Category Archives: HHS

SCOTUS Strikes Again

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The Supreme Court released two decisions this morning, both of them decided along liberal/conservative lines, 5 to 4.  The first decision, from Illinois health care workers against SEIU, sided against the union. It wasn’t unanimous but it was a rebuke to unions planning to expand at the expense of the public. On a 5-4 decisions, SCOTUS says that public service unions like SEIU cannot force non-members to pay dues.

Court: Public union can’t make nonmembers pay fees

By SAM HANANEL, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court dealt a blow to public sector unions Monday, ruling that thousands of home health care workers in Illinois cannot be required to pay fees that help cover the union’s costs of collective bargaining.

In a 5-4 split along ideological lines, the justices said the practice violates the First Amendment rights of nonmembers who disagree with the positions that unions take.

The ruling is a setback for labor unions that have bolstered their ranks – and bank accounts – in Illinois and other states by signing up hundreds of thousands of in-home care workers. It could lead to an exodus of members who will have little incentive to pay dues if nonmembers don’t have to share the burden of union costs.

But the ruling was limited to this particular segment of workers – not private sector unions – and it stopped short of overturning decades of practice that has generally allowed public sector unions to pass through their representation costs to nonmembers.

Writing for the court, Justice Samuel Alito said home care workers are different from other types of government employees because they work primarily for their disabled or elderly customers and do not have most of the rights and benefits of state employees.

You can read the entire article here.

A lawyer friend of mine explained that the defense, the Illinois health care litigators, argued for an exception. Therefore, SCOTUS could only grant that exception. If the grounds of the argument had been wider or on other grounds, the decision could have been different—knocking down all union extortion of dues from non-members…or siding with the union. In any case it was a step in the right direction even it it does apply only to public sector unions.

The second decision announced today is one the religious and 1st Amendment advocates have been waiting for. It is the famous Hobby-Lobby, Mardel and Conestoga suit against HHS that would force these companies to provide contraception insurance against the company owner’s religious views.

Hobby Lobby Wins Contraceptive Ruling in Supreme Court

Jun 30, 2014, 10:25 AM ET

Companies are not required to pay for employees’ contraceptives for women if they have religious objections, the Supreme Court ruled today.

The justices’ decision came in a 5-4 ruling in the much anticipated case.

The court holds: “As applied to closely held corporations the HHS regulations imposing the contraceptive mandate violate RFRA”

Alito wrote that “RFRA applies to regulations that govern the activities of closely held for profit corporations like Conestoga and Hobby Lobby” and the “The HHS contraceptive mandate substantially burdens the exercise of religion.”

“The Government has failed to show that the contraceptive mandate is the least restrict means of furthering that interest,” according to the majority opinion.

Alito wrote that the onwers of Hobby Lobby believe that the coverage required of the health care law “is connected to the destruction of an embryo in a way that is sufficient to make it immoral for them to provide the coverage … HHS [Department of Health and Human Services] has not shown that it lacks other means of achieving its desired goal without imposing a substantial burden on the exercise of religion by the objecting parties in these cases.”

“Protecting the free-exercise rights of corporations like Hobby Lobby, Conestoga and Mardel protects the religious liberty of the humans who own and control those FRFR companies,” Alito wrote in the majority opinion.

The rest of the article can be read here.

Justice Ginsberg called Alito’s written decision, ‘radical’. She thinks the 1st Amendment is radical, too. She has said before that she believes the Constitution is not a good example for other countries.

It was not a good day for Obama and his union sycophants. It was a good day for the rest of us. Missouri HB 1617 was passed in this last legislative session and will be put before the voters in the November general election. HB 1617, also known as ‘Paycheck Protection’ will require public service unions in Missouri to acquire written permission to deduct dues and from state employee’s paychecks. The unions will no longer force the state to arbitrarily act as the union’s agent to collect union dues.

As a friend of mine says, “It’s a good day for Liberty!”

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Friday’s Review

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Tens of millions of people across the country celebrated today with the news that Kathleen Sebelius is resigning as Secretary of Health and Human Services. As she read her resignation speech, she reached one point and said, “Oh! There’s a page missing!”  That is indicative why those millions are celebrating.

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Catherine Hanaway spoke at the Cass County Lincoln Day dinner last night; she is running for Governor. Her opponent will likely be Chris Koster, Missouri’s current Attorney General. Hanaway is an eloquent speaker and has an impressive resume including positions as US Attorney for Western Missouri and Missouri Speaker of the House. The paragraph below arrived in my email box this morning.

