” The big win, from my perspective, is health care.”
-Rep. Phil Hare, August 17, on his major accomplishments in Congress this year.
Thanks to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act………………..
Our national deficit will continue to grow. Just a month after the bill passed the Congressional Budget Office announced it would actually cost $115 billion more than previously thought, bringing the total cost to more than $1 trillion.
Higher taxes will be imposed on small businesses. While politicians like Rep. Hare claim to be fighting for small business, the real business owners, like those represented by the non-partisan National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB), were not so easily fooled. “The fundamental mission of our organization is to promote and protect the rights of small businesses and the self-employed to own, operate and grow their business and this health care law directly undermines this core value,” wrote the NFIB president in a statement following the vote. The NFIB joined the 20 other states in the lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the bill.
More people will lose jobs. In a study published several months before the vote, the non-partisan Illinois Policy Institute predicted the bill would cost Illinois 169,000 jobs. Newly added provisions in the bill are expected to significantly increase this number. Major employers in the17th district like Caterpillar and John Deere will see their costs rise by $100 million and $150 million respectively, in the first year alone. Why would any company hire workers when their costs are increasing by hundreds of millions of dollars? They won’t.
Our quality of care will decrease. Rep. Hare assured the 8 in 10 Americans happy with their health care they would be able to keep their current plans. However, according to the Associated Press, the Obama Administration itself, “estimates that many employers will be forced to make changes to their health plans under the new law. In just three years, a majority of workers-51 percent-will be in plans subject to new federal requirements.” In addition, the Obama Administration has acknowledged that “health insurance plans that are now offered by small businesses probably will not survive the transition to a regulated marketplace.”
Our cost of care will increase. Obamacare imposes billions of dollars in annual fees and taxes on drug manufacturers, prescription drug importers, and health insurance plans. Moreover, the bill establishes new taxes on certain retail sales by manufacturers and importers of medical devices. According to The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) these fees and taxes, “would generally be passed through to health consumers in the form of higher drug and device prices and higher insurance premiums.
Seniors will see major cuts in Medicare. The most drastic cuts ($132 billion), will be made to the popular Medicare Advantage program. Additionally, Medicare payments for home health care will be reduced by $40 billion and payments to certain hospitals will be cut by $22 billion.
Even the New York Times can’t ignore the fact that 
Daniel Halper asks a 
The Hill conducted its 
After the heming and hawing by the Obama administration over whether we should bring terror suspects to trial before military commissions, Obama’s DOJ and DOD finally decided that they could. But once again we see the half-way actions of the Obama administration shining through by the fact that, even as Obama seems to agree with the Bush administration policy of military tribunals for terrorists, the president hasn’t made a single plan on what to do with any of those terrorists after they are convicted.
Thanks to CATO’s Jim Harper, 
The so-called “
It seems like a story written by a bad Hollywood script writer, but Illinois Senator Roland Burris is today challenging a federal judge’s decision to block any more candidates from being added to the ballot of the special election that has been ordered to fill the last few weeks of this Congressional session. Burris wants to be on that ballot but the judge said that only party nominees from the primary are allowed to be on the special election ballot.
Paul Magliocchetti, president of the lobbying firm PMA Group Inc. of Arlington, Virginia, was arrested on August 5 and charged with using friends and family to make 
Let’s go back to those hopey-changie days of the Obama campaign for president when he railed constantly against all those “special interests” and eeeevil lobbyists that he claimed were ruining the political process. Let us recall that once elected he claimed he’d have the “
If this doesn’t exemplify the left’s propensity to act in the mode of for-thee-but-not-me, nothing does. The Wall Street Journal (by way of the Wash. Examiner’s 
The AFL-CIO plans to spend another $50 million coming to the aid of Democrats during this campaign season for the 2010 midterms. But all is not well in uniondom as many unions are very, very unhappy with various and sundry Democrat candidates across the country.
Chicago Magazine has conducted an