NBC, ABC Gush Over ‘Celebrity-Packed Secret Soiree’ at White House

While NBC’s Today and ABC’s Good Morning America ignored longtime Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal testifying before the House Benghazi Committee on Tuesday, both morning shows eagerly touted a “celebrity-packed secret soiree” at the White House “with 500 guests, including a couple of music legends.” 

On Today, co-host Carson Daly proclaimed: “Now to that secret soiree at the White House hosted by the President and First Lady, featuring Prince and Stevie Wonder. Not too shabby. It happened over the weekend.”

 Moments later Daly revealed: “You know who was at this event? Our friend Al Roker.” News anchor Natalie Morales noted another NBC host at the exclusive presidential party: “And Tamron [Hall]. And Tamron was there.” 

Roker gushed about the event: “Well, it was very nice, some lovely hors d’oeuvres. And got to watch the First Lady and the President get down. So it was – but to see Prince and then Stevie Wonder together performing was worth everything....it was unbelievable.”

Daly wondered: “How do you get on the list?...How did you get invited to this secret party at the White House?” Roker joked: “I don't know. I think it was a mistake. They actually wanted [my wife] Deborah and I had to come along.” 

In reality, it was not the first time Roker attended a White House bash. In 2014, Roker could not contain his excitement while describing another party with the Obamas: “I actually got to boogie a little with the First Lady....Deborah and I were dancing and all of a sudden I turned around and there was Mrs. Obama....And I'm thinking, ‘Oh, my gosh, I'm dancing with the First Lady.’” 

On Good Morning America, correspondent Jim Avila declared: “It's tough to keep a concert secret when the headliner is Prince, the accompanist is Stevie Wonder, the audience is the First Family, and the venue is the White House – especially in the age of social media.”

Via: Newsbusters

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California Gun Limits Face Court Challenge

California Gun Limits Face Court Challenge

June 16, 2015 By Ashby 

California’s requirement that residents looking to carry firearms in public have a good reason to do so is facing a high-level court challenge, one that gets to a key question surrounding the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms.

On Tuesday, 11 judges of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco will hear arguments over California’s requirement that applicants show “good cause” before they are allowed to carry a concealed handgun in public. The challengers are taking issue with the rules in two California counties — San Diego and Yolo — where sheriffs say that concern for one’s personal safety alone isn’t considered justification enough for a concealed-carry permit.

In a 2008 case, District of Columbia v. Heller, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled definitively that people had the right to bear arms in their homes, even in municipalities with strict gun-control laws. But aside from a 2010 case that extended the reach of that ruling, the court has been quiet on how far the right extends beyond the front door, largely leaving lower courts little guidance. The California case will likely give the high court another opportunity to more clearly define the law.

Via: California Political Review

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[VIDEO] Melissa Harris-Perry Presses Dolezal: ‘Are You a Con Artist?’

MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry, who previously wondered whether it was possible that Rachel Dolezal actually was black, straightforwardly asked the former Spokane NAACP head in a recent interview whether or not she was a con artist.

“Are a con artist?” Harris-Perry asks, in a preview of the interview posted on MSNBC.com.

“I don’t think so, you know?” Dolezal responded. “I don’t think that anything that I have done with regards to the movement, my work, my life, my identity– I mean it’s all been very thoughtful and careful.”

Dolezal enigmatically added that some of her decisions were made for “survival reasons,” and that when it came to protecting her kids, “I will never stand down on that.”

Via: Mediaite

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[VIDEO] Budget Office: US Debt Picture Has 'Worsened Dramatically'

Congress' budget office again warned that the U.S. faces a massive debt problem Tuesday, using stark language to describe the government's long-term mismatch between spending and revenues even as it slightly upgraded its projections for debt over the next 25 years.

"The long-term outlook for the federal budget has worsened dramatically over the past several years, in the wake of the 2007-2009 recession and slow recovery," the Congressional Budget Office reported in its long-term budget outlook for 2015 released Tuesday.

