Effective April 16, Walgreens drugstores across the state [ed: Washington state] won’t take any new Medicaid patients, saying that filling their prescriptions is a money-losing proposition — the latest development in an ongoing dispute over Medicaid reimbursement.

The company, which operates 121 stores in the state, will continue filling Medicaid prescriptions for current patients.

In a news release, Walgreens said its decision to not take new Medicaid patients stemmed from a “continued reduction in reimbursement” under the state’s Medicaid program, which reimburses it at less than the break-even point for 95 percent of brand-name medications dispensed to Medicaid patents.

Walgreens follows Bartell Drugs, which stopped taking new Medicaid patients last month at all 57 of its stores in Washington, though it still fills Medicaid prescriptions for existing customers at all but 15 of those stores.

Hey Walgreens, just wait until ObamaCare becomes law and you get the same reimbursement rates not just for a handful of Medicare patients but for the entire population of Washington.

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Buyers, beware: President Barack Obama says his health care overhaul will lower premiums by double digits, but check the fine print.

Premiums are likely to keep going up even if the health care bill passes, experts say. If cost controls work as advertised, annual increases would level off with time. But don’t look for a rollback. Instead, the main reason premiums would be more affordable is that new government tax credits would help cover the cost for millions of people.

Listening to Obama pitch his plan, you might not realize that’s how it works.

Health insurance premiums will continue to rise with or without ObamaCare.

If cost controls work as advertised (and does that ever happen with government programs?) annual increases could level over some time frame. But this will only be accomplished if government tax credits cover the health care cost for millions of people. And who will be providing all those government tax credits? Yep, those poor souls that actually pay income taxes. The federal government will never simply “give away” any of its money, they will simply raise taxes to cover the additional costs.

So for middle America, Joe Sixpack and his household, healthcare insurance premiums will continue to rise. On top of that Joe Sixpack will have part of his income taxes siphoned off to assist with the healthcare costs of folks that do not have health care insurance … while still paying his ever-increasing health care costs.

Bow before Höpenchange, mortal. This is the legislation that Congress is using every legal (and illegal) trick to shove down your throat against your will.

If you don’t contact your elected representative over this debacle, then you deserve anything you get.

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The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Thursday shows that 24% of the nation’s voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Forty-two percent (42%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -18.

Thirty-seven percent (37%) give the President good or excellent marks for handling the economy while 47% say he’s done a poor job in this area.

Twenty-five percent (25%) say the U.S. is generally heading in the right direction.

Fifty-seven percent (57%) believe that passage of the proposed health care legislation will hurt the economy. Just 25% believe it will help. Forty-two percent (42%) favor the President’s health care plan while 53% are opposed. Fifty-five percent (55%) say that Congress should scrap the current health care legislation and start over.

So why is Congress still trying to ram this hideous piece of legislation down our throats?

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According to the most recent Fortune 500 rankings, health insurers are not even among the top-30 United States industries in profit-margin. Health insurers rank 35th, with a profit-margin of just 2.2 percent — less than one-fifth the profit-margin of railroads. None of the ten largest American health insurers made profits of more than 4.5 percent, and two of them lost money. Health insurers’ collective profit-margin is less than one-eighth that of drug companies and less than one-seventh that of companies that sell medical products or equipment. It’s also less than that of medical facilities. Yet when was the last time you heard President Obama rail against greedy hospitals?

But … but … but didn’t King Obama spend yesterday launching a campaign to vilify insurance companies?

The combined profits of America’s ten largest health insurers are $8.3 billion. That’s less than two-thirds of the profits of Wal-Mart alone, less than half of the profits of General Electric alone, and less than one-seventh of what Medicare loses each year to fraud. Health insurers collectively have one-eighth the profit-margin of McDonald’s or Coke, one-ninth that of eBay, and one-fifteenth that of Merck.

Why don’t these much more profitable companies or industries need to be taken over by the federal government? Why don’t they need to be subjected to something like President Obama’s proposed Health Insurance Rate Authority, which would be run by the same U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that already loses $60 billion of taxpayer money to Medicare fraud each year?

This has nothing to do with healthcare. This has nothing to do with making Americans lives easier or more healthy. This is government intrusion into the lives of We The People. In 1776 the people revolted against King George for far less that what Obama is attempting.

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1. Additional federal spending transfers resources from the more productive private sector to the less productive public sector of the economy.
2. As federal spending rises, it creates pressure to raise taxes now and in the future.
3. Much federal spending is wasteful and many federal programs are mismanaged.
4. Federal programs often benefit special interest groups while harming the broader interests of the general public.
5. Many federal programs cause active damage to society, in addition to the damage caused by the higher taxes needed to fund them.
6. The expansion of the federal government in recent decades runs counter to the American tradition of federalism.

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• The cost of our federal government is 25% of our total economy (GDP). This is compared with the average of 20.7% of the GDP during 1970-2009
• If you include the cost of state and local government, the total cost of government is almost 40% of our GDP
• Since 2008, the cost of our federal government has increased by one-fourth
• By 2020, Obama will have increased the federal government by one-half on a per family basis
• Before the recession, federal spending totaled $24,000 per household
• By 2020, Obama would raise that to $36,000 per household

Remember that every dollar, dime, and penny the federal government comes out of some taxpayer’s wallet. Every increase in the federal government comes from a forced decrease in individual income. Every expansion of government is accomplished by a shrinking of household income. This is your Hope and Change.

