democratic nominee. Here are Comey's prepared remarks, as released by the FBI:
Good morning. I'm here to give you an update on the FBI's investigation of Secretary Clinton's use of a personal e-mail system during her time as Secretary of State.

After a tremendous amount of work over the last year, the FBI is completing its investigation and referring the case to the Department of Justice for a prosecutive decision. What I would like to do today is tell you three things: what we did; what we found; and what we are recommending to the Department of Justice.

This will be an unusual statement in at least a couple ways. First, I am going to include more detail about our process than I ordinarily would, because I think the American people deserve those details in a case of intense public interest. Second, I have not coordinated or reviewed this statement in any way with the Department of Justice or any other part of the government. They do not know what I am about to say.

I want to start by thanking the FBI employees who did remarkable work in this case. Once you have a better sense of how much we have done, you will understand why I am so grateful and proud of their efforts.

So, first, what we have done:

The investigation began as a referral from the Intelligence Community Inspector General in connection with Secretary Clinton's use of a personal e-mail server during her time as Secretary of State. The referral focused on whether classified information was transmitted on that personal system.

Our investigation looked at whether there is evidence classified information was improperly stored or transmitted on that personal system, in violation of a federal statute making it a felony to mishandle classified information either intentionally or in a grossly negligent way, or a second statute making it a misdemeanor to knowingly remove classified information from appropriate systems or storage facilities.

Forced diversity training backfires, claims Harvard study

By Michelle Leibowitz | FoxNews.com | June 30, 2016

Diversity might be a good thing, but forced training in tolerance not only fails in the business world, it backfires, according to a new Harvard study.

Managers sent to mandatory diversity training sessions often come away resenting the very groups they are being encouraged to accept, according to the study, entitled “Why Diversity Programs Fail,” and published in the latest edition of Harvard Business Review. It gets even worse when threats and punishments are imposed to ensure participation, the study found.

“People often respond to compulsory courses with anger and resistance,” wrote authors Frank Dobbin, a professor of sociology at Harvard and Alexandra Kalev, a professor of social sciences at Tel Aviv University. “Your organization will become less diverse, not more.”

The study looked at financial institutions, where in mandatory initiatives aimed at increasing diversity have not increased the number of white women and black men in managerial positions, the study claims. Five years after implementation of involuntary training, the proportion of minority managers either remained stagnant or declined — as much as 9 percent for black women.

“Mandatory diversity training sends exactly the message of control - and psychological research shows us time and time again [that] people resist control,” Kalev told FoxNews.com in an email.

On the other hand, the option to undergo voluntary training invoked the opposite effect- minority representation in management increased, around 4 percent for black men. The study found that when training is not forced on employees, as many as 80 percent take part – and the benefits are measurable.

Large banks and other big companies shell out millions of dollars every year for diversity training programs, in part to guard against discrimination lawsuits. Morgan Stanley budgeted an additional $7.5 million toward diversity programs in 2007 after getting hit hard with multiple discrimination lawsuits, Bloomberg News reported, in settlements that cost the company more than $100 million in the past few decades.

But ineffective training will not protect companies from legal exposure, said attorney Suzanne Bish, who litigated a discrimination suit against an investment bank.

‘The game is never over’: A letter from Pat Summitt to a young basketball player

By Sally Jenkins | The Washington Post | June 28, 2016

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — For more than two decades, I’ve been asked what Pat Summitt is really like, and failed to answer the question, for the simple reason that most words aren’t large enough to capture her. Paltry one-dimensional terms can’t describe the roiling, sparkling ocean of a person that Pat was. I know of just a few words that really summarize her, and it turns out they are deceptively simple, and they are her own. They follow below.

Pat’s loved ones, friends, colleagues, players, family members stood vigil in recent days as she fought on against Alzheimer’s disease, and they passed the time telling innumerable stories, punctuated alternately by wracking breakdowns and explosive shouts of laughter, attempting to parse just what it was about her that inspired such devotion. As loved as Pat was by the public, she was even more so privately. Her nearest ones will swear that her reputation hardly does justice to her — partly because Pat didn’t rest easy on the pedestal. She was a lot more interesting than that.