RELATED: House defies veto threat, passes defense spending bill

The Budget Office, a nonpartisan in-house think tank for Congress, projected that the federal debt is set to rise from 74 percent of economic output today to 103 percent by 2040, driven by spending on government healthcare and retirement programs and interest payments on the debt.

The projection issued Tuesday, which is subject to significant uncertainty, is a slight improvement from last year, when the budget office estimated that debt would hit 106 percent by 2039. The outlook has gotten brighter, if only trivially, because financial markets now expect lower interest rates in the future, which will lower the cost of servicing the debt for the Treasury.

The budget office warned that debt would still be growing in 2040. It also could be nearly twice as large by 2040 as in the baseline estimate if a more realistic guess about how Congress will act in the years ahead and the economic feedback from higher debt placing a drag on economic growth are taken into account.

RELATED: Dems demand budget summit with GOP

Although the long-term budget picture is dark thanks to the anticipated costs of the Baby Boom generation retiring, the federal debt is anticipated to decline for the next few years, thanks partly to spending cuts and tax increases imposed by Congress in recent years.

But the larger development is the government dedicated more and more tax dollars to entitlement and healthcare programs.

Spending on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare subsidies and other healthcare programs will rise from an average 6.5 percent of gross domestic product over the past 50 years to 14.2 percent of GDP by 2040.

Via: Washington Examiner

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The Federalist: America, The Unserious Super-Power

The United States is no longer a serious country.

Now, by this I do not mean that America is no longer a super-power. By any gross indicator of strength, the United States is as powerful as it’s ever been, perhaps more powerful than at any time in its history. It has a massive, highly productive economy, a military second to none, and an alliance that dwarfs all possible competitors. On paper, it’s still the only super-power on this planet (or on any other that we know of, so far).

But the status of a great nation is built on more than raw power. It includes intangible qualities like respect, admiration, and, yes, fear. We don’t need all three of them; no major power does. But we need at least one of them at any given moment, and right now, we’re bottoming out in each of these measures. President Obama may insist that America is now “the most respected country on Earth”—a claim even the normally more forgiving folks at PolitiFact rate as only “half-true”—but the Russians, Iranians, and Chinese clearly disagree, and for good reason.

The Chinese hack of the Office of Personnel Management is the most recent, and most obvious, example of how our status is going down the drain. This is a disaster of unimaginable proportions. The intelligence damage, including security-clearance information, will last for decades. (I, of course, am one of the millions of federal workers waiting to find out if my files are now in Beijing.) Almost as shocking as the size of this breach, however, is the fact that no one seems to care very much, including the Chinese, who have shown no concern at all.

An Act of War, Ignored

In any normal world, a super-power would not tolerate this kind of an attack. Perhaps more accurately, a true super-power would never have to endure such an attack in the first place, because other nations would be loath to engage in such a direct act of open hostility. States do lousy things to each other all day long, but the wholesale and brazen theft of personnel records is a different kind of espionage. The scale is so vast that it is a direct challenge to the United States of America.

Countries, as a rule, do not do whatever they can do, they do what they think they can get away with.

In response, the most powerful country in the world has drawn itself up to its full height, clenched its mighty fist in anger, and….contracted out for some identity-theft protection for its employees. The majesty of the enraged eagle is truly remarkable to behold.

The critics say the government wasn’t very good at protecting that information. It was wearing its data-management skirt a little short this time, so it deserved this kind of attack. To argue that sloppy information security makes what happened understandable, however, is to miss a far larger point: countries, as a rule, do not do whatever they can do, they do what they think they can get away with, and those are two different things.

Via: The Federalist

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Obama wants to reengineer your neighborhood

Julian Castro addresses the 2012 Democratic National Convention at the Time Warner Cable Arena in Charlotte. (Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post)

This is what you get when you put a community organizer in the White House — he tries to reorganize your community from Washington.

Apparently, President Obama thinks your neighborhood may not be inclusive enough, so he has instructed his Department of Housing and Urban Development to issue a new rule called Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing, which is designed to force communities to diversify.