Catherine Hanaway’s campaign touted support from a couple dozen sitting lawmakers, including: Senate President Pro-Tem Tom Dempsey, St. Charles; Senate Majority Floor Leader Ron Richard, Joplin; Senator Brian Munzlinger, Monitcello; Senator Mike Kehoe, Jefferson City; Senator Will Kraus, Lee’s Summit; Rep. Susan Allen, Chesterfield; House Asst. Majority Floor Leader Mike Cierpiot, Lee’s Summit; Rep. Marsha Haefner, St. Louis; Rep. Tom Flanigan, Carthage; Rep. Bill Lant, Pineville; Rep. Bill Reiboldt, Neosho; Rep. Sheila Solon, Blue Springs and Rep. Ann Zerr, St. Charles. — PoliticMO Rundown, April 11, 2014.

I noticed two infamous RINOs in her list of supporters, Ron Richard and Tom Dempsey, the two state Senators that killed the 2013 2nd Amendment Protection bill last September when they refused, after a junket out of the country with Jay Nixon a month earlier, to override Nixon’s veto.

Seeing these two in Hanaway’s list of supporters gives me pause. If elected, will she support our 2nd Amendment freedom, gun owners and gun rights, or, will she stab us in the back like Dempsey and Richard?

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A Rasmussen report today says the 59% of the GOP think their representatives in both Houses of Congress are out of touch with their party’s base. I’m surprised the percentage was so low.

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Red State has a ‘breaking’ news report this morning. The White House admits the democrats will lose the Senate come the Fall election.

BREAKING: White House Admits Democrats Will Lose the Senate

By: Erick Erickson (Diary)  |  April 10th, 2014 at 05:48 PM

Put another way, Kathleen Sebelius has resigned and “Senior Administration Officials” are telling the media it is because of healthcare.gov.

You do not have a celebration event last week to celebrate 7 million sign ups and have Sebelius there to get credit then this week throw her under the bus because of a screw up that happened last October.

They have been standing with her since last October. They stood with her when the President’s polling was nosediving and throwing her under the bus could have stopped the bleeding.

They are doing so now. Sebelius actually resigned last week and the President already has a nominee ready to roll out tomorrow.

Why?

Their internal polling must be terrible and they want her gone and the issue treated as “old news” before the GOP takes the Senate in November.

Sebelius leaving now is a pretty direct admission against interest that the Democrats expect to lose the Senate and do not see any events on the horizon to change that momentum. Now, they’re just trying to slow the momentum down.

That is good news. I don’t think there will be enough seats up for election to gain a veto-proof majority, however. My fear is that those elected will be as weak-willed and spineless as Mitch McConnell and his establishment sycophants instead of strong conservatives like Ted Cruz and Mike Lee.

Having a majority in the Senate is useless if the new GOP Majority Leader won’t confront Harry Reid and Obama. We don’t need RINOs leading the Senate and I fear that is exactly what will happen.

“But—but—but, the GOP will stand up for us conservatives, won’t they?” says the GOP rank and file.

“Will they?” says I. That is the question and conservatives have no assurances the establishment will do so.

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And for a parting shot, here is this story. A GOP official fails to appear on Laura Ingraham’s show after he bad-mouths conservatives who don’t support amnesty.

Virginia GOP official that dissed anti-amnesty Republicans skips Laura Ingraham radio show

 

11:44 PM 04/10/2014

Virginia Republican Party executive director Shaun Kenney was a “no show” to conservative host Laura Ingraham’s radio program Thursday.

Ingraham was prepared to question Kenney about his statements that conservatives who oppose amnesty are afraid of “The Other” and that “nativists” should be driven out of the Republican party. Kenney made the statements in an office meeting that included former SEIU secretary-treasurer Eliseo Medina, according to video footage published Tuesday by The Daily Caller, and on his personal blog.

“And I think that we understand too that there’s a lot of people that are afraid, of you. Not for any reason that they ought to be but because you’re just not somebody, you’re just not people that they’ve ever had an opportunity to sit down and encounter, to talk to… A lot of people concern themselves with the Other, and it’s not a comfortable thing to have dialogue, and it’s not a comfortable thing to have that encounter with the Other,” Kenney said on the issue of immigration reform, according to the video.

Kenney also added that neither party should support immigration reform simply for “vote-harvesting” purposes, though SEIU official Eliseo Medina, present at the meeting with Kenney, previously pitched immigration reform in a speech by stating that it would help Democratic chances.

