Wow, what a path to get to today.
Head below the fold for my (lengthy) thoughts on today’s historic milestone.
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CNN reports on insurers dumping doctors from their networks and other Obamacare woes.
Fox News
November 17, 2013
President Obama going over his lies and disinformation prior to a speech.
President Obama’s proposal to allow insurance companies to keep offering consumers plans that would otherwise be canceled under the federal health care law could lead to an increase in premiums, according to insurance industry experts and state regulators.
America’s Health Insurance Plans, the main industry trade group, said Obama’s offer comes too late and could lead to higher premiums, since companies already have set 2014 rates based on the assumption that many people with individual coverage will shift over to the new markets created under the law.
“Changing the rules after health plans have already met the requirements of the law could destabilize the market and result in higher premiums for consumers,” Karen Ignagni, president of the industry group, said in a statement in reaction to Obama’s plan.
This article was posted: Sunday, November 17, 2013 at 11:51 am
Tags: domestic news, healthcare
Fox News
November 17, 2013
President Obama going over his lies and disinformation prior to a speech.
President Obama’s proposal to allow insurance companies to keep offering consumers plans that would otherwise be canceled under the federal health care law could lead to an increase in premiums, according to insurance industry experts and state regulators.
America’s Health Insurance Plans, the main industry trade group, said Obama’s offer comes too late and could lead to higher premiums, since companies already have set 2014 rates based on the assumption that many people with individual coverage will shift over to the new markets created under the law.
“Changing the rules after health plans have already met the requirements of the law could destabilize the market and result in higher premiums for consumers,” Karen Ignagni, president of the industry group, said in a statement in reaction to Obama’s plan.
This article was posted: Sunday, November 17, 2013 at 11:51 am
Tags: domestic news, healthcare
At Alternate Viewpoint, the privacy of our visitors is of extreme importance to us (See this article to learn more about Privacy Policies.). This privacy policy document outlines the types of personal information is received and collected by Alternate Viewpoint and how it is used.
Log Files
Like many other Web sites, Alternate Viewpoint makes use of log files. The information inside the log files includes internet protocol (IP) addresses, type of browser, Internet Service Provider (ISP), date/time stamp, referring/exit pages, and number of clicks to analyze trends, administer the site, track user"s movement around the site, and gather demographic information. IP addresses, and other such information are not linked to any information that is personally identifiable.
Cookies and Web Beacons
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DoubleClick DART Cookie
These third-party ad servers or ad networks use technology to the advertisements and links that appear on Alternate Viewpoint send directly to your browsers. They automatically receive your IP address when this occurs. Other technologies ( such as cookies, JavaScript, or Web Beacons ) may also be used by the third-party ad networks to measure the effectiveness of their advertisements and / or to personalize the advertising content that you see.
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Journalist sounds off on ‘Affordable Care Act’
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
October 1, 2013
Journalist Geraldo Rivera told the Alex Jones Show that although he supports the idea of free health care, his health insurance costs have more than doubled as a result of Obamacare.
“Half a dozen people work for me….and my health insurance for all those people has more than doubled in the last two years,” said Rivera, adding, “I can’t think that it’s not related to Obamacare.”
Rivera remarked that he was actually “socialist enough” to support universal healthcare but that Obamacare merely provided a monopoly for the insurance industry.
“Why is Congress not participating in the same kind of system as everybody else?,” asked Rivera, referring to an exemption that members of Congress and their staff will receive that will hand them generous subsidies from their employer to pay for their health insurance.
Asserting that Obama had failed to govern in the midst of a government shut down, Rivera said the President has been “a terrible manager” and “hasn’t in any way reached out in a way he should,” quoting John Boehner’s lament that Obama has agreed to negotiate with the Iranians but not with the Republicans.
Despite the White House claiming that Obamacare will be “affordable” for Americans, complaints about soaring costs and lower quality have raged.
As Infowars documented last week, large insurance companies have seen their stock prices surge since Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law in 2010. By working with the Obama administration to force Americans into buying lower quality health insurance at higher prices, corporate giants like Blue Cross Blue Shield and United Healthcare are laughing all the way to the bank.
