Obamacare Numbers based on Fraud, Deceit, and Corruption: Serco Whistleblowers

Meet Serco.

This is what happens when the government run by a politician of the highest order, a person who puts public relations above actually getting things done, is left to their own devices. Serco is not only getting 1.2 billion, they are processing very few applications. Which begs the question, if they are willing to hire people who don't work and blow through taxpayer dollars, how valid are the numbers they are reporting back to the government? How close are they to the 8 million they reported? If you take that number at face value, you are a fool.

Serco’s contract with CMS requires a particular level of staffing regardless of the work coming into the facility. If Serco falls below that — presumably measured in man-hours on duty — they can lose their $1.2 billion contract. The OT may well be in play because Serco has trouble getting people to get stuck for eight hours at a stretch with nothing to do, a situation that sounds pleasant until it’s experienced first-hand. (I have had this experience at two different jobs for relatively brief periods, and can attest to the torturous boredom it generates.)

... 

It’s telling that this problem with Serco has been exposed for a month, and yet CMS has done nothing to stanch the waste of taxpayer dollars. Whistleblowers are claiming that we’re flushing a billion dollars down the drain, and yet the same administration that claimed that insurers wasted too much money on activities other than patient care hasn’t lifted a finger to fix this problem. How much patient care would the $1.2 billion deliver if it wasn’t being wasted by Serco?

A good question. But how many have actually been helped, either by Serco or anyone else? Bob Beckel touted on the Five yesterday that Minnesota has half as many uninsured as it had before Obamacare. The question is, do you even believe that number?

You do?

Fool.

The Best and Brightest are in Government. Take these Judges For Instance. Please.

National Review shows us that tenured judges and bureaucrats are frequently the path to failure and corruption:

Disability judge Harry Taylor has long been accused of misconduct. The allegations have included repeatedly sexually harassing female colleagues and employees, frequently dozing off and audibly snoring during hearings, and making an inappropriate call to a legal expert representing clients. But even as he avoided significant reprimand, he continued to award disability benefits to thousands of claimants, often without even holding a hearing, at a taxpayer cost of around $2.5 billion. The kicker: Though the Social Security Administration knew of Taylor’s shortcomings, it allows him — to this day — to continue judging its disability cases.

And he's not the only one.

Charles Bridges, who served as the chief administrative-law judge in the SSA’s Harrisburg, Pa., hearing office between 2004 and 2010, was so notorious for prodigally awarding benefits that one disability law firm enacted a so-called Bridges Policy: to accept “any individual as a client if their case was assigned to [Bridges], regardless of the evidence.” Between 2005 and 2013, Bridges singlehandedly awarded an estimated $4.5 billion in benefits. 

The report also heavily features David Daugherty, a disability judge who awarded benefits in all but roughly 1 percent of the cases he heard. Previous reports, including ones from the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, the Wall Street Journal, and National Review, have detailed how Daugherty worked with a greedy disability attorney who was shamelessly gaming the system.

How many more before the left realizes that the government.....

Wait, they never realize anything. That's why they are the left.

Carpool Conversations: Episode VI - Low Information voters, boxing, Rocky, and James Bond

This will make sense when you listen.

Bernie got us depressed but we perked up when we discussed boxing, Bond, and Balboa. Enjoy!

Update: Here's the link for the minimum wage article I mentioned. 

What Are We to Make of the Left? Bad is Good and Good is Bad in Their World.

Let's take a few stories running around right now. First off, the Bergdahl case. We got this soldier who basically deserted his post and got captured. Soldiers looking for him got killed in the search.  

Former soldiers involved in the operations to find Bergdahl asserted to CNN this week that at least six soldiers were killed because of the search for Bergdahl in 2009. They provided the soldiers' names and their dates of death, with circumstances for some of them. 

A day later, Nathan Bradley Bethea, a former member of Bergdahl's battalion who searched for him that summer in 2009, wrote in the Daily Beast that eight soldiers' deaths were tied to the Bergdahl search. Bethea provided the eight soldiers' names -- including six names that CNN earlier reported.

And how did the administration get this to go through without informing congress? They straight up lied. 

So, what Administration officials need you to know is that the Taliban expressed a strange interest in the internal information flow in the American government, and said something like, "Now youse guys, you make sure you break the law in your own political interests, and you make sure you don't inform Congress, or Serious You Guys, we'll execute Bergdahl, and see if we don't!!!111!!eleventy!!!" 

The Administration officials do not explain why, exactly, the Taliban are so interested in denying information to Dianne Feinstein. 

The Taliban, AP breathlessly reports, said they'd kill Bergdahl if the deal "leaked." 

You know who leaked the details of the deal to the press? 