“The nativists have no home in the modern Republican Party,” Kenney wrote in a February blog post on his website BearingDrift.com. ”They have no place in the history of a Free America… They deserve nothing more than a footnote to the ignorance that liberty rightly stamps out… Conservatives are smarter than this, and America deserve better than nativist hate. Drive ‘em out, ladies and gentlemen. Generations are watching.”

If there is anyone or any group who should be run out of the GOP, it is Kenney and those like him.

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Rewrite!!

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Obamacare

healthcare.gov

One of the top headlines on Drudge this morning says, “5 million lines of software code needs to be rewritten...". Five million lines of code. You know what that means? A  rewrite of a significant portion of the software.

Before I retired, I was a project manager. I built things for my employer. I built customer service call centers across and outside the country. I built nearly 30 specialized call centers to allow the Deaf and Hard of Hearing use TTYs to communicate with the non-deaf. I created specifications for unique hardware and in the process of all this, was awarded seven telecommunications related patents.

Some of those projects were larger than the one proposed for Obamacare. The expected user base for our systems approached that expected for Obamacare.

My largest budget was under $15million over a three-year project. Obamacare spent over half a billion dollars—and it doesn’t work. In the private sector, everyone connected with that software development project would have been fired in three months—for gross incompetency and failure to meet milestones.

You see, in the private sector, there exists project gateways. Every few months, a gateway review is conducted—are you on schedule, does the design meet the original specifications, are you on budget (and woe to you if you are over or under budget for that particular segment of the project.)

Fail one of these criteria, and your project is on probation, fail two, you, the manager, are up for review and maybe fired, fail three and the project is killed before it can waste more money and usually, everyone on the project team is looking for a new job. Contractors are out on the street. In addition, at the end of each year of the project, it is reviewed for specification changes, whether the business climate, still needs the project. The project must pass this gateway, too, before any money is allocated and allowed to be budgeted to the project for the coming year.

I once had a three-year project killed after the second year. Why? I was on-time, on-budget, meeting all the project specifications and milestones…but the business climate changed and the project wouldn’t meet its expected ROI, Return-On-Investment. Too bad. Stamp! The project was killed. The company would not pour money into a project that couldn’t pay for itself within three years.

That is the real world, not the fantasyland that is now government. Apparently, the government failed to do any of these project reviews.

Obama is scheduled to have a press announcement later today to explain what he’s going to do to fix Obamacare. I know what he should do but knowing him and the dems, he’ll throw more money down the rathole to fix the unfixable.

He no longer takes questions. It is too dangerous. Someone may ask a hard question such as why a project needed 500 million lines of code or why was a Canadian company chosen on a No-Bid contract? Are there not plenty of US companies with that skill? I’ve managed projects with a comparable customer user base that was one-tenth that amount of code—and my project worked.

I suspect the real reason is that the data collected from people is shared across a multitude of government (and maybe outside companies, Obama favorites?) databases all across the government from the IRS to the FBI to who knows. One bottleneck in that update slows everything—if the transaction is completed at all. It is a rookie mistake by software engineers who don’t understand transaction processing, which, at the core, Obamacare enrollment must be.

Be that as it may, now Obama must “explain” why it failed. He’s already blamed Bush, I wonder who he will blame now? Probably Ted Cruz and the Tea Party.

Tech ‘surge’ to repair Obamacare websites

By JASON MILLMAN | 10/20/13 1:38 PM EDT Updated: 10/21/13 11:21 AM EDT

The Obama administration Sunday said it’s called on “the best and brightest” tech experts from both government and the private sector to help fix the troubled website at the root of the Obamacare enrollment problems.

The unusual Sunday 600-word blog post from the Department of Health and Human Services was the first update in more than a week on the many failings of an expensive website that HHS itself described as “frustrating for many Americans.” But it didn’t specify whom the administration had called in, or when the American people would see clear-cut results on HealthCare.gov.

“We’re kind of thinking of it as a tech ‘surge,’” an HHS official told POLITICO.

The Health and Human Services statement didn’t explain everything that’s wrong, or give technical details about the repairs under way. It outlined some steps being taken to fix the site, including updates with “new code that includes bug fixes.” The department also says it’s installing monitors to catch parts of the website that are proving the most troublesome for consumers. And it also said it had seen some improvements in wait times and consumer access to the website, the online portal to health insurance exchanges or marketplaces the federal government is running in 36 states.

Blah, blah, blah. Words from non-engineers who have no concept what they’re doing. I can tell you right now, they’re going to fail because they never knew what it was supposed to do in the first place. It reminds me of the old programmer’s joke.

IT Manager yells to his programming team, “You start coding and I’ll go see what they want!”

It was never so true as with Obamacare.

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