As Senator Max Baucus confirmed when Obamacare was passed, the genesis of the bill was an “87-page document which became the basis, the foundation, the blueprint from which almost all health care measures in all bills on both sides of the aisle came.”
And who wrote that 87-page white paper? None other than Liz Fowler – who in the two years before the bill was passed and while she was writing the “foundation” for Obamacare, was simultaneously working as Vice President of WellPoint – one of the largest health insurance companies in America.
Baucus profusely thanked Fowler for being personally responsible for crafting Obamacare. Politico described her as a “major player” in getting the bill passed.
Applicants attempting to access Obamacare exchange websites ran into a multitude of problems earlier today, with users in numerous states unable to reach domains that couldn’t cope with the surge of traffic.
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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a host for Infowars Nightly News.
This article was posted: Tuesday, October 1, 2013 at 10:23 am
Print this page.A wildfire spreading within miles of water and hydropower sources for San Francisco in Yosemite National Park has cost the city $ 600,000 for replacement electricity, officials said yesterday.
California Governor Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency for the city on Aug. 23 as the Rim Fire moved toward the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir. The lake, 160 miles (257 kilometers) east of San Francisco, supplies about 85 percent of the city’s water and powers San Francisco International Airport, San Francisco General Hospital and the city’s transit system.
The Rim Fire has charred more than 134,000 acres (54,000 hectares) or 200 square miles, and was only 7 percent contained, fire officials said late yesterday. More than 2,800 personnel were fighting the blaze, which erupted outside the park in the Stanislaus National Forest on Aug. 17, according to the national Incident Information System.
The fire caused “no change or impact to water quality or delivery from the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir,” Tyrone Jue, a spokesman for the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, said yesterday in a statement. The system serves 2.6 million water customers in San Francisco and the Bay Area.
Water flows from the Hetch Hetchy, more than 3,000 feet above sea level in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, through tunnels to San Francisco. Inspectors found no damage to O’Shaughnessy Dam and no apparent ash deposits on the lake surface, Michael Carlin, the commission’s deputy general manager, said in a statement.
Transmission Lines
The commission deactivated electrical transmission lines and two of three powerhouses in the area of the fire on Aug. 19, and has spent $ 600,000 buying replacement electricity, according to yesterday’s statement.
San Francisco’s water system has supplies in Bay Area reservoirs and is linked with the East Bay Municipal Utilities District and the Santa Clara Valley Water District, according to the commission.
Brown, whose emergency declaration cited “conditions of extreme peril,” secured federal financial assistance to help fight the fire, according to the California Emergency Management Agency.
The damage to Yosemite has been minimal and all lodges and recreational activities remain open and accessible, according to the park’s website.
Several large fires have damaged utilities in Southern California in recent months.
A blaze that spread across almost 30,000 acres north of Los Angeles in June triggered “multiple forced outages” on lines that connect to Northern California and the Pacific Northwest, according to the California Independent System Operator Corp., which manages the state’s power grid.
© Copyright 2013 Bloomberg News. All rights reserved.
This undated handout image received 25 January, 2006 shows the National Security Agency (NSA) at Fort Meade, Maryland. (AFP Photo)
Top-secret national security documents leaked to the Guardian newspaper reveal that the United States government compensated the tech companies that signed on to participate in the controversial NSA spy program known as Prism.
The Guardian published on Friday new documentation attributed to former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden in which it’s suggested that the US National Security Agency spent millions of dollars making sure the biggest names on the Internet were kept compliant with an international surveillance program disclosed by the leaker earlier this year.
According to the paperwork provided by Snowden and discussed by the Guardian’s Ewen MacAskill on Friday, the NSA emptied millions of dollars on ensuring Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Facebook were able to share information sent over the Web with the federal government.
“The material provides the first evidence of a financial relationship between the tech companies and the NSA,” wrote MacAskill.
