Capitol Hill Update, 30 November, 2015

Capitol Hill Update, 16 November, 2015

The irreparable structural flaws of ObamaCare are being revealed at a frightening pace. 12 of the state insurance co-ops have failed, insurance premiums just keep rising, enrollment is predicted to be flat, the majority of newly insured Americans have actually just been shoved into Medicaid, and the insurance companies are asking for billions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts to forestall even steeper price hikes. ObamaCare is dismantling and destabilizing the entire infrastructure of our health care system, and it’s hurting real people.

Capitol Hill Update, 2 November, 2015

Capitol Hill Update, 26 October, 2015

Thanks to a newly minted Republican Senate majority and the budgetary tactic called reconciliation, it appeared that getting a full repeal of at least most of ObamaCare to the president’s desk was inevitable this year. With ObamaCare’s insurance exchanges and co-ops failing around the country, premiums still going up, and people being forced to buy plans they can’t even afford to use, the case for forcing President Obama to defend his unsustainable, malfunctioning law was perhaps the strongest it has ever been.

This week, the Senate is set to finally take up its Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA), S. 754. In the wake of several high-profile international hacking events, CISA is being sold as an essential component of national cybersecurity. Unfortunately, not only does this bill not address the fundamental difficulties with protecting our critical data, it also creates perverse incentives for companies and adds further to the massive collection of our private data by government agencies.

Capitol Hill Update, 19 October, 2015

Last Friday, 218 Members of the House (including 42 Republicans) made a sudden and uncommon move called a discharge petition to bring a re-authorization of the U.S. Export-Import Bank out of committee without a vote. Although GOP leadership in the Senate have indicated that they are unlikely to pass this specific bill, the tactic demonstrated that the House has the strength to revive the expired corporate welfare bank if the Senate were to reauthorize it in a separate bill.

Over twenty years after the spectacular failure of "HillaryCare", Hillary Clinton is back in the health care debate. The collection of modest proposals she has made recently gives us a glimpse into her vision for “HillaryCare, 2.0”. With ObamaCare already taking a huge step towards accomplishing her goal of total government control of health care, Hillary’s new, more measured approach is just to keep nudging current policies further in that direction.