Independent voices from the TWT Communities

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce said Wednesday it will start a campaign to try to fix American entitlement programs, saying Social Security, Medicare and other programs are growing so quickly they will eventually crowd out other spending on infrastructure, defense and education.

Being accepted to medical school was once seen as a ticket to a prosperous and fulfilling career, but today's students face far less certain futures under Obamacare.

The federal government owes $16.7 trillion to its creditors around the world, definitely including China. Each year, that number grows by $1 trillion, the amount President Obama has been borrowing to keep his bureaucracy expanding at a rapid pace.

Standard & Poor's Corp. on Monday withdrew its threat to downgrade the U.S. government for a second time, citing an improving economy and declining budget deficits. But it said the U.S. still falls short of getting a AAA rating because the two bickering political parties refuse to bridge their differences and address long-term debt problems.

While most Americans next year will have to grapple with the intricacies of President Obama's health law and the "individual mandate" requiring residents to have health insurance, Mr. Edwards and more than 160,000 others who use health-sharing ministries will be exempt. They're one of nine exemptions built into the health care law.

Over the next decade, Medicaid expansion under Obamacare will add millions more people to the program, doubling its current cost and bringing the number of enrollees to 84 million by 2022, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

President Obama's top health official on Tuesday strenuously defended her decision to ask two major organizations to contribute to a nonprofit that is promoting the president's new national health care law, saying she didn't violate any laws.

Social Security ran a cash-flow deficit of $55 billion last year and one of its two trust funds, used to pay disability benefits, will go bust in three years, forcing benefits to be cut by 20 percent unless Congress acts, the program's trustees reported Friday.

The Obama administration took a victory lap after the latest Medicare numbers released Friday showed the program's solvency has been extended by two years — a development the president's aides said is a result of the health care law.

When setting up Medicare as a parallel "earned-benefits" program to Social Security in 1965, Congress tacked onto the legislation — like an insurance rider - a secondary provision to help existing state programs provide medical assistance to a very small population: America's most helpless and destitute.

Ideas of the 1960s have now grown reactionary in a world that is vastly different from a half-century ago.

Much of the fight over illegal immigration isn't about immigration at all, but rather over the generous social safety net that has sprung up in the past five decades, and which has proved to be a major sticking point in voters' minds as Congress contemplates a legalization.

House Republicans released a draft bill Tuesday to repeal the ill-defined way physicians are paid under Medicare in a bid to finally end the annual Capitol Hill scramble to find extra cash to pay the doctors.
Imagine a deeply indebted household paying two companies to cut the same lawn, a shopper going to Costco and not buying bulk or a failing company paying billions to study itself.

This Memorial Day is punctuated by one other scandal in the Obama administration. The inability of the Department of Veterans Affairs to process disability and related claims of our nation's veterans in a timely manner is a shameful situation that may well add not only to anxiety among veterans, but even to the number of deaths of those who served their nation.