Commentary

As the nation pauses to celebrate the birth of our Savior, we at Idaho Chooses Life wish to offer our prayers for the Lord’s great blessing on your Christmas Celebration.

Christmas is the quintessential pro-Life event of the year. It is the story of great love, the story of humanity being saved by the littlest among us. The story of Mary’s acceptance of an unplanned pregnancy with open love has too many applications for our modern world and lessons for our selfish culture.

We would also like to take a moment to thank you for your support and encouragement.

May the Lord fill your home with His joy this Christmas Day.

This news update from Dustin Hurst over at Idaho Reporter:

Health centers around Idaho will receive an additional $275,000 to promote Obamacare throughout the state, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced.
The new cash pushes Idaho’s total federal aid for pushing the health care law to just more than $1.6 million. In July, the federal agency announced $1.38 million in grants to 11 Gem State health centers to help Idahoans enroll in the controversial program.
In the latest announcement, HHS said it expects health centers in Idaho to sign up more than 13,000 people for Obamacare.
Across the nation, the July grants cost taxpayer $150 million. This latest round of cash payments will cost $58 million.
“This investment means that health centers can provide expanded assistance for people in communities nationwide looking for resources to help them understand their insurance options and enroll in affordable coverage,” HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius said last week in a prepared statement.
Ben Domenech, a health policy expert with the Heartland Institute, told Watchdog.org earlier this year that the grants are nothing but public relations slush funds. “They’re going to use this money to hire Obamacare promoters, who will push people who come through their doors to sign up for taxpayer-subsidized coverage, whether through Medicaid, the CHIP or the (private insurance) exchanges,” he said.
Health care sign-ups, slowed by tech chaos at the federal level, stand at an anemic level in Idaho. According to report released earlier this month by HHS, just 1,730 Idaho residents have selected health plans through the state’s exchange website.

The Idaho Insurance Exchange, a creature of ObamaCare, reports that it has enrolled just 1730 as of the start of this month. That figure represents just 4.3% of the total expected.

What is not clear from the data released is how many new Medicaid applicants have been processed through the exchange apparatus created by Gov. Butch Otter. Look for substantial budget issues to emerge in the next legislative session as more welfare recipients swell state costs.

If the start-up costs of the Idaho Exchange are $20 million, we have a real bargain at work: Taxpayers have only spent $11,560 per Idaho ObamaCare recipient. Wouldn’t it have been cheaper to simply buy them an old insurance plan? At least those people would have received actual benefits. As it stands now, all that tax money has simply gone into building a new bureaucracy designed to “serve” the uninsured by imposing ObamaCare on the citizens of Idaho.

Ya gotta love government.

As we experience more of the unpleasant realities of the Affordable Care Act, Americans are questioning, finally, the forthrightness and honesty of their president in his selling of this law.
As millions of individual health insurance policies are cancelled, it is transparent that the president distorted the truth when he told Americans, “if you like your plan you can keep it.”

But misrepresentation goes beyond how a particular feature of the law was sold. It also applies to the selling of what this whole law was supposed to be about.

In a recent appearance at a synagogue in Dallas, President Obama summed up the supposed motivation in putting so much of the energy of his new administration behind passing this health care law. The bottom line, according to the president, was about making sure “that everybody had affordable, quality health care.”

Who, of any political stripe, would question the merits of this goal?

The problem is that the president is being as honest in stating that this was the goal of this health care law as he was in saying “if you like your plan you can keep it.”
The Supreme Court indicated this week that it would hear two cases of Christian-operated firms — Hobby Lobby Stores Inc. and Conestoga Wood Specialties Inc. — who claim their religious freedom is violated by provisions of Obamacare forcing businesses to provide employees, free of charge, contraceptives, sterilization and abortion-inducing pills.

How exactly does forcing businesses to pick up 100 percent of the costs of abortion-inducing pills for women employees reconcile with the alleged goal that all Americans get affordable, quality health care?
A White House blog about the cases written by Obama senior advisor Valerie Jarrett states, “Ensuring the full freedom of women as health care consumers to access preventative health services is a vital component of the Affordable Care Act.” And nothing is more “essential”, Jarrett goes on, than decisions regarding “reproductive health.”

In other words, to reconcile the words of Jarrett with those of her boss, the president, a “vital” and “essential” part of making sure that everybody gets “affordable, quality health care,” is giving women the “right” to do whatever they feel like regarding their sexual behavior, bearing zero personal responsibility for the costs associated with their behavior, and dumping those costs on someone else.
I hope you are scratching your head.

My experience with insurance plans is they lower premiums when customers demonstrate more responsible, cautious behavior — certainly not when they claim the right to act as they please and then have other people pick up the tab.

If you go onto the now-infamous healthcare.gov website, you can click on a section that says, “What are my preventive care benefits?” There appears a special section on “Preventive health services for women.”
Why is there no special section “Preventive health services for men?”

A 2010 newsletter from Harvard Medical School talks about the “gender gap” in health, saying that when it comes to health, “men are the weaker sex.”
Life expectancy for women is five years longer than for men. Of the top 10 leading causes of death in the U.S., the incidence among men is markedly higher than among women in nine of the 10.
You would think if the health care law was going to focus on gender, it would focus on men.