According to the Obama administration, in too many neighborhoods “housing choices continue to be constrained through housing discrimination, the operation of housing markets, [and] investment choices by holders of capital.” (Yes, that is a quote from an actual HUD document, not a bad undergraduate thesis on Karl Marx.)

Under Obama’s proposed rule, the federal government will collect massive amounts of data on the racial, ethnic and socioeconomic makeup of thousands of local communities, looking for signs of “disparities by race, color, religion, sex, familial status, national origin, or disability in access to community assets.” Then the government will target communities withresults it doesn’t like and use billions of dollars in federal grant money to bribe or blackmail them into changing their zoning and housing policies.

This is not about blocking housing discrimination, which has been illegal since 1968. It is unlawful for someone to deny you a loan or prevent you from buying a home because of your race, creed or color. Socioeconomic status is — and ought to be — another matter. If you want to buy a nice house in the suburbs, you have to be able to afford it. Apparently, Obama thinks that’s unfair discrimination by the “holders of capital.”

Via: Washington Post

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OBAMA ADMITS HEALTHCARE.GOV ‘A WELL DOCUMENTED DISASTER’

In a glossy “Fast Company” magazine spread promoting his new “tech team,” President Obama admitted that his Obamacare website was a “well-documented disaster” and that it forced him to pay more attention to technology.

“This did not get the kind of laser-focused attention until ­Healthcare.gov, which was a well-­documented disaster, but ended up anyways being the catalyst for us saying, ‘Okay, we have to completely revamp how we do things,’” he said during the interview.

Obama added that he was too busy handing national crises including the collapsing economy, bailing out the auto industry, and halting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to pay enough attention to the technology that was running government.

He also took the blame for not anticipating the problems with the Obamacare website sooner.

“It’s something, by the way, I should have caught, I should have anticipated,” he admitted.

Part of the reason he was creating a new tech team in Washington D.C. was to create a “startup” feel in allowing him to recruit some of the best people in the tech industry to come and work for the government to make it better.

Although he said there were “really smart people” in government, he insisted that the technology in the federal government was “terrible.”

“[T]o see how lumbering this thing was, that was pretty distressing,” Obama said, pointing to the contrast he experienced with his presidential campaign and the actual workings of government technology.

Via: Breitbart

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The FDA just banned trans fats — here's what it means for you

In a move that experts say could prevent thousands of deaths every year, the US Food and Drug Administration has declared that trans fats are no longer considered safe in food.

The new rule released Tuesday, June 16 gives food companies three years to cut trans fats from the food supply. And while the use of these fats has already declined a lot in recent years, some companies are slacking on removing it from their products.

About 85% of artificial trans fat has already been removed from the food supply, as a result of an ongoing public health campaign including a requirement to put trans fat on nutrition labels, state and local bans of trans fats in restaurants, and lawsuits, according to the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI).

The newly announced ban, then, is a means of "putting the last nail in the coffin," Jim O’Hara, director of health promotion policy at CSPI, told Business Insider.

Via: Business Insider

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California Water Cuts Leave City Days Away From Running Out Of Water

MOUNTAIN HOUSE (CBS13) — The community of Mountain House is days away from having no water at all after the state cut off its only water source.

Anthony Gordon saves drinking water just in case, even though he never thought it would come to this.

“My wife thinks I’m nuts. I have like 500 gallons of drinking water stored in my home,” he said.

The upscale community of Mountain House, west of Tracy, is days away from having no water. It’s not just about lawns—there may not be a drop for the 15,000 residents to drink.

“We’re out there looking for water supplies as we speak,” said Mountain House general manager Ed Pattison. “We have storage tanks, but those are basically just to ensure the correct pressurization of the distribution system. No more than 2 days are in those storage tanks.”

The community’s sole source of water, the Byron-Bethany Irrigation District, was one of 114 senior water rights holders cut off by a curtailment notice from the state on Friday.

That means Mountain House leaders must find someone to sell them water, hopefully, the GM says, to have enough until the end of the year.

