Tag Archives: ACA

Help Craig Spector

Last year I wrote a blog post based on a Facebook article by Craig Spector. He’s a working novelist and screenwriter at a fairly remunerative end of the income stream for said folks (He earns more than the median income of such folks, which is in the high four figure range). He was writing about his enrollment in […]

Why ACA may be a negative in 2016

I’ve been trying to explain to my liberal, pro-Hillary friends that championing the ACA (also ‘Obamacare’) is not a winning strategy for the Democrats. My experience with the ‘reforms’ has been that employer-provided insurance now comes with far bigger deductibles and less coverage, at least up front–you have to pay down a lot of co-pays […]

Sleepwalking into calamity

After the last State of the Union address by our Nobel Peace Laureate, bromide/memes like the above circulated freely on the Internets. This one was at least smart enough to leave lower gas prices off the list. You probably shouldn’t draw people’s attention to the fact that oil prices have fallen off a cliff because […]

Worst stock market opening ever

I want to capture this moment, because (depending how things change), people might not have this on their radar screen a month or so from now. Remember, I warned you. The Stock Exchange lost over 5% of its value in the first week after New Year’s, and lost over 900 points. That makes this the […]

Hostage Capitalism, the ACA and RIP Medical Debt

(a CBS promo for a story about RIP Medical Debt) I don’t wish to join the conventional chorus of nay-sayers about ‘Obamacare’ (formally the ACA), but results are in after the Supreme Court upheld the law a few weeks ago, and it ain’t pretty. It appears that the insurance companies are jacking up insurance rates some […]

Cheap gas and economic collapse

  I was hoping to keep this short when I started writing it back in early December, but (to quote Ralph Waldo Emerson), “things are in the saddle and ride mankind.”  Oil prices have fallen off a cliff in recent weeks, declining some 45%. It has been a good time for motorists–and for the peak […]

Impeach Obama? The truckers protest

If you haven’t been paying attention, a group of disgruntled truckers are planning to invade our shuttered capitol  on Friday and promise to disrupt all truck-bound transport this coming weekend. They are protesting to demand… something. Well actually, that’s unfair. They’ve laid out what they want and what they’re upset about. Courtesy of their web […]

How to stop the Empire–the Government Shutdown edition

Yesterday the Republicrats managed to shut down the government. While I’d agree with many of my friends that this piece of political theatre is largely the province of the GOP and the Tea Party, there’s more than a bit of blame going for the Dems. Some thoughts: 1. I tour a play about a priest […]

Don’t Know much about History: Ron Reagan, War Criminal

Finally–someone (in the form of Stephen Colbert) called out Bill O’Reilly for constantly bringing up Ronald Reagan in all the discussion of Obama’s reaction to Syria’s alleged poison gas attack. I don’t take Bill-o terribly seriously anyway, but since the memes about Reagan are constantly being picked up, let’s be clear: Reagan inarguably made the […]

Healthcare and Hostage Capitalism

I’ve written here about my dad and alluded to some of his pet peeves. Dad was something of a moocher in life, and when he had to pay for things, he got… intense. And one of the things that made him crazy was price gouging. He had a point–if you go to a ball game […]