Administration officials. Just six weeks ago. Administration officials leaked the fact that the Taliban were pushing this deal.

So the administration trades 5 known, undisputed, terrorists for this deserter. We give freedom to 6 people who are basically human garbage, in total. They get special treatment. The Administration has to lie to make it happen.

Meanwhile we have a good hardworking baker in Colorado who doesn't want to make a cake for a same-sex marriage gets sent to a re-education camp. Whatever you think about his beliefs, they are honest. And really, what's the damage here? The couple had to go to another baker? Holy shit, the horror! What happened to "we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone?" I don't see anyone trying to force gay dating sites to accept straights.

I know, you're going to hit me with blacks turned away at lunch counters or some other silly argument. Look the capitalist, free market system should allow us to be stupid and people can make choices of whether or not to shop there. He'll either sink or swim by our choices as consumers. The power is in our hands. But instead, we given that power over to an all knowing, and downright creepy government:

A family owned bakery has been ordered to make wedding cakes for gay couples and guarantee that its staff be given comprehensive training on Colorado’s anti-discrimination laws after the state’s Civil Rights Commission determined the Christian baker violated the law by refusing to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple. 

Jack Phillips, the owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop, in Lakewood, Colorado was directed to change his store policies immediately and force his staff to attend the training sessions. For the next two years, Phillips will also be required to submit quarterly reports to the commission to confirm that he has not turned away customers based on their sexual orientation.

My god, this is like re-education camp. Can't we just not shop there if we don't like their policies?

So terrorism, desertion, getting your fellow soldiers killed, and lying to congress? All good. Having a religious belief and not baking a cake for someone? Re-education camp.

These people are sick. I give to you an explanation:

Why Do I Think We're Over Regulated? Because People Can't Volunteer to Help Cancer Patients Now.

Godzilla's Got Nothing on the Red-Tape Monster

From The Blaze:

A driver who regularly volunteers as part of an organization to bring patients to New York City hospitals free of charge was fined and his vehicle impounded Monday when a city agent thought he was illegally operating a driving service. The whole incident was later deemed a misunderstanding, but the damage was done. 

According to the New York Daily News, 25-year-old Yeshaya Liebowitz was shuttling two people to area hospitals as part of the Jewish charity Chesed when he was stopped by one of the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission agents. 

“I tried to explain to him we're not a car service,” Liebowitz told the Daily News.

Nope. You are outside of government approved activities. Please report to the nearest re-education camp. Of course that's only the tip of the fascist, tyrannical, and totalitarian iceberg:

The content of the responses on Twitter and elsewhere was a useful reminder that the Left, including its sexual-liberationist faction, is inarguably totalitarian. Critics suggested not only that I be fired for my views but that I should be prosecuted for them, and that the government should ensure that such views are not published. Live-and-let-live is not the Left’s way, never has been, and never will be. It is not sufficient that transsexuals should be free to act on their delusions — the rest of us are expected to participate in them with unreserved enthusiasm, and the Left is willing to use the state to compel us to do so. 

This is the difference between me and them: I want them to continue to speak. I want Matthew Yglesias to continue to out himself as the moron that he is. I want everyone to speak their minds, even if it's terrible speech. Sticks and stones has gone out the window long ago to the left and their oversensitive, pussy reactions to least little slight is always responded with attempts to destroy the person they are ever-so-angry with.

You hurt my feelings, I shall now take away your livelihood, make you an object of public scorn, imprison you, and if need be, have you executed. There are countries that follow that progression, on this the 25th anniversary of Tiananmen Square, which I mention coincidentally.

Government Services Raise Taxes? Why Didn't Anyone Tell Me?

Via Ace:

Cause and Effect is hard, especially when you're a good-thinking liberal. Here a clueless homeowner in Austin complains about surging property taxes which somehow 'just happened'.

"I'm at the breaking point," said Gretchin Gardner, an Austin artist who bought a 1930s bungalow in the Bouldin neighborhood just south of downtown in 1991 and has watched her property tax bill soar to $8500 this year.

"It's not because I don't like paying taxes," said Gardner, who attended both meetings [of "irate homeowners"]. "I have voted for every park, every library, all the school improvements, for light rail, for anything that will make this city better. But now I can't afford to live here anymore."

This is the kind of thing that causes me concussions due to the force of the facepalm.

Carpool Conversations: Episode V: Selling Insurance Across State Lines and Godzilla #Podcast

We got Stitcher! Now Carpool Conversations can be sent really easily to your mobile phone. Just download the Stitcher app from the Play Store or Itunes.

We get into selling insurance across state lines and the differences between states competing vs companies competing and wrap it up with a review of Godzilla. Mark almost lost consciousness.