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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No way around it, the politics of ObamaCare are bad. So bad that it lends credence to the belief that some in the White House and Congress are far more ideologically interested in establishing European-style health care than they are the public’s will or their party’s electoral success. The question now is how many congressional Democrats are going to follow them into a political black hole.

“European-style” is just a nice way to say “Socialist”.

“more ideologically interested … than they are the public’s will” is just a nice way to say “we’re smarter than you mere mortals”.

Bow before Höpenchange.

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Bluntly put, this is the political reality:

First, the battle for public opinion has been lost. Comprehensive health care has been lost. If it fails, as appears possible, Democrats will face the brunt of the electorate’s reaction. If it passes, however, Democrats will face a far greater calamitous reaction at the polls. Wishing, praying or pretending will not change these outcomes.

Nothing has been more disconcerting than to watch Democratic politicians and their media supporters deceive themselves into believing that the public favors the Democrats’ current health-care plan. Yes, most Americans believe, as we do, that real health-care reform is needed. And yes, certain proposals in the plan are supported by the public.

However, a solid majority of Americans opposes the massive health-reform plan. Four-fifths of those who oppose the plan strongly oppose it, according to Rasmussen polling this week, while only half of those who support the plan do so strongly. Many more Americans believe the legislation will worsen their health care, cost them more personally and add significantly to the national deficit. Never in our experience as pollsters can we recall such self-deluding misconstruction of survey data.

We The People do not want what’s coming out of Congress. Yet Congress still demands that We The People swallow what they’re shoving down our throats. Why?

Second, the country is moving away from big government, with distrust growing more generally toward the role of government in our lives. Scott Rasmussen asked last month whose decisions people feared more in health care: that of the federal government or of insurance companies. By 51 percent to 39 percent, respondents feared the decisions of federal government more. This is astounding given the generally negative perception of insurance companies.

CNN found last month that 56 percent of Americans believe that the government has become so powerful it constitutes an immediate threat to the freedom and rights of citizens. When only 21 percent of Americans say that Washington operates with the consent of the governed, as was also reported last month, we face an alarming crisis.

Health care is no longer a debate about the merits of specific initiatives. Since the spectacle of Christmas dealmaking to ensure passage of the Senate bill, the issue, in voters’ minds, has become less about health care than about the government and a political majority that will neither hear nor heed the will of the people.

Voters are hardly enthralled with the GOP, but the Democrats are pursuing policies that are out of step with the way ordinary Americans think and feel about politics and government. Barring some change of approach, they will be punished severely at the polls.

This country was founded on a concept of a small limited central government. Over the last 100 years we have allowed the government to slowly grow year after year, and not we are faced with an out-of-control Godzilla. Enough is enough. It’s the fault of the people for letting this happen, and today we are faced with a great battle to wrestle control out of Washington and back to We The People.

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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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New Disease Discovered and Classified: ‘Gonorrhea Lectim’

The Center for Disease Control has issued a warning about a new virulent strain of this old disease. The disease is called Gonorrhea Lectim (pronounced “Gonna re-elect ‘em”).

The disease is contracted through dangerous and high risk behavior involving putting your cranium up your rectum. Many victims contracted it in 2008 … but now most people after having been infected for the past 1-2 years are starting to realize how destructive this sickness is.

It’s curable with a new procedure just coming on the market called Vo-tem-out! You take the first dose/step in 2010 and the second dosage in 2012 and simply don’t engage in such behavior again, otherwise it could become permanent and eventually wipe out all life as we know it.

Several states are already on top of this like Virginia and New Jersey, and apparently now Massachusetts with many more seeing the writing on the wall.

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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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