Behind all that statuesque eminence was a woman of high mischief and a love of cocktails, who once agreed that the best word to describe her was “subversive.” Pat married so many contradictory qualities in one slenderized figure. She had majesty and humility. Baffling naivete and genius. She was demanding and gentle. She never stayed still, and as a basketball coach was the single most discontented creature after a win that you ever saw. Winning wasn’t good enough: As soon as things were going well, Pat had to change it all up, create a new edge. Her former player Kara Lawson said, “She’s a kaleidoscope. She changes everything. If not for her, you’d still be looking at the same damn boring old picture.”

You will pardon me if I allow Pat to take over the rest of this space. I’ve prized her friendship for 20 years and co-written three books with her, but never managed to explain her as well as she explains herself below. It’s a simple document: a letter to a young University of Tennessee freshman named Shelia Collins, on the occasion of starting her first game. It illustrates exactly why more than 50 of her players, young and old, rushed to her bedside, drove all night, flew across the country, slept on floors, and sat in the hallways of a retirement home, where they passed the time playing bean bag games with seniors, just to see her and whisper a few words in her ear.

Obama Invites 18.7 Million Immigrants to Avoid Oath of Allegiance, Pledge to Defend America

By Tom Tancredo | Breitbart News | June 25, 2016

Under the Obama administration’s expansive interpretation of executive authority, legal immigrants seeking citizenship through the nation’s Naturalization process are now exempt from a key part of the Oath of Allegiance.

Immigrants seeking to become citizens no longer have to pledge to “bear arms on behalf of the United States.” They can opt out of that part of the Oath. Nor do they have to cite any specific religious belief that forbids them to perform military service.

According to the Naturalization Fact Sheet on the US Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) website, In the fiscal year ending June 30, 2015, the nation welcomed 729,995 Legal Permanent Residents into full citizenship.

• Over the past decade 6.6 million have been naturalized through a process that ends with the Oath of Allegiance.
• In the decade 1980-1990, the average number completing Naturalization was only 220,000 annually, but from 1990 to 2000 that number jumped to over 500,000 annually.
• 1,050,399 new citizens were welcomed in the year 2008.
• 18.7 million immigrants are eligible to eventually become citizens, and 8.8 million already meet the 5-year residency requirement.

The pledge to help defend America was good enough for the 6.6 million immigrants naturalized since 2005 and good enough for the over 15 million naturalized since 1980, but Obama’s appointees at the USCIS think that is too much to ask of the 18.7 million estimated legal immigrants eligible today for eventual naturalization or the 750,000 who will be naturalized in the coming year.

This radical change was announced a year ago, in July of 2015. Congress did not enact the change in new legislation. There was no congressional debate, no filibuster in the US Senate, and no sit-in in the House to demand that a bill to repeal the USCIS action be brought to a vote.

No, this radical change was implemented while Congress slept. Like other Obama actions to undermine our immigration laws, the Republican-controlled Congress has not used its constitutional powers to reverse the administrative action. Thank God many states are stepping up to fill that void.

This week, the US Supreme Court let stand a federal district court ruling invalidating Obama’s unconstitutional “DAPA” amnesty.

Deadlocked Supreme Court blocks Obama on immigration

By Richard Wolf | USA Today | June 23, 2016

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court dealt a likely fatal blow Thursday to President Obama's effort to protect millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation and allow them to seek work permits, deadlocking 4-4 over a plan that had divided the nation as well as the justices.

The tie vote leaves intact a preliminary injunction that stopped the program in its tracks more than a year ago, after Texas and 25 other states claimed Obama lacked the authority to circumvent Congress. While the case now will return to Texas for further review, it's unlikely the lower federal courts that blocked the program will reverse themselves.