The Guardian article cites a top-secret NSA document from December 2012 in which the agency said through a newsletter that it spent millions to keep the tech companies cooperating with the government after the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ruled that it was a violation of the US Constitution’s Fourth Amendment to be collecting purely domestic communications through the Prism program.
“Last year’s problems resulted in multiple extensions to the certifications’ expiration dates which cost millions of dollars for Prism providers to implement each successive extension – costs covered by Special Source Operations,” it reads in part.
Snowden, the 30-year-old leaker who has exasperated the US and British governments through a steady stream of classified disclosures, told the Guardian that the Special Source Operations unit handles surveillance programs, such as Prism, in which telecommunication companies and Internet providers sign-on to “corporate partnerships” with Uncle Sam.
Asked about the latest disclosure, a representative for Yahoo told the Guardian, “Federal law requires the US government to reimburse providers for costs incurred to respond to compulsory legal process imposed by the government. We have requested reimbursement consistent with this law.”
Facebook denied that it received compensation from the US government ever for facilitating the flow of private data. A representative for Google told the Guardian, “We await the US government’s response to our petition to publish more national security request data, which will show that our compliance with American national security laws falls far short of the wild claims still being made in the press today.”
In the wake of the first NSA disclosures leaked by Mr. Snowden, lawmakers in the US and abroad have debated whether or not the secretive surveillance programs, such as the Internet one operated under the name Prism, strike the proper balance between privacy and security.
President Barack Obama and his administration have made numerous claims that those operations exist with significant oversight to prevent any errors, including constitutional violations, but other documents released by Snowden in the wake of the first disclosures have shown that the NSA has accidentally collected the personal correspondence of Americans at least thousands of times annually.
According to their latest report, the federal government is spending millions to find a way to keep those companies only collecting data that invades the privacy of those outside the US.
Source: RT
End the Lie – Independent News
A Shell logo is seen at a petrol station in London January 31, 2013.
Credit: Reuters/Luke MacGregor
LONDON |
LONDON (Reuters) – Rising costs, a surge in oil thefts and disruption in Nigeria and other negative factors hit profits at Royal Dutch Shell (RDSa.L) on Thursday, leading outgoing chief executive Peter Voser to call the second quarter result “disappointing”.
Shell said it took a $ 700 million hit for a combination of Nigeria and for the tax impact of a weakening Australian dollar, and warned that Nigeria itself faces a $ 12 billion annual bill for the disruption. Shell recently put more of its Niger Delta activities up for sale.
Adjusted second quarter net earnings on a current cost of supply basis came in at $ 4.6 billion, down from $ 5.7 billion a year ago and below analysts’ expectations of a result that would have been little changed on last year.
“Higher costs, exploration charges, adverse currency exchange rate effects and challenges in Nigeria have hit our bottom line,” said Voser, who is due to step down at the end of this year. “These results were undermined by a number of factors – but they were clearly disappointing for Shell.”
Shell (RDSa.L) vies with U.S.-based Chevron (CVX.N) for the world number two spot among investor-controlled oil companies behind Exxon Mobil (XOM.N). Exxon is due to report results later on Thursday.
(Reporting by Andrew Callus; Editing by Paul Sandle)
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Mark Drajem
Bloomberg
June 12, 2013
Buried in a little-noticed rule on microwave ovens is a change in the U.S. government’s accounting for carbon emissions that could have wide-ranging implications for everything from power plants to the Keystone XL pipeline.
The increase of the so-called social cost of carbon, to $ 38 a metric ton in 2015 from $ 23.80, adjusts the calculation the government uses to weigh costs and benefits of proposed regulations. The figure is meant to approximate losses from global warming such as flood damage and diminished crops.
With the change, government actions that lead to cuts in emissions — anything from new mileage standards to clean-energy loans — will appear more valuable in its cost-benefit analyses. On the flip side, approvals that could lead to more carbon pollution, such as TransCanada Corp. (TRP)’s Keystone pipeline or coal-mining by companies such as Peabody Energy Corp. (BTU) on public lands, may be viewed as more costly.
This article was posted: Wednesday, June 12, 2013 at 12:34 pm
Tags: energy