“We don’t want this town to become a ghost town, it was a beautiful master-planned community,” he said.

A number of water districts plan to sue the state on the grounds the State Water Resources Control Board has no legal authority to cut off some of California’s oldest and most protected water rights.

Via: CBS Sacramento

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Access Denied: Daily Mail Reporter David Martosko Barred from THIRD Clinton Campaign Event: 'Offensive, Unacceptable'

A political reporter for The Daily Mail told The Kelly File that he was barred from a third Hillary Clinton campaign event in New Hampshire. It was a story reported by Megan Kelly.

"This is the one thing she doesn't get to control,” said Megyn Kelly.

The latest incident happened Monday night at the Manchester City Democratic Committee’s Flag Day Dinner, according to David Martosko, the Mail’s U.S. political editor.

"The Daily Mail is a very dogged, thorough reporting organization, and we don't tend to show up and do what we're told...and a lot of those stories the Clinton's don't like," said Martosko.

"I was embarrassed, as a journalist to see how many journalists reported on Saturday only what the Clinton campaign wanted them to,” he added. "We have a duty to do more than that. But I think the Clinton campaign, at this point, doesn't have a lot of tolerance for reporters who stray outside the lines."

The press pool stands with Martosko and the Daily Mail to have access, like all other journalists, to cover the Hillary campaign.

This was the third campaign event Martosko has been denied media access to as it was previously reported that Martosko was barred from covering Clinton events in Rochester and Concord, NH.

Hillary can choose whether or not she wants to answer questions from the media, but as Martosko stated, "the Clinton campaign doesn't get to choose who covers them."

As the Daily Mail reporter noted, this story is about the fact that reporters "have the freedom to go to these events and cover them."

"I was told 'you need to leave,' Martosko said, "I find that unacceptable and offensive."

If Hillary won't give power to the press, how can we trust she'll give power to the people?

Via: Fox News

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Trump Jumps Into the Race: 'I Am Officially Running for President of the United States and We're Going to Make Our Country Great Again'

Real-estate mogul and television personality Donald Trump announced his 2016 presidential campaign Tuesday morning.

"Ladies and gentlemen, I am officially running for president of the United States, and we are going to make our country great again!" Trump said.

The Republican businessman made the announcement at the namesake Trump Tower in New York City.

In his wide-ranging and, lasting about 45 minutes, lengthy speech, Trump railed against President Barack Obama and the potential Pacific trade deal — the Trans-Pacific Partnership — while repeatedly touting his own negotiating skills.

"Our country is in serious trouble," he said. "We don't have victories anymore. We used to have victories, but we don't have them. When was the last time anybody saw us beating, let's say, China in a trade deal? I beat China all the time. All the time."

Via: Business Insider

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[SPECIAL REPORT] A Bicycle, an Infection, and a Lie

“Land of Song!” said the warrior bard,
“Tho’ all the world betrays thee,
One sword, at least, thy rights shall guard,
One faithful harp shall praise thee!”
— “The Minstrel Boy” by Thomas Moore

The last two weeks have seen a surprising sequence of events surrounding the Iran nuclear weapons talks. It all started on the night of Friday, May 29 when John Kerry arrived in Geneva for an all-day talk scheduled for the following day, Saturday, May 30. The talks did not go well. A senior administration official described them as “intense,” which is diplomatic-speak for “nasty.” There had been plans to continue the next day, but the Iranians mysteriously hightailed it out of Dodge City that night.

When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. As he had a free morning on Sunday, Kerry decided to go biking in the French Alps. He’s an experienced cyclist and had brought his bicycle along. And so he set off, riding his orange trail bike, which matched the orange of his helmet. His cycling suit was an elegant black, except for some white markings and a blue band around the bottom of the shorts he wore over his tights. And his bright yellow arm-warmers provided just the right pop of color.

