Medicare Improvements for Patients and Providers Act
Congressman Steve Kagen:
I see you voted yes to the above.
I have only one question I want an answer to. But first I wish to inform you that The Washington Times July 2nd, 2007 Op-Ed article stated that by January of 2009, when the new Congress and President takes over, Social Security and Medicare ALONE will be $90 TRILLION Dollars in UNFUNDED liabilities, over the inifinite horizon.
Where is the money going to come from to pay for this 90 TRILLION UNFUNDED liability, let alone additional or extended costs added to it? You’re not thinking about taxing us more to go along with the skyrocketing cost of the shortage of energy products caused by U.S. Congress interference with our freedom to harvest oil and gas by the oil companies that us American citizen pension and 401k program stockholders own or the skyrocketing cost of food due to the U.S. Congress enforced mandate to place percentages of ethanol in our gasoline, are you?
You’re not thinking about taking more money out of our paychecks in the form of payroll tax “withholding” then you already do are you?
Please respond soon, my family, friends and associates all think you are going to take more money out of our paychecks, by withholding, before we even get our earnings from our weekly efforts and hard work. You certainly wouldn’t really do something like that would you?
Sincerely,
Here is his reply:
Dear Mr. Koenigs,
Thank you for allowing me to listen to your concerns about the cuts in Medicare payments to physicians that took effect on July 1st. I appreciate your taking time to share your views with me.
I am proud to have joined my House colleagues in overriding the President’s misguided veto of the Medicare Improvements for Patients and Providers Act (H.R. 6331) by a vote of 383 – 41 on July 14, 2008. The next day, the Senate followed suit by voting 70 -26 to override the veto. H.R. 6331 became public law on July 15, 2008.
Enactment of this legislation stopped the 10% reduction in physician reimbursements, and instead provided a modest increase of 0.5% through the end of 2008 and a 1.1% increase for 2009.
It may take up to ten business days to implement the new law. Meanwhile, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) will continue working with health care providers and the beneficiary community to avoid disruptions in the delivery of health care services.
While the reimbursement provisions in H.R. 6331 are a short-term fix, many of my colleagues and I are committed to a long-term solution to the physician payment issue. We cannot fix health care without doctors, and I will continue to work hard to guarantee access to affordable care for every citizen.
Solving our health care crisis begins by making certain that Medicare and Medicaid pay for at least the overhead cost of providing a service or a health care product, plus a margin of profit. This would eliminate the cost-shifting that has distorted the medical marketplace during the past several decades. No business can continuously operate at a loss, and physicians’ offices are no exception.
Thank you again for sharing your concerns with me. By working together, we will build a better future for everyone.
Sincerely,
Steve Kagen, MD
Member of Congress
Now my question is; did he understand that my question was where the money was coming from to pay for the Social Security and Medicare debacle and was he going to take the money out of our paychecks OR does MD stand for Mentally Deficient? Assuming he is not MD than why did he not answer the simple questions for which I obviously wrote him the letter? All of us better realize the reason for avoiding the answer, because it is not going to be pretty! They are going to take us for nearly every thing we earn.
Is a Socialist like Steven Kagen (MD) who has nothing but contempt for the hard “working” people of America, who are trying to get ahead in life, and who does little more than insult our intelligence, somebody who you want to vote for come November. If you don’t want hardly any take home pay for yourself, your children and your children’s children and you don’t care about FREEDOM (from Government), if you would rather live in apartment complexes and live in the chains and bondage of the soup kitchens of the Socialist welfare state, than vote for the likes of him and his ilk.
Why do we give to every country to help them, BIG financial business and subsides to foreign auto markets. My opinon we are selling out OUR country.Where is United WE stand?
Please read the following for me.
Thank you.
Brian Schmidt
Mitch Albom?could very well be the best columnist in the
> country, IMHO
>
> ?
>
>
>
> ?November 23, 2008
>
> If I had the floor at the auto rescue talks
>
> BY MITCH ALBOM
> FREE PRESS COLUMNIST
> OK. It’s a fantasy. But if I had five minutes in front
> of Congress last week, here’s what I would’ve said:
> Good morning. First of all, before you ask, I flew
> commercial. Northwest Airlines. Had a bag of peanuts for
> breakfast. Of course, that’s Northwest, which just
> merged with Delta, a merger you, our government, approved –
> and one which,
inevitably, will lead to big bonuses for
> their executives and higher costs for us. You seem to be OK
> with that kind of business.
> Which makes me wonder why you’re so against our kind of
> business? The kind we do in Detroit. The kind that gets your
> fingernails dirty. The kind where people use hammers and
> drills, not keystrokes. The kind where you get paid for
> making something, not moving money around a board and
> skimming a percentage.