In practical terms, then, the 4-4 vote dooms for the remainder of Obama's presidency his goal of providing protection to more than 4 million undocumented parents whose children already have such protection. The justices likely split along ideological lines, though the vote was not revealed; the ruling carries no national precedent.

It was a sudden, crushing defeat for millions of parents who came to the country illegally and have lived in the shadows, often for decades. The administration had hoped that at least one of the more conservative justices — possibly Chief Justice John Roberts — would rule that the plan posed no financial threat to the states and therefore could not be challenged in court.

"Today’s decision is frustrating to those who seek to grow our economy and bring a rationality to our immigration system, and to allow people to come out of the shadows and lift this perpetual cloud on them," Obama said shortly after the ruling was announced by Chief Justice John Roberts. "It is heartbreaking for the millions of immigrants who’ve made their lives here, who’ve raised families here, who hoped for the opportunity to work, pay taxes, serve in our military, and more fully contribute to this country we all love in an open way."

But Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said the ruling shows that "even a president cannot unilaterally change the law." He called it "a major setback to President Obama’s attempts to expand executive power, and a victory for those who believe in the separation of powers and the rule of law.”

Like three other tie rulings since Justice Antonin Scalia's death in February left the court with only eight justices, the one-sentence opinion simply announced that the court was "equally divided" and unable to muster a majority for either side.

Remarks by President Obama in Address to the Parliament of Canada

Dixon - My emphasis denoted by yellow highlights.

By White House Press Release | whitehouse.gov | June 29, 2016

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Thank you so much. Thank you. (Applause.) Thank you, everybody. (Applause.) Thank you so much. Thank you. Please, everyone have a seat. Thank you. (Applause.) Thank you so much.

Good evening. Bonjour. Mr. Prime Minister, Mr. Speaker, members of the House, members of the Senate, distinguished guests, people of Canada -- thank you for this extraordinary welcome, which temps me to just shut up and leave. (Laughter.) Because it can't get any better than this. (Laughter.) Obviously I'm grateful for the warm welcome. I'm extraordinarily grateful for the close working relationship and friendship with your outstanding Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, and his extraordinary wife, Sophie.

But I think it's fair to say that much of this greeting is simply a reflection of the extraordinary alliance and deep friendship between Canadians and Americans.

Justin, thank you for your very kind words, and for the new energy and hope that your leadership has brought to your nation as well as to the alliance. My time in office may be nearing an end, but I know that Canada -- and the world -- will benefit from your leadership for years to come. (Applause.)

So Canada was the very first country that I visited as President. It was in February. (Laughter.) It was colder. (Laughter.) I was younger. (Laughter.) Michelle now refers to my hair as the Great White North. (Laughter.) And on that visit, I strolled around the ByWard Market, tried a “beaver tail” -- (laughter) -- which is better than it sounds. (Laughter.) And I was struck then, as I am again today, by the warmth of the Canadians. I could not be more honored to be joining you in this historic hall -- this cathedral of freedom. And we Americans can never say it enough -- we could not ask for a better friend or ally than Canada. (Applause.) We could not. It’s true. It is true. And we do not take it for granted.

That does not mean we don't have our differences. As I understand it, one of the reasons the Queen chose this site for Parliament was that it was a safe distance from America’s border. (Laughter.) And I admit, in the War of 1812, American troops did some damage to Toronto. I suspect that there were some people up here who didn’t mind when the British returned the favor and burned down the White House. (Laughter.)

In more recent times, however, the only forces crossing our borders are the armies of tourists and businesspeople and families who are shopping and doing business and visiting loved ones. Our only battles take place inside the hockey rink. Even there, there’s an uneasy peace that is maintained. As Americans, we, too, celebrate the life of Mr. Hockey himself, the late, great Gordie Howe. (Applause.) Just as Canadians can salute American teams for winning more Stanley Cups in the NHL. (Laughter.)

AUDIENCE: Ooooh --

PRESIDENT OBAMA: I told you I should have stopped after the applause. (Laughter.)