The answer to all of this is that Obamacare was never primarily about getting the best, most affordable health care to Americans. If it was, there would have been open discussion from the beginning about how best to achieve this. That open discussion never took place. This was and is about bringing the left-wing agenda of the Obama White House to America. The result is displacement of religious freedom with left-wing tyranny and the beginning of more expensive, lower-quality healthcare.

We pray that you and your loved ones enjoy a wonderful Thanksgiving Day.

This most American of holidays reminds us at once of our national heritage as well as the spiritual blessings we have inherited. Courageous souls launched upon a perilous journey in search of religious and economic liberty. The Pilgrims were heroic souls pursuing a dream of freedom. God richly blessed those efforts and our founders were wise and humble enough to recognize His provision.

America today faces many critical challenges, almost all of them related to our “forgetfulness” of those founding experiences. We fail to acknowledge God’s gifts, taking Him for granted. Our successes and creature comforts all too easily become our accomplishments, our right, our demand.

Let’s resolve today to work at remembering His provision and great kindness, as well as our profound national inheritance.

And may He continue to greatly bless your families on this day of Celebration!

Marriage and abortion are economic issues.

Because fewer are working for every retiree, our taxation nowhere near covers what the requirements for Social Security and Medicare will soon be.

Political discussions commonly assume there are two separate sets of issues.

There’s a social agenda — issues like abortion and marriage. And there’s an economic agenda — issues like federal spending, debt, taxes, and government programs like entitlements.

It’s usually assumed that these two agendas don’t have anything to do with each other.
But it’s simply false that we can consider the challenges of our federal budget without thinking about the state of the American family, our birthrates and abortion.
Our massive entitlement programs — Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid — now make up about 45 percent of our current federal budget. These programs are overwhelmingly driven by the demographics of the country, mostly directly, but also indirectly. Their economics are driven both by how long we live but also by how many children we have.

Social Security and Medicare focus on our elderly, to assure they have income and health care. Because the programs are financed through payroll taxes of the working, their viability depends on how many are employed compared to the size of our aged, retired populations.

This picture is changing dramatically, for the worse. And this is the root of our problem. In 1945, there were about 42 working Americans paying payroll taxes for every retiree receiving Social Security benefits. By 1960, the ratio was about 5-to-1. Today it is about 3-to-1.  Americans are living longer but having fewer children.

Currently, about 13.3 percent of our population is over 65. Projections from the Department of Health and Human Services are that by 2040 — in a little over 25 years — 21 percent of our population will be over 65.

Meanwhile, birthrates are dropping. According to data compiled by the Pew Research Center, between 1920 and 1970, birth rates varied from a high of about 118 births per 1000 women of childbearing age to a low of about 80. In recent years, this rate has been a little over 60 births per 1000 women.

A report from the chief actuary of the Social Security Administration discusses factors that have led to the drop in birth rates. These include more use and availability of birth control, more women working, postponement of marriage, increased prevalence of divorce, and more women choosing to remain childless.

Not surprisingly, the SSA report ignores the impact of legal abortion. But this is a critical factor. You can look at any chart showing historical fertility rates in the United States and see it bottom out after the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 and staying around those levels.

Because fewer and fewer are working for every retiree, our current level of taxation nowhere near covers what the requirements for Social Security and Medicare will soon be. Meanwhile, although Medicaid is usually thought of as health care for the poor, it’s the source of funding for most long-term care for the elderly. Today, about 60 percent of Americans in nursing homes and long-term care institutions are being covered through Medicaid.

Just think what this financial burden will look like as our aged become an increasingly large portion of our population.

It’s why projections for the shortfalls in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid combined have been as high as $126 trillion.

A central premise of Obamacare is forcing healthy young Americans to buy health insurance to subsidize overall premium costs for older and less healthy parts of the population. What happens as the percentage of youth in our population continues to shrink? It should be clear that it is impossible to separate marriage, children and abortion from our overall economic picture. These factors are at the root of the economic picture. A renaissance in American family life — restoration of marriage and children as central to our culture — and purge of the scourge of abortion — can restore a healthy future that today looks so ominous.

NOTE: Ms. Star Parker will be our Special Guest Speaker on Friday, December 6th. If you’d like to attend our Christmas Dinner & Auction, please call 344-8709 to make reservations!

There is quite an internet buzz going on about a new ad campaign aimed at young women under the banner, “got insurance?”

The text of the ad copy blatantly promotes premarital sex under the guise of urging young women to purchase an ObamaCare plan. Now that Obama has decreed that every young woman is entitled to “free” contraceptives – young libertines are loosed to pursue free sexual encounters as well.

Some will argue that this campaign is something of a weird aberration, certainly not central to ObamaCare. They are wrong.

The objective of ObamaCare is not improving health care. It is certainly not to provide insurance coverage to the uninsured. The central objective of ObamaCare is to remake American society. One key component of that agenda is to further degrade the sexual ethics of young Americans.

The federal government has long been involved in legitimizing premature sexual activity, but this ad campaign takes things to a whole new level.

Check it out for yourself, then spend some time in prayer for the nation’s future.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/11/12/obamacare-ad-hope-hes-as-easy-to-get-as-birth-control