> You’ve already given hundreds of billions to banking
> and finance companies — and hardly demanded anything. Yet
> you balk at the very idea of giving $25 billion to the
> Detroit Three. Heck, you shoveled that exact amount to
> Citigroup — $25 billion — just weeks ago, and that place
> is about to crumble anyhow.
> Does the word “hypocrisy” ring a bell?
> Protecting the home turf?
> Sen. Shelby. Yes.
You. From Ala bama. You’ve been
> awfully vocal. You called the Detroit Three’s leaders
> “failures.” You said loans to them would be
> “wasted money.” You said they should go bankrupt
> and “let the market work.”
> Why weren’t you equally vocal when your state handed
> out hundreds of millions in tax breaks to Mercedes-Benz,
> Hyundai, Honda and others to open plants there? Why not
> “let the market work”? Or is it better for Alabama
> if the Detroit Three fold so that the foreign companies –
> in your state — can produce more?
> Way to think of the nation first, senator r.
> And you, Sen. Kyl of Arizona. You told reporters:
> “There’s no reason to throw money at a problem
> that’s not going to get solved.”
> That’s funny, coming from such an avid supporter of the
> Iraq war. You’ve been gung ho on that for years. So how
> could you just sit there
when, according to the New York
> Times, an Iraqi former chief investigator told Congress that
> $13 billion in U.S. reconstruction funds “had been lost
> to fraud, embezzlement, theft and waste” by the Iraqi
> government?
> That’s 13 billion, Senator. More than half of what the
> auto industry is asking for. Thirteen billion? Gone? Wasted?
> Where was your “throwing money at a problem that’s
> not going to get solved” speech then?
> Watching over the bankers?
> And the rest of you lawmakers. The ones who insist the auto
> companies show you a plan before you help them. You’ve
> already handed over $150 billion of our tax money to AIG.
> How come you never demanded a plan from it? How come when
> AIG blew through its first $85 billion, you quickly gave it
> more? The car companies may be losing money, but they can
> explain it: They’re paying workers too much
and selling
> cars for too little.
> AIG lost hundred of billions in credit default swaps –
> which no one can explain and which make nothing, produce
> nothing, employ no one and are essentially bets on failure.
> And you don’t demand a paragraph from it?
> Look. Nobody is saying the auto business is healthy. Its
> unions need to adjust more. Its models and dealerships need
> to shrink. Its top executives have to downsize their own
> importance.
> But this is a business that has been around for more than a
> century. And some of its problems are because of that,
> because people get used to certain wages, manufacturers get
> used to certain business models. It’s easy to point to
> foreign car makers with tax breaks, no union costs and a
> cleaner slate — not to mention help from their home
> countries — and say “be more like them.”
> But if you let
us die, you let our national spine collapse.
> America can’t be a country of lawyers and financial
> analysts. We have to manufacture. We need that
> infrastructure. We need those jobs. We need that security.
> Have you forgotten who built equipment during the world
> wars?
> Besides, let’s be honest. When it comes to blowing
> budgets, being grossly inefficient and wallowing in debt,
> who’s better than Congress?
> So who are you to lecture anyone on how to run a business?
> Ask fair questions. Demand accountability. But knock it off
> with the holier than thou crap, OK? You got us into this
> mess with greed, a bad Fed policy and too little regulation.
> Don’t kick our tires to make yourselves look better.
>
> ?
>
I think you posted this under the wrong thread. But I am glad to have you as a reader. We need to talk these things out because according to The Constitution and the vast majority of the writings of our Founding Fathers, what is to be done is up to us, the taxpayers and the MASTERS of our “Servant” Government but within the realm of a “republic” and not a democracy (which is where 51% of the people steal from and control the other 49%). According to the Supreme Court cases quoted in other posts on this blog, the Sixteenth Amendment did not give the U.S. Government any additional taxing powers beyond what they had before it was (supposedly) ratified. The apportionment clause of the Constitution, the LAW of our land, is still, in reality, in full force and effect according to The Supreme Court. Additionally the 9th and 10th Amendment does not allow for the “Federal” Government to do anything of this “bailout” nature as it is far outside of their limited powers “enumerated” in the Constitution.
Secondly, in addition to being completely illegal for the U.S. Government to do on several Constitutional issues, the Auto Makers aren’t going anywhere and will not completely close. Trust me. All that is going to happen is chapter 11 bankruptcy which will allow sanity to prevail at the UAW and supplier levels. This is wonderful for the Big Three Automakers because they can hire back employees who will be “onboard” and get the ball and chain of Union thuggary U.S. Government supported, market out of touch wages, pensions and insane benefits that are far and above anything the common American citizen has or could ever dream of. The “king’s ransom” pension program is completely unviable and nothing less than lunacy. We all have to live within a realistic world and once we touchdown back on the planet Earth we can all proceed in “freedom”, which means, according to the majority of the Founding Fathers, means “self government” or “freedom from government”, to become INDIVIDUALLY prosperous from within a basis of reality and not perception or a Matrix like world that only exists in our minds.