Alas, man proposes and God disposes. Shortly after he set out, we’re told that he hit a curb and fell off his bicycle, breaking his right femur. How that happened isn’t clear. The press wasn’t notified of the accident for some 90 minutes. Local officials said that he was “traveling at a slow speed, on flat ground.” There is a 40 second video where you can see your Secretary of State maneuver his bike, weaving through the other cyclists who were riding with him. They look like bodyguards, and for some reason they keep getting in his way. Riding with guys like this, no wonder he took a fall. You can see it here, but it doesn’t actually show Kerry hit the curb and fall.

Did Kerry’s elegant outfit get mussed up? We’ll never know. For the camera cuts away and we’re taken on what seems to be a ride backwards in time to where Kerry has not yet gotten on to his bicycle. The scene is surreal. There are lots of cars and security personnel aimlessly milling about and then, on the left side of the frame, Kerry can be seen walking out from behind some tall bushes, holding what might be a white folder in his left hand and his cell phone to his ear with his right. He turns and stares directly into the camera, in case we’ve not noticed him. We are perhaps meant to understand that our Secretary of State is not just a pretty face and a fashion plate. He is always working hard on our behalf. Right up until the moment he gets onto his bicycle he will be attending to his duties.

Kerry is flown back to Geneva where he spends the night in a hospital. On the following day, June 1, he is flown to Boston and taken to Massachusetts General Hospital where he apparently undergoes a four-hour surgery under a regional anesthetic. By Tuesday, his doctor says that he’s been fixed. He can walk and is starting physio.

The world breathes a collective sigh of relief, because now the nuke talks can go on. Kerry will continue to hold our side. Only no one hears from him for 10 days. “Ten days later, why no pictures of John Kerry?” asks the Washington Examiner.

Via: American Spectator

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5 Things You May Not Know About Donald Trump

Donald Trump has become one of the most well-known Americans through his business dealings, television shows including "The Apprentice," and frequent appearances in the media, and he plans to announce on Tuesday if he will seek the Republican presidential nomination in 2016.

But there are still a number of things about "The Donald" that are not widely known. Here are five of them:

1. Trump's grandparents anglicized their name from Drumpf. His grandfather Friedrich and grandmother Elisabeth were born in Germany and emigrated to the United States. Their son Fred Trump married Donald Trump's mother Mary Ann MacLeod, who was born in Scotland and met Donald Trump's father during a vacation trip to New York.

2. While Donald Trump did inherit wealth from his father, he is personally responsible for accumulating the great bulk of his fortune. Trump's father built affordable rental housing, mostly in Brooklyn and Queens in New York City. He had a net wealth estimated at between $250 million and $400 million at the time of his death, but his four surviving children were heirs.

By 2011, Donald Trump's business dealings had boosted his fortune to $2.4 billion, according to Forbes. One estimate now places his worth at $4.1 billion, although another maintains that it is as high as $7 billion.

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3. Trump's parents sent him to a military school, New York Military Academy, when he was 13 years old. While there he played varsity football, varsity soccer, and was captain of his varsity baseball team.

4. Trump's oldest sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, served as a federal appeals court judge. She was nominated for the post by President Bill Clinton in 1999 and unanimously confirmed by the Senate. Prior to that, she had a seat on the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey.

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5. Trump prefers cherry-vanilla ice cream. He also loves hamburgers and meat loaf, he once told Us Weekly, but he doesn't drink coffee, tea, or alcohol, and eats only the toppings on pizza, discarding the dough. And he eats lunch at his desk.

Via: Newsmax

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Fact Check Whacks Bill Clinton

Bill Clinton’s claim that Hillary did economic diplomacy because there was no Commerce Secretary

“She [Hillary Clinton] believed that part of the job as secretary of state was to advance America’s economic interests around the world. And, for much of the time she was secretary, for a number of complex reasons, we didn’t have [a] commerce secretary. And now we have got Penny Pritzker. And she’s very vigorous and very good, I think. But we didn’t have one. And so, if she hadn’t been doing this economic diplomacy work, nobody would have been doing it.”