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The era of big government has returned with a vengeance, in the form of the largest federal work force in modern history.

The Obama administration says the government will grow to 2.15 million employees this year, topping 2 million for the first time since President Clinton declared that “the era of big government is over” and joined forces with a Republican-led Congress in the 1990s to pare back the federal work force.

Most of the increases are on the civilian side, which will grow by 153,000 workers, to 1.43 million people, in fiscal 2010.

Please never forget where each and every dime of all these employees salaries come from … out of your wallet.

So middle America is either unemployed or under-employed, middle America is suffering through lower salaries and higher costs, middle America is suffering through a terrible economy and record foreclosures, and President Obama believes that the best use of all that money taken out of your wallet is to subsidize the income of more and more government employees.

I didn’t think Obama could beat Carter’s dismal record, but he is sure working hard to do so.

The Obama model has two stages. The first stage is that the government and government unions grow massively and take over more and more aspects of what used to be free choices by people – all paid for by increasingly confiscatory taxation crushing the private sector. The second stage is just the elimination of the private sector as America moves to his ideal state of a gray conformist equality, with government officials “more equal” than others – similar to Mao’s China.

Bow at the Höpenchange, mere mortals. “We The People” is evolving into “We The Government”.

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The Obama administration’s plan to cut more than $1 trillion from the deficit over the next decade relies heavily on so-called backdoor tax increases that will result in a bigger tax bill for middle-class families.

In the 2010 budget tabled by President Barack Obama on Monday, the White House wants to let billions of dollars in tax breaks expire by the end of the year — effectively a tax hike by stealth.

While the administration is focusing its proposal on eliminating tax breaks for individuals who earn $250,000 a year or more, middle-class families will face a slew of these backdoor increases.

And from The Hill:

Grappling to contain record deficits, President Barack Obama is seeking to end a middle-class tax break he once said would be permanent.

The $3.8 trillion budget request rolled out by the White House on Monday would renew the Making Work Pay tax credit for fiscal 2011, but then would have it sunset.

That’s a switch from last year, when Obama’s budget called for making the tax credit permanent.

So to all those 55 million people that voted for Obama in 2008, I hope you’re happy with his higher taxes and his record deficit spending and his increasing reach of government.

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President Obama is expected to propose that Congress freeze “non-security” federal spending for the next three years, senior administration officials said Monday.

The term “non-security” is broad. It will exempt costs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, all other Pentagon spending, as well as foreign aid and the budgets of the Veterans Administration and Department of Homeland Security.

The freeze will apply to the annual spending on day-to-day government programs that do not include mandatory spending on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Spending on these three programs alone this year is projected to equal 8.7 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product or 59 percent of all federal spending.

OK, let’s be honest here. I don’t like Obama. I didn’t vote for him, I think he’s done a poor job as President, and since I see him as just another neo-euro-Socialist I do not respect him as a man.

Nevertheless, I give credit where credit is due. The federal government has to stop spending taxpayer dollars. You do realize, don’t you, that every penny spent by the federal government is a penny taken by force out of someone’s wallet or purse? So every penny they spend, on any program, is a penny you or I could have used to buy our groceries or pay doctor bills.

I also appreciate that he limited this to the next three years – his administration – and didn’t try to impose anything on the next President.

Then there’s Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. I’m afraid that these three Socialist programs are now too intertwined into this country and cannot be touched. It’s a damn shame that so many people absolutely depend on the government to pay their bills.

Now let’s look at reality, though. These spending freezes will do little to bring down the deficit. These spending freezes will do little to help average taxpayers. These spending freezes may be nothing more than a “look at me” from Obama as he attempts to re-image himself as a man of the people. Just like he did during the election, Obama may be doing nothing more than saying what his advisers tell him the people want to hear. Don’t forget that no less than four times during the presidential debates did Obama actively campaign against an across the board spending freeze. And until I see something really happening out of Washington I do not believe a word out of his mouth.

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- 63% of public thinks projects in plan were included for purely political reasons.
- 21% of people in poll say nearly all the money in the stimulus has been wasted.
- 56% of the public opposes the stimulus.

Nearly three out of four Americans think that at least half of the money spent in the federal stimulus plan has been wasted, according to a new national poll.

A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Monday morning also indicates that 63 percent of the public thinks that projects in the plan were included for purely political reasons and will have no economic benefit, with 36 percent saying those projects will benefit the economy.

Twenty-one percent of people questioned in the poll say nearly all the money in the stimulus has been wasted, with 24 percent feeling that most money has been wasted and an additional 29 percent saying that about half has been wasted. Twenty-one percent say only a little has been wasted and 4 percent think that no stimulus dollars have been wasted.

“One reason why the economic stimulus bill is no longer popular with the American public is the perception that a lot of the money has been wasted. Six in 10 believe that the projects in the stimulus bill were included for purely political reasons,” said CNN Polling Director Keating Holland.

Duh.

Have you seen any stimulus money? Have you seen any concrete positive results coming from Washington’s stimulus money? And do you remember that every penny of Obama’s stimulus money came directly out of some poor taxpayer’s wallet, money they could have used to better their own condition?

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