Our entire country is about to undergo changes whereby “The Matrix” created by The Federal Reserve company, a cartel of twelve privately owned banks, will collapse because there have not been enough assets or resources created to support it from a “realistic” sense. There could have been enough assets and resources to support everything we have AND MORE, if the U.S. Government would have only obeyed the LAW as set forth in The Constitution. But the bastards in both houses of Congress just couldn’t resist the personal benefits of power, corruption and pure outlawism as they have been headed down the wrong path, away from freedom, since the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 with unscrupulous powerful private bankers. The fact is the vast majority of the money that the Federal Government spends is supposed to be ours and our economy’s. Just think how much more money we would have, as a people and an economy, if all the money that the Federal Government steals from us yearly which goes directly, as reported in The 1983 Grace Commission Report to President Reagan, from the IRS to a mammoth private corporation called “The Fed” for short. The U.S. Treasury gets no money from Income Taxes. They, the Federal Government, borrows all the money they spend from the BIG private bankers of The Federal Reserve, of which we additionally pay interest besides the principle.
Wake up and smell the coffee Mr. Schmidt. None of us will be able to avoid reality, sooner or later “The Matix” that only exists in our minds, as we have been programmed by public education, the Government, and ultimately The Fed, will collapse. This is a good thing in the long run because our population will eventually realize that it is the Government that caused this entire financial crisis by not obeying The LAW to the very WORD, spirit and intent AS MEANT on THE DAY OF ITS DRAFTING and not what the creators of “The Matrix” want it to mean or corruptively twist it to mean today to further their own megalomaniac power hungry desires.
The Matrix also takes God out of the equation and I personally believe that he doesn’t appreciate that. Our prayers and hopes are being offered to the Almighty U.S. Government instead of to our Lord, who created the entire universe. If you were God, how would you feel about that?
It is time to force both houses of Congress to obey the LAW; which means that the Federal Government is hardly to even exist (see 9th and 10th amendment) but to be little more than an agent of The Free and INDEPENDENT States. State and local governments are supposed to be quite large and very powerful because we as individuals can better control them and then, additionally, we will always be able to run away from a corrupt State government that has to many goofy freedom and prosperity killing laws or taxes too much. In this way WE CAN HAVE EVERYTHING with the vast majority of us being INDEPENDENTLY prosperous “within the realm of reality” by the sweat of our brow and the blessings of Almighty God, instead of the handouts of the cold corrupt greedy disgraceful hand of a Godless Government where all the money ultimately is stolen out of our paychecks.
Just imagine how many cars we could buy from you if we had in our hands all the money that the Federal Government Constitutionally contemptuously spends in direct contradiction of The Constitution.
We have a rendezvous with destiny, a time for choosing. We, as people can choose whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves. Those who would trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state have told us they have a utopian solution of peace without victory. They call their policy “accommodation.”
Well we as a people have a choice to make. We’ll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we’ll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness. We must think about not only our lives but the lives of our children and posterity. What of them?
We the people must force the U.S. Government to obey every single word in The Constitution, which will effectively give us individually the vast majority of the money that Government steals from our paychecks and earnings, to buy cars and anything else we need and provide for happiness and real freedom.
I sure understand what you are talking about and I do agree that your premise is 100% justifiable!
I too feel that it is not right for MILLIONS of hard working Americans to have sooo much Social Security and Medicare money stolen out of their paychecks, for all of their lives, not even mentioning the “invisable tax” of the employer’s half that he would rather pay you than the government in his half of Social Security and Medicare taxes. All of this people like Representative Congressman Steve Kagan says, according to your report on this blog, wasn’t to be used for retirement purposes?? What the heck?
How can anybody argue with your point? How can that be justified in anybodies book? More insanity from the U.S. Government stealing money from all working Americans.
And, I would be willing to bet that the U.S. Government is going to keep stealing money from all Americans, in the form of Social Security and Medicare taxes in 2009 and 2010 as well; even though they know damn well nobody paying into it now is going to get a damn penny of it when they retire.
Anybody out there want to take up my bet. I feel my bet is as secure as a bet that anybody reading this is going to die someday. I have been writing about this since 1983, when I was calling for Congress to end it when very few would have been hurt. Now it is far too late. Many Millions of hard working Americans are going to be heinously financially stricken by this horror, of not being paid their earnings for their hard work, and then to top it off, getting nothing for their retirement for having so much money stolen from their earnings. It isn’t right. That’s what happens, throughout ALL OF HISTORY (please do read and learn about the history of ALL GOVERNMENTS), when you let them run people’s lives, make decisions and spend their earnings for them. That is why our Founding Fathers sought to make us FREE (which means FREE from Government, but short of anarchy, under “NATURAL” LAW. for further information read “The 5000 Year Leap”).