— Former President Bill Clinton, interviewed on CNN’s “State of the Union,” June 14, 2015

Former president Clinton, in rebutting accusations that Hillary Clinton helped donors to the Clinton Foundation while serving as secretary of state, made an interesting point on one of the Sunday politics shows — that she had to engage in “economic diplomacy” because “much of time she was secretary,” there was no Commerce Secretary.

This made little sense to us, and it’s certainly easy to check. Was there such a gap in Commerce leadership that it was left to Clinton to conduct the administration’s economic diplomacy?

The Facts

The Commerce Department is sometimes described as the broom closet of the federal bureaucracy, in that it contains a number of unrelated agencies, such as the Census Bureau, the National Weather Service, the Patent and Trademark office, the Economic Development Administration, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, and so forth. The notion that the commerce secretary was some sort of globe-trotting promoter of American industry only began to take hold in Clinton’s administration, when Ron Brown became commerce secretary.

The Commerce Secretary, in the department’s mission statement, “serves as the voice of U.S. business within the President’s Cabinet.” Commerce Department Order 1-1 says “the historic mission of the Department is ‘to foster, promote, and develop the foreign and domestic commerce’ of the United States.”

Via: Washington Post

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How South Carolina’s Congressmen Voted On “Obamatrade”

The U.S. House of Representatives cast a pair of critical votes on Friday related to president Barack Obama‘s crony capitalist trade push (a.k.a. “Obamatrade“).

The result?  A mixed bag … leaving the future of this massive deal (which would impact up to forty percent of the world’s economy) up in the air.

The first vote was on a so-called “trade adjustment assistance” (TAA) provision favored by Democrats as part of the Pacific Rim pact.  This measure – which says all you need to know about the secretive deal – would have created a costly new government program aimed at helping American workers who lost their jobs as a result of Obamatrade’s passage.

That provision failed by a 302-126 margin.

Five of South Carolina’s seven congressmen – Jeff Duncan, Trey Gowdy, Mick Mulvaney, Tom Rice and Mark Sanford – voted against this provision.  Only two of them – Jim Clyburn (the lone Democrat in the delegation) and Joe Wilson – voted for it.

The next vote addressed whether to give Obama’s administration so-called “trade promotion authority” (TPA, or “fast track” negotiating authority) to conduct the trade deal.  This provision would let Obama continue drafting the agreement in secret – forbidding Congress from debating it, amending it or even overseeing it once it had been approved.

That measure passed by a narrow 219-211 margin.

Unfortunately, only three South Carolina congressmen – Clyburn, Duncan and Mulvaney – voted against this provision.

The rest of the delegation – including so-called “conservatives” Trey Gowdy and Mark Sanford – voted for it.  Their votes were critical, too.  Had all of the Palmetto State’s so-called “conservative” delegation opposed this provision, then the chamber would have deadlocked.

Via: Fit News

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King v. Burwell in Perspective: Only 1 Out of 5 Whose Insurance Costs Grew Because of Obamacare Got Subsidies

The Supreme Court will soon hand down its decision in King v. Burwell. That case asks the Court to decide if the statutory text of the Affordable Care Act authorizes the Treasury to pay subsidies to individuals who purchased coverage through Healthcare.gov—the federally operated health insurance exchange for states that did not establish their own exchanges.

Yet behind the legal dispute over who is eligible to receive subsidies lurks the larger policy issue of the subsidies’ function. While their stated purpose was to help more low-income individuals purchase health insurance, the subsidies also served to mask the significant health insurance premium increases that would inevitably result from the law’s new insurance benefit requirements and regulations.

For instance, if a 45-year-old received $540 annually in subsidies, he may not realize that the premium for the lowest-cost health insurance plan in his area actually had increased by $600 a year thanks to Obamacare regulations—because the government was paying most of that additional cost.

That imposition of costly new requirements on health insurance coverage was one of Obamacare’s fundamental errors. Good health care policy, by contrast, would have started by focusing on finding ways to make coverage less costly rather than just having the government pick up some or all of the extra cost.

Via: The Daily Signal

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