Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has taken a major step toward rationing medications to the elderly.

Thanks to Obamacare: READ MORE

"This is the first time a government insider has gone on record challenging the administration's insistence that there were no worrisome security concerns."

"Teresa Fryer, the chief information security officer for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), revealed the findings when she was interviewed Tuesday behind closed doors by House Oversight Committee officials..."

Security bombshell #1:

Details are not being made public for security reasons but Fryer testified that one vulnerability in the system was discovered during testing last week related to an incident reported in November. She says that as a result, the government has shut down functionality in the vulnerable part of the system. Fryer said the other high-risk finding was discovered Monday.

Security bombshell #2:

In another security bombshell, Fryer told congressional interviewers that she explicitly recommended denial of the website’s Authority to Operate (ATO), but was overruled by her superiors. The website was rolled out amid warnings Fryer said she gave both verbally and in a briefing that disclosed “high risks” and possible exposure to “attacks”.

Fryer also said that she refused to put her name on a letter recommending a temporary ATO be granted for six months while the issues were sorted out.

READ MORE

Centers for Medicare & Medicaid 10-year forecast: National health spending will grow at a rate faster than it would have if Obamacare had not passed!

New numbers, no surprise: Affordable Care Act anything but affordable

Richard Foster, chief actuary of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, delivers devastating blow to Obamacare

Washington Post:

James Capretta, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, also testified and observed the full hearing. In response to my inquiry as to the main take-away, he e-mailed, "The most important thing said [by Foster] today: in so many words, moving toward defined contribution health care has more potential than price controls to bring about real efficiency gains and higher productivity in the health sector, and slow the pace of rising costs. That's a very big deal." And a very big blow to the credibility of ObamaCare cheerleaders.

Rep. Paul Ryan 1, ObamaCare 0

Paul Ryan (R): Obama said he would respond, then didn't, and never has...

Ryan updated the Roadmap for saving America from fiscal and economic collapse that he’d introduced in 2008...

[2010] was an even greater year for Ryan. His Roadmap began the year as an obscure plan to reform federal spending, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, the tax code, and health care, and became the most important statement of Republican aspirations in Washington. At the seven-hour White House summit on health care in February, Ryan took apart Obamacare in a six-minute speech that quickly went viral on the Internet. Obama said he would respond to Ryan at the summit, then didn’t, and never has.

Democrats were certain the Roadmap would be an albatross for Republican candidates. It wasn’t. After the election, the leaders of the president’s debt commission, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, issued a plan that included parts of the Roadmap, especially its version of Social Security reform. And two weeks ago, Alice Rivlin, former budget director for President Clinton, backed Ryan’s ideas for reining in Medicare and Medicaid. Ryan, as chairman of the budget committee, will draft the House budget for next year...

Not Yet a Great Race

Dr. Donald Berwick - Medicare Czar: Elected to nothing, accountable to no one (except Obama)

Yes, everyone knows that George Bush recess-appointed John Bolton as U.N. ambassador. . .after a contentious Senate confirmation hearing.

Obama's choice to head Medicare - the Leftist, socialist free-market hating Dr. Donald Berwick (Harvard) didn't even get a hearing because Sen. Max Baucus, Senate Finance Chairman, knew that a Berwick hearing could not have stood the light of day.

Dr. Berwick is now our Rationer-in-Chief. In a 2008 speech to Britain's National Health Service on the occasion of its 60th Anniversary Berwick said this:

You could have protected the wealthy and the well, instead of recognizing that sick people tend to be poorer and that poor people tend to be sicker, and that any health care funding plan that is just, equitable, civilized, and humane must - must - redistribute wealth from the richer among us to the poorer and less fortunate. Excellent healthcare is by definition redistribution. Britain, you chose well.

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UPDATE: Berwick and wife exempt from crappy health care law he'll oversee!

For the first time by any administration in memory, the Obama budget forecast rejects the Medicare Trustees’ projections for long-run healthcare cost growth....

Obama Budget Rigs Healthcare Numbers

Prominent newspapers warn about Obamacare costs!

This today:

Wall Street Journal

...and from yesterday:

USA Today

Democrats remain tone-deaf...why???

Given the ever-increasing national debt ($12+ trillion and counting), and with nearly $90 trillion (!) in unfunded Medicare liabilities, why, oh why, are we on the verge of having the federal government assume responsibility for providing healthcare for 40+ million more Americans?

With 15 million additional people fully covered under Medicaid and another 26 million heavily subsidized by the government in the new insurance exchange. All at an incremental annual cost approaching $200 billion by 2019 according to the CBO. (A number, I suspect, which will be much higher by then.)

Have our leaders in Washington completely lost their minds? Is this why “we need heath insurance reform now”? So a federal government which has never in history demonstrated one iota of ability to reign in spending can permanently add another 40+ million people to federal entitlement programs. This is the silver bullet necessary to reduce costs? Really??

It defies logic. It defies evidence. It’s completely preposterous.

Read the whole thing!